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 Reuter's IPSOS poll showing Trump has hit a new low with an approval of thirty six percent. We have such a great show for you today. The Majority Reports own Sam Cedar stops by to talk the
unprecedented corruption in the Trump administration. Then we'll talk to the levers David Sarota about his amazing new reporting on the unitary executive theory and it's threat to our democracy. But first the news.
Mai.
I'm going to read you a headline. I need you to tell me if it's good or bad. I just can't decide. I'm a fed center here today. The Treasury just declared the US and solve and the media mist it seems bad.
Again. I am not an economist, but it seems not good. There is a conclusion drawn from the Treasury Department's own consolidated finance statements for the fiscal year of twenty twenty five. They were released last week. Basically six h six trillion dollars in total assets against forty seven point seventy eight
trillion in total liabilities. By the way, this forty seven trillion, really almost forty eight trillion doesn't include the unfunded obligations of Social Security insurance problems like Social Security and Medicare. They're in a different off balance sheet statement. So let's talk this through. I think this is one of these headlines that it's sort of for the algorithm. It's meant to catch your attention. But the larger point that America
has too much debt is an important one. And you'll remember that Republicans they often run on making the debt smaller, They're going to get rid of the debt, and often they instead grow the debt. And so one of Donald Trump's things was that he was going to work on
the deficit, lowering the deficit. Maybe he didn't, you know, he's sort of He said was that, you know, the Republicans tend to criticize Democrats for spending, but in fact, Donald Trump is in the middle of a warrant that nobody knows why we're doing it, and is costing a billion dollars a day, one billion dollars a day. That is quite a lot of money, and the reason that
we're in this war nobody knows. So we are in a moment where we're really just spending money that has absolutely makes no sense, and it's just a completely insane way to run a country. And you know, it's only going to get worse because Trump is paying solar companies not to do projects, He's incentivizing oil companies. He's making all of the dumbest of dumb decisions.
Yes, speaking of the GOP, senators are admitting that Trump blocked the deal to partially fund the DHS, even though he keeps saying it's the Democrat shutdown, it's the Trump shutdown.
Yeah, so this is amazing. John Kennedy, who is a member of Congress from Louisiana, writes books, appears often on Fox News, famous for getting Christy Nome fired basically by asking her where the two hundred and twenty million dollars. When he's talking to Will Caine, Fox News's own host, not yet a member of the Trump administration, but probably soon, and he says, quote, the Democrats have offered to open up everything, but Ice ted Cruz, and I said, Okay,
let's accept their offer. At the same time, we would do a bill for reconciliation for the ICE money. That way, we're out of the shutdown and DHS is back open, and then we have airports at work again. And Senator Soon submitted that to President Trump, and he said, no,
no deal with Democo. So instead he sent ICE to airports where they are arresting mothers and also just wandering around talking on their phones, right, I mean talking at their phones, looking at their phones, wearing bulletproof vests in a place that you can't have a gun, looking ridiculous where I mean, you know, but at least not wearing masks.
I mean, our next sunline is literally that they're not doing anything but playing Candy Crush and they're getting nothing done here.
Not that there's anything wrong with Candy Crush this podcast. We support Candy Crush. You should support us again. Candy crushing it.
I heard you've been candy crushing it.
Unless Candy Crush is paying me. I'm not candy crushing it.
Oh okay, I didn't know.
I'm not candy crushing for free baby.
But the point being, we're now two days into this and we're seeing ICE doing nothing at these airports aside from standing around and not helping these wait times go down.
Wrecked. Lots of good photos of them looking very bored. Also, the other thing that is that's actually pretty sticky for Trump is that you have these guys who we were told had to be in masks because of Docsing. Now they are out there and they're not wearing masks. Which is it, do we have to protect their identities or do we not have to protect their identities when they're in the airport because they might not be doing crimes. I think that's pretty interesting.
Look.
Donald Trump weighed in on his social media saying he's a all caps, big proponent of all caps ice wearing masks, but he'd greatly appreciate all caps, no masks when helping our country out of the democratic mess at the airports. Guess what branches Republicans control, Jesse all three?
Supreme Court two. Yeah, And you do have Steve Batten saying that this is the trial run for the elections, and you know, so far, if this is the trial run for the elections, it seems like it's a lot of people just getting pictures of these people.
So I'm excited. At least they're not wearing masks. And the way times, by the way, are real long. If you're going to an airport, get there seven thousand years early.
In one of my group chats, people have spoken of getting there three and a half to four hours early and barely making their flights.
Yeah.
Good stuff. So as a reaction to this, we have Delta Airlines suspending airport perks for members of Congress until the shutdown is over.
Honestly, good for them, Yeah, good for them. Here's the TSA. The newest recommendation from the TSA recommends getting to the airport four hours before your flight. Four hours. That's right, four hours. Many of these flights, most these flights, if you're flying in America, are under four hours, but you should still get to the airport four hours early. It is just incredible stuff. But good for Delta Airlines. You know, if the Congress is not going to fund the airports,
then Delta should not be giving them any free orange juice. Correct, no orange juice for Congress people.
How about wheelchair lifts to their gate through back doors? What about Nancy may shoul I need her handheld?
Listen, man, I'm not getting involved in any of this. I am not getting involved in this is all I can say is, yeah, No, we have exciting news over at our YouTube channel. The third episode is out now. From our series Project twenty twenty nine are reimagining where we examine what went wrong with democrats approach to policy and how we can correct it and deliver changes for the American people. The first episodes dove into campaign finance, reform, antitrust,
and regulation. Our newest episode is on how we solidify reproductive rights for women. We talk to the smartest names in the field, like Abortion every Day is Jessica Valenti, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy Northok UCLA is oh and Mary Ziegler and the gout Macher Institute's Kelly Badden. Republicans were prepared for when they got the levers of power.
Democrats need to be too. So please head over to YouTube and search Molly John Fast Project twenty twenty nine or go to the Fast Politics YouTube channel page and you'll find it there. Help us spread the word. Sam Cedar is the host of the Majority Report. Welcome, Welcome, Sam Theater.
Always a pleasure to be here.
Molly.
I am happy to have you here because I feel like you are equally outraged. I mean, I know we're going to talk about the corruption, because you have to talk about the corruption because it's so glaring. It's the corruption, but it's also just the blatant stupidity of the thing. But we can start with Trump's SEC chair prevented the head of enforcement at the SEC from investigating Trump's circle for insider trading. Yeah, she's.
Her name was Margaret Ryan. She's been on the job for only about six seven months or so, and usually it's a job like you stayed there for a long time. She was the chief enforcement officer of the SEC, and they were investigating the Trump business between the crypto and other things, and apparently you're not allowed to do that.
It was the enforcement they had the problem with.
Yeah, no, you can show up to work, but you're just not supposed to do anything. It feels like every week there is at least one one example of enormous corruption that the Trump administration is doing that would take out any other administration. Yes, like we probably have had, honestly,
like I don't know twenty five of these stories. Yeah, and it seems to be largely irrelevant because of the nature of this administration, which is incredibly authoritarian, and everybody who works there, I mean, Donald Trump did a very good job having four years off of making sure they
surrounded himself with nobody who is going to challenge him. So, you know, it was surprising to me that NOME was booted because they don't really seem to feel political pressure in the same way that any other administration does, because everybody just closes ranks. And you know, that's why we're invading a country. Possibly we're certainly bombing a country involved in a huge war with forty percent of the country supports it tops and doesn't seem to be influencing Trump
at all. And so but it's fascinating. The corruption is just I don't think that we can fully grasp the depth of the corruption. It's so transactional and naked.
That is why with the oil futures situation, with the question of whether or not Trump world, you know, Trump says the war's over, the markets open, they rally, you know, the markets closed, Trump says we're going to bomb them.
Well, but there's also some front running. I mean, so there's tudor codes going on here, right, Yeah, there's there's this sense of he's responding to the markets, although I think it's also possible. You know, we've got what thirty five hundred US Airborne.
The Marines from I think it was a Marine.
Expeditionary force, and the airborne is like, I don't know, four days out. It's possible he was just buying time. But it's also possible he was just reacting to the market and there isn't necessarily a plan. But then there's also like, uh, you've got people buying oil futures, you know, moments before he makes these announcements.
Yeah, and you.
Know, we've seen this time and time again. We've seen it, you know on ploy Berker. That's just like insider trading, which I don't know, it's hard to assess which is worse. It's just it's quite obvious. There's a tremendous amount of corruption and they're just milking every single aspect of the
job is being monetized. You know, today it was official that the Trump administration is paying a French company that had bought about a billion dollars worth of federal leases to build wind farms off the coast of New York State and North Carolina.
Right wind farms that we need to make power that would be free once it got going.
It's relatively, yeah, relatively, and he's making them whole as a way of like, you know, I guess buying them out. But part of the deal is we'll give you a billion dollars taxpayer money, right, You then have to invest in a new liquid natural gas refinery in Texas and some other oil deals down there. So essentially tax dollars to encourage to subsidize more or less more fossil fuel production.
The company itself said, like, you know, we still believe that the wind power is is the thing, but it's just too expensive now to do it in America because of course it would take all sorts of legal hurdles. And then you know, just one other sort of side note to this. In December, Donald Trump's media company, which trades under DJT I think it is, did a six billion dollar all stock transaction no money involved in this, all stock transaction with a company that is in development
of fusion. Now, we've been hearing about fusion power for a long time.
It's always like twenty years.
It always feels like it's a decade away. Yeah, exactly, this is supposedly a decade away.
But make energy with nothing, Well here, it might happen.
It might happen, but at the very least we know that they have less competition because Donald trumpet is essentially destroying the solar market, both in terms of like the the centralized stuff with the solar panels, you know, you no longer subsidized to put those on your house, but also taking out these wind farms. So even as like a pump of dumb scheme, he's using taxpayer dollars to increase the value of his company's all stock investment in this fusion company. It's donning.
So it's corruption and its grift, and it's sort of venn diagram of both. I want to go back to Christinome because I think that her being kids of the
curb is an interesting phenomenon. And I want to talk about a press conference yesterday that Donald Trump did where so one of the things Trump does is he backs away from things when they start to seem like they might be And one of the things that happened with Christine Oome is it turns out she spent two hundred and twenty million dollars on horseback riding basically horseback riding movies and cowboy hats. And there's quite a lot of
money even for this administration. You know, she's the tactical pants, right, the Scott Prouet with the tactical tactical pants of Trump one point zero. I was watching this press conference yesterday, and there was one today where he said a lot of crazy stuff. But yesterday he started I thought it. It seemed as if he was starting to make a case that Whiskey Pete might eventually go the way of Christy Nome.
I don't know if we watched the same press conference, but he said at one point like Pete told me to do this.
Yeah, That's what I'm talking about it.
He's always looking for a fall guy. It occurred to me today on my show. It's like, maybe what we all need to do. It's not like Donald Trump watches my show, but we should all just pretend he's won, you know, just give him a little bit of grace, tell him that he's won, and hopefully back. I don't know that the plan could be also to you know, it's unclear. I don't think that, you know, we're in
a position. The New York Times reported that MBS Crown Yes, yes, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is supposedly encouraging him to go further. The Saudi government denied it, but who knows it certainly wouldn't be on Israel, who definitely wants us to go further to say that it's the Saudist But Maddis mad Dog Maddis.
Yes, who was too sane for this administration and is out.
He yesterday reportedly said at some event that, like, if we leave now, Iran's going to charge a toll to get through this straight to hor Moves, which apparently oil companies don't like. I don't know this for a fact, I haven't done any research on this, but I'm willing to bet you that Maddis works for a defense contractor. Oh I since on a couple of boards, and.
So yes, just put the toll up. I'm fine with that go.
The thing is is that there's a lot of people who as much as this looks like a disaster to us, right, as much as like, you know, a three or four month oil shock and all of the sort of like other implications of the fertilizer shortage, you know, which I think.
Won't really class in season, won't.
Really crest until twenty twenty seven. I think the fertilizer is already in the system for this crop. But twenty twenty seven, you're going to see a lot of social believe. The last time we saw that, we got the Arab spring. But who knows where this will happen. There's a lot of people who can make a lot of money off
of this. Yeah, you know, as to like why Donald Trump did this, which is clearly no political upside, right, Like if he wins, whatever that means, and we pull out, like, there's no he's not going to be in better shape than he was before we went in. So to me, it sounds like somebody he's got to be making some money some way, right, And he doesn't.
Even said right. Remember he even first before he got elected, he told oil company billionaires, you know, you should get me money. You'll earn the money back. And then he recently he said, here's a truth, social post. The United States is the largest oil producer in the world by far, So when oil price is gone, we make a lot of money. We because they only privatize the games, they socialized losses, we don't make a lot of money now.
We actually, if you want to look at sheer numbers, is actually the ones who are paying more money in gas prices and in inflation from everywhere else. We are the ones who are paying the oil companies who are making all the money.
Right.
I want to go back to Joe Kent for a minute, because you got my head going on the people who leave the admitted. So this administration closes rank really well. And the difference between Trump one point zero and Trump two point zero is that nobody everybody stays in right, So if you get fired, you move to a different job, which prevents you from doing interviews and writing books. So Christy nom now runs the Shield of the Americas, which is not a real thing. But nope, but she's too
stupid to know. Probably a good job. I mean, right, did she get to where the cowboy hat? But you know, let me just say she does not get her picture everywhere like she used to have her picture in airport. It's not anymore.
And I would imagine her political career. I think it's over, yes, Like I mean, like what like if she had any desires of being like a VP for somebody or something like that, I find it that's done.
Yeah, But everybody's political career, I mean, everyone who's gotten in any kind of contact with Trump world is not going to happen. I mean Jadie Vance is hiding from this war.
Jd Vance has gone into uh Is Like it does seem like he's hiding in a bunker right now. And Marco Rubio remember him, he was a Secretary of State. I haven't seen him in like.
Tweets you don't see. I mean the crazy part is Jade Vance, who had never who could not stop defending everything in the entire world, who was if there was a Nazi group chat, he was out there being like those kids they were just thirty two. That guy does not tweet anymore.
Yeah, I mean it's interesting, Like That's my point is like from a political standpoint, this is not a good thing for Trump to do. No, and so they could not make the argument that that was the case. Somebody told him it was it was going to be a slam dunk. But I also imagine he's got to be somebody. There has to be an entity that is putting money in his pocket in some fashion that is in favor
of this. Maybe it is Saudi Arabia, maybe it's some other country, but somewhere he is making money from this. I mean, I listens to be has to be if oil gets more expensive, maybe he owns part of like the output of Venezuela and maybe he's getting I don't know, but there is no other logic to it.
Well, you mentioned this before, but Reuter's reports this morning, and again it's just sort of we sort of knew this was true, but that Trump right gets off the phone with net Yahoo and orders the strike, right, and then we have this Times reporting later in the day at Saudie's. You know, wanted this involved in this, hoping for more from this. I always am curious about the timing of stories like this. Yeah, and we're both liberal Jews, so I get very worried about this for any number
of reasons. But you know, a lot of people on the right are saying it's anti Semitic to say that Israel somehow was involved in this war, though clearly they were no. But you know, the Jonathan Greenblatz of the world.
Jonathan lad is a is a grift. I honestly, if Jonathan green Blaze told me my house was burning down, I wouldn't believe. Both Marco Rubio and people somehow forget this. Mike Johnson almost at the exact same time that Marco Rubio said, yes, we attacked because Isla that they were going to attack, and we thought we would be attacked, and so we were preempting.
That, by the way, an insane statement.
Well, only if like they had agreed that was the best case scenario to sort of like say we had to do this, they could have stopped Israel in that right, They could have said, couldn't.
We're not the superpower. We're in the superpower.
Of course, yeah, it without a doubt. I don't I'm not even convinced it's in Israel's best interest, but certainly it was certainly on their on their bucket list. Yaho's been saying that, yes, And I mean, let's be honest, Like, you look at this country, ninety three percent of the polling is in favor of the multitude of wars that
they're waging right now. When other countries look at this country and see Donald Trump as winning twice, even though one time he didn't win the popular vote, they would be nuts to assume that this country isn't at the very least forty eight percent on board with Donald Trump. Right. And I'm sorry when you look at that, Yaho's been
in power for thirty years in that country. Off and on the fact of the matter is, there's no government that's going to be demonstrably bad than net Yahoo, particularly with the way that the system of their government is, and the polling shows ninety three percent they're excited about their war in Lebanon as they're trying to push up and essentially expansionist Israel. They're they're talking now about resetting a boundary permanently or at least semi permanently in Lebanon.
They're basically waging pogroms in the West Bank. We've seen them destroy and flatten Gaza and still continue to create incredible deprivation and the miseration of Palestinians in Gaza. I mean, so it was certainly within Israel's interests why Donald Trump decides to form a US policy around Israel's interest That was the story they told us until they realized, like, hey, this doesn't necessarily jibe with America. First, I have no doubt that there was also some other interest that Donald
Trump had. I'd like to say, I wouldn't be surprised to find out, like they're.
All making money. There is a garent country.
That somehow or yes, in some fashion. Yeah, But the fact of the matter is is that in the absence of Miriam Adelson's one hundred and fifty million dollars that we know of in this last rittle and the promises he made to her right and like maybe Netanyah who said like, we're gonna make this thing happen for you and Jared in in Gaza and you guys are gonna have your gold coast in Gaza. I mean, who knows what inspired but the idea that that, you know.
And he's took this up on his own, seems it's absurd.
It's it's absolutely absurd to suggest that. I mean, particularly when you see half his administration running the opposite way. I mean, you saw that press conference when there's a clip of Stephen Miller when Trump is talking about, you know, blowing up Iran. Even Stephen Miller is like, is it's interfering with his.
Right you know, his mass deportation, this.
Mass importation actually you know, a purification of America ran agenda. I mean, where is this coming from within the administration outside of Laura Lumer, who is like, you know, providing a full throated support for this. So I think it's it's naive and and just frankly, I find it offensive to say that it's anti semitic to you point out that Israel has its own agenda as a nation.
I find it.
Which is not ours, by the way, exactly.
And I find it incredibly dangerous frankly for Jews who live in this country and other countries to say criticism of Israel is anti semitic, and that because it implies that Israelis and Jews are the same thing, and they have the same agenda and they don't. That conflation is dangerous to me and to my.
Family, Yes, and bad for the Jews.
Yes.
And anti Semitatism that we're all afraid of will be forgotten, the confabulation of Jews and Israel.
I think the fact of the matter is that, you know, one of the sort of rationales for Israel is because Jews need a place to be safe. And I think it is simply objectively the case that Israel is making Jews less safe.
Yeah, I think that's right, Sam Cedar, I hope you'll.
Come back, Mollie, I would love to.
Dave Sarota is the founder of The Lever, whose news season of The master Plan podcast is out now. Welcome, Welcome, Dave Sarona.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
So you're here to talk about a podcast that focuses on one of my favorite topics. And it's one of my favorite topics because we did a whole thing on Project twenty twenty five, which now is out of date because he did it all and in it is this idea, the nightmare fuel of the unitary executive theory. So first I want you to explain what the unitary executive theory is.
The unitary executive theory is this idea that the president has a constitutional right to essentially do whatever he wants with the executive branch of the government, which of course is the federal government. Let's just be clear the federal government. Yes, it's the courts, Yes it's the legislature. But when you think of like the government, like the EPA or HHS
or the FBI, that is the executive branch. And what the unitary executive theory says is that because of Article two of the Constitution, there's this one line in the Constitution that says, yeah, the executive authority is vested in a president. That that has been extrapolated by the conservatives to argue that the Congress has no right or power to limit what the president does with the executive branch.
And this is obviously a fringe radical theory, especially when you consider that the Constitution is a I mean, the concert doesn't say everything about everything. It leaves a lot of gaps. But I think we can all agree that the Constitution was designed as an anti monarch document. Like the underlying theory is, you don't want all the power in one person's hand, so we have coequal branches of government, and the unitary executive theory flies in the face of
that which their theory is. The president is not a coequal branch of government. It gets to run the executive branch essentially without regard for the laws that Congress is passing.
So talk us through the history here, because this is a fever dream of Richard Nixon.
Yeah, I mean the history here is that in Watergate, that was seen as a scandal that embodied an imperial presidency, the president was deploying all sorts of things against his political enemies. As we trace in our new series master Plan, he was asserting the right to decide to spend or not spend money that Congress had already budgeted, despite Congress's very clear power of the purse in Congress. The president back then, Richard Nixon campaigned promising to end the Vietnam War.
Months after he gets into office, he is expanding the Vietnam War in secret without the authorization of Congress. Point being, Richard Nixon had constructed an imperial presidency. And I think what's important to understand is that after Watergate, the Congress grabbed back some of that power. Right the Congress passed the War Powers Act. The Congress passed the Budget Impoundment Act, which says, hey, the president cannot just decide not to
spend money on stuff we've appropriated money for. The Congress did all those investigations into domestic surveillance and spy, the Church Commission, which created the Faiza Court system, which was supposed to require warrants for mass surveillance. So there was a moment where Congress pushed back against the imperial presidency.
But from the backlash, a backlash that within ten years, the conservative movement was extremely upset about this congressional assertion of power, and inside of the Reagan administration came all sorts of attempts to grab back that power for the executive, including the creation as we find that we found the original document or set of documents inside the Reagan Justice Department articulating what would become known as the unitary executive theory.
And remember, Ronald Reagan had been exploring this, or at least pieces of this in his first term. Right, the invasion of Lebanon, the invasion of Grenado without congressional authorization, assertions of executive privilege, Reagan firing the air traffic controllers without any authorization from Congress. Right, So, all of this culminates in the articulation of the unitary executive theory, which
I think it's important to remember. It's one thing to say Congress says the executive can do this and can't do this, and the executive saying, well, we've view it this way. Inside of the statute, we have more power, you think we have less. What the unitary executive theory is actually saying is none of those laws apply, because we are making now a constitutional argument those laws that constrain executive authority are unconstitutional.
Now.
It did culminate in the Reagan administration in the Iran Contra scandal. The Iran Contra scandal was fundamentally a scandal about whether or not the White House has to listen to laws that Congress passed saying you cannot fund covert wars, and the Reagan administration tried to ignore those laws. And I think the good news out of the Iran Contra scandal was, Okay, we decided as a country, that's a scandal. You have to listen to the laws. People were indicted.
You can't just ignore congressional laws. And so for a time, the Reagan Revolution kind of hit a wall on what it could do on executive power. But of course you and I are old enough to remember what happened in the Bush years, where after nine to eleven the sort of push for unitary executive authority went on overdrive with very very little opposition.
Yeah, you know, I have a lot to talk about. You bring up Aaran contra, and I'm like, oh, I got to talk about a round country. But first I want to go back to the Reagan do oje because there are members of this Supreme Court. Yeah, I'm thinking of Gorsich who have roots in that world. And there
are others too who have roots. You know, there's a lot of like you know, the Clerk to Justice pipeline and the Federalist I want to know what the document was, sort of who cooked it up, and a little bit about if this was directly to justify the wars in South America.
So John Roberts and Samuel Alito were in the Edmese Justice Department. Edmese was Ronald Reagan's Attorney general, who, by the way, in Master Plan, we talked to Edmese. Edmes is still around, He's ninety five years old. He was gracious enough to talk to us about this.
Does he feel vindicated or does he feel regret?
I'll put it this way. Edmee's did not show any remorse or regret about specifically the unitary executive theory and how it's being used right now. But the scene to say is it's after Ronald Reagan's first term, and in Ronald Reagan's first term, people like John Roberts and Samuel Alito have been writing various memos asserting a broad view of executive authority under existing statutes, the president's right to hire and fire, the president's right to launch wars without
congressional authority. They are articulating this and they are getting help, by the way, from people like Dick Cheney, who is a congressman from Wyoming who ultimately is on the Minority Committee or representing the minority on the Iran Contra Committee, where after Iran Contra happens, he issues a Minority report essentially saying the problem is Congress, the problem is not the president. Right, So he's arguing, you know, for more
and more executive authority. And where the unitary executive theory gets articulated is Edmese becomes Attorney General and asks for a big, sort of stage setting report on separation of powers from a guy named Stephen Markman, who produces an eighty plus page report about how the administration can more aggressively assert executive authority in its second term, including starting
to make constitutional arguments about the president's power. And this all culminates, by the way, in the question of independent councils, special prosecutors. This is the thing that really tunes up the Reagan administration. After Watergate, there was a bill that was passed called the Ethics and Government Act, which said, listen, when there's accusations of high crimes in the executive branch,
the executive branch cannot investigate itself. Makes sense, right, Like the president's appointees cannot investigate the president, right, they got their job from him, they him their loyalty. So in special cases there needs to be able to be an independent investigation. And Ronald Reagan's administration ends up being investigated
in a couple of ways, including Iran contract. And what happens is that the Reagan administration goes into court and argues that independent special prosecutors are unconstitutional because they represent a part of the executive branch that the executive the president cannot control, and the Constitution says that the executive that the president controls the executive branch. Now that case loses at the Supreme Court. The only dissenter is Antonin Scalia. Shocker,
Scalia dissents. But it becomes kind of cannon for the conservative movement that we cannot allow anything independent, and that includes the FTC, the CFD, all the independent agencies that Donald Trump is now trying to pack with his own appointees and ignore the protections against that. But that's where all this culminates. Right. Ultimately, what you get to when I think you listen to our podcast, is you think
Donald Trump created the sort of imperial monarchical presidency. No, he didn't he's using the powers that were created for him. Now he may be using them in a more aggressive way than we're used to, but those powers were created for him. And by the way, here's the crazy part. Here's like the mind boggling part for as we talk about it. Right now today, the Congress is right now considering reauthorizing the Executive Branch's mass surveillance system without warrants.
And I want to underscore the without warrants part, right, warrantless spying means the FBI can sweep in all of your information and not have to go to another branch of the government, the judiciary, to just get like, hey, this is cool, right, Like we're just checking to make sure you're protecting everybody's civil liberties. And the Congress, including some Democrats, are considering renewing that power for the Trump administration.
So when we talk about the Imperial presidency being really a bipartisan project, that's what we're talking about.
There's a lot of stuff happening right now, and ICE has a ton of unfettered cash from the BBB. Homeland Security is in a shutdown despite the fac that ICE has billions of dollars, which it's mind blowing to me that no one has been like, just give the ICE money to Homeland Security. But I guess whatever, that would make too much sense. I want you to talk about the Pfizer reauthorization. Where is it, who is it going to,
and where would it go through? And also the only thing this administration can do is pass in reconciliation largely, that's right. So where is this like in reconciliation is in the Senate? Where is it?
So the PISA situation comes out of the post nine to eleven period. After nine to eleven, the Bush administration engages in warrantless wire vast amounts of data swept in no warrants. It's in a kind of legal gray area. And ultimately the compromise I put that in quotes because
it wasn't really a compromise. At the very end of the Bush administration, Democrats and Republicans joined together in Congress with the Bush administration to enshrine warrantless wire tapping and surveillance in law, saying you don't have to go get a warrant any Arguably just as bad saying to the telecom companies, if you have given over people's private information, you cannot be sued, so retroactive legal immunity. This gets
signed into law. Now this has come up for renewal every couple of years, this kind of genuinely unprecedented power, and we've heard about more and more abuses of this system. Surveillance being deployed against protesters, surveillance being deployed against the political opponents of Donald Trump, Surveillance being deployed against members
of Congress. And now the renewal is up again, and you have a s situation where Trump, who had previously publicly been a critic of FIZA surveillance because he perceived it being aimed at him, all of a sudden, now he's the president, he wants it. And what you have are you have very conservative Republicans and the Progressive Caucus saying this is no longer accepted, this is not acceptable
at all. We want to stop this. And you have this sort of mushy Uni party middle of both parties, many of them saying we want to give this power, we want to just simply renew this power. And what boggles the mind is Stephen Miller is the big advocate reportedly for renewing this because he wants this to be used with the FBI, with ice, et cetera, et cetera.
And you have the Democrat, the senior Democrat, Jim Himes on the House Intelligence Committee, who is now urging Democrats to vote for it because he says he has seen no abuses of the system. Now here's what's crazy. Remember where would you find out about abuses of the system? Like, what data is Jim Himes citing from.
The Trump administration the DOJ.
Like the people who don't want you to see abuses are the ones who have the data to tell you that there aren't abuses, right, and we already know from news reports, et cetera, et cetera, that there have obviously been abuses. So it's it boggles the mind that any Democrat would think about giving Stephen Miller the power that he wants. I have sort of a like a like a basic shorthand rule, like a rule of thumb. Here, if Stephen Miller wants more power.
It's probably bad.
You should be the opposite side.
Yeah, Jim Himes, what's going on? You think he just wants the stuff that is? I mean he is in the is he in the Gang of Eight?
Yes?
I guess the best like the most charitable interpretation is he simply believes this kind of surveillance is providing us a special special security or making the country safer. But I want to just really underscore this, We're not This is not a debate about whether this kind of surveillance
can happen. This is a debate about whether you just got to go to the court, you know, And I know I know that, like some people will listen and be like they'll have in their minds like a scene from Homeland and like she's running to save the day and she can't stop to get the judges warrant. All of these reform bills to require warrants have special provisions in them that are like, listen, if there's a real emergency, like a genuine emergency, you can go you can go
for the warrant after. So none of that crap applies. This is about whether you think the president should have all the power or not. And I think when you when you listen to a series like Master Plan, I think you come away from it, I hope being like, hey, maybe one guy shouldn't have all the power. Maybe maybe like the Founders way back a long time ago, like they had a point.
Yeah, so I want you to talk about the AI regulation because that shit is wild.
Yes, so this relates to it, and I.
Think it's worth like putting a bow on this, which is Donald Trump is very in the tank for AI, even though he doesn't quite understand what it does, and so a lot of his legislation is to prevent legislation.
That's right. So Donald Trump has just issued an executive order trying to prevent states from regulating AI in any way.
He has no idea what it does, but he just knows there's money there.
All right. He just knows his brologarchs want this. I do think there are parts of the government that we know want this too. So there has been this concurrent fight between Pete Hegseth's Pentagon and Anthropic that seems like a side issue but is actually, to my mind, like
a central issue. The fight is about. Anthropic has said, look, Pentagon, we'll let you use our we'll contract with you, you can use our technology, but we have some basic internal controls that are designed to prevent our technology from being used to run let's say, autonomous weapons or to do mass surveillance. Okay, these are not things that the law
requires us to do. But they're things that like, we have decided as a company, we don't want our technology to be used for heg Seth and the Pentagon are basically saying, no, we want you to give us a switch to turn off those guardrails when you contract with us. So what they're really saying is to my mind, what I hear them saying is we want to use AI
for autonomous weapons and for mass surveillance. We want to use AI as an example to plug into all of that data that we are sweeping up now without a warrant thanks to the FISA law. Right, it's the convergence of the PISA law debate and renewal with the AI contract. They want to plug all of that warrantless data into the AI systems, and Anthropic has basically said, we're not really comfortable with that. Now. Here's where it escalates at
the lever. We broke the story last week that Trump is now quietly proposing to put a line into all government procurement contracts okay, government wide, not just the Pentagon, saying that when any agency contracts with any AI company, the AI companies have to give Trump officials the power to override any of those AI systems privacy or safety guardrails.
In other words, a line in the contract that says the Trump administration when it contracts with AI companies, they can do whatever they want with that technology, regardless of how that technology is engineered or designed to operate. To my mind, I mean that is genuinely terrifying. And I should add whether it's Trump or another president, it is genuinely terrifying. That level of power concentrated a powered in the hands of one small subset of people is insane.
Dave, Dave, Dave, I hope you'll come back.
I would love to come back. Thank you for discussing this, Molly. I'll just say, these are a set of issues that are like the kind of issues that are like under every other issue. Right, there's a couple of issues that connect to like every issue, right, and I think it's executive power. Concentrated power is one of them. Obviously, legalized corruption, money and politics is another. It's like they're like the Kevin Bacon of issues, right, Like there's six degrees of Kevin.
They're like two degrees away from every single issue. So thank you for you know, helping us talk about this. And unpack it.
There no moment, Jesse Kannon Molly, the Pentagon is directing companies to censor Iran war information.
It is just unbelievable. They've now annexed the press to another room after the judge knock them down. This is just getting silly. What will snowflakes? The Department of War are truly fragile. Listen, Jesse, I'm all yours. Tell me, tell me.
I have a theory that these people are not free speech absolutists. I have a new theaty thinking about.
The evidence on your side, and I don't know what to do.
I have this theory that these people are actually not free speech absolutists. Satellite companies are being told how to describe the images they capture. Look, here's an interesting thing about this moment. We have Roan does not have a free and fair media. It has censored media. Then we
have Israel censoring its media. Then we have the United States, which theoretically the first Amendment, it's the first what not even the second Amendment, which Republicans love so much, the First Amendment, they don't like it anymore, the first Amendment.
And we have all sorts of situations where we have stories where we can't figure out who to trust, Where Trump and the Iranian government they can't agree on what and you don't know who to trust because our government is filled with liars, and so is theirs, and so, ladies and gentlemen, we find ourselves in a moment that is a particularly dark moment in American life. 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.