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 President Zelenski says to Trump, if you can really stop the war in twenty four hours, I invite you to Ukraine.
We have such a great show for you today.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich joins us to talk about the impact of the child tax credit and other policies Biden.
Can enact in a second term. And also right now then we'll talk to balls and Strikes.
Editor Jay Willis about the Supreme Court's horrifying next move. But first we have, because it's a Monday, the host of the Enemy's List, the one, the only, the Lincoln Project's own, Rick Wilson, Welcome to Fast Politics, my Baddy, Rick Wilson, it is I. It's been a fruitful week for you and also for the Lincoln Project more generally.
I would say, So, we had an ad that now has something like eleven million views and six hundred thousand shares, and it's right now in beautiful New Hampshire on a truck outside of every Trump rally.
I wanted to talk about the truck. Sure, so the ad is playing on a truck.
Well it's playing on TV also, But yes, right.
That seems like the kind of thing that would make him pleasy.
Well, here's the thing we did. I give full credit to Philip Jermaine and our team, who is the master of these truck things. He's our trolling director for the trucks. We've got two of them. One of them followed the Trump bus where at least saphonic the aggression meaners of Republican politics was. And one of them was in front, one was behind outside the rally space. You had to walk by the truck twice if you were in line to go to the Trump rally. We know that this
kind of thing. And by the way, it's like deminimous expense but his maximum trolling. We know their staffers coming out to like you're going to get sued by mister Trump. Okay, fuck off, go away. We've been to this road, Johns. But the ad basically came out and it flipped this whole like Trump is God thing and on its head,
and it's called you know, God made a dictator. It's an inversion of their bullshit from last week, which Trump is telling evangelicals I am God or I am God's representative, I'm the avatar of the of all your religious desires. You know, we just weren't going to put up with it. It's been an ad that's been bigger than anything anybody's done this year, and Friday bigger than anything we've done this year. We've got a few good ads this year, are in the last twelve months, but this one was
a really big smack into Trump's head. He's very unhappy about it because our little birds from his campaign sing to us again, and we know they're trying to keep him away from commenting on it, because every time Trump opens his mouth this week, he sounds like it's good for you, get crazy, lunatic, which is, you know, probably the advantage of being true.
I want to like pause for a second. Trump is going to be the nominee. And we in the chattering political pundon industrial complex have been saying this for about, oh, I don't know, two and a half years, not.
All of us, but a lot of us.
Yes, correct, Yeah, because the reality is if you offer nothing, which the other candidates did, Trump without the charisma and Christy who never had a shot, and how you know, it's like this saying you, if you come at the king, you best not miss. If you come at the king and don't even come at him, you miss.
Right, if you come at the king and don't make an argument why you should be the king, a real argument, not like a I'm nicer or anything. And again, we've talked about this a lot. There's no diet Trump, Okay, there's no like light less sugar less, caffeine less fat Trump. They want the real thing. And so Ron DeSantis was always trying to be Trump without being Trump.
Well he was Trump without the charisma.
Oh yeah, Look he was saying, I'll give you all the culture worshit you want without being assumed to be indicted felon. And that didn't work out either, because they don't care their post rule of law, their post conservative. All these people today who are like Mickey Haley's taking the fight to Trump, I'm like, guys, you got three days till THEO in New Hampshire primary.
She came in third in Iowa.
Right, the ballgame has already over. Stop insulting everyone's intelligence by pretending that this thing is going to last to Super Tuesday. DeSantis will be out by Tuesday night. As my guess, I don't think I.
Think he's going to be out today.
Right, he might be out today. Look, let me tell you, the first time Casey DeSantis has to fly coach on Delta, that campaign is over, over and done.
She backed down, They backed down, back down.
The backing down has been spectacular. In the last week, they have gone through one hundred and fifty million dollars modestly, that's a low boundary.
Of which Jeff row got sixty seven Who's gonna say, yeah, go on.
Sixty seven cents of every dollar that the Dasanta's campaign spent. Jeff where O took in to his companies, whether it was to the De Santa's campaign or the super pac, which was, as you know, not what we call traditionally legal. Right, it requires a novel interpretation of what we call the law. But okay, we'll play that out. We'll pretend that doesn't exist right now. All that happens in this space of
a campaign that was doomed from the start. Everyone knew it except apparently Ron and Casey, and people are shocked that it's failed. People are shocked that that it didn't work. We've said it from the start. Every single thing about Trump and trump Ism is a cult. It depends on cult like adulation and adoration, and no one, no one should be fooled that the result was going to be anything but what it was. I'm just it's exhausting.
Let's have a minute of media on media violence.
I'm always here for that.
We saw so many think pieces about Joe Biden's age. Sure, over the last two days, Donald Trump has confused Obahama with Biden more than once, and he has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, two people who, while they their names start with N, have almost nothing in common.
I'm starting to think Grandpa Mumbleforts out there on stage is not altogether. I'm starting to think Donald Trump might be feeling a little wee touch of the old Alzheimer's because this is a guy who there used to be an era where serious reporters would say, oh, he said kaffevy. That's because he's a brilliant five D thinker and its three dimensional chess. And Trump's communicating secretly with his bait. No, No,
he's a drooling old fool. He's a guy who's got a diaper valet now following him around because He's verbally and physically incontinent. Nothing about this is from strength. It's
because he's just a gibbering fool. I wish the national media would spend one minute of the time that The New York Times has done, like insiders say, Biden's age continues to concern and I don't see a headline double truck front page saying Trump's seventeenth about of verbal dysentery this week where he conflated, you know, the wrong people, the wrong facts. He thinks he beat President Obama. Really what? And even the Republicans are pretending this isn't real now.
They used to pretend, Oh he's playing some game or that's Trump being Trump. Now they're saying, like, oh shit, you know what the fuck?
I've sat through a million conversations with people.
Biden looks too old. He walks like an old man.
You know this is that you have a guy who's out there looking like he's going to die.
Confusing and Melosi and.
Barack Obama with Joe Biden and saying Jeb Bush started the Iraq War, right, Jeb. You can criticize Jeb for any number of things in that campaign, but he didn't start the Iraq War war.
I mean, so that's what I don't I don't totally get.
Oh listen, I totally get it. It's explicable as holl mollie. This guy is great for ratings. He's great fun. The craziness is spectacle, and the idea that he's going to be such a nut on the trail is unbelievably appealing to a lot of people who will they'll be mad at me for saying this, and they're man, oh.
Yeah, go for it. Then we like it even more.
But a lot of these folks had a great run with Trump. They got to write books, they got to do they got to do a lot of TV, they got to have fun. And look, people would say, oh, you did the same thing. I was trying to warn you fuckers off this guy. I was trying to scare you because he would lead to the destruction of America. And I guess I was wrong. I guess people, you know, wanted more of the chaos, and the more they want, the more they'll get.
I mean, no, I get you, and I get what you're saying. But I also think it just it's surprising to me. Here we are we all know, like if Trump gets elected again, there won't be no more mainstream media right right.
When he says things like I'm going to take away MSNBC's license, he's not fucking around. You don't think Steve Bannon. You think you people don't think Steve Bannon. Day one is going to say to the FEC, by the way, I want to remove all of NBC's broadcast licenses because they are libtard cucks. And they'll say, but mister Bannon, libtard coukery is not a reason or an excuse, and he'll say, well, fuck you. The President's going to issue an executive order banning libtardcock media.
Right.
How hard is this?
And by the way, I mean, what I think is the scariest is that the Heritage Foundation has a you know, a twenty thirty plan or whatever it's called for. When Trump gets back in office.
Project twenty twenty five. This time, it's personal.
Right project twenty twenty five. This time, we really fuck you. I actually don't think that people want Trump back. I actually think it's this weird perverse two sidesism and an overcompensation to look nonpartisan that drives a lot of mainstream media.
I think that's a lot of it. And look, the Republicans. I wrote about this a lot in my second book. The Republicans have played the refs on the media side for so long. The New York Times is now afraid to not have a pro coup voice or whatever on the op ed page. I mean, when you see that piece last week from Ross, it wasn't really a coup per se. They didn't call it one, so it wasn't what wait what right? Fuck?
I know, well, and I mean you know it was bad because the Atlantic was like, no.
It was right, right, Yeah. The Atlantic is more genteel than a lot of organizations. And when they say it's a coup, it's a coup people.
Yeah, I mean they were like, yeah, actually it's kind of a coup. But the other thing about it is like a failed coup is still a coup.
Yeah, so failed coup is a training exercise.
Right.
Another thing that trump enablers have done, which is what Adam Stirwell in that very good piece in the Atlantic said, was that they've been killing themselves to sort of say it wasn't a coup because it didn't work. And then also this idea that the Fourteenth Amendment was about reconstruction, and reconstruction is totally different than trying to have slates of fake electors change the results of an election.
The bright line lettering of the fourteenth Amendment. And I know what constitutional attorney or an attorney of any kind, so don't take legal advice from me. The idea that the bright line lettering of the words insurrection only referred to the Civil War is madness.
It's madness, yeah, But it's also this phenomenon where people just continually change the rules for trumpty. Right, Like, if you're under thirty five, you can't run for a president, right, if you're born in a different country, you can't run for president, if you are involved in an insruction, you can't run for a president, except if you're Trump, because it's different because his people will get upside and by.
The way, the same argument that they're making now of Trump and exceptions to the Constitution and the rule of law, which they make that argument every day, they will make that argument for a third full term, mark my words. They will come out and say, well, he was treated badly, and look he said this himself. They treated me so unfairly that I deserve another term. And if people don't think that's what's going to happen if he's president again,
or they'll just make it dynastic. Well, I now have reached the age where I'm going to pass along the presidency to my son, Prince Eric the slow you.
Know, And I want to like talk about this for a minute, because the things Trump has been saying on the stump.
When he's not confusing Nancy.
Pelosi with Nikki Haley or confusing Barack Obama with Joe Biden because they seem so similar.
They all look the same to him, right.
Exactly, he does this other thing where he makes this whole argument about how president should have complete and utter immunity. Now we know this is because he's facing ninety one criminal count So how does an electorate get excited about that? Explain to me how this helps candidate Trump.
Candidate Trump is driven or his people are driven by this imaginary sense of oppression and this imaginary sense that there's an elite constantly out to get them. Look, the elite wants you to not fuck your first cousin and to brush your teeth.
Okay, I don't even care about the first cousins. I'm tal with that.
I will say this. That world though, for them, is very coherent, and they see any time that Trump is held to account for anything he's done, said, or desired, they see that as an attack on themselves. It is a superpower in politics right now. I take it seriously. Which is why when people say, oh, Trump's just joking, he's just shit talking, it's just Trump being Trump. It's never just Trump being Trump. It's never just shit talking. This is a guy with a movement behind him. It
is an authoritarian movement. We'll say it a thousand more times before this election's over. But that authoritarian movement is dedicated to taking power at any cost and holding that power as long as they can. They are not small d democracy fans. They are not fans of liberty or freedom. Except for Trump and his family and a limited clack of his supporters, this is a dangerous movement. And for all the fun that people seem to have with it,
look look at the crazy thing you said today. The craziness is a very deep, scary element of our politics now. People are wired in for it. People who don't take it seriously and don't take him seriously are the ones putting us at risk.
Yeah, and the Heritage Foundation is right there with them.
By the way, the Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five, that's the gentry part of their plan. That's the country club part of their plan. That's the part of their plan they can take out to major donors and say, well, this is here. We're going to reform the way processing is done on applications in the Department of the Interior.
When they mean we're going to set up a system where our political opponents are systematically jailed and prosecuted, We're going to do the things that we claim are being done to Trump because we want to exercise political power in a way that is tyranny adjacent, and they will.
Trump was incompetent in his first term because he didn't know what he had, and not even his most weird and passionate supporters like Steve Bannon understood what they had, and what they had was miss handled and put in the hands of a variety of people who were not so smart in Jared Kushner, et cetera. That problem will not be there this time.
Right, I just want to pause for saying this. We're out of time, but I just want to say one thing. During Trump's only term. The first two years he had the House, the Senate, the presidency and they still had a government shutdown.
Yeah, of course it's a feature, not a.
Bug, which is incredible. Thank you. Rick Wilson, any Time by.
Robert Reich is former Secretary of Labor and substack author.
Welcome to Fast Politics. Robert Reich.
Well, thank you very much, Molly.
It's really great to have you.
And I was reading about you before we started podcasting, and you have been in every Democratic administration.
Since, yes, since Franklin D. Roosevelt. No, actually we go back to nineteenth century. It starts with Jimmy Carter. You know, I say, I said my students, I was in the Clinton administration, Carter administration, and I was a special assistant to Abraham Lincoln. And they used to laugh at that. They don't laugh at this anymore and starting to worry me, Molly.
But it is interesting.
You really have seen the Democratic Party through a number of decades and seeing the sort of trajectory.
I have this theory, maybe.
Because I'm gonna name drop here, but I'm going to name drop someone that no one cares about anymore.
When I was growing up, I spent a.
Lot of time with Gorbidal and well, not a lot, but a little time with Gorbudal, and Gorbadal had this whole theory that America's United States of Amnesia, because we remember nothing, we never.
Look back at all.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about kind of how you feel that these democratic administrations have changed and what your takeaways from that.
I mean, the big shift happened in the late nineteen seventies, and that was at a time when workers in the United States stopped getting wage increases. I'm talking about most of our workers, people who were paid an hourly wage, people who were at that time a third of them unionized. But everything came to a fairly grinding halt in the late nineteen seventies. This was the fault of Jimmy Carter. Happened to happen on Jimmy Carter's watch, but Ronald Reagan
did kind of exploit it and celebrate it. He said government is the problem. And I think from that point on Democrats were very were intimidated. They didn't want to go back to the New Deal. They did want a strong government to help average working people. And I worked for Well, I campaigned for Walter Mondale in eighty four, and then I campaigned for Michael Decaccus. You remember these.
Names, yeah, very much.
Yeah, and then Clinton Intewo and these people, these men really adopted the notion they were called Atari Democrats. They adopted the notion that the Democratic Party really did need to move toward the information economy and the suburban swing vote and the knowledge workers, rich people, well who became rich people, but essentially abandoning the blue collar working class that had been the foundation of the Democratic Party. And we're living with that legacy right now.
Yeah.
I think that's really such an interesting and salient point. And I mean, I do feel like Reagan is the original sin on a lot of this, and he did he sort of took advantage of it. And then this idea of democratic anxiety is so interesting to me because I do think you cannot live in our political world without being very clear that Democrats are anxious. And you could say it's because of the stakes, but it's also just a different way of operating in the political world versus Republicans.
Well, I think the Democrats did let the American working class go. I mean, they kind of abandoned them. And I saw this happening. I mean it happened during the nineteen seventies to eighties, nineteen nineties. There was a void. I mean, the traditional Republican establishment was big business at Wall Street. So who's there for the working class? Who's
there for working Americans? I mean, in effect, from a filled a void that was already there, from exploited the fact that there was a large and an ever more desperate working class had not really got a raise adjusted for inflation since the late nineteen seventies. Most Americans living paycheck to paycheck, no job security, no more pensions. Most people don't really have the advantage of looking forward to a pension. I mean, America and workers have got screwed
and shafted. You know, in recent years, Democrats are much better, and I think Biden is a much better job. But a lot of Democrats over the last thirty forty years have not really given the working class an opportunity to move ahead.
So let's talk about what that would look like.
I mean, the ways in what you feel that Biden has been more pro worker and how that could keep going well.
I think Biden, unlike Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, really has embraced average working class people and labor unions, and you know, he's really tried to give workers an opportunity to bring back manufacturing and manufacturing jobs. I mean, all of these investments that have been made under Biden in manufacturing in the Midwest in many Republican states. They don't know it yet, maybe they'll never give credit
to Joe Biden, but he really has done it. There are all sorts of industries that will generate a lot of jobs and manufacturing jobs and good jobs, particularly if they're unionized.
Do you think this is in some way related to Joe Biden considering himself to be a working class person.
I think so, you know, I think Joe Biden really you know, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, grew up in Pennsyla. That's where I was born, by the way, and Delaware, and you know, taking the train back and forth as far as I remember. And I worked around him and with him on various things over the years. He never really took on the mantle that some Democrats did of
the kind of fancy modern Washington world. I knew Washington qually when Washington was kind of a CD town, you know, under Reagan and after Reagan it became a very rich town. But Biden never really indulged that aspect of Washington. To his credit, I think he stayed a working class person.
Yeah, really really important point. And I think that's also true. And you do hear when he talks about it, because the fact that his father lost his job and they all had to move was one of the things that shaped him in a good way, I think as a president.
The loss of a job and having to move your family, these were traumatic events for a kid, they're traumatic for a family. Most American workers right now have even less security than Joe Biden's family had when Joe Biden was growing up. And the lack of job security, the fact that in this country you can be fired at any time for no reason, you know, makes American capitalism one of the harshest forms of capitalism on the planet.
Hot take even worse is the fact that your health insurance is tied to your job.
Your health insurance is tied to your job, your pension is tied to your job. Any other benefits that unions have fought for over the years is tied to your job. Obviously, But if you lose a job or if you are a part time worker, and right now, you know, anywhere from fifteen to twenty five percent of American workers are working part time. They are working maybe two or three jobs part time, but they're not as workers were thirty
or forty years ago, attached to their companies for lifetime. Well, that means that there is a deeper level of insecurity.
Yeah, I think is really an important point. I think there's more positive tey towards unions publicly, but it does seem like we're at a place where rebuilding unions should be high on the list of things that Americans are doing.
Absolutely because unions fought for higher wages. I mean in the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, over a third of Americans private sector workers were unionized. Now six percent are in unions. A progressive pro worker agenda also attacks monopolies, and this is something else that Joe Biden has done an a trust division of the Justice
Department and the Federal Trade Commission, very very proactive. A pro worker policy also fights to make sure that big companies are following the Dictates National Relations Act of nineteen thirty five, And this is something Joe Biden's labor board is trying to do is really doing actually more successfully than any labor board is done in forty years. It gets no publicity, but it just like fighting monopolies, it's exceedingly important.
Didn't they reject the merger with spirit?
The anti monopoly crew of the Biden administration was very active in that litigation, And yes, it was important and is important to fight monopolies like well, aircraft monopolies are a good example.
Yeah, talk to us about Boeing because I feel like a great time to just I mean, I don't know if you saw this, but Secretary Blinken's plane broke and he.
Couldn't get home. It was yet another Boeing.
There was some blaming in the billionaire class that this was all caused by diversity and inclusion.
So I'm hoping you could talk about.
That, Well, it's caused by monopolization, in corporate greed. Boeing is the poster child from monopoly. I mean, there's nobody else but Boeing merged with McDonald Douglas and became a giant monopoly. Nobody has any choice. I mean, if you are an airline and you want to buy an aircraft. What are you going to do if you go to Europe and try to buy something from one of the major European manufacturers, You've got to wait in line for ten years. If you need aircraft right now, Boeing is
about the only possibility you have. But if you're a monopolistlight Boeing, you don't have to worry about your consumers, you don't have to worry about quality, you don't have to worry about anything. Obviously, Boeing is concerned right now because of all of the problems with its max and it's had those problems for years. That's something else about a monopoly, Molly, I mean, a monopoly has lous equality because there's no competition.
Right.
Let's talk about one of the other things that Biden administration is doing, very unsexy but really disproportionally affects people who have less money and also people who can't do math aka me overdraft fees.
The Biden administration is cracked down on these fees, banking fees, overdraft fees. There there are things that if you put your money somewhere and you want to take it out, and it turns out that you have taken out a little bit too much more than you had. You are charged interest, but the interest can be huge and the
bank there's really no good regulation on this. If you borrow from a lender on Wall Street, who is a local lender really backed by Wallstreet, but a lender that is charging up to could charge up up to three hundred percent on your loans. I mean that you've got these fees. You've got loan sharks out there. The average worker, the average person is very much susceptible all this, and so the Biden administration is definitely cracking down.
It is a way to protect people who have lasts, right.
Yeah.
The other thing that needs to be said, Molly, is that the Biden administration, remember, it is facing a Republican wall of regression. Republicans really are standing in for big business and Wall Street, but they are using the rhetoric of anti establishment populism. So a lot of people are very confused. You know, somebody like Donald Trump comes along and says, I am your voice, I represent you. Yet what does he do. The only thing he did when he was president was a huge tax cut, mostly for
very wealthy people and big corporations. Biden has to deal with a Congress. That is very, very difficult. You know, the Republicans now control the House, that Democrats are holding on to the Senate by a very thin margin. It's amazing what Biden was managed to accomplish in his first two years given the intransigence of the Republican Party.
Yeah, one of the things that we don't talk about is corporate America. Even if they pretend to care, I mean, they really support the Republican Party.
The corporate America is basically bank rolling Republicans. You know, Davos this week, where you have the biggest American corporations and the CEOs gathering in their annual becunfab in Switzerland. The theme this year, if you can believe it, is rebuilding trust. What's really ironic here is that many of the companies and CEOs who are talking about we worry that about American political instability and how it's going to affect our bottom lines, that they are pouring money into
American politics. They are supporting the one hundred and forty seven election deniers who are still there. Right.
You know, this is about tax sets for businesses.
I've been trying not to talk about this because I don't think it helps them try to get it done. But there's some pretty exciting legislation that could happen with the child tax credit being brought back.
Can you talk about that a little bit.
America did an experiment in twenty twenty one. It didn't last very long, but it was an important experiment. We provided every family with children with a certain amount of money that enabled well, it enabled families to do better and also cut child poverty by almost fifty percent. And then because the Republicans in the Senate didn't want to continue it, and Joe Manchin joined the Republicans, it ended.
That experiment ended. Now there is a possibility once again for having at least part of that experiment revived with an expanded child tax grit and hopefully this compromise will go through.
Thank you so much, Robert, I hope you will come back.
I'd be delighted. Molly Well, thank you for everything you're doing to alert the public with the truth.
Jay Willis is the editor of Balls and Strikes.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Jay, Thank you for having me. What are you going to talk about today? Is anything going on?
No and no legal staff?
Oh well, thank you so much for having me.
We're going to start by talking about what's happening in the Supreme Court. This season of magas Supreme Court Chaos was billed as the season where they don't act as crazy.
Go they are acting just as crazy. There's just I guess what's the analogy like, Yeah, this is still like a prestige drama. It's just that there's like fewer explosions in this one. I think this is like Season three of the Americans as opposed to some of the earlier ones.
Right, it's succession and not Game of Thrones.
Yeah, I think that's right, whereas last.
Season was Game of Surrounds and this season before talk us through this case that they're hearing oral arguments about the Chevron deference.
Right, I will talk through what that is first in the briefest possible fashion to avoid having listeners fall asleep quick into our conversation, because overturning this concept again, Chevron deference is very critical to the conservative legal movement. So if you hear it and you think that sounds boring, that is pretty much exactly what Neil Gorsuch wants you to decide. So basic schoolhouse rock. Right, Congress passes laws, but most of the laws Congress passes are very general.
So for example, the Clean Air Act basically says we should have clean air, but lawmakers aren't saying exactly how to do this, Like Lauren Bober doesn't know shit about pollutant parts per million levels. So the laws just say, look, listen. The Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, staffed by experts, staffed by scientists. You figure out the best way for us to have clean air. The EPA creates rules called regulations, basically the same thing, and that's sort of the bread
and butter about how laws actually get enforced. Now, sometimes people will challenge these regulations. For example, a petrochemical plant that wants to pump more poison in the air will be upset about its obligations not to do that. And when these challenges come before courts, judges employ what's known as Chevron deference. It's named after a nineteen eighty four Supreme Court case. The court looks at a rule and it says, listen, is the law is it clear or
is it ambiguous? And if the court thinks, you know, it's ambiguous. And the agency did a reasonable job of figuring out how to go about this, this isn't our lane as a judge. As long as the agency is, you know, not way outside the scope of what seems reasonable, Courts defer to the agency. Remember how Lauren Bobert isn't good at pollutant level determinations. Neither is bretttay Right. That's
the idea behind Chevron deference. Conservatives, you know, if they want governments so small they can drown it in a bathtub. They hate Chevron difference because, in their view, it gives a lot of power to agencies. Now a little side note, can Conservatives didn't always hate Chevron deference because it was very helpful to them during Reagan era deregulation. Some of its loudest fanboys two guys named Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
But once Court started using it to uphold sort of more progressive rules under democratic administrations, You'll never believe it, but the Conservatives change their tune. So that's what these cases that the Court is considering now are about. It's about overturning Chevron and just turning decisions about air pollution and water contamination and medication safety and a billion other things over to unelected life tenure judges.
So the idea here is that they can just sort of do whatever they want when it comes to the environment, right.
They can. The idea is that they can sort of substitute their own judgment. If they don't agree with a rule, they may say, you know what, I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of agency power and force the EPA to sort of go back to the drawing board.
That really is sort of their larger geshtalled up trying to limit the power of the federal government.
That's right, And there's not sort of a super clean answer as to what would happen to legal challenges without Chevron, But that's kind of part of the problem, right. This has been sort of a background principle of the law for nineteen eighty four, forty years now. The day to day work of governing a country of three hundred and fifty million people is really hard, and undermining agency's power to do that work would just be like, really disruptive
and unsettling. I'm not saying that agencies always get their decisions right, but again, I want the FDA to make decisions about food contamination, not sam Alaedo, not Marjorie Taylor Green.
Right, and the idea is that you can then politicize things that should be about science.
That's right, And I mean we have a Supreme Court that is famously anti science, a conservative judiciary that is famously skeptical of that kind of thing. That sort of thinking could be tinging like major decisions about policy in this country in the years to come.
So let's talk for a minute about the oral arguments for a second.
Justice Kavanaugh is into the friend of mine.
Yeah, he's just really a dumb dumb right, not to put too fine a legal point on it.
Yeah, sort of sorry for the legal jargon, right, Like, Yeah, sometimes I struggle to talk about this because I don't agree with Brett Kavanaugh's jurisprudence, ideology, life choices, any of that, But like I want to sort of separate that from sort of this like really unique role I think he plays on the court. Like I can't stress enough how much of like just a guy Brett Kavanaugh is. He is like repeatedly sort of the like most obviously in over his head at oral argue when he writes opinions.
I just don't think he's very smart. And I mean this guy was like a Bush administration Lackey for years, like this is not someone with sort of the academic pedigree to the extent that anyone gives a shit about that that some of the other justices bring. Like he's just a dude who is in the right place at the right time, and now he gets to hear the sound of his own voice even more often.
Yeah, one of my favorite things is all the people who are so mad about diversity, equity and inclusion seem to not understand that they're quote unquote non diversity. Higher is as dumb as Max Rocks.
Yeah.
He has like a very funny tick where he will latch on to a word or phrase and you can just tell he's thinking, like, man, I've come up with something smart here. Like famously, at oral argument in Dobbs with you know, the case the Conservatives used to overturn Roe v. Wade, he kept returning to this idea that the court could be and I'm quoting here, scrupulously neutral
on the issue of abortion. And he said that a couple times, and I remember listening to it and just being like, oh God, Like he thinks he's got this, and sure enough, like he wrote a concurring opinion in Dobbs. That was just like littered with references to neutral and neutrality, the Court being neutral on the issue of abortion, which like is like, how would the some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard? Right, the Court's going to hear two more cases this term about abortion. The Court can't
get out of this issue. It's only making different choices about whose side it comes down on. Yeah, he just very much brings the energy to these of a guy who like just remembered today that he asked to deliver a presentation on the book report and he didn't finish the book, but he did get to skin the spark notes. That's how he does his job as a Supreme Court justice.
Now Justice Jackson is a bit different. Will you talk to us about that.
Yeah.
Justice Jackson got a lot of I think well deserved for like really doing her homework in her first couple years on the court. But this conservative court claims to be the champions of history and tradition. I think that is dumb and wrong and disingenuous for a host of reasons.
And right also because they're not.
Yeah, that is principally one of the reasons I don't like it. But Justice Jackson tried to play the game. Tries to play the game, really goes back and brings in famously the history of Reconstruction Amendments during the oral argument over affirmative action to correctly make the case that affirmative action policies are in fact consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Amendments. She didn't win that argument, obviously,
but shout out to her for at least trying. And I mean, the fact is that, like you know, a lot of these sort of competing ideologies is you know, mostly interesting to law professors and legal pundits and no one else. What matters is whether or not you can
count to five votes. The liberals can't do that. But I respect the liberal justices for trying, for giving it a shot, and for at the very least right like exposing the fact that, as Justice Jackson did in the affirmative action cases, the Conservatives aren't real champions of history and tradition. They are champions of the history and tradition, the elements of it, the slivers of it often that lead to their preferred result.
The Supreme Court is going to look at some trump I don't even want to say, cases, right, but they are cases. Can you explain to us what they're looking at and how and why.
The biggest case, the most potentially consequential case, is the decisions about Trump's eligibility to run for president again under Section three of the Fourteenth Amendment. Fourteenth Amendment was passed in the wake of the Civil War, and one of its key provisions is that if you previously engaged in insurrection against the government, we are not going to let you hold political office again. You can't try and overthrow the Union and then be like a key part of
its lawmaking governing process. At the time, there was sort of one big insurrection that they had in mind, but there have been other insurrections since then.
There are new into our that's.
Right, you may have been familiar. So the Colorado Supreme Court decided that Trump is not eligible under what this It's called the disqualification clause. The main Secretary of State made a similar decision, and both states for now want to leave Trump off their presidential primary ballots. And Trump, as you can imagine, does not much care for this, has challenged it, and the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the case next month.
One of the things I'm struck by with Trump, and the reason why Trump is where he is right now is because at every point sort of people have said, like, oh, no, the real rules don't apply to this guy.
We have other special rules.
Like it's kind of the definition of white privilege, right, Like, yeah, you know, I know everybody else has to go to jail for doing crimes, but not our guy because he's you know, he's Donald Trump.
And so I do think it's kind of interesting when it comes to fourteenth Amendment.
You have people who are saying, you know, this is not what it's made for, but it's actually, this is exactly what it's made for.
Yeah. I have been both surprised and unsurprised, definitely dismayed by sort of the army of political pundits and like ostensibly smart legal scholars who are just like twisting themselves into rhetorical knots to figure out why this shouldn't exclude a violent insurrectionist like Donald Trump from the ballots. Michael Lerof heard a great essay for Balls and Strikes Gray
website Balls and Strikes or about this. There's sort of this through line in a lot of these op eds that's basically like, well, the legal process isn't the right way to reject Trump. Americans should reject him through the political process at the ballots that happens, I mean, if you want to get technical about it, outside of the electoral college that happened twice. There's also this idea that you know, we mustn't exclude Trump because if we exclude Trump,
his supporters will become violent. And I just sort of question the use of the word become there. They are going to be violent no matter what. You can't as again, as Michael wrote for the site, like there aren't really magic words that you can get to stop reactionaries from being reactionaries, and it certainly certainly shouldn't stop you from using the howlingly obvious legal tools at your disposal to prevent dangerous people like that from being in positions of power.
It just smacks of, again, as you said, sort of the deep Sea did sort of cowardice and tolerance within the pundit community of finding ways not to apply the law to people in ways where they sort of fear the unknown consequences.
Yeah, And I mean I also think like they're saying, what's a political process, and that Senators should be the ones who vote to convict, and as we remember, senators would absolutely not do that because they were scared for their same day right.
Section three of the fourteenth Amendment. Congress enacted that to prevent violent people from assuming positions of power. I don't really understand the pundit's urge to sort of second guess that by requiring additional Congressional action, additional Senate confirmation, Like this is what the law says, and I don't deny it.
Like again, as my friend Michael wrote, it's definitely true, right that, like removing a major party presidential candidate from the ballot is like kind of but you know what else is fraught a violent insurrection that almost ended with Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence getting murdered in the capital, Like there have to be consequences for this.
Yeah, it's such an insane moment in American life, and I think we don't spend enough time sort of pulling back and going like this is not how any of this is supposed to work. The fourteenth Amendment is, you know, the fire alarm, because there is someone who did insurrection who wants to be in office, and now you know we're having an argument about gentility, right, I mean, like, this is not how any of.
This is supposed to go.
Yeah, Like I get really frustrated with sort of the terminal collegial brain that political pundits and especially that legal pundits and law professors are infected with, where they will just find a way to say anything nice about like people who would deny them civil and human rights. But the the idea of looking the other way on a presidential candidate who you know, thanks immigrants are vermin and wants to round people up and deport them from the
country on day one. That's almost a parody of frog in the in the boiling pop. Right, it's a little too on the nose.
Jay, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you again for having me.
Moment. Wait, do you want fuckery? Do you want some dirty, hot fuckery?
Yes, Psycho Jesse is like his life just.
Jess's like mom and dad are talking weird.
Yes, that's right, only by like six months.
The fuckery that I have been paying the most attention to this week is, frankly, the desperate media driven attempt to make Nikki fetch. Yes, Nicki's not going to be fetched. Folks, Nicki's not going to be the one. It like borders on insulting to the American people. That as what Tim Miller calls the horse race industrial complex keeps trying to put the paddles on her. It really bothers me because we are not there anymore. This is not the world
we live in. She's done. It's over. And the shock and awe effect that will hit people next week when they say, wait, we thought there was a prop Wait what I mean? It's time And I've had a lot of anger about that, because you know, we're in the moment where the greatest competition between authoritarianism and a limited government republic based on the constitution the rule of law has ever has ever been imagined in this country's about
to happen. And a lot of people are going to be surprised, in part because we have seen over and over again that people cast this race not as what it really is, but as a viable republican primary, and that ain't the case.
My moment of Fockray is going to be you talking with Frank LUNs Tell me why Frank Luntz is a problem.
I've known Frank for a very very long time. Before I knew him. My first interaction with Frank and I got in trouble because I was actually working for the government at the time, was at an event where he was defending Ross Perrot saying, Oh, he's not going to take Republican votes away from George Bush.
Yeah, he totally we love that guy.
I was like, yeah, he will, and what the fuck are you talking about? And I got a little like nasty gram for the White House Political I It's like, you didn't have to use your real name in that. Frank is a guy who's believed in this like dream of some sort of third party do gooder, not Republican or a Democrat, just American thing. And I kind of had to take him to school on ali Velshi on
Sunday morning. Because this isn't a contest between the perfect third party candidate grown in a laboratory somewhere who's gonna pursue good technocratic impulses to make America, you know, a safer and healthier country. It's between Orangeler and Joe Biden. It's between the darkness for one thousand fucking years and a guy who has been a center left Democratic president
has done a pretty good job. The idea that you have some perfect compromise candidate in the middle somewhere is a luxury that American politics cannot afford this year or maybe ever, because we're fighting a smart, evil movement. And when you get somebody who's willing to say this sort of things like oh, well, you know, people are going to run to it. Joe Manchin would be such a good No, stop it. It's insanity.
Yes, exactly, it's insanity. Who is Joe Manchin for?
No one? And stop it? No labels will do nothing but make Trump president again.
Which they don't have a path to. Two seventy might be their goal, which is their goal. You're right, they're funded by Harlan Crow and the Republican Party, so you know, call me crazy. All right, Well, thank you as always, fun time, Wilson, you are betcha. I'm your Huckleberry.
That's it for this episode to Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.