What's interesting is that the witness for the majority against the Biden administration in this opinion turned out to be Speaker Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They quote her at length in saying, of course, the president can't just grant a loan forgiveness, and so she's really in the argument of the majority for saying, this is not a close call. You really overstepped and overreached as a president, and this is now unconstitutional.
Supreme Court says, hey, Joe Biden, you can't just wipe out kids loans or tens of thousands of dollars with their loans. The fact that they were quoting Nancy Pelosi because she accurately said, trying to speak truth to her own troops, it's illegal.
May I quote Supreme Court Justice Nelson Months.
Chris Hayes of MSNBC with this tweet right after the decision came down. Lots of very bad things, This six to three majority is done, Dobbs being the worst, but them deciding you are now ten thousand dollars poorer than you were yesterday is really a hell of a thing.
Everything's performative all the time, and it's tiring me out. Here's a man who quests for the truth. Can you use quest as a verb? M oh? Tim Sander for Vice president for litigation with the Goldwater Institute. Tim the lawyer, longtime good friend of the Armstrong and Getty show. Tim. How are you, sir?
I'm great, Thanks for having me back. I think quest as a verb is okay, only in the context of dungeons and dragons.
There you go, mild dad, No, you were you a D and D person when you were younger.
I have always hated dungeons and dragon Okay.
I'm trying to figure why the dungeons because it smacks in the cruel and unusual pole.
Always. It just feels so dumb to sit there and have somebody tell you you're going down a dark hallway or something like that. It's almost it's almost as it's like it's as bad as sports, but without the sweating.
Yeah there's a quote.
Okay, Well, so what do you talk about? You talk about MCing a football game. Here's a trivia question for you. I actually want mced a basketball game. If you can believe it.
How did that happen? Was there literally no one else to ask?
So totally the worst. Possibly some idiot got the idea that it would be really funny, since I don't know anything about basketball, to have the MC the local game between the teachers versus the police department.
They were right about that, that would be funny.
I was smart enough to realize what a bad idea. This was a brought along a friend to do a lot about basketball. So it worked out okay, But that was Yeah, it was one of the weirder moments of my life.
Wow, how odd. I almost hate to get back to the recent Supreme Court decisions. I feel like we should. So where would you like to start?
What's got your hack?
Let me let's say this about yesterday's affirmative action ruling. Yesterday's decision was Brown versus Board of Education for Asians. Yesterday's decision was saying, we can't keep ignoring the fact that these race preference schemes that the colleges insist on keeping in place are a form of discrimination that is purposely keeping Asian Americans out of our colleges, aimed at keeping out hard working kids who don't deserve to be
treated in that way. And yesterday was a great vindication of the principle that all men are created equal and it's really a shame that the liberal side of this that keeps denouncing this opinion is, in the midst of their denunciations, are proving why it was necessary by totally ignoring the fact that Asian Americans are an important ethnic group in this country that deserve to have their equal rights. It's always being treated as black versus white, and they're Asians.
As Justice Thomas points out, Asians are totally being omitted from the equation in all these discussions. So yesterday's decision was brown versus Board of Education for Asians.
So, since you're a student of this sort of thing, are some of the opinions more pointed at fellow justices than normal? They seem like they are.
To me, Yeah, it certainly seems that way, Justice Thomas. Justice Thomas's concurring opinion, which is almost sixty pages long. He's been waiting basically his whole career to write this opinion, is aimed at the dissent, particularly Justice Jackson, with a it's ferocious. Now I agree with it, and so I love the fact that it's ferocious, but it is quite quite direct, and justics Jackson kind of steps back in her response. She responds in only one footnote, where she says,
I don't know what he's talking about. I didn't say the things he's accusing me of saying. But if you read her opinion, she actually is.
Well and today Gorsa saying in the student loan thing too, I think it was so my r. I can't believe we're looking at the same case. I mean, that just seems snarkier than usual.
It does now. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think the American people deserve to have the severe legal and constitutional differences between the justices aired in public. That these people work for us, and we have a right to see what they think, both about the law and about each other. But it must mean that the office Chris, this party is a little tense.
Yeah, I would think so for those who are not super hip to what was in the decision and the concurrences and that sort of thing. What was Clarence's Thomas, what was Thomas's main point?
Well, here's my favorite point in the opinion that I think really boils it all down. He says, quote, today's seventeen year olds did not live through the Jim Crow era in act or enforced segregation laws or take any action to oppress or enslave the victims of the past. Whatever their skin color, Today's youth simply are not responsible for instituting the segregation of the twentieth century, and they
do not shoulder the moral debts of their ancestors. Our nations should not punish today's youth for the sins of
the past. End quote. I think that is the perfect summation of the argument against these race counting admission schemes that punish innocent people, particularly Asians, for crimes that even their ancestors didn't commit a lot of these people came to the country after Jim Crow, after slavery, and yet here we have these affirmative our action programs that count people's skin color in order to give preferences supposedly to remedy the crimes of centuries that before the victims even around.
So is this going to have tentacles reaching out into other parts of American life, like hiring or anything else.
Well, it's There is a notable footnote in the main opinion that says we're not talking about military and it basically invites the next lawsuit to be about how military academies and military recruitment, military, how all of that stuff. They also have their own affirmative action programs, and I think that's the next big front that we're going to see coming. And the Court in this opinion explicitly says we're not going to talk about that now, We'll talk about that in a future.
Well, I wish I had Katanji Brown's actual quote in front of me, because she said something along the lines of, so it's okay to have black people in our bunkers fighting our wars, but not in our college classrooms.
Yeah. Well, I don't know the ideological blinders of people who are so wedded to affirmative action. And as you mentioned earlier, you know, seventy percent of the American people think that these programs are wrong. And the people who treat yesterday's opinion as being some sort of, you know, terrible setback for the civil rights movement are very much out of step not only with reality but with the way the American people see reality. And yet they act
as if they are obviously right. And it's really a way of insulating themselves in a way that I think really shows up in the opinion.
So, and we can jump back and forth as we like, but I want to talk a little bit more about this student loan forgiveness decision. And I'm well aware of my own ideology, but I'm also enough of a neutral observer in these things to feel like I have reasonably well based opinions. And I told my three adult kids, do not make any financial plans based on your student loans being forgiven to the tune to ten thousand dollars or whatever. It's not going to happen. It can't happen.
It's so clearly executive overreach. There's no way the courts let it through. And that wasn't just based on the composition of the court. What in the world were the arguments of the dissenters saying it's fine for the executive branch to do this.
Well, Joe, you have more confidence in the courts than well, frankly I do, because you were right about the law. But the law is one thing, and what the courts are actually going to do is a totally different thing. Sometimes this time you were right. The court did what the law required, but that doesn't always happen. Now, the case is about this a statute that says that the secretary that is the President can modify the obligations of
these student loans. And that's the word modify. And the question is, does modify mean that the secretary can wipe out really an enormous amount of money. Here, here's what the opinion says. The economic and political significance of the Terry's action is staggering. Practically every student bar where will benefit. He says, this is a third, it amounts to nearly one third of the government. It's one point seven trillion
dollars in annual discretionary spending. So what this is saying that the Secretary of Education does unilaterally wipe out an enormous amount of student debt. That and with the stroke of a pen. Now, Congress is supposed to be making the laws. They're not supposed to be handing this authority off to the president. And yet the President is claiming, oh, well, you know, we have I have the authority to basically make the law because Congress has given me this power.
That really is staggerant. And it's a good example of why you and I are always talking about the dangers of the administrative state, the dangers of regulatory bureaucracies, where the courts just stand back and let them just make the law however they want to. This is a perfect example of that. Incidentally, it also overlaps with the affirmative action case because the descent Justice Jackson and her descent. She says, well, what we ought to do is trust
the experts. The experts say that affirmative action programs, in race counting and all this is necessary to equalize society. So we ought to trust the experts. Well, if this whole attitude of well we should have this elite group of bureaucrats who decide how we live our lives in order to accomplish justice has that notion is really stuck in the minds of the leftists on the court.
You know, I've been flogging your book Freedom's Furies lately repeatedly, partly because I found the parts of the book that deal with the flirtation's the wrong word. It's just. A preference for totalitarianism among the left in the early mid twentieth century was shocking to me. It was part of history that I wasn't really familiar with. The idea that, look, we'll get experts together, they'll plan everything and will bring you a utopia.
Yeah, and that went along with the Supreme Court creating these doctrines about deference and not protecting property rights and not protecting economic liberty. All those things are going on at the same time, and we are stuck with the
legacy of that. In many ways to this day. The Supreme Court refuses to enforce property rights, refuses to enforce economic freedom in wide areas of life, and the reason is because of the legal precedents that date back to the nineteen thirties, when this country and in fact all of all of the world civilizations really kind of bought the idea that the dictatorship was a good thing. The person who is really responsible for this largely is Benito Mussolini.
We often forget about Mussolini because we always think about that era. We think about people like Hitler. But Mussolini invented the idea of this of fascist dictatorship in the nineteen twenties, and for almost an entire decade, everybody's like, wow, he makes the trains run on time. He's really getting things done over there. Sure, maybe he murders his political opponents, but he's really getting the trains to run on time.
And that attitude still exists today in the minds of a lot of people who think that democracy and persuasion and argument are just time wasting, and what we ought to do is just force people to do what we think is right.
Here, I think is an important question that I've asked before. Because we're going to hear the President called this a rogue court yesterday. You're going to hear a lot about that over the weekend and probably on the Sunday talk shows and that sort of stuff about this is a right wing outlier court, you know, unbalanced or whatever they
call it. Where does this court fit in if you had a one to five scale, one being the most liberal, five being the most conservative, Like where was the Warren Court or where were in most of the courts in modern history, and where's this one?
Well, when you're so far to the left, any movement to the right is going to look extreme. So that's why you get reactions from people like that. The reality is that this is a moderately conservative court that in some ways they're doing what they think is correcting the errors of the past, and so that keyn and seem extreme, for example in the Dobbs case and so forth. But for the most part, the court is is not picking fights.
For the most part, its decisions are not particularly radical. However, my initial reaction when I hear the President of the United States say that the Supreme Court is a rogue court, My question is, what would you prefer an obedient court? A court that takes off its hat and bows. He would say, yes, sir, whatever you liked, sir. Well do whatever you like, sir. We have a separation of powers in this country in order to balance these three branches legislative, judicial,
and executive against each other to protect individual freedom. It's not supposed to the courts are not supposed to just say, oh, well, the President says that it must be okay, Oh will of Congress does it? It must be okay. The role of the court is to enforce the Constitution, and that means striking things down that violate this nation's fundamental law. And that's what they've been doing. So I don't understand why we call, oh, it's a rogue court. The court is not supposed to be obedient.
Well, it's going to be painful and expensive, but I'm going to get that screened tattooed on my chest during the fourth of July vacation.
I love the idea that the Supreme Court has one collective hat.
Add the cost of that tattoo joe to the student loans are going to have to help you pay.
That's a good point. Tim Sander for vice president for the litigation that the Goldwater Institute. Tim, you brought it solid gold. Thanks a million.
That was awesome.
Thanks guys,