Can the Courts Stop Trump’s Power Grab? (Feat. Marc Elias)

34m
Attorney Marc Elias joins Jessica to break down the biggest legal battles shaping democracy today. From taking on restrictive voting laws to clashing with Elon Musk, Marc has been at the center of the fight for fair elections. We get his take on Trump’s latest power grabs, the Supreme Court’s role in checking executive overreach, and the future of campaign finance. Plus, what happens if a president just ignores a court ruling.

Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.
Follow Marc Elias, @marceelias.
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Transcript

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Jessica Tarlove, and I have a great guest today, attorney Mark Elias.

If you care about voting rights, you probably know his name, with his firm Elias Law Group, and his platform, Democracy Docket, which I visit constantly.

Mark has been at the forefront of legal battles in campaign finance, voting rights, and redistricting law.

Just recently, his firm helped strike down an Arizona law that would have forced voters to show documentary proof of citizenship in presidential elections.

And let's not forget, Mark has also been making headlines for his open letter to Elon Musk, firing back after Musk took a swing at him on X.

We'll get into all of that.

But first, Mark, welcome to the show.

It's great to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

I'm a big fan.

I'm a big fan too.

Yay.

I wanted to start with a general question.

We're, I don't know what the actual count is, 44 days or

something

into Trump 2.

However many days it is, it feels longer.

Yeah.

I'm very proud of the fact that I don't have any gray hairs yet.

And my husband is bracing for impact because he's like, if anything is going to do it, it is going to be Trump again.

So what do you think of the first couple of months of the new Trump administration, you know, writ large, but also from the legal perspective, what's been going on and what's really standing out to you?

Yeah, I mean, so first of all, let's go back to last summer when everyone was focused on Project 2025 and Donald Trump said he didn't know anything about Project 2025, totally ignorant of Project 2025.

I believed him at the time when he said he never read it because I don't think he's read 900 pages in his entire life cumulatively.

But it turned out that that was just another inner litany of lies.

Because what we've seen over the course of the first few weeks of the Trump administration has been, frankly, the implementation of much of what was in Project 2025.

All the things that Republicans said they were not going to do, he is now doing, right?

And he's trying to do it through decree, through executive order, through bullying, through posting on social media.

Interestingly, Jessica, not going to Congress.

You know, you wouldn't know that his party actually controls Congress

because he's doing it all.

And it's, you know, it is in some sense worse than we expected, but it's more or less, you know, kind of what an aspiring authoritarian would do.

Yeah.

It's a, I mean, you went right for one of the sore points from an electoral strategist point of view, because Project 2025 was resonating with the American electorate.

Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaSavita have even talked about it in the aftermath of the election where they said basically, we were scared because Project 2025 was permeating the ether.

People knew about it and it had something like an 83% disapproval rate.

I want to talk to you about legal matters, but do you feel like that was a place that Democrats really dropped the ball and we should have continued to hammer away at that?

Or it was kind of a lost cause.

Look, I think Democrats did hammer away at it.

I think the problem is with Donald Trump is that he is able to spew complete and utter lies, which he did,

about it.

And it sort of put much of the mainstream media in this on the one hand, on the other hand, side.

I mean, I'm not saying any individual journalist was in that place, but as a collective, there was like, well, there's this terrible thing called Project 2025, and Democrats say this is what's coming.

On the other hand, the campaign says they are distancing themselves and, you know, and having nothing to do with it.

And so I think it became a hard thing for Democrats to puncture through that wall, but I do think Democrats tried.

I like it.

This more optimistic view or positive view, I guess, of what happened than I might have.

I want to get there.

So many current events that are relevant to your work.

The Trump administration has recently suspended security clearances for Perkins-Cooey employees, citing the firm's past involvement in commissioning the steel dossier, despite the fact that you left the firm in 2021.

What do you make of that executive order?

Is it purely political retaliation?

Is it something that should have a chilling effect on the legal community?

How do you see it?

Yeah, so it shouldn't have a chilling effect on the legal community, but it is having a chilling effect on the legal community.

And I think that's what Donald Trump had in mind.

You point out I was partner at Perkins GUI for many, many years.

I was the general counsel of the Clinton campaign in 2016.

While I was there, I also led President Biden's successful litigation in the post-election of 2020.

We won more than 60 cases defeating Donald Trump and his allies in court.

So I understand

that

Donald Trump is vindictive and is willing to do things and break norms.

And in many respects, that's kind of baked into the cake.

What shouldn't be baked into the cake is the response of the large law firms, right?

The large law firms should be rallying behind not just this one law firm, but also, you probably know that Covington and Burling faced a similar kind of order, a little narrower, because they had the audacity, one of their partners had the audacity to represent Jack Smith.

God forbid.

God forbid, right?

And we know that he targeted other lawyers for removing their security clearances clearances on an individual basis for activity they did.

And the question I ask is, you know, I mean, Jessica, you and I and probably everyone listening to this, we grew up in school reading the poem.

by the minister in Nazi Germany who said they came for the communists and I didn't worry because I wasn't a communist and I didn't speak out.

They came for the socialists and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

They came for the Jews and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me and there was no one.

That's roughly, roughly it.

We all, and we all, you know, dutifully condemned the people who didn't speak out and said, we will never do that again, never again, right?

Was the phrase.

We all listened

and studied the words of Martin Luther King Jr.

when he talked about not the terribleness of the white southern racists, but that the worst that were being done was by

the moderates who were the supposed good people who stayed silent.

So here we are.

It's 2025.

And I ask, you know, the lawyers out there, why are you staying silent?

You know, why aren't you saying, don't come for another law firm without coming for us first?

Well, they're scared, right?

And is there no basis to be afraid?

Yeah, but courage doesn't come from not being scared.

I'm scared.

I'm afraid.

I'm sure you're scared.

You're afraid.

Like, it's okay to be afraid.

The question is, what do you do next, right?

Do you then cower in fear?

Or do you stand by your convictions?

And that's where courage comes from.

If you don't have fear, you're not courageous.

You're only courageous if you have fear and you're able to act notwithstanding it.

And, you know, and let's be honest, a lot of these large law firms, they're not being asked to do a whole lot.

I mean, they're making a lot of money.

They're quite successful in life.

They're not living hand to mouth.

Right.

So asking them to stand up for other law firms is not exactly asking them to walk across the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

It's a very fair point.

I just, I see so much less courage as Trump has been in our orbit, you know, year after year.

It gets whittled down.

I think the confirmation hearings were a big lesson right for where the GOP is.

And there's been some reporting about the kinds of threats that senators were suffering from.

I'm sure lawyers are getting similar threats in all of this.

How has the community felt?

You know, you're part of a close-knit community, right, of these high-powered lawyers that work on these kinds of cases.

Do you feel it fracturing?

Is it similar to how it is with elected officials that behind the scenes, everyone is kind of saying, this is absolutely crazy, but I don't know what to do about it?

Or is everyone kind of receding to their corners and just trying to weather the four-year storm?

It's a really good question.

I think it is a little bit of what you said, which is that I think

every

lawyer, every large firm litigator or manager of a large law firm thinks this is crazy, you know, and also thinks, by the way, it's unconstitutional, which it is.

It's, you know, like the president of the United States can't actually do the things.

And it's not just this executive order.

Like the president of the United States is claiming to have a whole lot of power to do executive orders that he doesn't have.

But in this arena, I think, you know, if you talk to most lawyers in private, they'll say, yeah, this is crazy.

This is terrible.

This is like anti-democratic and someone needs to stand up.

But, and then they explain why they are not the right person to do that because their clients will be upset.

They're afraid what it will will mean for their business.

They're afraid what it will mean in their community.

They're afraid, you know, I mean, and look, this is one of the reasons why you're like a hero to me and so many people, because you every, you know, you are constantly speaking truth in, in, in, you know, before an audience that oftentimes I assume, you know, is some of them are open to your truth and some of them are less open.

And so, so like, you know what I'm talking about because the easiest thing for someone like you is to actually not speak to an audience who doesn't want to hear, it doesn't want to hear the truth.

And I think that's what the legal community is.

And you have some people like you who are saying, you know what, I'm going to still speak truth.

And that will,

you know, that, that is the most important thing.

And there are other people who are like, you know what, I can just stay quiet.

Yeah.

I mean, I definitely don't feel like a hero necessarily, but I do think it is.

So crucial at this particular moment in time to be speaking to people who don't necessarily have the same point of view as you and to at least show them that competent, well-educated, and well-intentioned people have a different point of view and that it's rooted at least in some degree of truth.

So if you plant a little seed of doubt, and I feel like that's what you do for so many people who might not even agree with your politics or have issues with, you know, how 2016 went or, you know, think Donald Trump maybe even won in 2020, because there's a huge percentage of people who actually think that, that they can recognize.

your competency and your expertise.

And that's that little kernel where they say, oh, well, maybe he's got a point.

Yeah.

And look, that is, you know, I built a website called Democracy.com.

It's an incredible resource, by the way.

I just so appreciative because it keeps a lot of us who are not experts up to date on what's going on.

So big thank you.

Yeah.

And, you know, the original reason, I started it in March of 2020.

And the original reason, Jessica, was that I felt like you had the truth of what was happening in voting and in court.

And then you had what Donald Trump was saying was happening in voting and in court.

And so one of the features of that site from the very first day of its launch to today is we post all of the court pleadings, the underlying filings, both by the Democratic Party, by the Republican Party, by the states, the AGs, Republican, Democratic, and as well as the outcomes, the decisions by the courts.

Again, whether they are favorable or unfavorable to voting, we put it all there because my hope was that

even if people didn't trust me, even if Republicans would say, well, Mark Elias is just going to put it in his favorable light, I could say, look, here, you can go read what the Republican Party said, right?

When Rudy Giuliani stood up in a federal courtroom in December of 2020 and said he is not claiming there was fraud in Pennsylvania, okay.

When he said that in courtroom, I could tell people he said that, but I thought, well, maybe if we just put the transcripts,

like we put the

documents, it would help.

combat that kind of misinformation.

So I think it is really important to speak not just to people who agree with you, but to try to find ways to provide access to information, even if they don't trust the messenger.

At least, you know, here is the information and you can read it for yourself and form your own conclusion.

Yeah, the receipts are incredibly important.

The amount of times that I'm reading quotes of other people, like don't take it from me, right?

I'm a partisan messenger, but hear it from a judge or hear it from Rudy Giuliani himself.

And I mean, that was obviously the turning point in what happened in the courts that you could give a press conference and say, you know, the sky is blue.

Everyone can see it's a big storm out, right?

And that they're losing.

That brings me to what I want to talk about next, which is the courts as a backstop for what the Trump administration is starting to do or attempting to do in these early stages.

It seems like they've pretty much held.

Right.

And have been pushing back strongly along these lines.

I've even heard, you know, Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire now.

So can you give your assessment of what's going on in terms of the courts being the backstop?

And do you think it's really all that we have to depend on for the next four years yeah i mean look i mean our system of government uh relies on checks and balances the check that that the founders envisioned uh holding the president in you know under the constitution was congress but we have not seen speaker johnson or uh leader thune do anything other than you know hand their power over to the white house so so there is no check coming from republicans who control the gavels in congress so it has fallen really to the courts and you know i think you deliver a really important message.

And I hope people in the audience hear this.

The courts are holding.

You know, it doesn't feel that way to people in day-to-day life because judges don't hold press conferences, right?

Judges don't, the federal courts, unfortunately, are not televised.

I think it would feel better to people if they did have televised hearings.

But if you read the opinions, if you go to sites like Democracy Document, but if you read the opinions of what judges are saying, the judges are saying that what Donald Trump is doing is illegal.

They are saying that what he's doing is unconstitutional.

And they are using words that don't sound extraordinary to people who watch politics where vitriol is common, but for judges are quite unusually sharp.

I mean, you have federal judges saying things like, the president is not a king.

I mean, could you imagine a federal judge saying that about Joe Biden or Barack Obama or George W.

Bush or Bill Clinton or Bush or Reagan?

No, no, no.

Like that, like this is this is extraordinary language that you see out of these courts.

So they are holding.

I think what we're all waiting on is at some point, one of these judges is going to issue an order and the Trump administration is just going to say, you know what, we can't, we won't comply with that.

And then you will have what people refer to as a constitutional crisis.

Oh, something to look forward to.

Well, it's all, you know, it's only been the first few weeks.

We have years left.

Isn't that crazy?

Again, I go back to the impending gray hair.

It's really going to be the end of my life.

We'll take a quick break.

Stay with us.

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I want to talk about something that's been getting a lot of attention, Congresswoman Mikey Sherrill's request to the FEC.

She's asking to move money from her federal campaign account to Super PACs.

Your firm is backing this move.

She's running for governor of New Jersey.

Can you explain?

the move a bit for my audience and why you guys are backing it.

Yeah, so look,

the fact is that we have a system of campaign finance in this country that is

very much

segmented by jurisdiction.

So, what I mean by that, you have one set of campaign finance rules that apply to federal elections for House, for Senate, and for president.

Then, every state has its own set of campaign finance rules that only apply in those states.

In some large cities, like New York City, where there are mayoral elections, I hear, quite spirited.

Yeah, it's going to be beautiful.

Some cities in California, they even have city campaign finance systems.

So oftentimes

there are these questions of what do you do with funds that are in one system,

but don't necessarily match up with the rules of how they would be raised or spent in another system.

So one of my partners has sought this advisory opinion

at the FEC to deal with this exact question.

And, you know, we'll see what the commission says.

You know, we're also, I'm very much focused on what is happening with the FEC, because, of course, it's one of the agencies that Donald Trump has claimed that he and Pam Bondi can control what their view of the law is.

My firm and I have brought a lawsuit on behalf of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee against Donald Trump over this very issue.

Because it is one thing to get an advisory opinion about, you know, how does money get moved from one account to another?

And there are the FEC is a bipartisan commission.

You need some cooperation of both parties for a ruling.

It is quite another thing if we wind up in a world in which the person who decides whether Democrats can use money a certain way and Republicans can use money a certain way is no other than Donald Trump.

Do you think that the decision,

if it goes in your direction or in Congresswoman Cheryl's direction, will be a game changer for campaign finance?

No, I don't think it's a game changer.

I think it is an, I think it is a, it is, uh, it is a part of a long line of advisory opinions on similar topics.

I mean, if you really want to, if I want to date myself, I think I asked the first advisory opinion that sort of in this genre on behalf of then Senator John Corzine,

who was running for New Jersey governor.

So this question comes up a lot with

federal candidates running in New Jersey, federal candidates running in Virginia in those off years because of the way federal campaign finance applies in even-numbered years, but doesn't really have the same force because you don't have federal candidates on the ballots in these odd-numbered years.

Oh, okay.

I didn't know that.

Glad to have you here to explain it because I shortly talk about campaign finance and don't have that level of detail.

I wanted to talk about the Arizona case, which was a big win for you guys, striking down a provision that required voters to provide proof of citizenship in presidential elections.

What was your strategy in challenging that law?

Why is it so important?

Because I do,

increasingly, I hear even from some Democrats that they think that proof of citizenship should be required to go and vote in elections.

Right.

I feel like I'm talking here on a really important topic to exactly the right person because I'm sure you must give it to me all.

I do.

And the Brennan Center is always my go-to on this with the actual numbers of people who would be disenfranchised if this were the case.

But please, I'd love to hear your take.

So let's just start with the basics.

Federal law does not allow non-U.S.

citizens to vote, period.

It is already a crime for a non-U.S.

citizen to vote in a federal election.

Okay.

So it is already the case that in order to register to vote, you have to be a U.S.

citizen.

What is at issue in these laws is not really citizenship.

Rather,

proof of citizenship is a placeholder that Republicans are using as a way to disenfranchise certain groups of voters.

So in order to understand it, you have to begin with how does one prove citizenship?

Well, there are really only three ways.

One is if you're a naturalized citizen, you can produce those papers that show you became a naturalized citizen.

Most of us who are native born in the United States, we don't have that, right?

So now we're down for most voters, we're down to two things.

You either have a valid U.S.

passport or you have an original or a certified copy of a birth certificate, okay?

Where the name on the birth certificate or on the passport matches the name that you are registering to vote under.

So

for passports, what you find is that actually not a lot of, you know, most Americans don't have valid U.S.

passports.

Like, you know, having a passport costs money.

Most people don't get one unless they're going to travel.

The people who tend not to have passports tend to skew young.

Yes, they skew also less affluent.

But I want people to focus on the fact they skew young, because part of what is going on here is an effort to to prevent young voters from being able to participate.

We see over and over again, Republicans using these proxy issues that are really just proxies for targeting young voters.

So number one, you have a passport.

Okay.

So people say, but what about a birth certificate?

It needs to be an original birth certificate or a certified copy with a matching name.

Now, I ask you, you know, how many or your audience, how many people have their original birth certificate?

Not many people.

I mean, I don't have my original birth certificate.

I'm sure my mother had it.

How many people have a certified copy?

Not just a photocopy, but a certified copy, a copy certified by the state of their birth certificate.

Again, not a lot of people have need for that.

And I did a little bit of an experiment.

I was born in New York.

My wife was born in New York.

I was born in the city.

She was born upstate.

And so we applied for our original or not, we applied for certified copies of the birth certificate.

New York State, you know, good blue state.

They've, after COVID, they closed a lot of the offices that the vital records offices that issue these documents.

So we called and it was like months to get a new birth certificate.

Like literally they were telling us it will take months to get it by mail.

And so this is a real barrier for people to vote if they don't have it.

Who else is impacted?

Married women who change their last names.

Because if you're a married woman who changed your last name, your birth certificate name is not going to match the name on the other document you're going to use in order to register to vote.

So it it is a big disenfranchisement aimed at young voters, at married women,

and people who don't have their original birth certificate, which again tend to be more transient populations.

And I'd add one final thing, and maybe you can ask

some Republicans if you run across one.

So what was Donald Trump's first executive order?

It was to do away with birthright citizenship.

What would doing away with birthright citizenship do?

It would mean a U.S.

birth certificate would no longer be proof of citizenship.

So I ask you, how the hell is someone supposed to prove that they are a U.S.

citizen if you do away with birthright citizenship, which means birth certificates no longer are proof of citizenship.

The only reason why they are currently proof of citizenship is because of birthright citizenship, right?

And so then you're left with just passports.

All of this is just an aim at restricting who can vote.

I will definitely be using that and also the information around younger voters and married women who change their names because the usual spin that you hear is that it's just just about obviously getting illegals to be able to vote, but that it's minority voters that are the ones that wouldn't have the proof.

So this is a great pushback on that.

Yeah, look, it impacts what you oftentimes find is

things that attack minority voters tend to also attack young voters, which also tend to attack less affluent voters.

I mean, those things tend to go together.

I think that there is no question that targeting minority voters is part of the Republican voter suppression plan.

I think, though, that it is also also the case, and you see this in state after state, that, you know, why do states do away with college, state-issued college IDs for ID to vote?

It's because they're trying to target young voters.

And so they're not mutually exclusive.

I just think that they are going after different populations.

It's a more persuasive argument that way.

I'm thinking like a messaging strategist, but yes, of course, they're all connected.

And that was a great explainer on it.

You said, you know, the magic word or words, birthright citizenship.

I wanted to get your take on where you think all of this is going.

Is it going up to the Supreme Court?

A federal judge has obviously knocked them back saying, I think it was one of your, the examples you're giving of the most strongly worded responses, right, for a judge to have to say, essentially, like, what are you insane that you're trying to get rid of birthright citizenship?

But if this does get to the Supreme Court,

how do you think the court might rule?

What's going to happen?

So, look,

there are right-wing theories, there are fringe right-wing theories, and then there is the attack on birthright citizenship, which is simply nuts.

I mean, the fact is the U.S.

Constitution, the 14th Amendment, says what it says.

So if you are a conservative textualist, you believe in birthright citizenship.

If you are an originalist, you believe in birthright citizenship.

I mean, you simply have to be a right-wing xenophobe who doesn't care what the text of the Constitution says in order to not believe that there's birthright citizenship.

So I actually am pretty optimistic that the U.S.

Supreme Court will uphold the lower court's decisions and affirm birthright citizenship.

That's good.

Would be good news in all of this.

I definitely want to get to the open letter to Elon Musk.

He came after you and Norm Eisen with a bizarre comment.

I remember seeing it and thinking like, what is this?

About childhood trauma.

What message did you want to send with your response?

Yeah, so he posted on X that

Norm Eisen, another lawyer, another pro-democracy lawyer and another Jewish lawyer, posted on X that we were destroying civilization and that he suspected we had suffered childhood trauma and generational trauma.

And so I decided rather than doing what I think he probably anticipated I would do, which is to say, you know, you are.

whatever, terrible, you are cars, whatever, like rather than sort of screaming back at him, I wrote an open letter

and said, you know, you said that I suffered generational trauma.

And that's true.

You know,

my great-grandfather came to this country because of the pogroms that were taking place in the Pale of Settlement, which, you know, is basically the part of Russia.

Think of it as Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, that area.

That that was the reason why my family fled their native land.

They came to the United States with nothing.

I put an image of the ship manifest showing them coming over,

shows their last name, part part of it being scratched out,

and that that was traumatic.

And that my grandfather was three years old when he came to the United States.

And he and my father and the rest of my family, they lived without hot water.

They lived in tenements.

They worked,

many of them worked

unskilled labor or semi-skilled labor.

Exactly, they were exactly the people who today Donald Trump is vilifying, right?

The people who came here for a better life because they couldn't stay where they were and were willing to do jobs that Elon Musk may think are unworthy of visas.

Elon Musk may think this is the kind of laborers that we don't want because

they're not high-skilled, highly educated laborers.

And that is a form of generational trauma.

And it is, you know, my family found refuge in a vibrant Jewish community in New York.

They found a political community among the Democratic Party, which took them in, first under FDR, then under Kennedy, all the way through to the modern day.

And that I am the person I am in part because of that.

I am

my great-grandfather's great-grandchild.

I'm my grandfather's grandson.

I'm my father's child.

And I end by pointing out that, you know, that they didn't have the money he had.

I don't have the money he has.

I don't have the power he has, but that I will use whatever power I do have, whatever microphone I have,

whatever legal skills I have, to fight him and

what he and Donald Trump are doing to this country every single day.

I end by pointing out that my Hebrew name,

my family, we had English names, we had Hebrew names.

My Hebrew name was Oh Khanan, who was one of the fighters in David's army who helped slay Goliath.

And that, you know, I may not.

not have the money and the power that that they have, but I will do everything I can to try to take take on injustice where I find it.

That's what that courage is about, right, that you were talking about at the beginning of our conversation.

And I will say, not only was the letter moving, your explanation of it just now was as well.

And I've felt very strongly since Trump came back into power that it's the personal stories that are really resonating with people.

that they're talking about how impactful their lineage is, how important their job is, especially for someone who is a public servant, right?

That they are not societal leeches, but people who love this country and have dedicated themselves to it to make America a better place and to make it work better for you and me.

And I really appreciate you sharing that perspective with my listeners, but also to the public.

And Elon Musk, no doubt, you know, ingested it at least.

Obviously, it hasn't changed course much.

I want to

get your response to a question that I ask all of our guests.

Right before we go, what's one issue that makes you absolutely rage?

And on the flip side, what's something you think people just need to chill out about?

The issue that makes me rage is

the fact that we are watching Donald Trump exercise executive power, okay, Article II power, while Article I, the Congress, under the leadership of Republicans, are refusing to stand up to him.

I mean, of all the cowards in American society, there is a special place in the Coward Hall of Fame for Republican leadership in Congress today.

I mean, history will probably forget who I am.

It will probably remember you because you were on TV, but it will definitely remember, it will definitely remember Mike Johnson and Jonathan.

It will definitely remember the elected Republicans who at a time when this country needed them to do the minimum, they failed to do it.

And so that is the thing that causes me to rage more than anything else.

The other is what gives me, what was the other one?

What do you think we need to chill out about?

Yeah.

So look, I think we need to,

I don't know if it's chill out, but I think we need to recognize that when Donald Trump says he is doing something, he is oftentimes not doing it.

Like, so it's, it's not, it's, it, I want to be clear.

I'm not saying that, you know, you, you need to pick your battles.

Like maybe politically it's smart to pick battles, maybe it's not.

Like that's a fight that's not for lawyers.

What I do think is that if Donald Trump says, I, you know, I decree myself a magic wand and three, three wishes, we should not immediately assume that he has a magic wand and three wishes.

Like these executive orders, I mean, are

have no force of law.

I mean, in the hierarchy of law, you have statutes, you have agency rules, you have agency policies, and then you have executive orders.

They, they, they, they largely are symbolic.

And I wish people would understand that, um, that he is trying to create a reality about his power that doesn't always exist.

Yeah, I think that's an important lesson about him in general, that just because he says we're in the golden age, we certainly certainly are not at this particular moment.

Thank you so much for your time, Mark.

Is there anything more that you want to say about Democracy Docket before we go?

I've already said it's an incredible resource, and your work is so valuable.

But anything final on that?

I mean, look, the only thing I'd say is I started Democracy Docket to give people accurate information about what's happening to democracy in court.

We have more than, we have nearly 400,000 subscribers.

And if people want access to that,

I hope they check it out.

Fabulous.

Thank you so much for your time.

It was great to have you.

And you're somebody that I've kind of dreamt of being able to talk to.

So I really appreciate you coming on here with me.

Same here.