Gov. Howard Dean, Mitch Landreiu & Noah Rosenblum

a better shot. And these guys, the oligarchs, the right wing oligarchs, are spending money so as a disrupt democracy because they know, in a straight up vote that's fair, the Democrats are going to win. Knock of the Democrats are so wonderful, But because I think people really do want to live in a democratic country, right, I.

At this point, they're talking about cutting Social Security and most people don't want to do that, no matter what political part they're in. So is what the Roberts Court did is make democracies for sale, and now many years after Citizens United, these decisions are coming home to roost.

give a damn about democracy. They do not care. And that's true in all societies, not just in the United States. We for a long time had a bulwork against that, although we almost lost it in the nineteen twenties, and fortunately Roosevelt came out long and check some of their power. But they've worked very hard in the last century to get it back, and now they have it back and we are on the precipice.

I mean, it helps, but it's small donations. So Roosevelt came along when this happened in the nineteen twenties and finally the economy collapse, which is eventually what will happen here if this keeps up. Is he put in place guard for the ordinary people, for farmers who are starving, for old people who had no medical insurance and were dying in their apartment. And he put in play some guard so that capitalism worked for everybody and any system. I don't care what system it is, is not going

to work unless it works for everybody. This system that we now have does not work for everybody. And the Democrats know it. Sometimes they're courageous enough to say it, and sometimes they aren't. And the Republicans hope the system keeps working for them because all they care about is power. They really don't care about the country.

who keeps undermining safety standards for children. And here they are talking about the terrible threat that the point one percent of the American is who a transgender post and Meanwhile, the business community is putting our kids to work when they're fifteen years old in dangerous jobs, and the Republicans are saying that's just great. This is insane. It's going to end badly, and these guys will not have any

control over the ending. But the couples that will tell you to be the end of the country if it happens. So we just need some sanity. Unfortunately, forty eight percent of the people in Washington, DC have none, or maybe it's a smaller percentage than that, but the other ones are too afraid to confront the people in their own party.

because they don't care about fairness. So most Americans who do care about fairness, and this is people in both parties, although it's obviously skewed towards center left, do think that the decision about saying that the women in Colorado didn't have to help a gay couple if they wanted to her, you know, buy her product. They think that's wrong. Most people do not think that women ought to be told what to do by correct governors like Greg Abbott. They

think that's wrong. And politicians should stay out of the bedroom. Most Americans think that by wide margins. So that's what we should run on. And I think we can have a lot of fun with the antics of some of the Republicans. I mean, I thought that Biden put out

an ad about Marjorie Taylor Green saying some ridiculous thing. Sure, that's their games because she's got so much publicity now that he represents the Republican Party just as herschel Walker did, and the elections in Georgia for the Senate, So there are individual congress people we can go after if we want to. But the truth is this is much broader than that, and most people in America have no idea

who Jim door Jordan is and they wouldn't care. I do think that the broad themes are really important and people know we're right, So we have to articulate that.

expressive speech. It's not true. And in fact we're seeing now as a result of this, already this summer, we're seeing discrimination based on this decision and different we're seeing reporting of people who don't want to marry gay people who are already saying, well three h three creative says I don't have to. It seems like a lot of this very maga Supreme Court opening the door to discrimination.

Do you think that's what they're doing? And if it is, are they doing it on purpose or do you think they just don't understand anything.

pretty unsettling the people. You know, if one of your kids decides that they might be transgender, that's a big deal in the family, and most people don't want to have to deal with that. And if you ask the transgender person, they will tell you how hard it was for the most part to get through all that. So the Republicans know that, and in the abstract they can use that to scare the hell out of people, and that is what they are doing. And the Court is

absolutely compliant with that. Don't forget literally, you know, and the Federal Society screened these people to make sure that they're ideologically pure before they run them up to the White House, and in the case of a Republican president, simply rubbers Dampson, right.

the Supreme Court. They wouldn't even allow them to have an ethics program. That's insane. Now that we can run on because most people don't like the Supreme Court and they know they're politically oriented and they don't like that, so that we can run on.

submit a map. Is today the deadline that doesn't conform with the Supreme Court ordering on the subject. That's unbelievable. Here we are, We've wound the clock back eighty years.

extradition and there will be no extradition forthcoming. Then what happens? You know, we are rapidly approaching the place where the conspetition is going to fall apart.

inside of the Alway folks are talking about. So this isn't going to happen without effort. There's a ton of Democrats who are working very, very hard to make sure that the Senate doesn't flip on the House side. I think we have a shot taking back the House because I think we'll fix the problem in New York if the Assembly caused by not doing what the just to what they should have, and I think that's probably going to get fixed. I think we'll fix the problem in California.

And if Louisiana and Alabama actually do obey the court that they hire to to do all these things, then we'll pick up a couple of seats there, which, of course is exactly why McCarthy and people like that are telling the legislatures, calling into the Alabama legislature telling him not to obey the Supreme Court. That ought to tell you something about the decadence of the Republican Party.

are trying to ignore the past. They think that ignorance is bliss, and that's the best pathway to a more perfect union, which is completely wrong at this particular point, unlike you know, some other points where we thought that we had that all this issue, it's clearly not. And those monuments are just a symbol of people hanging on to a false past and a false narrative of America

that's going to take us in the wrong direction. And so there are many, many, many people who went before me, and there are some really very courageous people out there are still fighting the fight that's based on a really pretty simple principle that we all come to the table of democracy as equals, and that the reason why we said a more perfect Union is to denote that you can't have a reach perfection and you have to keep

But we have a long way to go. So I'm hoping that and I'm sure that it's going to happen by the way, that the next generation of leaders at a stepping up, we're going to pick up that mantle that has been laid down by so many people, not the least of which was John Lewis, who unfortunately was taken from us too soon, who reminds us that although we've made great progress, we have a long way to go.

You know what that speech was, if people have a minute to read, it was an invitation to people that haven't thought about it very much to open themselves up to understanding our history and our fullness, and to really understand how wonderful the country really could be if we ever could go through and I say, go through the issue of race, because you can't go around it, you can't go over, you can't go under it. It is

a wound that has not healed in this nation. And you know that was brought back to us as it is way too frequently. The murder of George Floyd and those that were murdered before him, all the way back to Emmettil and before that, and then all the way through our Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, and so many examples that that would spend all day talking about them to indicate that we have a long way to go

on lots of different issues. You see now in the political sphere, you know there'd be actually being a retrenchment, much like had occurred during the area of reconstruction when the black codes came in, and then we made some progress and there was a clap that there was a civil rights and then there was a clap back. Then there was President Obama's election, and now we're at a clap back again. But the issue has been with us since the beginning of time, and it is a constant struggle.

And I think that the forces of light have to kind of stay at and keep the shoulder to the wheel because, as I said, freedom's not free. You have to earn it every day, and this is the rent we pay for living in the greatest country in the world. So there is always a level of disappointment that we don't do better. There's also a sense of gratitude for those people that have sacrificed so much to get us

this far. But we ought not be clear about what direction we want to go into the country, which is forward, not backward. And I think that if this is not clear to people in America, it should be the diversity as our greatest strength. It's not out weakness. It is the one thing that separates us from every other country. And the idea that we all come to the table of democracy is equals understanding that we've been unperfect and we haven't reached that, But that's what we ought to

be reaching for. We ought to be reaching for separation and disunity and oppression and making sure people don't get a right to vote, are making sure that people can't live where they want to live or love who they want to love. We ought to be heading in the other direction. And I think that's what this president has been talking a lot about when he says we want to revive the soul of the nation, we want to unite the country, we want to rebuild the backbone of

the country. I think in many ways, you know, President Biden is actually walking the walk on all of that stuff.

am an American citizen, then I could make observations. I will say this that as a general rule, you know, the federal government over time says we're going to do something, and they pass a bill or they don't pass a bill, and then at some point in time they leave it up to the states and the cities, and you know, to see what might happen. And sometimes passing a bill,

as hard as it is, is the end of the route. Well, in this instance of infrastructure, of rebuilding our country, which has a lot to do with whether or not people who have been left out actually have something physically to stand on, can build generation and wealth out of it, actually can get a good job that can bring neighborhoods together. It's critically important and for the last fifty years in this country, all the presidents talked about infrastructure week and

then they would have able to deliver. They won't able to pass a bill this president when he ran for office. Remember now, I mean this is a proven fact that now when Joe Biden took off, there was an active insurrection under away, and then there was the worst public health crisis that was seen in our lifetimes plus some. And yet he put a stellar cabinet together, which is right, by the way, a majority female first time in the history of the country, all of whom are better than

the next. They're all competent people that are working really, really hard. And he then passed for the most significant pieces of legislation that was seen in the land fifty years, one of which it is the Infrastructure Bill, which is one point two trillion dollars to rebuild the roads, the bridges, the airports, up ports, waterways, to make sure we have high speed internet. Amazingly, not everybody in the nation has it.

Can you imagine going through COVID again and having access to high speed internet, how alienated and left out you are, how far behind you would be, Whether you're a kid who's trying to learn or a small business owner. You're a farmer who's trying to do precision agriculture, or a fireman trying to get someplace where you don't know where they are. I mean, that's really kind of crazy that most people in America don't have it. And then making

sure that everybody's got clean air and safe water. Now many of us take this for granted, but if you live in the Black Belt, are you living the delta? Are you live in some parts of this country. They're folks that don't have indoor plumbing in this country. And then many of our kids that are sucking dirty water out of lead pipes that are given a brain damage, so we're changing that too. And then finally, as you know, because of the existential crisis of climate we have to

move into a clean energy economy. And they're substantial outs of money that are being spent in partnership with the private sector to basically rebuild the entire country. Now, the President not only passed these bills and found the political muscle to make that happen, but then he said this smart thing, and this is what really separates him from past presidents. He said, well that's not enough. Now we've got to get it done. Now we've got to implement it,

and usually that's where the federal government stopped. And so he asked me to come up with kind of a lens of being a mayor and said, how'd you rebuild the city of New Orleans? What did that look like? How did it really work? Because he's got it right already,

he's a local government guy. It works when the federal government, the state government, and the local governments all know each other, are communicating with each other, are coordinating with each other, and are working across and all the way up and down, so that, for example, all the cabinet secretaries are coordinating their efforts so that when a mayor or a congressman or a community leader comes up here, they don't have to talk to twenty two cabinet metters. They can just

talk to one group of people. And then I've talked to all the governmors on behalf of the president and asked them to appoint an infrastructure coordinator. The job it is to coordinate the state. And then I've talked to sixteen hundred mayors and then we put them all in a room together and say, okay, look, you're the team that's got to get this stuff to the ground. So my team is kind of doing the three things. We're building the team, and that's what I just talked to

you about today. Now that was the government side, but you got to get the faith based community, the not for profits. Everybody's got to be in the same room. Communities have to set priorities, and so that's the first thing, build the team. The second thing that we're doing is we got to get the money out the door, because if you have a team and you got no money or you got no equipment, you can't get anything done. We've pushed two hundred and twenty billion dollars out of

the door in eighteen months. We have thirty five thousand projects that are in some level of formation in forty five hundred communities in all fifty states, in the territories, and in the communities. And then finally, we have to tell the story, which we do because we want to tell them from the perspective of the people who are being impacted, because that's who the president'cyes.

country over the last fifty years. So you actually have to go build and completely rebuild what I call the mousetrap, the execution side of what we're doing, which requires an intense amount of planning, vision, setting priorities, and then actually

getting it done. And when I mean getting it done, I mean actually digging dirt and building the bridge, where you're going to do it, who's going to dig the dirt, where you're going to get the materials from, where the employee is going to come from, Which one of the projects are going to get funded. All of those things require an intense amount of communication and collaboration, and of course we haven't done something this big in the last

fifty sixty years and arguably since the New Deal. So we're in the process again of doing three things at once that ing up the team. We're getting the money out the door, and then we're telling the story about how it's impacting real people in real time. And I can give you bucketloads of examples of the people that

we're touching, because that's what really matters. So like if I'm traveling around the country and I'm in meta Georgia and we're talking about house speed Internet, I'm talking to the men and women that live in that quasi rural community about how it's going to help the principal in

that school get those kids of better education. I'm talking to the emergency medical providers about how quickly it's going to help help them get to folks that they really need to do, telling medicine for a grandma or grandpa that might be living out in the rural community that doesn't have access to a community hospital because it closed,

maybe because of a state didn't accept medicating. We're talking about, you know, the guy that's working the lock and damn, the Montgomery lock and dam in Pennsylvania because we're trying to make sure that barges can move much more quickly and get more goods from ships to shells more quickly. Who is that guy? Well, how long is he been working there. How much generation of wealth is he able

to build up? Is he the third generation? You know, folks are if I'm in the Imperial Valley in California and we're talking about the water crisis out there, meeting a young girl named lose Is with a mom and daddy living in a mobile park, who is working the fields but is not making enough money, and by the way, is drinking water that has arsenic in it. That's to the president. See. So, yeah, it's an infrastructure project, but the whole point is to lift up individuals and to

give them opportunities they never had. And so you have if you want to do it fast, but you want to do it right. You don't want to miss anybody, and you want to make sure that you make it part of the pro growth economy, because, as you may recall, not too long ago, people said, oh, this is not going to work. Y'all can't make it happen'll y'all are trying to do too much with this stuff, and so you can't do it fast, you know, And that hasn't

turned out to be true. So I just like to tell people that Joe Biden is bringing the receipt right now and I know that have it. When he ran for office, they said he never could get elected. When he got elected, they said it never get anything done. When he started to get everything done, he said that he was too old. And now that the numbers are

coming up, roses, we're not in a recession. We don't think the economy looks like it's going into recession, although people have been, you know, saying the sky was falling for the last year and a half. The most noted economists in the country, All of a sudden, thirteen point two million jobs. Hello, how many?

supposed to apply just doesn't apply. It turns out that you got the right man for the right job at the right time in history doing the things that the country has needed for the last fifty years. Everything's coming up roses in many, many ways, although we still have some tremendous challenges that we're not finished. But it looks like we're doing pretty well on every objective metric that you would that you would judge presidents on over time you would like to is a stock market going up

or it's going down. It's going up, okay. So so I kind of, you know, I'm a kind of political you know, had you know, kind of chuckles a little bit, and I really kind of start to chuckle the most. And the President's got a good sense of humor and big show, so they'll appreciate this that. And he's told me and everybody else in this administration, don't listen to all the noise. Go everywhere in the country, Red states, Blue states. People voted for it, they didn't vote for it.

I represent everybody in the country. Make sure everybody gets it. But he does chuckle a little bit at at us doing groundbreakings in states and congressional districts where congressman has said it has voted against this bill. They said it was socialists, they said it was communists, They said it was going to destroy the country, and they show up for the groundbreakings and the ribbon cuttings. Then they come back to Washington and try and try, and then they vote.

They voted against the bill. Then they come back and try to cut the budget. Then they try to claim credit for it. And I think the American people are going to see through that because at the end of the day, the president is like, look, I'm here just to make the country aboutter place, and I'm delivering. I have the receipts and uh, and we're going to keep working at it because you have a long way to go and we have a lot more to do.

You should It seems a little bit of exaggeration, but not so much because the people of America may not know this. But he he was a local government elected official, and when he ran for office when he was twenty nine, having been on the Delaware on the Council and before when he became a senator because of his tragic family story, as a good dead would he commuted every day back and forth to Washington on Amtrak, and so he has

clocked a lot of miles. And he actually, because of that physical experience that he had every day, actually pretty much knows every inch of what they call the Northeast Corridor. So if you live in the South like me, you might not know what that is, or you live in the West you know, you might not know, but the entire corridor from Boston all the way down to Washington, d C. And he wants to make sure that we

get fixed at Amtrak's very important. Also, he wants to make sure that we're able to lay down high speed rail somewhere in this country in a reasonably short period of time, and then see if we can connect people in other areas in the country to the extent that it works. So there's sixty six billion dollars in this bill that is designed to improve rail serve was across America,

and we're working on that right now. Amtrak, of course, is the big player in that there's a substantial amount of money to actually help fix the tracks, to actually help fix the spaces and the places where the trains stop along not only the Northeast Corridor but across the country. There is substantial amount of money to make sure that

folks with disabilities have access. There's a substantial amount of money to actually rebuild the cars for the new clean energy future, so that to make sure that those cars are manufactured with parts that are made in America. We have a number of different companies that have planted new plants in states that are producing thousands of jobs, that are actually doing this very thing, and we're well in

the process and well along the way on that. You may have noticed that last week Satadashumer was able to highlight a fairly significant announcement in what they call the Hudson Tunnel are the gateway projects. These are the rail lines in and out of New York and New Jersey, starting on the Northeast Corridor, which of course is one of the most heavily traveled harriets. And so those investments, in partnership with the States, are going to improve rail

service in America faily significantly. But that's a big That is a big, big, big project. It's going to cost a lot of money, it's going to take a lot of time, but eventually, you know, we want to make sure we go faster, go safer, get as many people off out of their cars as we can. And if the President says, if you can, you know, get them there faster and cheap. But that's what they're going to do, and that's what that's what we're trying to do.

the administrative state. So I work on the legal history of that.

extreme version of it I've come across. Actually, people have been making arguments like this already for nearly fifty years, and during the George W. Bush administration, arguments kind of like this, and when Nybele were made at that time, they really freaked a lot of people out too.

you've got resistance coming from rich business interests. The villain is the dupap family, and for what it's worth, there's still the villain now. And these rich families who had a lot to lose from the creation of a more

economically egalitarian society. Initially they tried to fight the New Deal kind of on its own terms, but that was just incredibly unpopular their position to try to fight the New Deal on its own terms, because after all, the New Deal was about empowering the vast majority of Americans, a special working Americans, and if you're a super rich polutic prat and your whole political position is that you don't want to do policies that benefit the vast majority

of the Americans. You're just going to be on the losing side of those fights. So over the course of the next years, they started to change the way they made their arguments and to come up with new ways of trying to attack what were basically social programs that they didn't like. And one version of that attack is this attack on the administrative state. And so you'll remember, back when Trump was president, Steve Bannon famously gave some interview in which he talked about how his goal was

to deconstruct the administrative state. And for somebody like me, that's set off alarm bells, because a lot of what the administrative state does is implement those New Deal era programs. Also Lyndon Johnson Eric great society programs, And in saying you want to deconstruct them, what you're really saying is that you want to eliminate those programs. So the question becomes away, So how are you going to go about

deconstructing them? And I'm sorry for being such an academic, but I just have to name check two of my incredible co authors Levman and and Ashamed, who both teach at Columbia Law School, and with the two of them, I've been doing some work, and part of what we have been trying to expose is the way in which arguments for presidential control of the administrative state have been a powerful tool for doing what Steve Bannon wanted to do,

for trying to undercut the administrative state or deconstruct the administrative state. So I don't think it's an accident at all. You know you were saying a second ago, Molly, these kinds of arguments, they're not coming from Trump or even from World. They're coming from the institutionalized conservative legal movement,

and Trump is their useful mouthpiece. And that's exactly right. Right, arguments for strong presidential power, particularly coming from the right, have been used to try to attack the administrative state, which delivers a lot of things that the vast majority of the Americans want and like, and the theory to use it to cut through the administrative state that is a tool of the anti New Deal reactionary right.

second article of the Constitution. It's the article in which most of what the president is able to do legally under the Constitution is elaborated. So what is Article two do? It gives us the basic constitutional framework for understanding presidential power. What does Trump think Article two does? Yes, he told us, right, he says, I have an Article two and it lets me do whatever I want. And Isaac, I'll say it again, right. I think Trump genuinely believes that the Constitution makes the

president into something kind of like a king. And in Trump's defense, there are a lot of people who've made arguments that are kind of like that. I don't know anyone who's ever made the argument that Article two creates a kingship. And indeed, even some of the most royalist readings of presidentialism highlight that, in the words of Michael McConnell, a conservative law professor at Stanford, right, the president who

would not be king, It's not a kingship. Even the strongest versions of presidentialism would say no, no, Article two did not create a kingship. However, people have elaborated all kinds of arguments that under Article to the president should be able to exercise a tremendous amount of power over the federal government. You have to make those arguments in a constitutional frame, because otherwise, if we were looking for where the president's powers come from, we'd say, while, they

come from statutes. But statutes, of course, are drafted by Congress. And shockingly, even though Congress is in the habit of delegating lots of power to the president, Congress isn't in the habit of giving the president so much power that the president can do whatever they want, to run the country any way they want. So if you're going to make arguments that the president has got this kind of

expansive article to power the Donald Trump. Right, I have an article too, and it lets me do whatever I want. What you're saying is that the president has the power to cut through a whole bunch of other alleged restrictions on his power, which means you've got to come up with a constitutional theory that would let you cut through those statutes.

should really look that one up. But the key client the executive power is vesting in a singular person. That means that the singular person of the president should be able to exercise all executive power. And what is executive power, while it's not legislative power and it's not judicial power, is the way the argument goes. Or in other words, it's not what Congress does and it's not what judges do.

But if you stop and think about that for a second, most of what the government does is not what Congress does or what judges do. In fact, for most of us, most of the interactions we've ever had with the federal government are with parts of it that are not what Congress does or what judges do. So what the theory really seems to be saying is that everything that the government does that's not Congress or judges needs to be under the control, maybe even the direction, of the President

of the United States. And that might not be a kingship, but it starts to be pretty close to one.

into the history a little bit. What I can say is that in the nineteen eighties conservatives were really interested in strong presidential power as a reaction to one the already existing social democratic state and to a liberal Congress. So if you think about it, right, by the time we get to the Ronald Reagan presidency, the Democrats have had control of Congress for almost fifty years. Couple, there's you know, Republicans are in charge of Congress for a little bit.

is doing. And the fact that the Republicans were perceived to be the party of big business meant that if you were a big business you might want to be behind a strong president who could cut through what the Democratic Congress would do. So that's one bucket of arguments.

The other bucket of arguments might just be that by the time we get to the end of the twentieth century, we've already built up a regulatory apparatus, and obviously it's a super imperfect one, right, I don't have to tell the listeners of your show how obviously inadequate the regulatory

state has been. Nevertheless, there was a lot of it in place, and so if you were the kind of interest that wanted to cut through those regulatory activities, you had a better chance doing it through the president who could have reached through them, especially if you had a

Republican president in office, then you might through Congress. So what Ahmed and minand what ashen Lev and I argue is that actually the reason why folks like Heritage are interested in a strong president is in order to advance deregulatory priorities. Because the president a strong president can be the deregulator in chief. And for what it's worth, that totally explains what it looks like Donald Trump wants to do with the office.

you know, nativist, xenophobic goals. But when it comes to the actual management of the American markets, you know, if you think about the way that his Environmental Protection Agency acted, the way that he thinks about safety standards right this, it seems likely that were he empowered the way he would like to be, he would be using that power to make it easier for large agglomerations of capital to operate, not harder.

leaves that to Congress to create whatever courts. So, in other words, the Constitution leaves Congress a tremendous amount of space to define the number of justices on the Supreme Court, the kinds of matters that the Supreme Court gets to hear on appeal, the number of other intermediate federal courts that exist, their jurisdiction, and how they go about hearing things. So, if you were a Congress interested in curbing the Supreme Court, you could do it by adding new judges to the court.

You could do it by creating lots of other courts and having different kinds of cases in different ways before they get to the Supreme Court. You could also do it by transforming how the Supreme Court itself operates. So let me just say more about this idea because it's

one of my favorites. Imagine if instead of having nine justices on the Supreme Court, or twelve justices on the Supreme Court, or whatever, the Supreme Court had one chief judge and every other judge in the federal system were Supreme Court justice, and the Supreme Court heard cases in randomly chosen panels. Most of the federal appeals courts operate this way. There are twenty judges on a federal appeals court, but a case is heard by a randomly chosen panel

of three. And there are some good things and bad things about that system. But I'll tell you one thing.

It means that instead of having a durable super majority or you can just count the people in advance and know whose personalities you need to appeal to, the composition of the court is the product of a random process, and it will roughly correspond on average to the balance of the other judges where part of the pant or part of the court system as a whole right, So that would be sort of a way of immediately transforming out the court operates and completely constitutional, by the way,

truly no problems with it at all. And then a plan that a lot of people have been pushing that is another totally constitutional way of doing things would be

to just limit the court's jurisdiction. So very famously, during Reconstruction after the Civil War, the radical Republicans in Congress, the ones who had fought the war to save the Union and were trying to make sure that the treasonous white supremacists in the South who had lost the war and betrayed the Constitution, weren't able to take advantage of the large ESTs of the victorious Union by allowing them

back into the Union to undo the victory. Those radical Republicans were worried that the Supreme Court was going to strike down parts of Reconstruction, and so what did they do. They just stripped the court's jurisdiction, and the Court absolutely went along with it, because it's so clear that Congress has that power. I actually think another kind of fascinating moment to think about is after the election of eighteen hundred.

So this is back to all of our high schoolistory classes, but up until eighteen hundred, the federal government had been controlled by the Federalist Party, that's George Washington Adams, and the election of eighteen hundred is super vituperative right way high on the partisan opposition scale between Jefferson and Adams, between the Federalist Party and the Democratic Republican Party, Jefferson

wins first time. The new government is transferring power between parties, and just to really underscore how much the two parties hate each other, right, each party is convinced that the other one is trying to destroy the public. So, like you know, should remind us of a situation we're currently in. Anyway, when the Democratic Republicans come into power, the Federalists, their enemies, have stocked the federal courts with Federalist judges to try to hold onto power. So it's a lot like the

current situation. And in fact the Supreme Court, in particular, John Adams jams through John Marshall to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He puts a major Federalist and a big enemy of the Democratic Republicans at the head of the Supreme Court. What do the Republicans do when they come into power. The first thing they do, of course, is they refuse to serve a bunch of commissions, and we can talk more about that. That's where Marbreaving

Madison comes from. They repeal the Midnight Judges Act, but they also just cancel the Supreme Court's trump. They just say, you know what, the Supreme Court isn't going to hear

any cases next year. And the next time the Supreme Court comes around to hear cases, you bet that John Marshall is thinking to himself, wait a minute, if I issue rulings that are so repugnant to the people of this country, it's possible that my court will lose all its legitimacy, and the Congress and the Democratic Republicans in the Congress will go further to further trim my sales answerp me of power. And so the Court changes course. The Court reacts to the fact that it was out

of step with the will of the people. So, you know what is this tell us about the current moment. I think it's a reminder that at other moments in American history, the executive and Congress have been very aggressive in trying to rein in robue Supreme courts. The Supreme Court has gone rogue before, and it has been brought to heal before through the ordinary political process and the powers that Congress and the President already have.

difficult time in American history. What so, let's just talk for a minute about some of these slaves they used to talk about as people who were able to get jobs from being slaves. Okay, So one of the people is called Ned Cobb. He was listed as a blacksmith, but he actually was a tenant farmer and not a slave. And another person is called Henry Blair, and he was listed as a blacksmith, but he actually.