Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green says peace is the answer, so nothing makes any sense.
We have such a great show for you today.
The Linked Project z own Rick Wilson joins us to talk about regime change and why it always works out great. Then we'll talk to the Brennan Centers Michael Waldman about protecting the vote in the midterms. But first the news.
So, Mollie, while our Democratic leadership seems pretty neutered on the subject of opposing Trump's war with rn AOC is saying he must be impeached, what do you see him here?
So a lot of people think that Donald Trump bombing Iran without asking Congress, which he's supposed to do, and then only notifying Republicans and not Democrats is impeachment worthy. This is the reason that I think people are so angry at Democrats. And they come over to me during my readings when I'm traveling and they say they're fearous, and you know why they're fears because they don't feel that leadership is as angry as they are.
Right, that's why they're mad. They want the democratic leadership to be as galvanized as they are. You have Americans marching on the street, you have Americans saying this is not okay. So if you have that, then why do you have.
Democratic leadership saying, oh, this is what Israel wants, so we have to go along with it. I think AOC is much closer to where are most of the democratic base is, and you really want leadership to reflect the feelings of the base, at least in a case like this, So I think this is a really good example. Now, also, there were members of Congress who put together a resolution against the war because they know that no nobody wants this. The polling on this is terrible. Literally, no one wants this.
This is like one of the dumbest. At least with Afghanistan, you could at least make the case that nine to eleven was somehow tangentially involved in this. But with this, there is no fucking reason. But it is the dumbest, most pointless thing, and it has nothing to do with us, and it's just insane. Right Netnyahu has been saying that Iran has made nukes.
Forever thirty three years.
Right, we have never had a good experience trying to enact to regime change. There is zero reason for this. And let me tell you there are a lot of members of Congress and here there are fifty forty nine members of Congress who voted against Trump doing this unilaterally, and everyone from Rocanna to Thomas Massey to AOC and there are national security people on that list, people like Tim Kaine. This is not a lefty or a righty thing.
This is a dummy or a smarty thing. And the reality is the only people who supported this strike were Trumpian sick of fans and John Fetterman, who is just wants to make people upset.
Well and is also staunchly pro Israeli.
But this isn't even pro Israel. It is just stupid.
You say, dumb versus smart.
But I was told by jd Vance today that the difference between past problems in the Middle East is that we had dumb presidents.
This one's smart.
Yeah.
I think that's a good hill for him to engage with the idea that Donald Trump is smarter than other presidents. That I think that's the play there. I like Jada Vance on the Sunday shows saying that we weren't at war with Iran, we were at war with Iran's nukes.
Oh yeah, because that distinction.
I'm sure the Iranian people will well, absolutely, that will make a lot of sense.
Meanwhile, little Marco could not even say that Iran was close to having nuclear power because even that was a bridge too far for his bullshit.
But also like regime change, Meanwhile, we have we have ICE supporting people who are legal. My favorite ICE trope is that they keep arresting the same people and happy to let them go. Yeah, so our private military that wears masks so people can't identify them and arrest people who are recording them. Those guys, they had an ICE detainee die in transit.
Okay, so that's they're also killing people. Okay. His six children have been frustrated. Two of the children said he had no health conditions before being detained. By the way, that guy is going to be able to sue. And it's not even I mean, he's dead, so his family will be able to sue. It's just this is so incredibly appalling and disgusting, and our country has just completely lost its mind, and it's just terrible.
No.
We had La City Council Member Hugo Soto Martinez this week saying that Ice was going to a battered woman's shelter and looking for immigrants like you want to talk about like going to the people at the worst moment of their life. Like this is beyond the cruelty is the point. This is just literally the most disgusting behavior you can imagine that no one voted.
For Yeah, well, I think Steven Miller voted for well.
I mean, it is his sick mind behind all this. Speaking of sick minds and the agenda of this administration, the Trump administration has ordered California to remove gender identity from sex ed.
This is so stupid. This is like their favorite culture war issue. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Why do you care what other people say about their gender? It's so I mean, it's literally like we're a decade into this fucking thing and all and Trump world has like three things they do,
so here we go. They're punishing LGBTQ kids. The State Department receives five point eight million dollars, which is like, that's like how much the military spends on GOM under the program to teach safe sex practices, HIV prevention and abstinence to high need its populations, homeless, use minorities, migrant farm workers, incarcerated use s in foster. I mean, this is like they're just punishing the most vulnerable people because
they know that that's what the base likes. I am so depressed every fucking day, and it's like it never gets better. Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of the Enemy's List.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast how are you?
I'm good enough, man?
What good enough? Good enough?
You're ready to face the new world we live in?
Of h I found a very cheap dentist who works on the weekends, and God blessed.
That's always a it's always a benefit, right.
So let's talk about regime change.
You know, it always works out pretty well. As a as a former fan of regime change, I've noticed over the over the decades, it rarely happens the way you think it's going to happen.
Yeah, that's what you know. It's funny because McCrystal, mccraven, mra mc.
McRaven, and there's a Crystal Bill there's.
Bill Crystal, there's a Crystal, Yes, McCrystal.
M H. Stanley.
Stanley was on television talking about how it never goes the way you think it's gonna go. Correct, when you start bombing a country you have absolutely no business being in for any number of reasons.
Discuss been to this.
Rodeo, tried it before, it didn't work out. We have case A and case B. Case A George Herbert Walker Bush my old boss.
And that one you were in, right.
Yeah, that was that was the one I was. I was around for that, for that festivity. That war was very carefully bounded. We had a bunch of rules where we said things like and by the way, because I was a young, hot headed, you know, young dumb ass, I was like, we should have gone all the way to beg dde.
Well then we did.
We did that the next time around and did not work out for us the way anyone wanted it to or thought it. And of course Iran makes Iran. Iraq is like the the starter level in the video game, uh, compared to Iran. And I do think it's important we all we all just acknowledge the Iranian government are some of the worst possible abusers of human rights in the universe. They are very, very shitty, horrible bad people, and cautioning against Donald Trump involving us in a open ended by
the way, because it's never oh it's one and done right. No, no, no, bless your heart, it does not ever work that way. Now they get a vote. Now they get to go out and say, huh, okay, well you did you did to us with the B two and and these massive ordinance penetrating weapons. Now we're gonna well up an embassy or take hostages, or kill Americans or hijacked plane.
But we don't know.
They're going to do next, right, and the likelihood of what they do next sucks.
I want it also caution that we cannot trust anything this administration does.
Right the idea that Trump came out and said and said immediately and if it was funny because I got a text message from a former intelligence agency official, very high level person, who said Trump giving us a battle damage assessment within minutes after the raid is over, when the military doesn't know yet how effective it was. And look, the massive ordinance penetrator weapon is a very powerful device. We've never used them in combat before. We don't know
what effectiveness they had at for now. They could have done they could have wiped out the whole thing, or they could have had an effect. We don't know they could have. You know, look, when you're fighting uranium with with you know you have uranium hexafluoride in the in the refining process, you you better hope that you not knock the whole fucking thing out, because if the waste product is splashing around, that's not great either. There's a lot of things here.
There's a lock and go wrong. I mean, I think the top line from smart people is a lock and go wrong. You're opening the door to any number of unforeseen consequences.
Uh huh, and the whole justification for doing it doesn't make a ton of sense.
Look, I was a admittedly I was a skeptic of JCPOA at the time. A lot of serious people were. It wasn't just some of it was partisan, but it
wasn't just partisan. But a lot of people looked at JCPOA and said, oh, this is explain what j JCPOA was the international agreement that was spearheaded by the United States while Barack Obama was president to stop Iranian enrichment of FISA materials, right, Because folks, it's easy to build the boss part of a nuclear weapon, building the mechanical part of the nuclear weapon, the the device is any any sophisticated country can do it, and Iran is quite
a sophisticated country. Filling it up with all the fissile nuclear material to make it an actual nuclear weapon is really, really hard. So this JCPOA delayed that for five years, and Donald Trump, because he hates Barack Obama and did not want a deal with Barack Obama's name on it, killed JPOA, hoping that it would speed up the process of allowing either the US or Israel to strike the Iranian nuclear capacity. But what it did was delayed it
so that Iran could build up its nuclear capacity. So I'm not really sure it worked the way they thought it was going to work. And now what we have is the there are some indications that the Iranians evacuated the ficile material that was absolutely now.
Right, that they may have gotten their heads up.
Right, And you know, we were we the administration was certainly flagging it to everybody who would listened for the few days before, right, But we don't know, we don't know how much facile material got out, like how much they were able to exfil trait. We don't know the severity of the damage yet. It will be severe. I mean, make no mistake, this is not going to be trivial. And the Runians are not going to be happy about
this outcome. But we don't have a super clear read yet on on just how bad it is for them.
And look, it's not like we have the A team in this administration, right we have a lot of very confident people were taken out because he got Pedro.
Del Drunko and a bunch of these idiots. You've got his own head of the Director of National Intelligence, Gabbert has been completely sidelined. She's not involved in any of the discussions or meetings. You've got Marco Rubio looking like a hostage standing behind Trump today. By the way, I don't know if you noticed this today on on CBS Sunday CBS Show, but Marco is sporting a fabulous new hair piece.
I did not notice that. What I noticed was Marco on CBS with the Margaret saying, you know, I thought that was a great moment.
He said.
She said, well, military intelligence that you know had you know assess is that they have no nukes and he says, he's he gets very haffy and he's like, how would you even know what military intelligence is? And then he goes you can see the wheels sort of turning, and then he's like, no, wait, He's like, I don't care about military and doubt intelligence doesn't mean any public intelligence doesn't mean there is no This is moving so stupidly, and you can watch it moving through their brains.
And all their mental processes. You can tell from it from a distance. All their mental processes are Is Donald going to be mad at me?
Right?
That's all they think. Will Donald'll be angry if I say something that happens to mistakenly be the truth. And you can see that with Marco today, he was very nervous about it. I think we all have sort of come to the conclusion. I think correctly that essentially what happened here was bib Datna who manipulated pressured Mojo Trump into doing this, and they're now all doing what they
always do. They're having to go in reverse and reverse engineer explanations and excuses and reasons and blah blah blah for why this was a great idea, and yeah, and so they'll make up anything to not have to say the truth.
I think that's a good point about reverse engineering the idea, because you know, it feels so much like weapons of mass destruction now, it feels so oh yeah.
If you don't have that same vibe, if you don't have WMD vibes right now, you're not you haven't been around them, around in this campfire for a while. Because this is this is the structure, although it was different with the Bush administration in one key element. They got Congress to vote for an authorization, right, Donald Trump told the Republicans in Congress, but not the Democrats.
Right, which is really.
Which is like unprecedented in its duchiness.
Imagine if a Democrat did that, but also.
Much once again the counterfactual world of if a Democrat did this.
But also Mike Johnson didn't call anyone back, right, and you had Thomas Massey. I'd love to have like two seconds with you about Thomas Massey. Here's Thomas Massey. And I understand that I do not agree with that man on almost everything. What I do think it's interesting that Thomas Massey is standing up to Trump more than pretty much anyone.
Right, He's standing up to Trump more than a lot of Democrats to be.
That's what I was thinking.
Why, I mean, there are a lot of Democrats who are much more accommodated to Trump than Thomas Massey is.
Yeah.
Why, the guy's got nothing to lose, you know what. He's in a safe district. He's been reelected a couple of times against Trump's will, and he's kind of a contrarian dickhead, you know, and sometimes being a contrarian dickhead and you end up being somebody you don't want to have to dinner. But he is right, you know, you got to be honest. He's not wrong about absolutely right.
He's not wrong about the constitutional you know principle here that you know now way in a worn out with Iran is out of their fucking mind.
MAGA has launched from at CEOs a pack in efforts to oust Massy from Congress, of course, for being insufficient lay loyal to Trump.
Naturally, this is my not shocked face. He's a guy who who you know, has a lot of name mighty in his district. He's probably not going to lose that seat. I think that he's a he's a he's a jackass. But you know, even even seeing one guy in the in the GOP who's saying the words, know, this is wrong,
this is this is stupid, this is unconstitutional. I mean, I'm not saying it's some sort of like blessed sense of relief, but it's so unusual, so out of out of the normal bounds of the Republican world that you're kind of like, wow, this is weird.
Yeah, I think it's really important. So let's talk about where we are right now. Trump still has legislation, the one piece of legislation he's trying to pass. It is wildly unpopular. It is being wildly the Senate. What do you think now? I mean, there's a lot to not recommend there, but do you think and the House is sort of they're going back and.
I think Trump interestingly right now has an excuse to say, oh, we're at war now you must pass the big beautiful bill. Yeah, and I think that may have upped its chances a little bit. But but you know, if there are a lot of economic externalities right now, if he closed the straight of hormone, if Iron closes the straight of hormas and gas prices start to spike and the bond market loses its mind. There are reasons to say this may not work out like we thought. I'm not very sanguine
for the bill as it stands right now. If we weren't shooting game with Iran right now, the bill would probably be in more trouble. There is a rally around the flag effect from the anti war party suddenly very excited about going to war.
It's just so incredibly stupid. But you think that this bombing Iran, even though it's so unpopular, the polling is so unpopular, you think it still has a rally around the flag effect inside MAGA.
It does, and I, you.
Know, everybody, even though MAGA Trump ran on not starting.
You know, I said this to last week, like early or mid midweek last week, I guess I said to somebody or on the broadcast or something. I can't remember now it's all an old ones together. I said, this will end up being one of those things where MAGA they are absolutely positively against any kind of new war. They don't want any of this this neocon foreign policy, and the minute Trump attacks Iran, they're going to say, well,
of course we had to attack Iran. We love This is a war worth fighting, right and they are and and a lot of them you know, you got, You've got, You've got a lot of these guys who on paper are the hardcore MAGA influencer types. That's where this fight is causing. The anxiety for MAGA is at the influencer level. It's not at it's not at the base, it's not at the like every day right, it's Tucker, it's Alex Jones, it's Steve Bannon, and they're all like playing this game,
like Okay, shit, I hate this. But can I get away with hating it if Trump really wants it? And the answer is they cannot. If Trump wants a bass is gonna say I I captain whatever you want. So I think that's where we're at right now.
Unbelievably shitty, Oh yeah, oh yeah.
And opens the door to all sorts of unknown unknowns.
The the yes to quote Donald Rumsfeld, Yes, And I do think, Polly, there's a really realistic chance that Iran is going to do something truly fucking horrible, right right. I worry about that, and I and I think I think it was easy for a lot of these boga guys to go, Well, the Israel's already taken care of it and it'll be fine. Now. I don't share that view, I think. I think unfortunately, Iran still gets a vote in this fight.
So who is keeping us safe right now?
Rick Wilson, Well, you know, Molly, I don't know about you, but if I was looking for a senior national security official in the Department of Homeland Security, in the counter terrorism space, which is of course where Iran is extremely both dangerous and experienced, I would look for a twenty two year old guy who was deeply inexperienced and had obviously been like a waiter and a golf caddy or something like that. That's who I would pick. Oh wait,
that wasn't who I would pick. That's who Donald Trump picked. We are literally dealing with a Doge style twenty somethingter dipshit who is in charge of our counter terrorism efforts these days because he was picked by Sergio Gore, possible Russian sleeper agent and Trump head of personnel.
Yes, Sergio Gore has a lot of power in the Trump administration, a lot, and not for seemingly no reason. By the way, I do, I am curious, like I wonder what's happening with Elon.
I think Elon has had a very bad week. His rocket went boom boom again, and so he I think has had He's having a world of no fun right now. The ship ten blew up on the stand. It was a terrible setback. It's going to set him back a year or more. From what people are saying. I think there's a sense in elon world that unless he can retrain his AI to stop the Wokesters, the world is collapsing around him a little bit. I don't think Elon's having a good time right now.
I just want to go through a list of things that Trump promised during the campaign, the twenty twenty four campaign, and I just want for two seconds. Grocery prices would decrease. Nope, working families would get.
A tax kis not happening.
Entitlements, Medicaid, Medicare, social Security would be protected again.
The opposite is true.
Balance the budget and pay down the debt, hilarious, and end involvement in foreign wars.
Well how's that going? Uh? Look, I often say to the maga types who who hate listen to my show and your show. You don't have to like us. But at some point you have to admit to yourselves you've been played, that you've been you've been pranked. And I think there is a is a an unwillingness of course for them to say, yeah, we've been played. The guy. The guys, you know, the guys lied to us. He's
jerked us around, he's lied consistently. But after a while, you have to admit if the world is burning down around you, if everyone is is, you know, face with the evidence of the disaster, eventually you have to admit there's a disaster. And right now for them, this is this is exactly what they claimed they hated the most, the liberal international order, the deep state, telling people, you know what we're going to do in Iran or in
the Middle East. They have gotten everything backward into Trump's indifference to them. They don't even They're like, it's like he doesn't give a shit about what they think. He's having fun right now. He's got bb Net and Yahoo going, yeah, boss,
you did it, you did it. Great work. I mean, if you saw a net in Yahoo's remarks about Trump yesterday, I mean it was written by a team of Israeli psychologists who said, your goal is to is to fellate Donald Trump mentally so that he obeys everything we wanted to do forever, because it it's like the greatest president of all time has done something no one else could ever do. I mean madness. It was absolutely bonkers, how manipulative it was. And you know Trump took the bait.
Of course, Bob said, I'm the best, the very best ever.
Thank you, Rick Wilson.
You are welcome, my friend as always.
Michael Waldman is President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
Welcome to Bad Politics, Michael.
Great to be with you.
So I've been on this book tour. My life has been crazy.
Every time I go anywhere, all anyone asked me is how are we protecting the midterms?
That's good because everywhere I go people ask about your book. I read the excerpt in Vanity Fair. It's extraordinary. I can't wait to read it.
I can't wait offend you.
So how will we.
Protect the midterms? It's a good question.
Right now.
Of course, we're all seeing and facing this extraordinary effort to expand presidential power, and there are things Congress can do. It isn't There are things courts can do some of them have. We want to make sure those rulings stick, but ultimately, the voters have to have the last say
and have to have the loudest voice. And you know, the midterm election is coming up very soon, and in the last few years there've been really encouraging results where groups like the Brandan Center, voting rights groups, law enforcement others have worked with election officials and states to sort of harden the system. The difference this time is, yeah, we're going to still have disinformation, We're still going to have threats of violence. People know how to handle that.
But now we've got the federal government and the hands of election deniers being weaponized to try to affect and undermine the elections. So that's what we're really focused on, is this kind of new threat. I mean, I'll give you two things I think you know about. There's legislation in Congress called the Save Act, which would require you to produce a passport or a birth certificate to register
a vote in the United States. And that's just something tens of millions of people don't have ready access to. You know, only half of all people have a passport. And then there's old women who've changed their names because they got married different from the birth certificate, all those kinds of things.
We think we have the votes.
We think there are even though it's past the House, we think there are the votes to block it in the Senate. So Trump then said, oh, you know, I'll just do this by executive order. He basically purported to take over the election system of the United States on his own. In addition to that stuff from the bill, it says things like states have to give their data over their voter rolls over to DOGE.
That's wild, what could go wrong?
So we and Elders went to court. We sued, and the court did a preliminary injunction blocking the worst parts of that. So that's one power grab. That's one way in which they're kind of grab for outlandish executive power and the election kind of together. The other big thing that's new with the federal government is they've fired only people who were working on election security, and so we need to we and others. It's kind of like the
Soviet nuclear scientists. You need to find a place for these people, and so they can a lot of these people want to do the work of protecting elections that they were doing in the federal government, but they can do it outside the federal government. So it's sort of we and others are kind of amassing an operation with these folks, but it comes day after day. I read today that they made a point a special prosecutor will look at the twenty twenty election to try to prove again, Yeah,
nearly one. He's pretty focused on all that stuff. So it's going to be harry between now an election day.
Do you think we're going to have free and fair elections?
So I would say I think we will have secure elections. I think we will can have smooth elections. I think we can have fair elections. But it's going to take a really big fight to make it happen. To push back against this new factor. And when we talk about free elections, my colleagues always remind me that, you know, there's a lot of ways in which they're already built in discriminatory, racially discriminatory things, and other things. So we
shouldn't overly sugarcoat, you know, the elections. But I think we can have free and fair elections. The idea that oh Trump's just going to cancel the elections, he can't.
Now he can't. He can't, and they won't let him do that.
No, No, But the.
One thing that people do worry about is David Frumm has written this in the Atlantic, you know, who's the conservative author who's very crupple of Trump, that the stuff Trump did with the troops in Los Angeles could be a sort of dress rehearsal for saying, Oh, you know, I see problems in the blue states around elections, and
I'm going to send the troops in there. And and he said in the last week, Oh, we're not going to enforce the immigration laws with our masked men going in to hotels or restaurants, but we're going to do blue cities where the voters are illegal immigrants.
Right, So you could see of thinking there.
I mean, you know, the troops going to the polling places is something the state of local officials and law enforcement and everything have to be really strong about.
So much of this is illegal what he wants to do, I mean, from.
The executive orders down, it's just a.
Question of whether you have the right people who can push back on it, right, right.
I mean, in some cases it's the courts, and you know, there've been like something like one hundred and fifty rulings on the executive power questions by trial courts that have ruled against Trump. But now those cases are in the appeals courts and then up to the Supreme Court, and as we all know, those tend to be more political, more ideological.
You're thinking about like the Ninth Circuit, right, right?
Will you explain the story with the Ninth Circuit, because I don't think our listeners totally understand it.
Absolutely. It's interesting too because for lawyers for a long time, the Ninth Circuit was this kind of mythically liberal court. It's a kind of a reminder of what the real real deal is now in the federal court. So Trump said, oh, there's disruption, there's people burning Waymos or whatever, and so I'm sending in I'm federalizing the National Guard as well as also sending in the Marines to as his Homeland Security Secretary Christinom said, to liberate Los Angeles from its
political leadership. And people could say, well, wait a minute, how can the president do that with the National Guard. Well, actually the president can federalize the National Guard. It's very rare.
I mean, basically, the last time that a president sent the National Guard into a state, took over the state military force under his command without the permission of the governor, without the governor requesting it of the state was in nineteen sixty five around Selma, right, they wouldn't protect John Lewis and doctor King on the march from Selma to Montgomery.
Although it's really interesting I've been looking into Linda Johnson was so manipulated and George Wallace, the segregationist governor, was such a skunk that, like, it's a little hard to tell whether Wallace asked for it or not. And apparently Johnson went on TV announced that he'd asked for it, but he was lying. So anyway, it's since nineteen sixty five. Gavin Newsom government. Newsom said, this is terrible. It's going to inflame things. We have things, he said. Mayor Bass said,
we have this under control. The LAPD no squishes said we have this under control. Trump said, no, I've got the power to do it. Newsom sued, and a trial court judge Judge Bryer, who is the brother of Stephen Brier, the former Supreme Court Justice. Judge Bryer ruled no, the law that Trump used does in fact require governors to agree. Newsom said, I'm going to take command at noon tomorrow.
Then the appeals court ruled, and you know, with a trial court it's a single judge, and then it goes to a panel of appeals judges, and the appeals court ruled, actually, Trump does have the power to do this.
And that's because it was the Ninth circ right, which are the very conservative A short.
Cut, it's not so conservative, it's actually not. No, it's California, you know, kind of in the past that used to be viewed as kind of the hippie dippy circuit. What was the thinking, Well, the thinking was, look, the law gives presidents a lot of power here, and we judges have the power to make rulings on this. Trumpet said, the courts can't even make a ruling. But they said, oh,
you know, the law gives the president this power. And it was discouraging but not entirely surprising, because one of the things we're facing is that the laws around presidents taking over domestic military, around the use of emergency powers, the Insurrection Act, all these other very scary tools in a present's toolbox, the laws are very weak, often in terms of constraining the present, and it's just self restraint in the past that has kept Presence from abusing it.
When we come out of this, we need a moment of massive reform, massive response, massive construction. And part of the answer is to fix those laws so this doesn't happen again.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think this sort of anti corruption post Nixstonian, But boss, don't you think?
Well?
And those laws, there was a huge wave of laws. It wasn't just the campaign finance laws. It was the creation of special prosecutors. It was Freedom of Information Act, it was the Anti Impoundment Act, which is the thing they're going to be hearing cases on this year of Presidence cancers refused to spend money. Was a whole array of legal protections against an out of control president that were put in place after Nixon and Johnson too, in the seventies. For us right now, it's well, what are
the problems we're seeing today, not in the seventies. How do you deal with the world's wealthiest man paying for the campaign of the winning presidential candidate, moving into the way all the contracts for himself, but also being given power to gut all the agencies. That's never happened before. What's a lot to stop that? You know, the Insurrection Act. Interestingly, and this is where you will hear me say something you won't hear much on this podcast.
I'm betting.
Let me say something nice about Mike Lee.
Wow.
Wow, Yeah, you'll remember Mike Lee.
He recently was in the news for some really really bad tweets.
Unbelievable. You know, much of the time he's a principal conservative libertarian, and then on Twitter he does these awful things. And he made fun of the shootings in Minnesota and said they were Marxists who did it and wouldn't apologize. It's like he's one of these people who are two different people, you know, when they are at social media and they think they have to act out. But he's really in political trouble at home because of it, because
it was so ugly. Anyway, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, a number of these libertarian conservatives have worked with liberals over the years on trying to rein in these presidential powers. So you know, we all came fairly close to making greater restrictions on emergency powers, restrictions on how the Insurrection Act could be used, which has not been used. Yet that gives presence like practically nearly the ability to.
Declare martial law.
Not fully things are so scrambled the tariffs. In all the excitement about the tariffs and their impact economically, can be really easy to not say, hey, wait a minute, does the president have the power to do this? The answer is no, that they don't anymore than they can set the income tax rate. Trump just declared an emergency and set an economic emergency and said he could do it.
So there was Among the lawsuits that were filed to block this, one of the most important ones was filed by a right wing group called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, backed according to the media by the Koch Brothers and our friend Leonard Leo and we at the Brent Center filed a brief in their.
Ring of Liberals Everywhere.
A new name for my holiday card lit. We filed a brief in their case. We thought it was a really strong case and also that it was really valuable when it kind of left and right and center can speak out unambiguously on this constitutional question that's going to be one of the big cases of the Supreme Court is going to have no choice but to decide.
I think when is that coming up to the court.
So not in that case, but in a different case also challenging these tariffs, the Court of International Trade, which is not hugely known court.
Yes, please talk about the Court of International Trade, because I have read about this.
It's an amazing bit of sorcery.
Well you've just exhausted the entirety of my knowledge. But it's in Lower Manhattan. It deals with tariffs, and the Trump administration wanted these tariff cases to go to that court because they figured, oh, they'll they won't make some big ruling. And instead the Court of International Trade unanimously, one judge appointed by Obama, one judge appointed by Ragging, one judge appointed by Trump, said presidents don't have the power to do this. And another trial court in Washington, d C.
Did the same thing.
So this one's interesting. So.
Michael McConnell is a well known conservative law professor. He was a federal judge. He wrote in The Times New York Times that this was going to be the most important case on presidential power since the nineteen fifties. He felt there was no way they were going to the Supreme Court would get away with ducking it, you know, they're trying to kind of like not make it back. I have to deal with that, and of course the impact is huge because we're negotiating supposedly trade deals with
all these countries. There's tremendous economic uncertainty. This is one again where there's this sort of a scrambling of the ideological you know, alignments to Wall Street Journal strongly supports these lawsuits. Trump has decided, as he put it, that Leonard Leo is a quote sleezebag who hates America or probably hates America who helped him so much.
The irony here is pretty amazing.
You know, look in twenty twenty, when Trump was trying to lie and claim that he'd really want on the election and all those courts ruled against him. The number of the judges who ruled against him were very conservative judges from the Federal society deep bench, and they were very conservative, but they weren't bailing Trump personally out. And it now looks like he wants judges who will focus on that. I mean, he's nominated this guy, Emil Bouvay, who's.
His personal well, he's nominated Emil bouv to be on this to be.
A court, be a judge, an appeals court judge.
Wow, he's running helping run the Justice Department. Part of me thinks like, well, ye know, maybe he'll do let's damage on the court. But you know, I mean it's a political loyalty rather than a ideological fealty to conservative political you know, legal about originalism or whatever. So the courts are part of this fight. But I think it's so important that we not like Congress off of the hook and we not forget that ultimately voters have to do this. I mean, the judges are not going to
save us. They're really not. I mean, they're going to play a role.
Isn't this the I mean we be of Congress, like how we bear with Congress refusing to exert their power. They have power when it comes to pay outs, and also they have power when it comes.
To the money stuff.
You know that money is allocated by that. I mean, they have oversight powers they're not using.
Yeah, very much so. And as a broad mighter, this isn't this kind of congressional abdication didn't start yesterday. One of the reasons that the Supreme Court has itself kind of grabbed a lot of power and then now the presidency is also grabbing a lot of power. Is that Congress, which is supposed to have most of the power in our system, is paralyzed, can't act or won't act. And the whole notion of checks and balances in the Constitution is supposed to be based on the idea that there
is institutional and even personal self interest. The members of Congress would want to stand up for their power the present and it's going to want to stand up for their power, and that they'll battle it out because they're sort of set up as competing forces. And what's happened, you know, in recent decades, in part, is that the political parties have become more and more important. When people say, oh, we have such weak parties in the United States, that's
true in a lot of ways. But in Congress, when you're a person is in the White House, people don't stand up to them by and large anymore. And you would think that these freezes in spending, these cuts and spending which affect universities in red states, which affect you know, veterans programs all over the country, you would think these members of Congress would would find a way to stand up without breaking with Trump the leader of their own party.
But sooner or later these Republicans maybe won't happen until they lose control one or both of the houses. But they're only you know, they've only got one or two vote majority in the House of Representatives. You would think that some of that would happen. The one place we've seen this play out now for the first time, where it really is actually shaking things up, is on the
potential attack by the United States on Iran. Again, presidents have a lot of power when it comes to war and national defense, and presidence of both parties have wanted to use it all without Congress getting involved. But there are laws there too that say, in addition to the Constitution, that say that Congress has to pass up resolution, the War Powers Resolution. Remember George H. W. Bush went to Congress. George W. Bush went to Congress. Obama did not go
to Congress when he started bombing. It's not one party or another. If we're going to get involved in this war and start bombing Iran, which is a big country with the ability to retaliate, you would think that would be something Congress should at the very least be asked to approve in advance. And it very well might, you know, and you're seeing a lot of fights among the Republicans and a lot of squishings and ducking under the table among the Democrats.
On that, Michael, thank you so much for coming on.
I really needed to sort of chop this through without can really appreciate it.
Yeah, the answer to your very first question, we can have free and fair and secure elections in twenty twenty six. It's going to take more of a fight than it usually does, and that's the fight we've all got to wage.
Yeah, such a good point. Thank you, Michael Walson.
Thank you.
No moment, Rick Wilson.
Wellie Jong fast is it that time?
It's that time? Tell us what is your moment of fuckery?
You know, I think my moment of fuckery is the fact that Donald Trump refused to brief Congress on these strikes. Oh I'm sorry, wait, let me rephrase that. He didn't refuse to brief Congress. He just refused to brief anyone in the in Congress from the Democratic Party. This is not, as the kids say, how it's done, how any of
this works. He went and brief the Republicans, not the Democrats. Look, if we're going to have a constitutional order of any kind and you want to go to war, Okay, get an authorization because he went to war with a very partisan mix of telling the Republicans not the Democrats here. I mean, when this thing goes sideways. I don't know if you've heard about this, but war is in the Middle East occasionally go sideways. Yeah, when it goes sideways,
he's going to say, oh no, everyone supported me. Oh no, you never called us motherfucker. Yeah, So that's my moment, fucker.
Rick Wilson, thank you.
As always, my friend. I'll see you next time.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
Thanks for listening.