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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Favreau.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

On today's show, we got lots to talk about, Dan.

So much news today.

It won't stop.

Trump's trade deal with the UK, the Republican plan to cut Medicaid, the government trying to disappear people to Libya, a January 6th activist losing his confirmation fight to be DC's top federal prosecutor, a new Maha Surgeon General nominee, and Joe and Jill Biden's appearance on The View.

You'll also hear my interview with our pal Leah Lippman, strict scrutiny co-host and new author of the book Lawless, which comes out next week.

We'll talk about that and all the latest legal news.

But let's start with the big news of the day.

We got a woke Pope from the south side of Chicago.

The warm Barack Obama's heart.

Look at that.

On Thursday,

it's Reverend Wright.

Who's the one person in the studio laughing at that joke?

Reed.

Obviously.

Obviously.

Yes.

Obama, bro.

Yes.

You have to be a 40-plus Obama, bro, to get that joke.

On Thursday, Cardinal Robert Prevost became Pope Leo XIV,

the first American Pope, also a citizen of Peru, where he served for two decades, first as a missionary and ultimately a bishop.

Most importantly, he seems to be a poster, a poster who has retweeted criticism about J.D.

Vance, Trump's immigration policy, and Republican inaction on gun violence, among other things.

Dan, what do you think of our new pontiff?

I think if we're going to get a pope, we should have a American woke pope from Chicago.

That seems great, especially one who hates J.D.

Vance.

I say woke pope because it sounds good, but it is

more of a never-Trump bulwark pope.

Yes,

I just saw that was Tommy and Lovett's joke earlier.

He's a bulwark pope.

There's a lot.

Yeah, I mean, a lot, a lot of people posting that.

That's so weird.

They, they claim that they, I saw Lovett to the T for trademark.

Um, I mean, like, judging wokeness on a pope scale, right?

The, like, the pope is going to have a series of views that we do not love on abortion,

LGBTQ rights, all of those things.

But the fact that he has leaned so hard and very recently into a humane view of immigration and how we treat migrants that is in direct opposition to how Trump is doing it seems very positive for what is true like obviously a major political issue in this country, but a global issue for the next generation.

And also just enjoyable that the MAGA right is going bananas about this.

They're so upset.

They're so angry.

Like you, cause we talked this morning when we first, before we saw the, the tweets, we were like, when is Trump going to take credit for an American pope?

And now his base is freaking out about the woke pope.

It's so funny.

Yeah, I mean, I'll just, I'll speak as the resident Catholic here.

You know, I grew up in the Catholic Church as like pretty conservative, right?

Just with, on a lot of issues that we probably care about.

Though, you know, on immigration, on poverty, on war and peace, and the death penalty, it's always been more progressive than not.

And I do think that in the Francis era, and especially since Francis appointed like, I think, 80% of the cardinals that voted, the leaders of the Catholic Church are now leaning into sort of the more progressive positions on issues that they've always had, or at least the church has mostly always had, but on issues of sexual orientation, gender identity, abortion.

Church is still pretty conservative, though.

Even Francis, you know, he made some little headway on that.

But it is a generally traditionalist, conservative institution.

So I think this is very good news as someone who really wants to see the church continue in the direction that francis was was pushing the church um and as someone who likes to pick a twitter fight with jd vance you probably feel some affinity with this pope the piece that the pope the now pope shared it was about you know uh jd vance's what was it called ordo eateramus whatever that thing basically it's this this this theory that he fucking made up that he's that um he didn't make it up but it's not really the theory uh it's not really official policy of the celfic church that you're supposed to love love the people around you, and then as you go out in concentrate circles, you don't have to care that much about other people.

That's sort of,

that's the gist.

Yes.

Seems they went contrary to some parts of the golden rule, just as you.

Yeah, so the piece that the Pope shared says, it ought to be clear that Catholics cannot support a rhetoric that demonizes immigrants as dangerously criminal simply because they have crossed the border in search of a better life.

It ought to be clear that Catholics cannot celebrate aggressive deportation enforcement, a spectacle.

It ought to be clear that Catholics cannot accept a theory of love that pats itself on the back for putting some of the poorest among us farthest from our concern and charity.

Love that.

Seems great.

Love that.

His last tweet, his last retweet was after the Trump Bukele meeting, and it said, do you not see the suffering?

Is your conscience not disturbed?

How can you stay quiet?

I mean, you know, we love our American Pope, our Chicago Pope.

And Steve Bannon apparently called this like last week.

He was like, I'm worried that they're going to go with, that they could go with Cardinal Prevost because he would be the most progressive pick huh interesting yeah now he's not the most progressive pick but that's what that's what bannon said yeah and laura loomer's just yelling about a woke marxist pope i mean if if laura loomer loomers the pope then she is all powerful

her woke marxist pope thing of course has gone viral and i just retweeted this but someone someone posted sung to the tune of pink pony club and now i can't get it out of my head

that's so good

is pink pope club they're all singing at the Pope Club an official episode title?

Woke Marxist Pope.

All right.

Even though America has given the world a new pope, we must get back to talking about our worst export, Donald Trump, and his global trade war.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced this week that the central bank won't be cutting interest rates just yet and said that Trump's tariffs will likely lead to higher prices and unemployment, potentially the stagflation scenario that's basically the worst case for the economy right now.

But clearly, Powell hasn't read the art of the deal lately because on Thursday morning, Trump announced a trade deal of sorts with the UK.

There will still be a 10% tax on everything we buy that's made in the UK, except for cars like Rolls-Royce's and Bentley's.

And I guess they're going to drop tariffs on some U.S.

exports.

So just amazing work, Mr.

Trump.

You've done it again.

Trump announced the deal in the oval, followed by the ritual fluffing from his staff.

Let's listen.

This was the president's deal.

And people think, oh, that's not the way it works.

If you got to sit next to to him, I have the best deal maker to my left.

He's the closer.

He gets deals done that we could never get done because he understands business, he understands deals.

We started at 10% and we ended at 10%.

And the market for America is better.

And this is a perfect example of why Donald Trump produced Liberation Day.

This would have taken Jameson and I three years, maybe.

And instead, we got it done in 45 days, certainly, because we work for Donald Trump.

Howard Luttnick never fails to deliver.

Let me tell you.

What a commerce secretary.

What do you make of the big deal, Dan?

Well, I hate to

disagree with Mr.

Luttnick here, but they did not get this done in three weeks.

This deal has been under some form of discussion since Trump was president the first time.

It's not particularly related to Liberation Day.

It's not a deal.

It's at best a framework of a deal.

It's maybe a, to borrow a phrase from Trump, a concept of a deal.

Like we have some outlines.

We don't know when it's going into effect.

Nothing's been signed.

But the things to know here are Trump's completely ass-backward, asinine understanding of global trade suggests that if you have a trade, the United States has a trade deficit with that country, then we are losing somehow.

We have a trade surplus with the UK.

We are winning in this scenario.

So it's like, what?

This is not like if theoretically there's more, we can open up like one of the things in here is they're raising the quota on U.S.

beef going to the UK.

That's fine.

That's like a totally fine normal thing.

This is not going to change very much at all.

The fact that it's the UK is very telling because, as I mentioned, it's a deal that's been worked on for years.

It's also our closest ally with a special relationship with a very meager trading relationship.

So it's a pretty easy deal to get done if you're looking to show some victory.

And

Lutnik is celebrating that the 10% tariffs are on there.

What he's doing, he's celebrating the continued 10% tax that American people will pay on goods coming from the UK, unless you buy Rolls-Royce.

If you buy one of the 100,000

says we took it from 25 to yeah, we took it from 25 to 10 on Rolls-Royce, but you're right.

The first 100,000 that come in.

The first 100,000 Rolls-Royces and other British manufactured cars will not face that tariff.

Bentleys, Range Rovers, Minis.

I think that's everyone.

Daston Martin.

Dustin Martin.

Daston Martin.

You're right.

You're right.

All things I learned from James Bond.

U.S.

tariff rates because of this quote-unquote deal fell 0.06%.

Yeah.

So it's not much of a deal.

But NBC's, the NBC headline on this is amazing.

Trump gives break to Rolls-Royce cars, but threatens more tariffs on Mattel toys.

And honestly, the piece is even worse than the headline because there's a quote from Trump about the Rolls, Rolls-Royce.

He goes, we took it from 25 to 10 on Rolls-Royce because Rolls-Royce is not going to be built here.

I wouldn't even ask them to do that.

It's a very special car.

And then the CEO of Mattel had said that he's going to move some production out of China into other countries, but not the U.S.

And Trump said, That's okay, let him go.

We'll put a hundred percent tariff on his toys and he won't sell one toy in the United States.

Cool.

I would never ask Rolls-Royce to build their cars anywhere but the UK.

And please, please sell as many as you want.

But fucking Mattel Toys, no more.

We're done.

Trade embargo on Mattel Toys.

I mean, this also fits in with the news that Trump proposed to Mike Johnson a loan program for newborn babies to offset, assumingly to offset the cost of tariffs from, because 99% of strollers, car seats, baby toys, everything come from China.

So we're going to put babies in debt to cover the tariffs.

Like, what are we doing?

You have to give the baby back?

How does this feel?

Yeah, I'm not sure.

The baby themselves might be the collateral here.

I don't know.

It feels, I mean, obviously they're doing this because they want to show momentum.

Big deal.

You know, Tommy was pointing out that Fox News all day, even though the biggest story is the Pope, all day it was talking about the UK trade deal because you can tell like they want to, they want to make this a big deal.

And, you know, the markets reacted positively as they have been the last week or so because I think markets are hoping that we're sort of inching towards some kind of resolution here.

I don't know if that really works as a political strategy or really a trade strategy.

No, I don't think it works.

It doesn't work as a trade strategy.

It doesn't work as a market strategy.

Like, the markets went up this morning, but it's not because of this deal.

It's because the prospect that we're going to have negotiations with China next week.

That's what people care about.

Our relationship, our political relationship with the UK is quote-unquote special and important and historic.

Our trade relationship with the UK is fairly minimal compared to some of the other, like Canada, Mexico, China, the places that are most affected by this.

And people, it's all reality.

Like, reality sits in when it comes to the economy.

You can't fake it.

People are going to see prices go up.

They're going to see empty shelves.

The markets could make up.

Just ask Joe Biden.

That's right.

Exactly.

The markets could possibly go up on a deal here or there, but what they're really supposed to do is project the medium and long-term state of the economy.

And if that, if the economy performs as Jerome Powell thinks it might, then that's going to affect the market too, no matter how many deals Trump announces between now and then.

Let's talk about China.

The first cargo ships with goods subject to Trump's 145% tariffs are now arriving here on the West Coast.

Bloomberg had a fascinating breakdown of one container ship that's carrying $564 million worth of products from China that will cost the Americans who bought them $417 million in tariff payments.

I'm not a great business guy, but that seems like it's going to be difficult to turn a profit.

Unless you raise prices.

That's true.

The Port of Los Angeles is expecting a 35% drop in volume this week, and that's just one port.

Trump was asked about all this at the Oval event on Thursday with his big UK deal.

Let's listen.

Ports here in the U.S., the traffic has really slowed, and now thousands of dock workers and truck drivers are worried about their jobs.

That means we lose less money.

When I see that, that means we lose less money.

So when you say it's slowed down, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

It's a good thing, Dan.

It's a good thing to have the shipping of goods and global trade slow down so that people can't get the goods they need and have to pay more for the ones that are left.

And that the people who work at the docks and drive the trucks and the stores to sell goods lose their jobs.

That's a good thing.

I mean, he really is a walking, talking argument for making Econ a required course in American high school.

It's like he just, the fundamentals of it, he does not like if he had gone to and paid attention to the first three weeks of Econ 101 at any virus city in America, we would not be in this problem.

Well, that's his excuse.

What's the excuse of all the fucking people that work in his administration?

Because they do what he wants.

I mean, like, there are people.

Like, Scott fucking Bessie.

He is trying to work.

Of course, he wrote a thousand things before the election trying to rationalize tariffs, but whatever his queer quote was about how the tariff gun always stays in the drawer.

So he is trying to work around the insanity and ignorance of his boss and other people.

So many have before.

Yes.

I mean, he's going to end up working somewhere with Gary Cohn one day.

And the rest of these people are, they do, they do, like, they view their job as to ser, is to do what Trump wants, regardless of how stupid that is.

Apparently, Besant is meeting in Switzerland with the Chinese this weekend to maybe talk about, I don't know, first steps on a deal, first steps on negotiations about a deal.

I don't know how this ends with China because I don't, you know, it seems like Trump doesn't want to have it seem at all like he is giving into China, but he needs to give in to China.

So

this is what I feel like this is what this whole Switzerland thing is about.

Yeah, I mean, the Chinese are suffering economically from the tariffs.

Like there are projections that 60 million Chinese will lose their jobs.

The forecasts on economic growth are being revised down.

Like we are, we buy their stuff more than anyone else in the world if they can't sell it to us.

That like those ships,

those empty ships are bad for them.

But the problem with a trade war with China is they face no political pressure.

There is no,

she's not sitting around checking Dave Wasserman's Twitter feed to see how things are looking in the 2026 midterms.

And he doesn't have to worry about Congress.

He can just, as they are doing, just enact a stimulus plan to offset the economic damage, the short-term economic damage of the tariff.

So, like, Trump Trump will face political pressure in this country

and adverse effects that she will never face, even if his economy, even if their economy ends up suffering more in the short term than ours does.

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Let's check in on the other part of Trump's economic plan.

A big, beautiful bill filled with tax cuts and maybe cuts to Medicaid and other programs, but we still don't know for sure because Republicans can't seem to agree on anything.

The latest is that they're now looking at $4 trillion in tax cuts and $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.

It was originally 4.5 and 2 trillion, and the spending cuts are theoretically supposed to include $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid.

But House Republicans who will face competitive races in 2026 are nervous about cutting Medicaid, as they should be.

Reportedly, so is the White House.

So now they're trying to find ways to cut Medicaid without really cutting Medicaid, which is quite a trick to pull off.

One idea that's still floating around, capping the amount the federal government spends on each Medicaid recipient, which would lead to a lot of people losing their health insurance because the cap wouldn't account for rising health care costs.

And so when healthcare costs go up, people would just not be able to afford them or the states wouldn't be able to pay more.

The more moderate Republicans don't like this either, but the hardline Republicans refuse to vote for a bill that doesn't find $1.5 trillion in cuts somewhere.

So here we are.

What do you think?

Can you think of a solution here that gets all the House Republicans on board?

If you were to take these people at their word, and you probably should, frankly, most of them are liars and have

no understanding at all of how governmental fiscal policy works.

But if you took them at their word, if you just did that as a thought exercise, nothing can pass.

Because you have a group of people who say they will not pass a bill that cuts Medicaid above a certain level.

You have a bunch of different group of people who say they will not pass a bill unless it cuts Medicaid below a certain level.

Like the red lines are crossing left and right.

So if you took them at their word, they cannot get it done.

Will they find some way to get it done?

Maybe.

I mean, they have done everything Trump's asked them to do thus far.

Like we've.

Democrats have been quite skeptical that they would pass this budget resolution, and they did.

You know, I mentioned this on the show recently, last week, two weeks, six months ago, who knows?

But, you know, one thing they could do is just they could punt.

They could extend the tax cuts for a year or two

unpaid for, or with some non-Medicaid spending cuts where you're just sort of paying a toll and say, because of the economic uncertainty of the tariffs, the last thing we want to do is risk raising taxes on every American.

So we're going to do this and come back.

Now, the downside to them is they could very much lose the house in the interim.

And

then they're forced into a negotiation.

Trump is forced into a negotiation with Democrats, but they can't let taxes go up on every American.

Like that is just something they absolutely cannot do.

And if they cannot figure the cuts out in the interim, then I'm not sure what other option there is.

I'm trying to think of how Trump would explain that one because he's not going to be like, oh, we lost.

I guess he'd just be like,

he'd just say, well, I wanted all this, but you know what?

Democrats are going to, if we don't pass something, Democrats are going to let the taxes go up.

And Democrats want your taxes to go up.

So we're going to save the day and make sure the taxes don't go up.

up he's already started he's already there there's we don't have to have this conversation today but there's a longer conversation about democratic strategy here and what they should be doing that they may not yet be doing but he's already started the democrats want your taxes to go up because we're all opposing this bill um and so like it's not it's it's an inelegant solution for the republicans for sure but it is one if they cannot square the circle on these cuts Someone has to give.

The moderates have to give, the conservatives have to give.

And then you have a whole set of different problems with the Senate and getting to your 50 votes there.

If they can't do that, they're going to have to do something.

And

that could be a punt.

Reuters reported on Thursday that Trump is privately pushing Johnson to create a new higher tax bracket for people making over $2.5 million and closing the so-called carried interest loophole as ways of paying for tax cuts to everyone else.

This was like, you know, higher taxes for the rich were on the table, then they were off the table.

Steve Bannon wanted them, and some of the mega populist types, and then the more establishment mega types were like, no, that's crazy.

We love tax cuts for rich people.

That's why we came to Congress.

Do you think this flies?

Do you think they can do a $2.5 million tax bracket?

I also don't know how much it's $2.5 million in income.

So it's like, you know, really rich people,

like multi-millionaires and billionaires, they probably have a lot of money.

that they're not getting an income.

So I don't even know how much that saves them.

Yeah,

the devil is in the details here for sure.

They would, it would certainly get them some savings, which would reduce pressure on the cut side of it.

But it's impossible.

It's almost impossible to imagine this passing.

Every time this keeps getting floated, and Republicans keep shooting this down from like Republicans who rarely disagree with Trump shoot this idea down because the idea of taxing rich people is impossible for them to fathom.

And just even if you're being generous about this,

their

long-held doctrinaire Republican view that you never raise taxes, right?

That's the that's the that's the Reagan rule, the one that uh George W.

H.W.

Bush violated and um lost, you know, was primaried because of it and lost re-election.

So I can't imagine them doing that.

Now, carrying interest loophole, you could probably find some more support for, but once Trump's new VC buddies hear about this, they're going to blow up the White House and it's going to come to an end.

Like, I just don't think either of these are happening.

Well, someone asked, a reporter asked Trump about this last week or whenever, and he was like, oh, we can't let taxes go up, even on the rich.

It's not, we're not going to do that.

That's too much.

And then now he's, then, you know, Jake Sherman's like, oh, he called Mike Johnson.

He was like, let's do it.

And now Mike Johnson's entertaining it, but that probably doesn't.

He shot it.

Mike Johnson shot it down the last time, too.

So I just shot it down last time.

Now he's going to

know.

But this, I think it just goes to show that the math is so hard here for them.

One thing that's important is

we know in the past, almost every single time, maybe every time that I can remember, when there is sort of a battle between the hardline Republicans and the more moderate Republicans who are in competitive races, the moderate Republicans always fold.

The hardliners win the day.

And so I think that if people, and I know people have been going to town halls, holding town halls of their own, Democratic members have been going to Republican districts who refuse to hold town halls and hold them there.

Continue putting pressure on the Republicans in districts that are going to face competitive races in 2026 because that pressure needs to be sustained and we need to be loud because they need to fear what might happen to their job if they cut Medicaid.

And so you can go to votesaveamerica.com to look for places to take action.

But I do think in these next couple weeks, who knows, it could be months, but they're going to, you know, these things come together fast.

And then suddenly we're looking at a whole bunch of Medicaid cuts on the table that we didn't think were going to happen.

So, I think it's really important for people to keep up the pressure.

This is a fight we can win.

It's not guaranteed, like, we don't have the votes to stop it, but cutting Medicaid is way more unpopular than attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act or Trump's first term.

You have 80% of Americans opposing Medicaid cuts, you know, more than 50% of Republicans, 75% of Independents.

This is incredibly popular.

It is ingrained in people's lives.

It is how many, many Americans get healthcare.

Something like 40% of births in America are paid for by Medicaid.

And so like

you can't like, yes, Republicans are craven.

Yes, they do terrible things.

We may not win this fight, but it's one we can win.

There are a lot of fights.

It's just they're going to do what they're, like the confirmations.

They're just going to do what Trump wants, and it's not really going to matter.

This is one where the politics are such that if we put sufficient political pressure on, we could actually stop this.

Yeah, because, I mean, you laid out the scenario where this is a win and they still get by, which is they just give up on the cuts and they extend the tax cuts and they punt for a year or something.

That would be a huge win.

All right.

Trump administration is still trying very hard to disappear immigrants to foreign gulags, and the courts, including Trump judges, are still trying very hard to stop them.

The federal government has a new gulag in mind that's somehow even worse than El Salvador's Seacot.

Detention centers in eastern Libya, which is controlled by an African warlord.

Our own State Department calls the conditions in those prisons life-threatening and warns against traveling to Libya because of terrorism, kidnapping, and armed conflict.

A federal judge almost immediately blocked the Trump administration from doing this.

We'll see if they listen.

The lawyers that brought the case said that this was the plan.

ICE rounded up six Asian nationals who were detained in Texas and ordered them to sign paperwork agreeing to be sent to Libya.

When they refused, they were handcuffed and thrown in solitary confinement.

Wild shit.

There's also another lawyer who said that they were trying to potentially send Mexican immigrants, detainees, to Libya, which is even more insane because Mexico is taking deportees.

If they're Mexican nationals, you can send them back to Mexico and the Mexican government will take them.

So they're literally just wanting to send people to Libya to this fucking hellhole.

I don't know, just because.

To send a message.

To send a message, to send a message.

Meanwhile, in a D.C.

courtroom, Judge Bozberg challenged the DOJ's position that they have no authority to bring back the people they disappeared to foreign gulags by pointing out that Trump himself said on national TV to Terry Moran that he could just pick up the phone and ask Bukele to release Kilmar Obrego-Garcia.

Needless to say, the DOJ didn't have a good answer to that.

Neither did Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam or FBI Director Cash Patel when they were grilled about due process and deportations during their testimony on Capitol Hill this week.

Let's listen.

Do you believe that you have the right to detain or deport a legal permanent resident for expressing their political opinion?

I don't make decisions on legal status here in the United States.

The Department of State does that.

Your position is that every one of those individuals is by constitutional right afforded due process.

I don't know the answer to that.

I'm telling you.

You don't?

You haven't read the Constitution?

I've got it right here, but what you're saying is that that every single one of the illegals that was sent down to El Salvador is supposed to be given due process pursuant to the process.

That's what the Constitution says.

It doesn't say that.

It does say no person.

I'll encourage you to read it.

I would also encourage the FBI director to read the Constitution.

Leah and I will get into some of this in the interview, though I interviewed her

before this hearing.

What did you make of Noam and Patel's answers and the DOJ's answer in court?

That the president, he just says things.

He just says things.

I mean, the sum total of what these guys said in their testimony, what Caroline Levitt says at the press conferences, how Trump answered questions of Chris and Welker, the court filings is

what they're doing is indefensible.

It's indefensible morally, it's indefensible.

Legally, it's indefensible politically.

You can't answer the questions because Basically, the FBI director has to pretend to not understand the Constitution to be able to answer this question because the Constitution is crystal clear on it.

And even if you want to debate the use of the word person in there, the courts have ruled on this, as you pointed out on Tuesday Spot, as recently as like three weeks ago.

Yeah, all nine justices, even the ones we don't like, even Alito and Thomas.

And the reason they ruled on it that way is because they said it is the government's own position that due process is afforded to all these people.

Yeah, and has been for ever.

I mean, it's, it's just, it is, it's embarrassing.

If it wasn't so horrifying, it'd be embarrassing, frankly.

Also, remember this crew, they love the unitary executive theory, which is, you know, all power is vested in the president of the United States and the executive branch, and the president is all-powerful.

But then we were like, okay, well, he just said he could pick up the phone and bring people back from El Salvador.

So was he lying?

Oh, no, no, no.

He's talking about the influence he might have, not his authority.

That was what the DOJ said in response.

He's all-powerful, except when you ask him to do what the courts have ordered him to do.

And then, eh, I don't know.

And they're all like, it's just wild that they're all pointing fingers at everyone else.

Christina's like, DHS, we don't detain people.

That's Mark Or Rubio.

And then Cashville's like, I don't know.

I was the Constitution.

And then Trump's like, I don't know.

I listen to my lawyers.

I mean, I listen to my lawyers is such a pitiful.

He's a real stickler.

Yeah.

He's a real stickler.

It's someone known for seeking legal advice before he does anything.

Because, you know, the one thing I say about Trump is dot the I's and cross the T's legally.

I do find it just horrifying that, because I don't think Libya is the last example of a new country they're going to want to send people to.

And this one, like you said, it seemed designed to send a message because the, so there's one Libyan government that the world recognizes in Tripoli.

And then there's the warlord in eastern Libya whose son, I guess, met with the Trump administration a couple of weeks ago, where they cooked up this deal.

And it wasn't just a rumor because

there was a fucking flight plan that was filed for a C-17, a military plane in Texas that was going to Libya.

And so like this, this shit was going to happen.

And they were going to send just a couple of a couple of Asian nationals that they found in a detention center in Texas.

What?

Why?

Do we know if these people, do we even know if these people are undocumented?

Do we know that they're legal residents?

Do they know we know that they're citizen?

We don't.

What crimes have they committed?

We don't know.

What authority do they have to send them to another prison?

We don't know.

Well, no, we don't.

They have none.

You know,

it is almost certainly illegal to send people to Libya.

Is the Filipino guy Trende Aragua?

Right?

Is that what I thought we were?

I thought this was the Alien Enemies Act.

Is he MS-13?

Because I don't think those gangs are in the Philippines.

What about the Cambodian?

And why can't these people be sent to their home countries?

It's unconscionable.

It's unconscionable.

And I just don't like, they are not going to stop here.

They are going to keep going.

And they're losing.

And they're losing to Trump judges.

The second Trump judge was like,

there was another Obrego Garcia case where

the guy had legal protection.

They sent him anyway.

And she's like, hello, you got to bring him back.

I'm sure they got right on that.

It's really fucking bad.

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All right, let's play good news, bad news.

Oh,

is this a new segment?

Well, just this, maybe one.

Yeah, normally it's bad news, bad news, but this week we'll do good news, good news, bad news.

Or maybe bad news, bad news, good news.

I was going to say, just wait for it.

The good news: it appears that one of Trump's worst appointees won't be confirmed, Ed Martin, the Stop the Steal activist serving as the interim U.S.

Attorney for Washington, D.C.

North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis said on Tuesday that he would vote against Martin's nomination to the position.

And on Thursday, Trump said he would replace Martin.

Woo!

Yay!

Bad news:

Trump announced he's replacing Martin with Judge Janine Pirro.

And thus the five became the four.

Maybe, who knows?

Maybe Ed Martin becomes a good one.

Oh, good point.

Good point.

Your thoughts, Dan?

Your thoughts on Ed Martin going down?

Thank God.

That guy was fucking nuts.

This is very Matt Gates Pamboni, which is like, be careful what you wish for.

The idea that Judge Janine Pierrow would have a high-level poem in the Trump administration has been a running joke for nearly a a decade.

And thus it has become true.

We're not laughing.

We're not laughing anymore.

Because the U.S.

attorney is a very important job.

You are not, the U.S.

attorney of D.C.

is a very important job.

You are not just a, you're not just U.S.

attorney for federal crimes.

You're also the local prosecutor because D.C.

is not a state.

You have.

you end up taking a lot of governmental and political cases because Washington, because the government's there in D.C.

So this is not, I mean, it is bad that Trump's OAN spokesperson is the acting U.S.

attorney in

New Jersey, but it is even worse to have someone in D.C.

They can do much, much more damage, as Ed Martin was doing as he was threatening Chuck Schumer and doing all the other criteria.

He was just tweeting legal threats at Chuck Schumer, Georgetown University, anyone he could think of.

This is,

it's one of those, it's funny, but it's not funny from the New York Times explaining Ed Martin going down.

It was a revelation about Mr.

Martin's association with a well-known January 6th defendant that turned many fence sitters against him.

A man who has dressed up like Adolf Hitler, sketched cartoons depicting Jewish people as pigs, and once declared that he would kill all the Jews and eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, according to court filings.

That's the guy who Ed Martin had on his podcast, praised him,

and then lied about praising him and really knowing him.

Yeah.

That's Ed Martin.

And now we got Janine Piero.

Do your best.

Do your best, Judge Janine.

It is like how

it is.

The only, like as you said, it's not really funny, but like Tom Tillis is like, I am going to make a bold move.

I'm going to do the right thing.

And now he's going to be fucking forced to vote for Judge Janine Piro.

Not only that, Tom Tillis was like, but you know, if they want to put Ed Martin somewhere else in DOJ, that's okay.

I just don't think he should be in D.C.

because of January 6th.

Thanks, Tom Tillis.

Just real profound courage.

Yeah.

So Trump's also having trouble filling the slot for Surgeon General.

His initial pick pick for the job, a Fox News contributor named Jeanette Nishwat, who's also ex-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz's sister-in-law, turned out to have misrepresented her medical credentials.

Shocker.

Trump announced on Wednesday that he's replacing her with Maha's own Casey Means,

who never even finished her medical residency.

Here's what Trump had to say when asked about the nomination in the Oval Office on Thursday.

You just announced your new nominee for the U.S.

Surgeon General who never finished her residency and is not a practicing physician.

So can you explain why you picked her to be America's top doctor?

Because Bobby thought she was fantastic.

She's highly, she's a brilliant woman who Bobby really thought she was great.

I don't know her.

I listened to the recommendation of Bobby.

I met her yesterday and once before.

She's a very outstanding person, a great academic, actually.

He's a real details guy.

He's really good on the personnel decisions, really focused on the hiring process.

Islamophobe conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer had been leading the charge against Nishiwat.

Does anyone know how to say this?

Neshwat, Nishiwat?

Anyway, anyway, at this point,

we don't need to know anymore.

That's the point.

In part for being too vaccine-friendly, that's why she was loomered.

But now, Loomer is attacking Means for being too, quote, woo-woo and new agey.

So she's trying to loomer her, too.

What do we know about Casey Means, Dan?

You hit in your intro two key points.

One, she never finished her surgical residency and she does not have an active medical license.

Her medical license expired in 2024.

She has been up until she stopped having a medical license, been a sort of preventive holistic medicine doctor in Oregon.

But she's best known as a she's a very big figure in the wellness community.

She's a big supporter of Robert F.

Kenny Jr.

for a long time.

She's quite controversial for a number of reasons.

She has a lot of positions on.

You don't say.

I don't say.

But there are two reasons she's controversial.

One is she has a lot of non-scientific backed positions on disease prevention and other things.

But the other thing is that she's essentially a wellness influencer.

She is constantly promoting.

supplements, vitamins, other things with very limited scientific backing, but she does it by publishing affiliate links on her social media pages for which she makes money.

And even more controversially, she's often promoting products from a company called Trumed, which just happens to be run by her brother, Callie Means, who is also an employee of the Department of Health and Human Services.

And so this is, she has none of the credentials.

Even if you put aside her positions.

And the grift on the wellness side with the supplements and the whatnot, she doesn't have any of the credentials that a surgeon general normally has, not the clinical experience, not the medical experience, not the

like uh like like america's top doctor uh like being a doctor yes being yes being a practice she is technically not a doctor which is does seem to be a challenge uh one of the chapter titles in her book is trust yourself not your doctor

uh she said that the birth control pill disrespects life because it's quote shutting down the hormones in the female body that create this cyclical life-giving nature of women she likes full moon ceremonies um and she has said that talking to trees helped her find true love.

Well, she does.

She does admit that that was out there.

The tree thing,

let's not kink shame her on that.

It's not for me to judge how she found true love.

She talked to the tree.

She didn't.

Anyway, what do we think about Laura Loomer, head of presidential personnel now?

She's very effective.

I mean, has anyone survived a loomering yet?

I mean, Casey Means would be the first because

she got her man with Mike Waltz and Alex Wong.

And a whole bunch of people

deep in

the CIA also went down.

Large portions of the NSC.

She is one of the most influential people in the world right now.

Watch out, Pope Leo.

That's what I'm saying.

We've seen the white smoke.

He gave his speech, but can he survive the Loomering?

One final piece of good news with no bad news to follow.

Oh, exciting.

The final uncalled race race of the 2024 election is now over.

North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, who won her race by 734 votes out of more than 5 million, will be sworn in for a new term after her Republican challenger finally gave up his efforts to have various ballots thrown out, but only because a Trump-appointed federal judge said Griffin was trying to change the rules of the game after it had been played.

I guess this the not silver lining of bad news, the dark lining of bad news is that the fact that it took a federal court to step in because the North Carolina Supreme Court was going to let this fucking charade continue.

But all's well.

That ends well for now, I guess.

Yeah, it's a very important victory.

Very important victory.

It's a very important victory.

Also, that also highlights the importance of...

everyone getting out to vote and every single vote counting because she won by 734 votes out of more than 5 million.

Elections fucking matter.

Voting matters.

Pay attention.

Speaking of the 2024 election, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, Original Sin, about the White House cover-up of Joe Biden's decline is coming out in two weeks.

In what seems to be an attempt to pre-but the book, Politico reports that Biden has hired new staff to defend his reputation.

He's also back out there doing what he does best, speaking in front of cameras.

He sat for an interview with the BBC that aired on Wednesday, and on Thursday, he and Dr.

Jill Biden went on the view.

Here are some of the highlights.

Knowing what you know now, do you think you would have beat him?

Yeah, he still got seven million fewer votes.

Yes.

A lot of people didn't show up.

Number one, number one.

Number two,

they're very close in those toss-up states.

It wasn't a slam dunk.

There have been a number of books that have come out, deeply sourced from Democratic sources, that claim in your final year there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities.

In the final year of your presidency, what is your response to these allegations or are these sources wrong?

They are wrong.

There's nothing to sustain that.

You know, one of the things that,

well, I'm happy to.

Well, and Alyssa, you know, one of the things I think is that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.

And they didn't see how hard Joe worked every single day.

I wasn't surprised, not because I didn't think the vice president was a qualified person to be president.

She is.

She's qualified to be president of the United States of America.

But I was surprised.

I wasn't surprised because they went the route of the sexist route.

How do you think Biden did?

Is this helping?

Is this helping?

What is this?

What is going on here?

I am so exhausted by this conversation.

Because I don't even know what we're supposed to judge Biden by here.

Like,

was he better than the debate?

Yes, he was better than he was on the debate stage.

Compared to a

typical an average politician anywhere in America delivering a message, was he good?

No.

It was like some, there were some good parts.

He had some funny lines.

Most of it was like kind of hard to follow.

Dr.

Biden had to step in on a couple of occasions.

Like he survived it, I guess.

But it's like, to what end?

Like, who are we trying to convince here?

What's the audience for this?

The American people are pretty decided on the question of was Joe Biden too old?

And they were decided long before the debate.

And I don't know that one interview or two interviews or a thousand interviews is going to change, nothing's going to change that perspective.

Yeah.

First of all, were you surprised that Kamala Harris lost?

No, he wasn't surprised.

And then he starts talking about, because they really did the sexist thing hard.

And

that's what explicit, yeah.

They went the sexist route pretty hard.

And it's like

you can,

You can posit that there is sexism in the electorate, but

they didn't do the sexist route hard.

The Republicans just didn't.

And it's like a mixed race woman.

I don't know if you paid attention to the campaign or not.

But anyway, whatever Joe Biden says aside, I actually think you're right.

Like

he is a former president now, and that's it, right?

And if he wants to go out there and talk and defend himself, whatever.

We got to think about the party and think about other Democratic officials and other Democratic Democratic politicians who are going to be asked these questions, particularly when these books come out.

And,

you know, I've heard some of them, some people try to like, you know, they don't want to answer the question.

They're worried about, they try to elide the question.

And you've got Democratic strategists out there still saying like, oh, good for the Bidens for being out there.

And they're hiring people to help them.

And it's like, no, no, no.

The answer is he shouldn't have run for a second term.

And when he did run for a second term, he should have stepped down much earlier after the debate.

And his close advisors shouldn't have told him to run again, and they shouldn't have told him he was going to win.

And like, I think that every Democratic politician, particularly those who want to lead the party and want to run in 2028, have to just rip the fucking band-aid off.

Yeah, you need an answer to the question.

Like, we, I don't think we, we didn't talk about it on this podcast.

We talked about it on Tremly Online, but Elizabeth Warren had a brutal answer when she was pushed on this on a podcast.

Yeah.

And that's the first of many, right?

And you can see some of these people, when they start running for president in a couple of years, particularly those people, maybe like Pete Buttigiege, who I'm sure will have a good answer to it, but who served in the Biden administration, or if Kamala Harris were to run again, she's going to have to answer these questions.

She'll probably have to answer them when she does her first interview, but she still has not done since the election ended.

To me, like, on one hand, I am sympathetic to

Biden's desire to defend his legacy in the face of these books coming out.

I'm sympathetic to to the people who worked for Biden trying to defend a president that they have great affection and loyalty to and the work they did.

And I, like, I've thought about this.

If Joe, if Barack Obama had lost to Mitt Romney in 2012, I would have been an absolute fucking lunatic trying to do everything I could to like reshape, you know, try to, it's not his fault, like his legacy, like all the great things we did.

So I understand that impulse.

But there is an element here of reading the room.

And there is so much bad shit happening in the country.

The threats are so dire.

And the threats are so dire to the things that Joe Biden dearly and sincerely cares about

that this media tour is about Joe Biden.

It's not about Donald Trump.

It's about Joe Biden defending himself and his legacy.

It's not about,

which I wouldn't recommend this, but it's not about using the platform a former president may have to criticize a sitting president, to try to shift the public debate in some way or the other.

It's about, he's made it about himself.

And that I think was some of that is.

Yeah, which he made the last fucking year of his presidency about.

Which is one of the reasons we're all here.

And so I, that, that to me is frustrating.

You know, there's been this like, is it really bad that Biden's back out there again politically?

I don't think anyone cares is the truth.

Just no one is, no one's paying attention.

It is just, we, this was the problem in the election is the American people decided how they felt about Joe Biden.

Nothing he said or they did could change, was going to change their mind about it because it was right before their eyes.

It was like an obvious thing that he should not run for re-election.

And so they made up their mind and went.

And so I don't, it's just, it's not going to change

anything at all, I don't think.

Yeah.

No, my, my, the reason I care about this is in a world where reporters just all decided never to ask Democratic politicians about Joe Biden and the 2024 campaign again, then like, let's none of us talk about it.

But that's not the world that we live in.

They're all going to be asked and they're all going to get the question.

And we don't know that he is suffering from any kind of cognitive decline or condition, right?

We just, we don't know that.

We all know what we saw, what we've seen for the last year.

The man can't communicate coherently on a consistent basis.

And that's the job of president.

That's the job of candidate.

That's how you sell your agenda.

That's how you run for office.

And he couldn't do it.

So he shouldn't have run.

And like the people who were closest to him failed him in that regard.

Not the whole staff, like you said, not all the people doing the work, but the inner circle in his family failed him in that regard.

And

he failed too.

And so like, there's no...

I just think there's no reason and there's no

purpose to trying to fuzz that up, especially because we have a credibility problem as a party, right?

I mean, both parties have a credibility problem.

All politicians have a credibility problem.

But I do think that could be a threshold question for a lot of these candidates where it's like, if people think that Democrats or politicians in general are just bullshitting them when they talk, then this is going to be a prime example of Democratic politicians, of people thinking that they just got bullshitted again.

Someone bullshitted them because they gave some answer where they were like,

he was fine and he did a lot of good things and the party lost their mind after the debate and the polls actually showed this and all the bullshit that they were saying.

I think, yeah, I think that's true.

I think the press is going to, like, this is going to be a hurdle that attests the press is going to,

and I use the press in the broadest thing.

I mean, Kristen Welcome Meet the Press to the podcaster who is doing the interview.

Like, like Elizabeth Warren got taken down on a podcast, not on, you know, the Situation Room or whatever.

Right.

I think there's just two more things I want to say.

I know I said I didn't really talk about this, but now I have a lot to say about it.

So I apologize for that.

No, fine.

The one thing that I found very frustrating is Biden can't.

I mean, I know this is the, like, we know him.

This is the pride in him, but it is, I find it very aggravating and infuriating, frankly, infuriating when he says that he thinks he would have won.

Cause I feel like that's so, it's politically insane, right?

It's just, it's like detached from reality.

But even that, even if you truly believe that, to, to verbalize that in such a direct way repeatedly is to me so disrespectful of Kamala Harris, who he put in an impossible position.

in a gazillion ways, right?

From

like some of the things she had to take on as vice president to

the three weeks or whatever it was between the debate and when he actually got out, the month, I guess 30 days or whatever it was, like that he took that time, like that that, like be answer that question better in a more respectful way to your vice president, who in a different world would have lost his vice president.

If he had stayed in the race, she would have lost his vice president and she would be the front runner for the Democratic nomination.

She may still be that right now, but it's different because she was the nominee who lost.

And so it's just like, so that angers me.

And the second piece is

there is just like, it is deeply naive for Biden and his team to think that he can really change the conversation around his legacy right now with interviews.

What, like, where his, like, I think there's a very, there's a real chance that decades from now, Biden's legacy will greatly improve people's minds because people will look back at some of the really important things he did.

He beat Trump.

the pandemic, like maybe some of the long-term investments he made really bear fruit.

And he can end up like someone like Harry Truman, who is a one-term president who was left very weak and then ended up as being seen as one of our greater presidents.

But that happens over time.

It's not something you're going to solve on the view.

And so it's like, step back, like putting it, reminding people of why they didn't want you to run in the first place is not going to help that conversation.

So it's just like you have to, if you really, truly believe that the work you did was good, then you have to trust history to judge it correctly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

When we come back from the break, you'll hear my conversation with strict scrutiny Scrutiny's Leah Lippmann.

But before we do that, brand new episode of Polar Coaster just dropped.

Dan, what did you guys talk about this week?

We talked about Donald Trump's ill-fated.

Speaking of Joe Biden, we talked about Donald Trump's ill-fated efforts to blame the economy on Joe Biden and why that was a strategy doomed to fail miserably.

And we took a bunch of really interesting questions from the listeners.

It was great, great episode.

Caroline was amazing as always.

Really fun.

Check it out.

To ask Dan questions or listen to Polar Coaster and to get ad-free episodes of all your favorite shows and access to our Discord community, subscribe to friendsofthepod at cricket.com slash friends or on Apple Podcasts.

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Leah, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Congrats on your new book that's out next week, May 13th.

It's called Lawless, How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.

Here it is, right in front of me, displayed.

I want to talk about the book a little bit later.

First, I want to pick your brain on some of the

lot of the legal news that's out there, because there's plenty.

It has now been several weeks since the Supreme Court upheld a district court's order that the Trump Trump administration must take steps to facilitate the release of Kilimar Obrego-Garcia.

Trump administration has refused to do so.

Trump basically said he could, but that his lawyers don't want to.

That was sort of the essence of the answer he gave Terry Moran of ABC.

What happens now?

And what can you do if you're

Kilimar Obrego-Garcia's lawyers?

So I think what is going to happen is the district court proceedings are going to continue to play out.

It's likely that Obrego-Garcia's lawyers might file a motion to show cause as to why the government isn't in contempt of the lower court ruling directing the administration to facilitate a brego-garcia's return.

There's always some discomfort with using out-of-court statements in court to actually prove them.

And so there is going to be some tension with, well, do you actually take Trump at his word when he wasn't signing a sworn declaration or hadn't been administered an oath and take that at face value and use it against him.

But I think it's not just that.

It's the fact that, as you say, so much time has passed.

They have done diddly squat and everybody knows that there is an agreement that obviously they have some leverage on.

I saw the New York Times report that the State Department sent a diplomatic note to Bukele, basically asking him to facilitate the release.

And then he said no.

Obviously, this is like a cover-your-ass move.

Do you think the courts buy that?

Is that enough for the courts?

Does that qualify as trying to facilitate?

You know, this is some of the difficulty that the Supreme Court, I think, put the lower court in because they told the lower court you cannot actually effectuate the return.

That is, you can't specifically order the president to do X, Y, or Z.

And so that gives the administration some cover to do these antics where they, you know, ping Bukele and say, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, won't you return him?

And then Bukele says, no, I will not.

And then everyone around us knows what's going on.

But it's going to be difficult for courts to say, we all know what's going on here, right?

Like they want some direct evidence to kind of prove that.

I think there is enough for them to say the administration isn't facilitating the return, but it's going to be a fight.

Do you think this ends up back at the Supreme Court at some point?

Yes, unless the Trump administration actually gets Mr.

Obrego Garcia, as well as the other individuals that other courts have now concluded were wrongfully deported back.

There's no reason why their lawyers aren't going to ask the Supreme Court and other appellate courts to get the administration to actually do something.

Aaron Ross Powell,

speaking of things that may end up back at the Supreme Court, you know, they chose not to rule on the legality of Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act in this way.

But now we have two judges, one, a Trump-appointed judge, who have ruled that the invocation is unlawful.

We also have now a declassified intelligence report that

the intelligence agencies, with the partial exception of the FBI,

don't really think that the Maduro government is coordinating with Trende Aragua and telling them to go invade the United States.

I feel like that's going to be headed back to the Supreme Court as well, ideally before another few hundred people are shipped off to Seacot.

Like, what's taken so long there?

That would be ideal.

what's taking so long is the Supreme Court created this situation where they forced everyone to use this other procedural mechanism to challenge the Alien Enemies Act.

And that was always going to take some additional time to delay the Supreme Court actually having to say, obviously, you can't use the Alien Enemies Act here.

You know, it's not just the declassified intelligence reports and whatnot.

We can all read, and the statute says it applies to foreign nations when there's been a predatory incursion or invasion.

None of these things are true here.

So

Stephen Miller, who's not a lawyer, and the president, also not a lawyer, J.D.

Vance, who is a lawyer, they also.

He went to Yale.

It doesn't really count.

They keep arguing that due process only applies to citizens.

Or, you know, J.D.

Vance tries to say, well, we can't be expected to offer a hearing

for every immigrant and asylum seeker before we deport them.

Do you think there's any court that takes that legal argument seriously?

I hesitate to say no court will because I am well aware of some of the individuals that Donald Trump has appointed to the lower courts.

You know, there was the classic, let me order a nationwide ban on medication abortion, you know, doozy from Matthew Kasmirik.

There's the Eileen Cannon specials of basically single-handedly preventing any trial on the obstruction and wrongful retention of classified material charges against Donald Trump.

So I'm not going to say no court, but that doesn't mean the arguments aren't utter bullshit, right?

Like, again, we can all read the Constitution says no person shall be denied life, liberty, property without due process.

It's not limited to citizens.

Also, no one is asking for full-blown trials for every individual who is part of immigration proceedings.

All they're asking for is some sort of hearing before, by the way, an executive branch official, like an asylum officer or immigration judge or board of immigration appeals.

And it's not my fault that Donald Trump has fired a bunch of people, made civil service intolerable, and is terrorizing bureaucrats.

They could offer these hearings if they wanted to.

Instead, they have opted for effectively concentration camps.

Also, in that initial Alien Enemies Act ruling, that was the 5-4 ruling, even there, the majority was basically like, well, the government acknowledges that everyone deserves due process, and that is something that

we all believe as well.

And that would seemingly include all nine of them.

So I don't even know what they're doing there.

Just because the Supreme Court says something does not make it true, John.

And this is one of the big lessons of my book, Lawless, because while the Supreme Court said the government acknowledged that people were entitled to notice and the opportunity to challenge their detention, in fact, the actual papers that the government filed said they were under no obligation to modify when an individual was deported or expelled in order to give them time to challenge their deportation.

The government took the outlandish position that basically everyone walks around with habeas petitions in their pockets and boots.

And so whenever they are arrested or removed, they have an opportunity to challenge their detention because they can just whip out that ready-made habeas petition that they all have, you know, in their wallets and handy.

So, you know, yes, the government kind of acknowledged that everyone is entitled to due process, but they just define that to basically mean nothing.

And the Supreme Court knew that.

It seems like that would be a profitable business in this era, just to just make sure that everyone, you can sell habeas petitions so that people just have them at the ready.

Should we get abducted by the government?

I don't know.

You know, I think part of the difficulty is the government is...

trotting out so many different bases for deporting and expelling people that even if you were carrying around a handy habeas petition challenging one possible basis on which the government might send you to a foreign mega prison, no guarantee that that's the actual ground they would invoke.

It's a bit of a whack-a-mole there.

So it seems like Trump keeps losing in court when it comes to his most overtly authoritarian actions.

Banning law firms from practicing in federal court was struck down by a federal judge last week.

Freezing federal funding, tried to do that to Maine.

That was struck down.

His attempt to regulate federal elections uh it seems like the doj has said they're not even going to bring that back after that got struck down to court um are you surprised relieved mildly heartened what do you think

um you know i might use all of the adjectives but i'm not breathing easy just yet in part because

These cases have not made their way up through the appellate courts.

And I don't think it's an accident that lower courts are more uniformly ruling against the Trump administration than the appellate courts or Supreme Court is.

So, you know, lower courts, they tend to be a little bit less ideological.

They're oftentimes appointed with the consent of the home state senators.

And so even people appointed by Trump in states with Democratic senators, they're not going to be as cray-cray as the people he's putting on the Supreme Court or the appellate courts.

I do find it.

I mean, again, who knows what the court, the judges we have out there right now, but I do find that the EO on the law firms

seems pretty obviously unconstitutional.

I'm no legal scholar, I'm no lawyer, but like, I don't know how that one gets upheld anywhere.

I hesitate just to say it's unconstitutional because it manages to pack in like at least five different constitutional violations to a pretty short executive order.

So.

Yeah, that one's really wild.

Really wild.

So all this brings us to your book, Lawless, which is about how we came to have a Supreme Court majority that essentially tries to disguise increasingly extreme right-wing political views as carefully reasoned legal doctrine that comes straight from the Constitution.

Why did you want to write this book?

So I started thinking about writing the book after the court overruled Roe versus Wade, and it seemed like a moment when more people were paying attention to the court and understanding just how broken the Supreme Court was.

You know, from my own perspective, I was pretty nervous and scared about the Supreme Court back in 2011 when I was clerking for the court and they came within one vote of dismantling the entire Affordable Care Act and health insurance for so many people based on some cockamamie theory that the government might force us to eat broccoli one day.

And so

I thought people should be more worried about the Supreme Court back then.

Almost 10 years later, when people were more concerned, I thought I actually want to talk to people about just how bad things have gotten, because there will inevitably be a moment when people come to believe maybe the Supreme Court isn't actually so bad.

And I want them to understand like how the court got us to this moment we are in and just how messed up the court has become.

You sort of trace the history of how this all started.

Can you talk about the origin of the court's politicization, at least in the modern era, and maybe explain the greenhouse effect, which I I thought was a great example.

Yeah.

So, origins, it's really an amalgamation of different grievance stews that they kind of threw in together and then decided to base a political movement around.

Because when the political parties were going through the Spager alignment after the civil rights movement, you know, you had the Republican Party decide, well, we want to cater to white Southerners and conservative Christians.

And so they were adopting positions that almost by definition were not going to appeal to a majority of the country and in particular, groups that were newly included in civic society.

And so they kind of leaned into minority rule and having minority rule requires them to control the Supreme Court.

So they recognized we kind of need the Supreme Court in order to impose our.

wildly unpopular weirdo views on the rest of the country.

And so they went about trying to control the Supreme Court and they successfully took it over through

different factors I'm happy to talk about, but that's kind of the high-level story.

And one of those factors relates to this greenhouse effect that you just alluded to.

So the greenhouse effect refers to this idea that once Republican presidents appointed Republican justices to the Supreme Court, they drifted left because they would read news coverage about them.

And again, because the median person in the country doesn't think women should be stripped of rights, doesn't actually think the mega-rich should control politics, when the Republican justices would write those things and opinions, they would be criticized.

And they didn't like that.

And so they would drift left.

And the greenhouse effect was named for former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse.

So they created their own ecosystem, like the Federalist Society, that would provide the justices with affirmation for doing Republican things.

So they got some validation and affirmation, and they basically had built-in fans, for lack of a better word.

So basically, they realized they had to keep feeding them a steady stream of crazy in their media diet just to kind of keep them

part of the plan.

They built this echo chamber and that's part of it.

Do you get the sense that a lot of elected officials and legal experts and law professors are still reluctant to view the court's actions and decisions as nakedly partisan or political?

Or do you think that's shifted over time, especially with this court?

I still think there is considerable reluctance to do so.

I think people tend to gravitate toward focusing on the differences between the Republican appointees.

So we are fed a constant stream of stories about, oh my gosh, Amy Coney Barrett has not voted with the other Republican appointees in every single case.

Doesn't this prove that she is, in fact, a big secret liberal and the court is super moderate?

No, in fact, it does not.

And I think people also who are part of the legal profession want to believe that the Supreme Court, the law, the legal profession is different than politics.

It's something special.

It requires some specialized training, and it does in some respects.

But the reality is how the court is operating now can be explained with reference to politics and ideology.

And trying to report on Supreme Court decisions and litigation without doing so is borderline malpractice at this point.

Where do you think that reluctance comes from?

Because, yeah, like I remember, I remember I sort of first came in contact with it when we started doing the show and it was 2017 and Gorsuch

was nominated in the Gorsuch confirmation.

And there were people who, you know, in the legal profession, had worked in Democratic politics, more liberal leaning, who were like,

I don't agree with Gorsuch, but you know,

he's still a good guy and he's got some solid legal, you know, background and he's really smart.

Actually, the first time, I heard it a little around the Roberts confirmation way back in 2005 when I was working for then Senator Obama.

People started saying that too.

But,

you know, it feels like it's dissipated a bit since then, but it always surprised me.

I'm like, where does this come from?

Why do you feel the need to do this?

You know, I don't know where to start with that.

You know, I could remind you or ask you to remind all of the people that were saying that about Neil Gorsuch that in the last few weeks, Neil Gorsuch looked at the book called Pride Puppy and insisted it had bondage workers and sex workers, when in fact, all it had was a woman in a leather jacket at a pride parade.

So, maybe not such a legal super genius, or maybe he can't read.

I don't know.

But as to like why people want to continue to insist that, no, this isn't just political.

You know, doing the podcast and studying the court has given me insight into the minds of Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch, and those are really dark, bleak places.

I don't know that I have as firm a grasp on why the legal commentariat or legal profession sticks to this idea that we shouldn't explain the court and its decisions and its reasoning in terms of politics or ideology.

Some of it comes from, for people in the media, a desire to appear unbiased and to do both sides.

I think some of it comes from people in the legal profession, again, a desire to lean on this idea that there is a specialized training and expertise, which again, I can see there is, but they

that to matter more than politics when we need to acknowledge both.

And part of why I wanted to write the book is when you put out the actual reasoning in the decisions and you situate that in terms of here were the political talking points that were happening 20 years before, 10 years before, the language is just totally ripped from it.

I mean, John Roberts, again, that super genius guy who was just calling balls and strikes, who's super moderate and institutionalist, literally struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5 in Shelby County, by saying it illegally discriminated against who?

The former Confederacy, the poor former Confederate states who were victimized for being called out for their history of racial discrimination.

And guess whose objection that was to the Voting Rights Act all along?

Segregationist Strom Thurmond, who literally called it, right, like political vendettas and retribution and a campaign against a certain part of the country so yeah he whitewashed it sandwashed it a little but it's still the same stuff

yeah it does it seems like it mirrors a bit what we've seen in electoral politics as well on on the left or at least the center left which is you know we believe deeply in institutions, democratic institutions, and want to defend those institutions or at least make those institutions work and make sure that they're trusted.

And you get caught between wanting to have faith in the institutions and believing that the institutions operate based on a certain set of objective rules and principles, whereas the right has decided that they just want to tear down those institutions.

And you're like, well, look, and I wonder just like, what you think the best strategy for liberals is here or people in the legal profession who just want to take the court back from sort of the extreme right.

Like, is mirroring what the right has done the best strategy?

Should there be a liberal version of the federalist society?

Or

what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so, you know, in addition to tearing down the institutions, I mean, I think we should understand what the Republican Party has done with the Supreme Court as effectively weaponizing it and like capturing the machinery of the state.

Because through the Supreme Court, they basically made it so Joe Biden couldn't govern, right?

They took one of his most popular policies, student debt relief, and blew it up.

And then you had people blaming Biden and the Democrats for not doing student debt relief when, no, no, no, no, that was the Supreme Court.

So as to this institutionalism, institutionalist thing, I agree that is just a big challenge for people on the left, Democrats, center left.

You know, I believe there have to be institutions.

I believe in the rule of law.

It just also is the case that I look at the institution we currently have, the Supreme Court, and it is not functioning as an institution that is part of a constitutional liberal democracy should function.

And so it needs to be changed.

I don't think that makes me not an institutionalist.

I actually think that makes me an institutionalist because I actually want to bolster and make this a legitimate functioning place

as to how we get there.

I'm not a big fan of this federal society of the left in part because the federal society works in part because it's based on fringe theories.

They are a minority, right?

It's easier to credential people in that system and have those network effects when you're operating with smaller numbers.

I think there are parts of the conservative legal movement the left should replicate, campaigning against the court, making the court part of politics.

That should absolutely be part of the strategy.

Like identifying, again, a kind of common punching bag that we can all mock and make fun of and run against, like that's part of what makes politics fun and it can be effective as well.

And so I think there are components of the conservative legal movement strategy strategy that can be replicated, some that can't, and some that shouldn't be.

The book is Lawless, How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.

It's out May 13th, but you can pre-order right now wherever books are sold.

Go get this book.

I have to say, you know, I never went down the legal path because I took a couple of law classes in undergrad and it was like too dense for me.

And you write this book and it's so funny and it's so accessible and still so smart.

That if I had had a book like this in college, who knows?

Maybe I would have gone to law school.

So, everyone, everyone, go buy Lawless, go pre-order it and then go buy it next week.

Well, thank you so much.

And if you're on the fence, I just say try to make Sam Alito even matter than he already is.

Yes, that is it.

That is it.

Leah Lippmann, thank you as always for joining.

Thank you.

That's our show for today.

Thanks so much, Talia, for joining, and we will be back with a new show on Tuesday.

Everyone, have a great weekend.

Bye, everyone.

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