Overtime - Episode #469: SCOTUS Term Limits, Wave of Women, Wildfires

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Okay,

here we are back

on the internet.

We were just making fun of Preet.

should there be 18-year term limits for the Supreme Court?

Yes, some people have mentioned that.

I would say yes, because Trump got two picks in a year and a half.

Jimmy Carter never got one.

Got zero.

Yeah, it's...

Nixon got four.

Reagan got four.

Yes.

Look, so

I think there's a reasonable case to be made for it.

I think you want to have judicial independence, which the founders thought could be accomplished through having life tenure.

But I think they also probably thought that over time, the people in the Supreme Court would sort of match, again, over a long period of time, the ideological proclivities of the party that was appointing them.

But if you look back at a stat that people don't focus on, if you go back to 1968,

in the last 50 years, and if you count the new nominee, there will have been 18 people appointed to the Supreme Court.

Do you know how many of them were appointed by Republican presidents?

14 of the 18.

So it's over 80.

Including four from two presidents who did not win the popular vote.

Correct.

So because of the vaccine.

Well, but the reason why people haven't freaked out more than they might have is because in, you know, yestery, there were times when a president like Gerald Ford would appoint someone like John Paul Stevens, who ended up not being as ideologically pure and right-wing as some of the people you have now.

That problem has been solved by the right in various ways, but it is interesting to see how lopsided it has been, even though Democrats have been in office for for a much different percentage of the time than the 14 to 18 would suggest.

Well, you know what?

The founders screwed up.

They didn't know that we would stop smoking.

So they didn't think that people would be living into their 80s and 90s.

If we were still a smoking country, we wouldn't have to worry about term limits.

We wouldn't have a country run by people who are all 88, 89 years old and still dying.

So you're saying America was never really that great?

Yeah, we were saying.

They were lousy too.

Oh boy, this is a rough day for America.

Okay,

Charlie, are you going to join other principled conservatives and vote for Democrats in the midterm?

I would prefer to vote for sane, rational Republicans.

I just

can't find them.

Right.

But let me know.

Don't tell me you're going to write in, you know, the Pope or, you know, Reagan.

You know, that's just a chicken.

Well, it would definitely won't be the Pope.

No, no.

You're mad at them now.

Yeah, you.

But no, you're not going to vote Democratic.

You know, I mean,

there's only two sides.

That's okay.

Well, okay.

We've got to pick a side.

Race by race.

And I do think that America needs to have like two not crazy parties.

And I do think that if principled conservatives all abandon the Republican Party, you're going to leave it to the

swamp lizards and the crackpots and the Trumpists.

But as of right now, I don't see

any constituency for Republicans who are going to stand up against Donald Trump.

And I do think this election is going to be a referendum on constitutional

democracy.

What about the next presidential election?

I mean, John Kasich looks like he's making some moves.

I mean, Mitt Romney, if he could find a spine

consistently, he could be, you know.

Do you think there will be a challenge from the Republican classic wing of the party?

Yeah, there will be a challenge, and it will fail because the party has basically become, as Jonathan was saying, has become kind of cultic.

We don't care if it's a movie.

We saw it because it tried.

Wait a second,

it won't fail if it saps enough votes away to elect the Democrat.

Then it will succeed.

And that's why it should do it.

I'm not saying John Kasich will win the election, but if he runs as a third-party candidate.

Third party candidate will be interesting, but then again, I mean,

don't underestimate that Donald Trump could be re-elected.

Oh, I don't.

You know, I mean, never underestimate the capacity of the Democrats to blow this.

Oh, I'm the guy who says he's not leaving even if he loses the election.

Yeah.

Not really funny, but okay.

Jennifer, how important is the election of women to the success of the Democratic Party?

Boy, talk about it.

You take that card on Thursday.

You'll never get a more softball right down the middle of the plate there.

Woo-hoo!

Let me groove one.

You say they're not important.

Give us the

about why they're not important.

No, and we're going to see, I mean, we have seen these incredible numbers for those of you who have been watching this.

Women are killing women are killing it both in winning when they raise their hands and in raising their hands

which is great there's this great just quickly there's a great stat that comes out of Emily's list where in the midterms last cycle last time they had about 900 women who had raised their hands to say they wanted Emily's list help in this cycle 40,000 women have raised their hands to say in some way, shape, or form they want to run for an office, you know, which is fantastic.

It's between Stormy Daniels and Amarosa and pussy-grabbing tape.

I think it is women who are going to wind up taking down the political state.

We will take care of this country.

Just put us in office.

Melania.

Melania could be the keto it all.

One of the smartest analysts of the elections, particularly in the House, is Dave Wasserman, who works at Cook Political Court.

And he called this year, he's already called it, the year of the angry female college graduate.

And I'll tell you, when you talk to Trump's political advisors, that is the constituency they fear most because they already vote in huge numbers.

And his approval rating among them is, I think, 26%, something like that.

It's truly.

How many voted for him in 2016?

I don't know what the college educated women

won white women and he says I won women.

He actually means white women.

But I don't know what his numbers are.

They were actually not so bad.

They were not so bad in 2016.

And now he's underwater even with white women, just white women without college education.

So that's progress.

Preetze, how has the Trump family gone so many years in New York City without facing major prosecution?

Great question.

I would love to know that.

She gets the easy one.

My bad.

That's all I got, Bill.

That's not what we meant.

That's what I got.

You just wrote some headlines there.

No, because

Nathan Swan laughs some more.

All right.

Adam, is it naive to believe that California's wildfires could be random or are they truly due to man-made climate change?

Oh,

that's a softball question for me.

They're absolutely due to man-made climate change.

But not just that.

Not just that.

Here's what people don't realize.

If it entered differently, you would have ruined you for me.

Here's what people don't realize is that when natural disasters happen and people say, oh, it's an act of God,

we really are the ones who make the natural disaster so destructive.

In the case of fires, it's because we built, we're doing this on this show coming this year.

It's because we build homes so far out in the wilderness that now we extinguish every single fire that happens, right?

But those are like, you know, forests need a certain amount of fire, you know, like small fires every year to clean out the deadwood.

When you extinguish every fire, because oh my god, now people are, the suburbs have encroached out into the forest, then the deadwood builds up, and then when the fire does come, it's a real motherfucker.

And that's what we're seeing.

That's what we're seeing right now.

I mean, it's impossible to live in California and not realize that climate change is real and that we live in a man-made landscape that is crumbling under its own weight.

It's really astonishing.

Have a nice weekend, everybody.

Have a nice week.

Thank you very much.

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