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 former Congressman George Santos has been sentenced to eighty seven months in prison. We have such a great show for you today. Know your enemy is Sam Adler. Bell stops by to talk about the arrest
of the Wisconsin judge and all the authoritarian fuckery. Then we'll talk to the Shadow Docket author Stephen Vladdock about whether or not the Trump administration can do that legally. Spoiler they cannot, Samali.
I think we have seen a new aggression in Trump's authoritarian rule. Cash Pattel announced that they're going to bring a judge up on obstruction charges, and Pam Bondi has doubled down.
Let's hear what she has to say.
To our judiciary is beyond me.
So when the American public hears this and they think these were once substanding people in their communities and their professions and they put it all on the line for this, Have you dug into their motive, like what inspired them to carry out these acts?
In harbor criminals? They're deranged.
It's all I can think of I cannot believe. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. And we're sending a very strong message today. If you are harboring a fugitive, we don't care who you are. If you are helping hide one, if you are giving a TDA member guns, anyone who is illegally in this country, we will come after you and we will prosecute you.
You know, the false equivalency here is staggering. If you're giving somebody guns or trying to keep them from being arrested by ICE goons who are not wearing police costs. Right, Like we've seen these videos of these ICE members in playing clothes. They arrested a student in a hedge job because she'd written an op ed. You'll remember that that happened in Boston. So look, man, First of all, being
in this country illegally was not a crime. It was not a criminalized crime until Donald Trump made it so right before that, it was a civil crime. That's number one. Number two, ICE was not supposed to go to courthouses. That's a new Trump thing. I mean, this is the thing about this administration. They're changing laws really fast and saying that it's Democrats who are doing something wrong. But all of these are new laws, right, like that ice can go to schools, that ice can go to courthouses,
that ice can go to hospitals. And then they're losing in the courts. So you'll remember that this Supreme Court, which is the most conservative court ever, the one that overturned Roe v. Wade, a nineteen seventy three statute. This Supreme Court ruled nine zero that even if you're not a citizen, you still have the right to do process. Think about that for a minute. Okay, Trump administration had said migrants, illegal immigrants do not have the right to
do process. Well, guess what the fucking Supreme Court said they do. So let me tell you something. Pambondi may be very pretty, but she is wrong, and she's wrong. These are not people doing criminal activities. These are people listening to their consciences. And here is a moment in American life where we all know that what the Trump
administration is doing is wrong and often illegal. And you'll remember, the Supreme Court said that Donald Trump needed to bring back Garcia, right, and he has not brought back Garcia. He's in Seacott in El Salvador, and had he not been sent there, none of this would have happened. So do not comply. Peacefully pushback. The lesson from Harvard can be a lesson to all of us, which is none of this is legal, none of this is okay. You
need to stand up, just like this judge did. The chances that this judge ends up in jail are zero because this is crazy, because this administration is acting in a way that is illegal and there should be no question about it. And she can say whatever she wants on Fox News, but we all know the truth.
Yes, And speaking of the truth, Molly.
Many people are saying that mister Trump in his one hundred Days interview with Time Magazine was not sounding like his mental faculties are so good. They did not sound like they're the greatest. They did not sound like they're the greatest ever. They did not sound like they're doing great. Everybody's saying this.
It's pretty funny, though. I Mean, the one thing I will say is it's amazing. So when you listen to Trump's incredible. Actually, I was on the train going to the District of Columbia today and I listened to the Time magazine they publish the entire transcript, And I implore you listen to a Trump transcript, because you forget when when journalists right about Trump, they never make him sound quite as bat shit as he really does in real life. And when you put his ramblings together, it is just
incredible stuff. So do yourself a favor. Take a few minutes to listen to that Time magazine transcript of Donald Trump saying things like, I mean, basically, the man thinks Jerome Pal is responsible for all his problems. And let me tell you a secret, Jerome Pal is very much non responsible for all of Donald Trump's problems.
Yeah, I think that that's his own bad instincts. Speaking of his own bad instincts. When asked about a millionaire tax hike, Trump said, I love the concept, but it may not be acceptable to the public.
Get the public. That public is not your problem, honey. Your problem is your donors and yourself should be a millionaire tax apps fucking looney. But is Donald Trump going to do it? No fucking why. I mean, the man was put in the job to extend the tax cut.
You know, there's one smart person in this entire administration, and his name is Steve Bannon and Steve Bannon knows that if you passed a millionaire's tax, it would be incredibly good for this administration because then Democrats couldn't push back on a lot of stuff. But you know what's going to happen, not that.
I got to disagree with you.
I think he's going to adopt big structural bailly from Elizabeth Ward, and he's going to take the two petties and he's going to text the millionaires just like you said it.
Yes, he's the millionaires and the billionaires.
Yeah.
You know who he looks to for policy proposals, Elizabeth Warren.
He loves Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, No, that is not happening.
We would be remiss, though, to say that nearly every poll on this subject shows that has overwhelming support by large margins.
We very rarely see.
No, this is absolutely true. But there is absolutely no way. There's zero chance that Donald Trump enacts progressive taxation. Zero chance. And by the way, this is like one of these things where even reporting on it is kind of malpracticed because the whole ethos of the Republican Party is letting their friends get away with stuff. So whatever, sure, okay, it's not happening.
Crony capitalism is the brand, yeah, Cronyism and stupidity is the brand.
Yeah. Yeah.
So the DNC, who we let's be honest, where you worry about which direction they're heading in, have given a pretty good indicator to us that they're maybe getting a clue since they are now embracing formerd DNC chair Howard Dean's fifty state strategy and they say they're going to organize everywhere.
Don't they always embrace the fifty state strategy.
Hasn't that been Robert Manuel said absolutely not. Fuck that, under no circumstance. That was the Howard Dean ram Emanuel War.
Okay, I mean I don't know. I mean yes, listen, I love Howard Dean. He's a frequent guest of this podcast. Do I think that they should do it? Of course they should do a fucking but Trump's polling is now almost lower than it was in his first administration when we had COVID and none of us could leave the house. Okay, he is crashing and burning, and Democrats, it would be
malpracticed not to run someone in every fucking seat. That's Oklahoma, that's Ohio, that's all of those red state seats because the truth is Trump is not a good candidate. He's running a wildly unpopular agenda. I think it's very likely we're going to see why we have a government regulation to avoid the kind of catastrophes that ineverently are going to happen when you don't have government regulation.
Sounds right to me.
Sam Adler bel is the co host of the famous Know You're Enemy podcast. Welcome to Fast Politics, Sam.
Hi, great to be here, Great to meet you.
Yeah, it's great to meet you. I think of you as like just a very smart person who is good at talking.
Oh that's good.
I hope I live up to your expectations. You set the bar high for your listeners.
I think we have to talk about this. So they arrested a judge in Wisconsin. She's a county judge elected partisan. But here's the real I feel like this concerning truth. She's partisan in that she believes that people should rule of lights right. She believes in the rule, but she also believes like people should have rights even if they are not in this country legally, which is also something that our very conservative Supreme Court believes. So make it make sense.
Yeah, that is just any abstract something that's very concerning about this political moment that you can that we all would have to agree. Yeah, well, she's a partisan, But what that means nowadays is that one party cares at all about the rules, norms, laws, constitutional legality, and one of them does not. And so what does nonpartisan mean anymore? I find it pretty disturbing. I don't know the details of this case. What were the circumstances of her arrest? I mean, I read the headlines.
So the Washington Post has a story. Again, this is like one of these things where it's a new story, it's just reported on so there's more facts coming up. But the Washington Post had a story on it. She was in trouble because she had an illegal immigrant in her courtroom for a battery charge, which is not related to his This is like, again, these are the results of criminalizing what has not been until the Trump administration a criminal activity, which is being in this country legally, right.
That was not a criminal activity until trump Ism criminalized it. It was not a criminal activity, and now it is. So this judge who let this man go out a different door because Ice was waiting outside of the courtroom to get him again, something that is a new Trump phenomenon, having ice allowed in federal or state court hases, and he was chased down by ice that arrested. These aren't these same ICE agents who we've seen arresting people, you know,
wearing plain clothes covering their faces. There may be some connection. Some of them are connected to local militias, right, we saw that in reporting in the Washington Post. She has been arrested now. So the question is all of these are new circumstances brought to bear because of trump Ism, because Trump has changed the designation of certain crimes. But the question is like does this mean and again, this is like yet another moment of like are we on
a constitutional grisis? Ice is certainly acting in a way they did not act with any other president ever.
Yeah, And the kinds of situations where you don't know how dire or how far along the path to full authoritarianism we are produces these kinds of moments where someone like this judge or someone else in a position of momentary authority over somebody else's life, has to make this decision like, well do I trust this you know, like pseudo gestapo to treat this person according to the law
or according to their human rights. And I think increasingly we're seeing situations where, you know, in an encouraging way, people make a decision that's like, no, this is an extreme circumstance, and it demands a kind of moral courage that would seem to be norm breaking in another circumstance. I'm not saying that that's necessarily true about this judge.
I don't know the details, but what it reminds me of is just in the first Trump administration, there were also circumstances where people, you know, were kind of they felt the need to do something extreme to protect against an extreme behavior by the administration. But then there was this very strong impulse that, well, if we break norms in reaction to their norm breaking, are we just setting up this kind of inevitable you know, domino chain decline
of consecutive norm breaking. I feel like, and I never really got there in the first administration. I'm here now. I'm there now that we really kind of are out in the breach. We're in a very, very very dire situation where the kinds of choices people have to make about what's normal and not normal to do. I think those things are changing. You see it with the universities, for example, who are first kind of like, all right, you know, come on campus. Sure, uh, you know, detain
these students. Sure we'll make a deal with you or whatever. But then it becomes clear that no, this isn't this isn't a normal administration. It isn't just new people in charge with different values. It's getting very very dire and
very very bleak. And you know, it used to be that when we talked this way in the first administration, and I did, sometimes we were accused of having trumped arrangement syndrome or having some kind of secret, unstated wish, a wish for there to be a real authoritarian situation. But actually this is just kind of a normal, very
bad Republican administration. It's not so different. But I just don't think that story stands up anymore, because it seems very clear that they are willing to go all the way in every single direction and on every single issue, all at once. That just changes the situation.
As far as I'm concerned.
I vacillate between being like, these guys are so stupid. It's great. Here they are arresting a judge in Wisconsin, right, Wisconsin, where they just love lost a judicial election that Elon mush put in thirty million dollars. Okay, So like, obviously Wisconsin is going to be a place, it's a purple state where this kind of thing is going to stand out in a way that it wouldn't in say, are Medillo, Texas, Like you could arrest whoever you want in Texas's first district.
I mean I heard ones from a member of Congress who was running for office there that they didn't open the polls on time and that he had seen Proud Boys around the area or some kind of neo militia. Like it's a huge country. There is a lot of room for this federal government to do in crazy stuff.
But when you do it in Wisconsin to a partisan Democrat who has been elected, and I mean, I just think they constantly do things which are like if you wanted to enact authoritarianism the way they have in Hungary, there is a playbook for that, and it's slow.
No, I think that's right. I mean it's always been weird with Trump to feel and with Trump World and the Mega movement to feel like our greatest protection against their you know, most extreme designs is their incompetence and their recklessness.
But that may be the case.
I mean, that's clearly the case right now with the trade war, which is just not going to be popular, and it is definitely they're definitely shooting themselves in the foot. It's definitely the reason that his numbers are going down. I just think it's obvious, and you just have to you know, it's just crazy to be in a situation where we're like, oh, thank goodness, these people are idiots, because obviously there are situations where their recklessness is totally
consonant with their dangerousness. But I agree, I agree with you about that. I take your point very much about if they were wanted to do this right, you know,
which to say, to do it successfully and strategically. You know, if they wanted to really fundamentally change this country without igniting some kind of you know, resistance movement and resistance from the institutions of this country, you know, they would have started slow, and they would have built on the license and the kind of sense of you know, that period of time right after he was elected, when Democrats were like, ah, well, I guess this is just a
conservative country. We're just going to have to go along with it, you know, people saying, let's make deals where we can work with these people, let's face the facts, you know, taking that moment of kind of legitimacy and building on it by doing things that were really popular for a while and kind of magnanimous even, and that then you can gradually turn the screws on the authoritarian agenda. But they didn't do it that way. They went with
this other thing. And it's just a weird situation to be in because I'm simultaneously relieved that they're doing it so recklessly and also made absolutely crazy by the kind of ferocity of it and the feeling that you just never know what they're going to do. Oh, the FBI director is going to get on Twitter and said we arrested a judge, or like, are you so happy? Aren't you so thrilled?
Ohn?
And then he deletes it.
I know my sense was that he deleted it because he said in the post we believe that she did this, or that it's like, Okay, you arrested at judge because you heard something that's a pretty extreme thing to do. But yeah, I'm with you. There's just it's just it's a whiplash though, to feel like relieved that they're more reckless and stupid than you could possibly have imagined.
Yes, I agree it's a whiplash, but it's also I want to get back to the tariffs, because the tariffs are the single thing Like ten Griffin, Okay, major Republican donor, biggest donor of the cycle, did not donate to Trump, but donated to every other Republican you've ever thought of,
or dreamed of or knew of. It was like Donald Trump is ru I mean, I want to find the Ken Griffin quote because I feel like it's one of these things where it's like, now, he didn't really say that, but he really did say that in fact, and even like the cover of the Economist, right, this is the Economist, Okay,
the woke Economist. This is like not the nation says only one three hundred and sixty one days to go, and then it has a picture of like a bald eagle that looks like it's been through what we've all been through in the last almost one hundred days.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. I mean again, there's another irony of feeling like the saviors of our republic are going to have to be like bond traders and Wall Street, you know. As a socialist myself, I'm kind of like, oh god, yes, okay, they're coming to our rescue, the people who just move money around and make money. But it's true that they really just they got out over their skis.
I'm going to read this to you because I I feel like I'm sorry to do this. I know you're a socialist. One of my kids is a Marxist. My husband's like a blue Anon capitalist, so he's like, we're going to fix Americay.
True, Hey, it takes all types, you know, right.
We have it all. And then I have a never Trump Republican. I have one good kid. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I have lots of good kids. The United States was more than just a nation. It's a brand. Okay, I'm sure you love this. It's a universal brand, whether it's our contraur or financial strength or military strength. It was like an aspiration post of the world. We're eroding that brand right now, Okay. Like, I mean, I'm sorry, but if you're a Republican donor of saying that, like stick deal.
Yeah, I mean it makes me wonder about and this is we can only speculate about, but like, what are the circumstances that have made them so hubristic? Is it just that the goal of surrounding him with only yes men and women and the goal of you know, retribution being the kind of like you know, the reason you
know for his presidency. Is it just that there's nobody going, hey, wait a mang ad minute, that the bond markets are going to freak out if we do this now, like Ken Griffin, people don't always answer his calls or like, what is it? What is it that creates this license in their minds that makes them think that they can get away with it?
You know what Trump did was he scared these people, and they were scared of him. I mean that's like like Lisa Murkowski. They don't want the mean tweets. They don't want to have to pay for security, they don't want Maga one two three coming outside their house with a gun. Like actually think about this a lot, and you, as a student of history, I actually wanted to talk to you about this. Which is so My grandfather was jailed by the House in an American activity, Howard Fast
and he was a communist. Refused to name names not a particularly brave guy, right, not, but did the thing in that moment. I believe that part of how we got here is that, like we are just in modern life, we are not used to bravery of any sort.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, what.
Do you think about that? Because if you look at like this sort of the last.
Fifty years, Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to go to tackle this, but like I generally think that, yeah, the kind of resources that we have as a political and moral culture for rewarding true bravery, moral courage, selflessness are just depleted, like profoundly. And I think there's a million reasons you could point to for that. I mean, I think like kind of the neoliberal turn and the kind of the fact that people are so much more isolated from each other, and the kind of atomization that
comes with privatization. And yeah, I think that sound like a fogy here, but like you know, kids, heroes are influencers. The kind of like models for kind of greatness are all celebrity and fame and kind of getting your own I mean, the lessons of the manisphere or whatever are just like get up, get the paper, like get it for yourself, you know, and it takes actually effort as a political community to produce you know, this other idea of what success is because you know, naming names, that's
saving your own hide. And there's like a lot of kind of like sort of what would seem like common sensical norms in this country about like you're a sucker. If you don't save your own hide when you can, you're a sucker. And so yeah, I think, but you know, people rise to the occasion. I think there's also just sort of a suspicion of kind of self aggrandizing political heroism because that stuff is also kind of infused with this suspicion about or are you just doing this for
the fame? Are you just doing this for a popularity contest. I mean, it's one of those things that I always think about about the right is that whenever whenever somebody in a position of power blows the whistle or something, the right will just always say, oh, they did this because they're a Democrat, they did this because they're getting paid,
they paid protesters. I think that there's an enormous number of people on the right that just don't believe that anybody just goes and protests because it's inconceivable to them that someone would take the time to do that and have some kind of like actual genuine concern that is not reducible to self interest. I think it's a problem across our culture. I think the right has really a desiccated sense of what human generosity can be and do.
But it is interesting if you think about it, Right, like this idea of paid protesters. They stormed the Capitol, so they obviously feel strongly about some stuff, right, I mean a lot of those people went to jail. No, it's true, but I agree.
It's a solypsism.
It's like, well, people on our side have genuine beliefs, but right, how how could the others?
I also think that we find ourselves in a moment here where there is such a cynicism from the right and also I think from the left. That's what it feels like you're talking about, is like, none of this is real. Right, they're paid protesters, And I mean that goes the whole ethos of Elon Musk, right, that we're
all non playing characters. And that is something that a lot of very wealthy people believe or know enough to not say they believe, but do secretly believe because life has worked out so well for them that they are the only playing characters and that everything else is a simulation to lessen or increase their own experience.
Yeah.
I mean that's another contributing tributary to this crisis of moral courage is also that there's an enormous number of people and there are cultures in this country. I mean, I think this look on Valley culture is particularly bad in this regard, which encourage you to think of other people as not as real as you. I don't know when we when we were we did several episodes on Musk and that kind of like I sort of steeped in his whole gestalt and moral universe and it was
really disgusting. And I also just encountered a lot more of the kind of common sense ideas about what matters in the world and how the world works from the Silicon Valley kind of you know, insular world, and there was so much of that NPC stuff and it's like it's like it's like I just remember this tweet that I saw that was just one of many like this, but there was just from some kind of tech world influencer who was saying, how sorry, how sad she was
for most people in the country who will never like do anything heroic.
Yeah, well they may. They may have to because of this administration.
They very well may, and they do every day. I mean, I can get very maudlin about this, but I have a great belief in the everyday heroism of regular people, and actually quite little confidence in the capacity for heroism of the of the very wealthy and privileged.
I agree, And we are out of time. I hope you will come back. Yeah, it's fast. It's not one of these like fancy dead.
Podcast goes on and on.
No, I know, I lit, We're just twenty minutes. Baby, We're in the corporate world, so I know. But definitely come back. Stephen Gladick is a CNN contributor and the author of the shadow doc Welcome to Fast Politics.
Steven, thanks for having me, Molly.
Okay, So Supreme Court has become I don't know that Roberts wants it to be this way, but they have all of a sudden become sort of the center of the action. And I think they probably would prefer not to be with the Republican president, especially one like Trump, but they are it. So talk us through the sort of how the deportations got to the Supreme Court and everything else.
So there are really two different lines of cases that sound alike and that have some overlap, but are really
raising different sets of questions. It might be helpful, Malli, for these purposes to separate out what we might call just generally the Alien Enemy Act cases and for those who know the case name, so that includes JGG and AARP and a few other acronyms on one hand, and then Abrago Garcia and Abrago Garcia is the Marilyn man who was wrongfully removed to El Salvador, right even though he had something called withholding of removal which specifically barred
the government removing him. A Brago Garcia Mali was not removed under the Alien Enemy Act. He just happens to be, you know, at least or he was being held in the same horrible mega jail in El Salvador as the folks who were removed under the Alien exactly. So you have these two different sets of cases, and the Supreme Court has already issued I guess it's three rulings now in those two sets of cases, and so let me sort of try to break them out briefly, separately.
Before you just break this out. How much do you think Judge Roberts wants not to have to do this?
Well, I think he desperately wants to not have to do this. I think he is incensed, not necessarily at the Trump Administration's behavior, although maybe that too, Malli. I think he's in sense that they're not getting the message. I mean, I think from his perspective, you know, the rulings I'm about to describe were meant to send a message to the Trump administration to knock it off, and that message has just not been received. Why is all
this happening, right? This is all happening to Molly, because the Trump administration is trying to effectuate a policy of mass summary removals right without having to go through individualized process in each.
Case, right, the legal process, right.
And so part of what is happening in all of these cases is the Trump Administration's trying to basically find any way through the legal you know, sort of process, the legal traps from their perspective to being able to just sort of put a whole bunch of people on a whole bunch of planes and get them out of the country.
So talk me through the three decisions.
So on April seventh, right, in the first case that's JGG, that's where the Supreme Court sort of split and did two things right. This was one of the Alien Enemy Act cases. So a five to four majority in that case held that basically the right way for litigans to challenge the Alien Enemy Act was not under a statute called the Administrative Procedure Act, but was rather through habeas petitions, basically like you can't be before Judge Boseburg, you have
to go to Texas. But bally in that in that same case you had the Court unanimously say in that at least going forward, the government could not use the Alien Enemy Act to remove people without notice and judicial review, without noticing a meaningful chance to contest right whether they are who they say they are. So that was the
first ruling. The second ruling was in the case of Abrigo Garcia, the guy who was wrongfully removed to El Salvador, where a district judge in Maryland, Judge Paula Zenis, had ordered the government to return Abrago Garcia by a day in time certain and the government went to the Supreme Court saying we shouldn't have to do that. And there again, Molly, you had this little bit of a split decision where the Supreme Court in one sense said, you know, we're not going to make you produce him by a day
and time certain. But Judge Zenis was right that she has the power to at least find out what steps you could take and what steps you have taken to bring him back, and so we're gonna let her do that. We're gonna let her try on Remann to figure all that out. So that's where things were until late last.
Week the nine zero decision. Where did that come from?
That was a go Garcia, That was.
A nine zero for due process. Do you think that it was written so vaguely because Roberts was trying to get Alito and Thomas to rule nine zero.
Absolutely, And it's why the sodomy or separate opinion, which really does read in some respects like a partial dissent, is actually styled as a statement she didn't want to break that. So but Mollie right, You also have the nine to nothing due process holding in the JGG case that all the Alien Enemy Act books are entitled to due process. So now you have two different messages from the Supreme Court, right, message number one you got to give.
These are both nine zero, that's right.
So message number one, you've got to give due process to folks who before you remove them under the Alien Enemy Act. Message number two, you know, even once they're removed, right, like, the federal courts are not totally powerless to look into the possibility of bringing them back. My sense, Mollie is that John Roberts would have been very happy stopping there and having the lower courts just sort of figure it out from there, like filling all the details as you go.
But then right like late last week, like Thursday night and Friday morning, you had these news stories of a whole bunch of immigrants at the Blue Bonnet Detention Center, which is in Ansn, Texas, just outside of Abilene, receiving these completely indecipherable, incomprehensible notices only in English, even though these folks are mostly only you know, Spanish speakers, suggesting that they were subject to imminent removal under the Alien
Enemy Act, that you know, inconsistent with what the Supreme Court had said. And so that set off this third chain of litigation that got to the Supreme Court, like in a lightning Bolt with the justices ruling Molly this time, we think seven to two right after just before one am Saturday morning, that basically, you know, hey, government stop. And it seems to me that like that was at least seven of the justices right, and you know, enough of this. We're getting very frustrated, Like, you know, we
met what we said in those two prior decisions. So the state of play Molly is that there are now six different lawsuits in six different district courts challenging the Alien Enemy Act as a basis for removing folks. The Abrego Garcia case is still going before Judge Zenis, where the government is increasingly not responding to the discovery that she had required. And so you know, we're in this place where it's like there's a lot going on. It's not easy to keep traff of everything, but like this
is going and get worse before it gets better. I mean, the government is by all you know, by all intents and at appearances like continuing to try to play games with all of this.
Okay, So we have both of these things going on at the same time. Then we have this split descent that was seven too. Can you talk us through that?
Yeah, so this was the early Saturday morning ruling. So what the court didaurday morning is it really just looked at the Blue Bonnet detainees and said, you know, the ACLU has credible reports that they face imminent removal without the process we required, and Molly, like, knowing how hard it's been in Abrago, Garcia to get anyone back from El Salvador, right, the justices are, you know, understandably don't want to let anybody else get on a plane until
they've had their due process. And so that's what set off Justice Alito and Justice Thomas. So from the sort of early Saturday morning orders, they just noted their descent and that a separate statement would would follow. Sometime around eleven pm Saturday night, Justice Alito filed his descent and Molly, I am. I mean, as you know, I'm not sort of the biggest ban of Justice Alito's work to begin with, but wow, this was I mean, it's not that it
was like snarky, it was just so superficially specious. Right, So, so Alito offers seven bullet points where he's trying to come up with like different reasons why the court acted. In his words, hastily and prematurely. And you know, one of those claims is that the court didn't even have the power to rule. That's just silly. Alito has been in the majority in lots of cases in similar contexts
where the court ruled. One of his claims is that there was no urgency because the government had represented that there would be no airplanes either Friday or Saturday. That's actually a complete misstatement of what the government said. What the government said before Judge Boseburg was that there will be no flights on Friday, but quote, we reserve the right unquote to send planes on Saturday. I wrote about
this for my newsletter on Monday. But like the Alito dissent, just smacks of an effort to rationalize right a position he knew he wanted to take, and not to actually follow the law and the rules where he where they where they led him.
And how does habeas factor into all of this? And can you explain to us has.
Yeah, so a root of habeas corpus is one of the oldest forms of legal process, Molly. The sort of the old school habeas was the court would issue the writ to a jailer, and the jailer was supposed to produce the detainee before the judge so that the judge could say, hey, why are you holding this person?
Right?
Are they who you say they are? Do you have the authority to hold them?
Like?
Is all of this on the up and up? So it's like the classical way of challenging executive detention. One of the reasons why this litigation Molly has gotten so procedurally complicated is because habeas historically has really been about individuals. You know, am I being held lawfully? Are you being held lawfully? And what's really needed in this case is what the lawyers would call class wide relief. You really need, you know, one lawsuit where a federal court can decide
one way or the other. Is the Alien Enemy Act even lawfully applied to trende Ragua? And if it is, like, what should the rules be for how the government proves that you're a member of trendy Aragua. And so that's what the ACLU had been trying to get that class wide nationwide judgment in the case in DC and that's why the Supreme Court's very first intervention on April seventh,
that JGG case. That's why the first part of it was five to four because you had the conservative majority saying nope, you got to do habeas, and you had Justice Sodamaire saying, you know what the hell, One no, you don't, and two if you make them do habeas, it's going to get like really complicated really quickly. Lo and behold, it's gotten really complicated really quickly.
Right.
I'm hoping you could talk about else is happening in the Supreme Court. Who decides trying to keep Trump from turning America into Venezuela, right or El Salvador. Well, that's also happening. They have their regular schedule, so a lot of these are coming on the shadow, right, or they're going as an emergency. Explain to me how they're taking all these Trump cases.
It's worth stressing two things that I think may not be visible to everybody. So I think folks Molly have a pretty good intuitive sense that there's been a ton of litigation against Trump administration policies. What I think is less visible is that Trump's Justice Department is being very selective about which cases they're taken up quickly and which cases they're slow walking. So you know, for example, right,
like the law firm lawsuits. Right, they've already lost those cases in the trial courtse but they're not hustling to take those appeals up.
Why is that?
Because they know they're losers and because they right there, they're trying to sort of keep this, you know, sort of in place to bully other law firms as long as possible.
Say that again, because I think people need to know that the law firms that are protesting Trump, standing up to Trump Trump is losing.
Yes, the law firms are winning. The district judges here. I think there are three different cases and the district judges in all three cases have issued temporary restraining orders blocking the executive orders, Mollie, because there have been I think now ninety eight cases where district courts have either granted or denied temporary relief against it. Like who can keep track of all those cases?
Right? Right?
But it's word to the wise. If you are a law firm and you want to go against Trump, you will win.
This is well, this is what the lawyers have been saying, right, I mean, why the law firms are folding when the law is so I mean, you know they're good enough lawyers, Molly to know that they're going to win.
And when you're captured by Trump, you are then his servant and you're not protected by the courts, You're not protected by the Supreme Court. You are actually just only at the whim of one man.
Right, I mean, if you make a deal voluntarily, right, the fact that a different executive order has been struck down isn't going to help you. But meanwhile, right instead, So the Trump molly here we are. It's what April twenty third, so we're like ninety two days in and the Trump administration has so far filed ten emergency applications in the Supreme Court. So there are ten of these cases that the Trump administration has tried to get to
the Supreme Court in a hurry. Just to put that into context, during the Bush and Obama administrations, right across sixteen years, if I Recoverment filed eight emergency applications. So we've had more in three months than we had in sixteen years. A lot of those are in this Alien Enemy Act and or immigration context. But we also are going to have oral arguments in May in the birthright
citizenship cases. We have an application pending where Trump is trying to basically get the Supreme Court to sign off on his firing of members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
I want to go back to the birth rate citizenship. Birthrate citizenship was taken up by the Supreme Court. Why, Well, that's.
A good question. So what is weird about the birthright citizenship cases is that the Supreme Court has only for now taken up the question of whether when three different district courts, one in Boston, one in Seattle, one in Greenbelt, Maryland, blocked Trump's policy, whether their injunctions were too broad. Administration is not asking the Supreme Court, molly at this juncture,
to say that the policy is lawful, right. All they're asking the Supreme Court to do is to narrow the relief that the Court's provided to only the plaintiffs in those cases. And the reason, Mally White that's a huge deal is because if the Court agrees and says, oh, we're not saying anything about the merits you know, blah blah blah, that still means the policy would go into
effect for like ninety nine percent of the country. And so maybe you know you're next door neighbor who happens to be covered by the policy, like maybe they could sue, but they'd have to sue to get their kid to be declared a citizen.
Oh wow, so it would actually work. This is for the whole Encelona.
And this is the pattern. So you know, we spend so much time ally talking about sort of John Roberts trying to defuse things Trump is two I mean, and what I mean by that is Trump is trying to use the Supreme Court procedurally to take policies that he doesn't think that he has the votes for on the marriage, or he does not think or the lawyers don't think
that five justices are going to uphold this policy. But these procedural conceits and these procedural contrivances are there to try to provide the sort of the fig leaf, right, the shadow of a justification for why the Supreme Court could issue a technical rule in where maybe even they say nasty things about the Burke relationship policy, but the practical effect is that the policy goes goes into force.
That is so craven in a way. But there's also a lot of other policies. Just two more seconds on this what else Because there's an anti LGBTQ.
Believe it or not.
The Supreme Court also has a regular job, right, and so the Court is in the middle of the April oral argument calendar, which Molly traditionally is where all the big cases go. So you know, you and I are
sitting here on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the Court had this big oral argument about whether parents of public school kids in Montgomery County, Maryland can object to the inclusion of certain books in the curriculum on religious grounds, right, books that portray same sex couples in a positive light, et cetera.
Next week, the Supreme Court has an oral argument on whether the Oklahoma Constitution violates the First Amendments Free Exercise Clause because it's been interpreted to not allow the state to fund religious charter schools, right, meaning like must states fund religious charter schools. The Supreme Court still has its regular bucket of cases that are going to make people like you and me tear our hair out. Well, you still have hair. But what's crazy about what's going on
is all of this emergency application stuff. This happening not in lieu of those big cases, but on top of them, where it's just like the Supreme Court is busier and more in the middle of everything than really we've ever seen before.
If it comes down to it, do you think ultimately there are five saying people on the court.
I do.
So let me say this as clearly and emphatically as possible. I think there are exactly five votes in the big rule of law cases to stand up for basic principles of due process, to stand up for basic principles of separation of powers. And just to be clear, I think that the five votes are the three Democratic appointees and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Ammy Cony Barrett.
And that's it, and that's it.
And so when I lose sleepover is not that I think there are five votes, and I think those five votes will will be enough when we get there. Where I lose sleepover is how much damage and how much mess and how much disruption there's going to be until and unless we get to that point.
Thank you, Stephen Bladock, Thanks Molly, No moment, Jesse Cannon Somley.
In our home city of New York, this is really really grotesque stuff. We have four year olds going to court in New York City with no lawyer for immigration.
It's disgusting. This country is falling apart This is not how any supposed work. Four year olds should not be going to courthouses by themselves, they should be being protected. The fact that this country is so uninterested in protecting children is just so incredibly distressing and unsurprising and disgusting and will forever be our moment of fuck Ray.
Yeah, and I can't help but think that this is the logical conclusion of what happens after Eric Adams is shown to be Tom Holman's pet and has meetings with Christy nom this week the worst.
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.