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Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. I'm Carlos. All thanks for joining us, and I say us because Ms. Adams is here in the studios. Hello. Marketplace world headquarters. It is Monday the first day of July. If you can believe that. Yes. Today we are going to do some news, even though it's just kind of the news. And then get to some smiles. Start with the news, Mr. Rizdal. I don't know what happens now.
So we've had a lot of Supreme Court activity last three, four, five days, whatever. The big one is one of the big ones, right? But arguably the biggest of the term is the immunity ruling this morning for Donald Trump. Well, for presidents of the United States in the person of Donald Trump saying that basically for all of his official acts, he is absolutely immune. And I don't know where we go now that one person is above the law. I don't know. I don't know what happens. I don't know what happens.
Well, it kind of depends on what happens in November. Well, yes, it does. But, well, yes, but, but not just this November, right? Because as Gorsuch said, I think it was Gorsuch's arguments for this case. We're trying to make a ruling for the ages here. Right. So, so if Biden wins or whoever runs instead of Biden, but that's a whole different podcast, you know, well, yes. And I also think that if we do end up with a Democrat in the White House in, you know, after November,
that the push to change the makeup of the Supreme Court will kick into extreme high gear. And those conversations that have not been super serious before now will become very serious. And depending on the Constitution of the Congress, you know, like so it really depends what happens in November. If you end up with a Democrat in the White House, if you end up with Democratic majorities in the House and or Senate, then I think those conversations about expanding the court,
and limiting the power of the court get a lot more serious. You're looking very skeptical, which I can tell because I'm sitting here. Two words, Philla Buster. And yet, the rules have been changed about around Philla Buster before they can be again. They certainly have. Like the system is changeable. It is hard to change the system, but the system is changeable.
So all right, wait, so let's back up for a minute. The system by which we mean the constitutional system is changeable and it is hard to change on purpose, right? And that's the thing. What we're talking about here, when we talk about the Philla Buster and all that jazz is the rules of the Senate, right? And that's a different ball of wax.
Yes, I mean, folks may remember the huge scandal it was when it be they changed the rules to allow Supreme Court justices to be make it through, you know, with just a simple majority basically. Instead of making it subject to the Philla Buster, which clearly came back to bite the Democrats. The Democrats made that change.
And it definitely came back to bite them, which is exactly what people predicted, but you were also faced with, you know, McConnell being like I'm not letting Obama seat a Supreme Court justice full stop. And so like were there a lot of other options at the time, not necessarily, but whatever. If you had to pinpoint a moment when the Supreme Court became overtly political, right? Because let's grant that it's a creature of our political system, right?
So it is and always has been in some way political in air court. When did it become a political player if you had to pick a moment? I am not enough of a constitutional scholar to pick the exact moment. I think when it entered the consciousness of how political it had become would have been the expansion of the right to marriage to gay folks to queer folks. That was interesting. Because that was seen at the time, especially by Republicans as an extraordinarily extraordinarily political move.
And then I think for other folks for liberals, it became when they overturned row versus weight. That's when it entered. And I think you've seen kind of rising panic amongst liberals ever since row and more attention paid to the court because row was overturned.
And folks who've been watching this for a while have seen this happening. Katanji Brown-Jackson, when she was talking about Loper Bright Enterprises versus Ramanda that overturned the chevron, deference which we talked about last week said the court has been working on this for a while.
This has been a process that has been in place chipping away at it. And then we have this other case that came out today, which was the corner post case, which was about the statute of limitations for challenging federal regulations. And the court to almost no unsurprise said, you can challenge a regulation when you become subject to it, not necessarily within a window of time that the regulation existed. And so I know that the immunity thing kind of swallowed up all the oxygen today.
But basically this, I think it was like a truck stopper or something where they were saying, hey, we can't fit within the six year statute of limitations to challenge a regulation because our business didn't exist within six years of this regulation kicking in. And so the court said, all right, fine, you have six years within when a regulation affected you to challenge it. Well, that means in light of chevron being overturned.
Anybody can set up a business and then use that business to challenge any regulation that currently exists because the carve out when they overturn chevron was like, oh, we're not back dating this. We're not going to worry about regulations from the past. This is just about regulations moving forward.
But a new challenge to a regulation means that they have to adapt it moving forward. And so this is really upending a lot of things. And I've already started getting emails from people about, you know, here's how it's going to affect fill the blank. And so I have an example here that I got from a law firm, Herrick Feinstein, where their lawyer, John Chun, was talking about the FTC's nationwide ban on non-compete clauses, right?
And I'm just going to read here the overturning of the chevron doctrine further imperils the survival of the FTC's nationwide ban on non-compete likely returning the issue to state and local jurisdictions to decide. The FTC's authority to issue a non-compete ban was already on shaky constitutional ground to begin with without the lifeline of the chevron deference, the prospects of its survival is significantly diminished.
There are new rules about overtime protections that the Biden administration is putting out. You can expect those to be challenged. Now, I have seen a lot of people talking about what happens next, right? What happens next? So we are going to see these lawsuits, we are going to see these challenges. And had tip to Richard Ford Burley on Blue Sky, who flagged this thread for me from someone who says squire, their name is Squire Boone, which I'm guessing is not the real name.
The correct response to chevron being overturned is for every single environmental group to start filing millions of lawsuits. Right now, today, arguing that various regulatory decisions didn't go far enough. Absolutely flood the zone. Just take every public comment period submission by green piece or ducks unlimited or literally any one that the EPA hasn't fully implemented and demand the court's rule.
File everything in the ninth circuit, which is a more liberal circuit than the fifth circuit, which everybody's worried about or at least all the liberals are worried about the fifth circuit. Play their game, just log jam the court system, denial of service attack it everywhere, fundraise that this is explicitly what you're doing. Because this is what conservatives have already said they're planning to do is to flood the system. Right? So what happens if you flood it both ways?
The government grinds to a halt. The federal government does not have enough lawyers or enough people or enough time to litigate all these cases. The courts will be overwhelmed and who knows maybe that would force the Supreme Court to say, okay, this was a bad idea. Who knows? But that is an interesting strategy. Interesting strategy. It's not desirable by any means, but it's totally understandable. I think it goes back to what I started with. I don't know what happens now.
I don't know what happens now. I don't know what happens now with the Unitary Executive and the next executive. The Unitary Executive Theory is a theory that says the executive as outlined in Article 2 of the Constitution has all the power of the executive branch. And now the Supreme Court says today can do almost anything he or eventually she wants. And I mean, look, I don't know what happens now. I don't know what happens now.
And anybody who, by the way, says they do is just full of it. This is true. But this does relate to my make me smile. Yes, well, Jake. Because as one might have guessed, I don't have a smile. So during my extraordinarily long epic journal from one coast to the other yesterday that took me what was it? Probably a grand total of like 20 hours of travel or something like that to get here from DC yesterday. I was thinking a lot about this and kind of the hopelessness with a lot of people.
Yeah, for sure. Hit me this morning for sure. And I think it's particularly hard for us as journalists because we don't get to turn it off. And we also, I think many, forgive me if I'm speaking for you, we feel a sense of personal responsibility. You go on, you go. A lot of us got into this work thinking that we could do something good for the democracy by giving people information.
And I know that when I started in journalism at 16, I thought to myself, if people just had better information or better access to information, they'd be able to make better choices. And we can improve the democracy and help people. It's idealistic, but I believed it. And I still do. Despite everything. But there's not as many journalists. There's particularly not as many local journalists.
And a lot of our industry is rightfully criticized for making it kind of all about ourselves instead of about the work. But I also think that one of our roles now is to address the hopelessness. Like I was on a plane a lot yesterday. I should probably tell people. But also you are on a plane close to the appropriate amount of time.
It was just the amount of time he's been waiting. Yes. Yes. I had a lot of delays, a lot of cancellations, and a very odd moment where I was checked in at the gate on time. And my boarding pass just wouldn't work. And they wouldn't let me on the plane. Anyway, but this thing they say about flight attendants. No matter how bad the turbulence is, people are looking to the flight attendant.
If you can, if the flight attendant is looking like they're keeping it together, you know, it gives people some confidence and gives people hope. And so I think that kind of our job at this point is like what can give people hope and what can give people tools to address this very unique moment that we're in for the democracy, right? So, including the show notes will be a couple of resources that I found about what you can actually do to address the moment that we're in.
Whether that be, whether that is becoming more engaged on the local level, whether that is supporting organizations that align with your values in their efforts to fight these things in the courts. Whether it means changing the way that you're having conversations with people, whether it means signing up to be a poll worker and making sure that your community is protecting poll workers.
Whether, you know, a lot of people have expressed a lot of concerns about food safety in light of the Chevron deference being overturned. All right, so make sure that your state food inspection regulator is being held to account. And maybe that being being held to account is you. I think people can pick one thing and make that thing yours and make it your personal responsibility that at least in your community, you're going to make this one thing better.
There's a story in the Washington Post about this woman in Michigan. And it says on the morning of November 10, 2016, Katie Faye posted a short message on her Facebook page. It read, I'd like to take on Jerry Mandering in Michigan. If you're interested in doing this as well, please let me know. She ended it with a smiley face emoji. And it goes on to explain how she went and created this coalition that changed the policy in Michigan from allowing partisan commissions to set
voting lines to it being a nonpartisan commission. We've had conversations on the show about ranked choice voting about open primaries about things that are changeable at the local level that can make a difference at the national level in the long term. I will also point back to something that I reread today, which was an opinion piece in the New York Times that was published posthumously, I never can say that word.
That came from John Lewis. And the headline on that was together, you can redeem the soul of our nation and encourages people to make the good trouble. You know, he said, ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of American America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble, voting and participating in the democratic process are key.
The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it. I would add to that. You must vote and you must do something else because I was I was brought up in this like super conservative school and they felt so passionately that abortion was murder.
And I watched those folks work for decades with purpose and intention to get Roe versus Wade overturned. And when you think about people like Lewis and King and folks in the Civil Rights movement, they had zero expectation that the work they were doing was going to improve anything for them, that it was and they were not super optimistic.
They think it was going to improve anything for their kids. They thought maybe if they put themselves out there and they worked really hard, perhaps it would be a better place for their children's children. And I think a lot of us want change now and don't necessarily want to invest in change that we don't reap the benefits of, but that's part of it.
I think that's exactly right. That's the key point here, right? The conservative movement legal and social and political and otherwise has been working and playing the long game for 50 years. And now in the last 18 months, the conservative movement has had amazing success. It has reaped the fruits of all the work that went into it.
And look, it was working and you can value judge however you want, but they worked it and worked it and worked it and kept their eye on the ball and all of that stuff. And now I think members of the progressive community are finally waking up to the fact that the long game matters. And there will not be a reward soon, right? It is going to take decades if progressives want some sort of equilibrium established and it's going to be rough.
There's a website that I found when I was looking into this today called protectdemocracy.org, which purports to, you know, be a pushback against a, basically an anti-authoritarian group. And they list a couple of steps that you can take. Know the signs and the red lines between democracy and authoritarianism, engage in democracy locally.
And then they said something nice, find your voice, lead a chorus. Find your voice, lead a chorus and give some examples of that. Embrace your niche. It has examples here of things that veterans can do, teachers can do, business leaders can do, faith leaders can do, journalist tech experts, lawyers, law enforcement members. And then, you know, remember democracy in the voting booth and then the last one on their list is keep the faith.
Yeah, which is the hardest thing, right? It's truly the hardest thing. And so, you know, I know this was an extra long spiel for me, but I've been thinking about this and I've been talking to people and I know people who don't like these decisions that are coming down, who don't like the presidential candidates we have, who are fearful for the future, you are not helpless.
You know, you are not without agency. We still live in a country with incredible privilege for a lot of people. And as we've said on here before, democracy is not a spectator sport. So, mic drop. Yeah, we're done. All right. That is it for us today. You can join us tomorrow for our weekly deep dive. This time, we're going to check in on the big remote work experiment that's been playing out for many American workers and also contributing to probably our over consumption of news.
And, you know, this has been going on since the start of the pandemic and we haven't checked in on it in a while. We're going to get into what the new normal looks like for many companies and what studies are finding out about how this new paradigm for the people who do work remotely is impacting employees. Nice lips, Mack. Make me smart. It's produced by Courtney Berg, secret today's program is engineered by Jake Cherry on the office, writes our newsletter.
Jessica Brayers, our senior producer, Bridget Baudner, the director of podcast and Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital. And just another shout out to the show notes today, folks. Check out some of the resources. I think I'll try to pull together some more, but don't lose hope. The planet is heating up sea levels are rising and if you're feeling overwhelmed by it all, you're not alone. There are things we can do to make a difference.
That's why we're answering your burning questions on this season of how we survive a podcast for marketplace. Whether you want to reduce your homes, carbon footprint, eat a climate-friendly diet, or you just want to ease your dread about climate change, how we survive can help you navigate our changing planet. Listen to how we survive wherever you get your podcasts.