Lion Sounds and Big Vibrations

the acronym, he was a taco person attack Taco. I'm guessing right now that Iran may have taken a Trump's war aversion too seriously, but they won't be celebrating Taco Tuesday this next week. Put it that way, right, Maybe that's too glib, but the point is, I did wonder. You know, there's ways of thinking that Trump didn't want them to do this, and did they do it without telling us? And you know these things have gone on.

But then he released that very strong statement on truth social saying, look, I told him Ron that they had sixty days and today would be six day sixty one. That I meant it. And it looks to me like Trump didn't chicken out this time. Of course, they're not American forces committed to this, at least not yet.

their position. Yeah, not a smart move in politics, especially with Trump on this in particular, though, Trump is an interesting figure in that there is a movement that has been built up around Trump that often projects onto Trump views that he doesn't actually hold and uses him to claim changes on the right that have not happened.

It is true that Trump criticized the Iraq War, but there is a huge gap between the Iraq War and the vast majority of things that American presidents have done in the last thirty years. Iraq, in fact, is only notable because it was an aberration from the foreign policy that had surrounded it. And for some reason, some within the so called or supposed Trump faction have decided that he is an isolationist who would be opposed to ever

deploying American troops, ever exerting American force. Well, he hasn't actually, in this case, had to do either of even those things. He's just had to say, yeah, Israel, go deal with Iran. Quite why there was this vehemence and assumption that he would be opposed to this, It was never quite clear to me. Clearly he is not. He has left some wiggle room in his rhetoric. Marco Ruby was clear to

note that the Americans weren't involved. But this isn't out of character for Trump if you look at his first term, or if you look at the way that he sees the world, supporting Israel, doing America a favor, and of course doing Israel a great favor too. In taking out some of Iran's nuclear capabilities is classic Trump, surely.

is good for America. Right, yeah, Well, we can debate how we do that, whether we should do it ourselves, whether we should support is, how much we should spend, whether there are risks, those are totally reasonable questions, But the goal, the end, the aim here of Iran not having a nuclear weapon surely is presumptively good.

were very dug in that. Really it's none of our business. If it Ron has a bomb, it's not really a threat to us. And I think that there has been this effort by people like Dan, who I repeat I like very much, but I think is greatly mistaken here, along with others who are saying the same thing. And that's not even before you get into Tucker Carlson territory, which I don't want to get into.

or enemies, or we're just neutral towards them. We take that perfect theoretical Washingtonian stance. It matters, So I just I can't. I don't know if that is being used as a proxy for it is better on balance for us not to get involved, or it's better for them to get a nuclear bomb than it is for us to art or support a war. Sure, I can buy the argument, although I don't agree with it, but not to care. Come on, not to say it's not in

our interest that that ship has sailed. That is just not There was a certain point in American history, I think where this sort of view made perfect sense. I mean, for example, although we weren't wholly unaffected by it, if you were an American president in eighteen twenty, the movement within the Habsburg Empire, they didn't actually matter that much, right, I mean, you could say plausibly, we don't care, but Iran nuclear weapons.

crazy stunt with Senator Padilla in California. By the way, my theory as a native Californian who's watched the state slide into a one party socialist republic here in the last twenty twenty five years. The problem with Padilla and Kamala Harris and Newsom to some extent is they don't affect They don't face much effective Republican opposition, they don't face much serious media scrutiny, and so suddenly when things are running against them, they behave in these ridiculous ways

like Senator Padia. Now we'll talk with Andy McCarthy in a few minutes about some of the legal aspects of this, But you and I are better at the politics of it. And it seems to me this disastrous politics for the Democrats, and I think some of their own polls are even perhaps showing this. What Mayor Bass said, this is all terrible. And then she declares a curfew. I think, you know, faster you can say bad opinion poll, she put in

a curfew. So what's your sense of it from over the other side of the country.

than Florida would. I think that it has become clear within California that the view that I just outlined is the majority in the country, and that there is a great deal of downside to taking the stance that California has. It is not the case that Donald Trump is wildly popular. He's more popular than I thought he would be in his second term, but he's not wildly popular. But he is about twenty or thirty probably more popular than the Democrats,

and especially on the question of immigration. The party looks absolutely crazy compared to Trump, and I think that some of the rhetorical backtracking that we've seen we can get to Perdilla separately, because he escalated, but from Mayor Bass from Gavin Newsom is the product of that they've recognized, and I've noticed a shift prior to that backtracking. Joe Biden was disgraceful in his refusal to enforce federal immigration law, an absolute historic disgrace, and he cost his party dearly.

But he always pretended he was doing it. He always said, no, no, we are enforcing the border. And then later on he said, you know whose fault it is that the border is open. Republicans remember that stunt where they said that they needed more power from Congress, and of course that was nonsense, but Biden understood at least that he had to lie about it, and for a while Bass and Knewsome and Shift they didn't. They just came out openly said, look,

we just don't believe that we should be enforcing this. Lord, it's terrible, we'll stop you. Paddia is still doing that, those guys are, which is probably the product of a shift in opinion. Pauling that United.

about states rights and the Tenth Amendment. Trump has this way of turning everybody on their heads.

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we thank Qualitia for sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast our great friend Any McCarthy, Senior Fellow at National Review Institute, a National Review contributing editor and author of Ball of Confusion, The Plot to Reagan Election and Destroy Presidency. Welcome Andy. Gosh. You know, as a lawyer, the Trump administration is keeping you busy trying to keep up with things.

have any validity? Or what's Anny McCarthy's always candid take on what Trump does here?

We can get into why he said that, but one of the what he basically argues is that there is no rebellion and that there are you know, there's sporadic violence, but that there isn't as much violence as the administration suggests. And then, you know, you get a lot of pushback from the other side that at least in the places where the violence is happening, federal functions are not able to go forward.

is also huge. We're talking about not just Los Angeles the city, but Los Angeles County, which is just it's massive. So you know, there are many people in Los Angeles, I guess who can look out their windows and see that everything's fine and there is no violence, and there is no seemingly there's not a problem. But in the places where there has been there have been uprisings, they've

been pretty intense. So there's that difficulty of getting a level, you know, getting a read on how violent things are, which I think is important because he's invoking rebellion and I think, you know, it used to be prior to January sixth if you threw around words like you know, sedition, insurrection and rebellion, those words had and we actually thought that, you know, you had to get to a certain level

of uprising before invoking those sorts of things. I think, you know, the fact that they tagged a three and a half hour riot where none of the security forces

were killed. There were a lot of injuries, but the damage to the facility was so minimal that Congress was able to reconvene that evening that nevertheless had to be because of political reasons and insurrection, and I think it kind of trivialized the concept, and now they want to have an exacting definition of rebellion after, you know, after we basically, you know, got rid of insurrections as something meaningful. So that's a big part of Judge Brier's opinion as well.

But you do have to make a judgment about how serious the violence is if you're going to throw words like rebellion around, I still think that's true.

was an insurrection for people who didn't like it. Okay, but it seems to me that again I've come up this from a political point of view more than a legal one. And one thing is is that, of course, the Rodney King riots and actually one of my earliest childhood memories growing up in Pasadena was seeing the distance

smoke from the Watts riots in nineteen sixty five. I could go out in my front yard and see the smoke from a long way away and what was I nine years old or something, and thought, wow, this is really kind of scary. The point is that it seems to me there's an argument for saying, don't wait for it to spread all over to the city or to spread to five more places. You want to nip it

in the bud. And and I mean, that's why it seems to me that at least the political logic and the moral logic is entirely on Trump's side.

than almost anything that happened in those years. I think the Kent State debacle in which four students were killed created the mythos about the Vietnam War as we remember it now. To me, because I was so young and impressionable, that's like the most powerful memory of that incident. And every time we have something like this happen, that's what I find myself.

tend to like courts. I tend to think in so many cases where people say that's non just dieuble, there's no real way of arbitrating unless you use the courts even in core constitutional questions involving the political branches. But this level of micromanagement surely at some point must become unsustainable.

And what frankfort basically said, and this gets the lines very blurry, I think, is that the court owes a lot of deference to presidential judgment because of the nature of what was being litigated there, but that courts are capable of interpreting statutory terms, and what the court there decided was that because Congress and the political branches together, Congress and the President had not acted in any way to end the declaration of war, and we're taking the

position that the war was still ongoing even though it.

think the courts have been consistent on that. I think what they basically say is, since the statute is written in an objective way, in the sense that it doesn't say in the President's judgment, it just says, you know, insurrection or rebellion, the first thing is, you know, objectively speaking, is there reason to believe that that condition obtains? And that I think is one threshold. And then the second question becomes, if the president decides it obtains, then how

much are we going to subject that to scrutiny? And one of interestingly, in the oral argument in California, one of the questions that Judge Briar pressed the Trump Justice Department on was what if President Trump, in order to invoke twelve four h six, had decided there was a rebellion. He had absolutely no evidence that there was a rebellion. He just on his own, ifsay Dixon, it's a rebellion, does a court have to accept that? The administration's position

is that the court has to accept it. Briar's position is that the court doesn't have to accept it, so it seems to me there's not a.

the president needs the law at all. I think it depends on what it is the president wants to accomplish, because you have this crash, which I think also leads to some blurriness between the position that the Justice Department and the Office of Legal Counsel have taken historically, which I think is best articulated in this nineteen seventy one memo which was written by William Rehnquist when he was running OLC at the Justice Department, which talks about the

protective function of the meaning the president's authority to use the military in order to carry out executive functions that are his lawful, legitimate functions. In the executive branch, and that crashes into POSI Coomatadis, which is enacted at the end of the toward the end of the nineteenth century and basically says that in the absence of a congressional authorization or something clear in the constitution, the president cannot

use the military for domestic law enforcement functions. So it seems clear that if what the president is calling the military and to do is protect federal facilities like courthouses or federal buildings, the military can do that because that's not a law enforcement function. There's also authority for the proposition that if people are blocking, say.

this yesterday about in the podcast. I'm less confident now than I was when I gave that answer, because I've looked a lot more into this since then. The question is what if the president you have these disruptions of the ability of the agents to enforce the immigration law, people blocking the places where they want to go in and do the raids, people trying to prevent the agents from getting it, people they want to place under.

protect them? And when does that evolve from a protective mission where you're basically making sure the agents are safe when they go about the duty of, say, arresting someone or carrying out a raid, or are the military guys actually doing law enforcement? Is that so close to the actual execution of the law that in the absence of congressional authorization, it's something that should be illegal. And I

don't think that's been resolved. The more I look into it, the more I think it's a blurry line.

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sponsoring this the Recochet podcast. Well, this seems to me a blurry line that a lot of modern trends have brought us to. I mean, I repair to a few simple things. First of all, curtis right case the president is the sole organ of foreign policy. Now you say this isn't a foreign policy question, except maybe it is in a certain way that I mean, the left says we should live in a world without borders. Well, guess what that means foreign policy is different. I'm sure I'm

just using their argument against them for a moment. The other one is you mentioned Frankfurter. Was he the one who said the Constitution is not a suicide pact? Or was that Jackson? I don't remember Jackson, Robert jack Jackson, Right, okay, but that you know famous line of that same era of cases that you were invoking, And I don't know, Andy, I just get frustrated with trying to parse this out

in legal terms. I guess here I'm a strong executive power man, and that the checks on him ultimately should be political and popular. But popular, I mean a sentiment of the American people and Congress is not without remedies available to it. I mean they're difficult. Impeachment takes time if you want to go to the most extreme one. But I don't know, this seems like I see, I'm I'm attacking your profession. I'm sorry, Andy, I can't help it. But as a constitutionalist rather than as a lawyer, and

I know there's a blurred line there. I just get very frustrated with the way this always ends up in court, the way Topeville said all of our disputes we're gonna go.

we're a political society. The most important decisions that get made are political ones, and I think we delude ourselves sometimes into the actually they can't even with respect to the most important decisions that we might have to make for the protection of the country. You can't make antecedent and Hamilton recognized us right, because the threats to a

country could be infinite. You can't make antecedent laws that bind the government in a way that they might not be, that the government might not be able to respond in a meaningful way to kinds of threats that you haven't anticipated.

So I think the thing that's challenging about Trump's presidency, and I think this might be best seen in the in the immunity the argument, which you know, as time goes by, I actually think Charlie you noted, I think at the time when the when the Supreme Court made their decision about whether the president had immunity from criminal prosecution or not, which of course is not in the Constitution.

But at the same time, I think everybody common sense wise knows that the president has to carry out certain particular executive functions and he can't be stopped from carrying them out by criminal statutes. So that's the that's the tension, and I think looking back on it, Justice Barrett has a much more modest take on that than the rest

of the majority did. But the broader point I wanted to make about Trump is that we went two hundred and thirty years without having to have that sketched out in an apidictic way, because everybody kind of knew that

there were these norms. You know that the president has to make very hard decisions and some of them are going to be legally dubious, and we can't have a situation where the next administration is going to come in and prosecute the president or what he did in the last administration unless it's so blatantly criminal that it can't be that its criminality can't be ignored, because you can't

have a function in government that way. Right If the president has to worry about being prosecuted or civilly sued while he's making these decisions that are of great consequence of the country, the government can't function. We went two hundred and thirty years without a court having to to describe what the parameters are or at least grapple with them, because you know, we still don't really know exactly what

the lines are even after that decision. But the thing is everything, there's a number of things Steve you talked about, you know, politics rather than law, and a lot of the important stuff that goes on and government is covered by norms more than laws because once people get into these once you get into an important government position, your bad calls are not going to be subject to criminal

prosecution or civil suit. So what controls you to stay within the four corners of your authority is more norms than law. And I think we function that way fine for a very long time. But Trump, I think more than any of his predecessors. And this isn't to say he invented this. I just think he pushes it harder than the rest. But he finds the loose joints in the system and he pushes them. And I think, you know, I've had this argument with people who say he wants

to be a dictator. You know, he's accumulating power to himself. I don't think he's got I don't think he's got a realistic idea that he's going to be president forever. I think he knows he's going to be president for four years. And I think in the current very paralyzed system, that we're in, he's basically got two years to get stuff done. He has no prayer of getting much statutory

stuff done. And what he's trying to do is identify all the things that he can do unilaterally and push as hard as he can in the directions that he wants to take the country. And a lot of it looks like, you know, Charlie and I both talked about, you know, the pretextual use of emergencies in order to you know, to do things that a president shouldn't be able to do, essentially legislate. He's looking for all the things that he can do unilaterally, even if he needs

a pretext to do it. And I don't know that we've ever had a president. I mean, we're only six months in and I feel exhausted trying to, you know, to watch him every day. But I don't know that we've ever had a president who tries to to push the outer limits of his authority so hard, so fast, to the point where now courts are being called in to try to draw lines, just like they did with the with the immunity. I think that's the stress on the system.

it too far. But it seems that we have a perfect storm where you have one side pushes everything over and then Trump says, oh, well, I'm going to push it over in the other direction, and then we expect the courts to fix this Or Am I just being two partisan?

There's no way that an attack on the capital of the kind that happened on January sixth would not have been investigated as a as a criminal event. And even if we quibble of whether the statutes that were stretched the way they were applied to what Trump did, there's no question that Trump did appalling things on January sixth and the run up to it, which would have justified

at least investigating him, right. And then the Florida thing, I think that was you know, you can argue about whether they should have brought it criminally or not, but that's there was definitely conduct that was involved there. You know, did they overdo it, Yes, they overdid it. And was there a coordinated strategy in order to bring cases at a particular time that would hit in the run up to the election. There absolutely was, But it's just it's complicated.

I think the sanctuary city stuff is much more on point for what we're talking about, because, you know, if you look at what Judge Bryer wrote, he wrote a thirty six page opinion, which means he must have he had to start writing at the minute he got the case.

But you know, there's nothing in that opinion about sanctuary cities or sanctuary policies or the fact that the federal government has the right and the power and the authority to, you know, to enforce the immigration laws, and that the states are effectively obstructing the enforcement of the immigration laws.

So the whole opinion is kind of it's artificial in the sense that what you're talking about is like, there's violence in the streets and is it enough of an impediment on the federal agents And we're not really talking about why there's a problem and that whole.

was a gun case. It was a case that came about after the Brady Act because the Brady Act initially required the states to enforce certain portions of federal law. And Scalia writes this opinion and he says, no, you're not allowed to do that. That's commandeering. So whenever people complain about sanctuary cities, I always jump in and say, hey, oh yeah, terrible politically, but legally, we actually like some

of the principles that are in play here. But California, in its rhetoric and in its actions, has gone so much further than Prince and it really annoys me because in any other circumstance it would be very obvious that they are behaving like George Wallace. They're the ones who are redolent of the Confederacy and of the massive resistance, not Trump. And yet somehow in the press this gets cast as he's breaking norms. Well, he might be pushing it to the edges. But we had this fight, right,

We had this fight over and over again. Are you allowed to nullify federal law? No, you're bloody well not. I've sent my piece.

derived a federal role out of basically two things. One the notion that the national government is sovereign and has to protect the borders and is in charge of foreign policy, is in charge of protecting Americans who are abroad, So that that was one part of it. And then the other part is Congress's the constitutional assignment to Congress an Article one of naturalization authority, you know, setting the terms of naturalization. From those two things, the court derived a

federal responsibility over immigration enforcement. And then I think what happened is probably what invariably happens, which is, once the federal courts invent a federal responsibility, it swallows up the state responsibility. But for a long time we went along and this arrangement worked because federal statutory authority in terms of enforcement of immigration is very strong. It's very pro law enforcement. Charlie, you've had to deal with it in a way that you know that Steve and I happened.

But I mean, they're, you know, they're pretty formidable laws. So you could tolerate a system where the states had the authority to enforce immigration only in so far as it was consistent with federal law. But then what happened was Obama comes along and he says, no, no, no, you don't have to use States don't have to comport with federal statutory law. You have to comport with Obama administration immigration policy, which is to not enforce the law,

the federal laws. And I think Scalia rightly said that if you know, if it was presented to the States at the convention in Philadelphia in seventeen eighty seven, that you can't protect yourself immigration wise, because that's going to be a federal responsibility, and if they decide to not enforce their own laws, you can't. Then nobody would have joined this compact. The Constitution wouldn't have been ratified.

gridlock when we have you here. You sort out a lot of these problems for us and a lot more always to be said, but we'll have to have you back soon for the sequels, of which I'm sure there are going to be many.

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that's sort of one of those totems. By the way, Paul McCartney once said that God Only Knows was the greatest rock and roll song ever written, which I thought was high praise, and I think it was George Martin who said that it was in fact, pet sounds really great out the greatest dabble of the Beach Boys that inspired the Beatles to excel and Sergeant Pepper. Sergeant Pepper was the Beatles answer to the Beach Boys because they thought the Beach Boys were their competition.

but he was quite genuinely afflicted by mental illness. He had a form of schizophrenia and he had auditory hallucinations, and I think the auditory hallucinations helped him. We overplay in our culture the tortured genius. Being mentally ill is not fun in movies. They often make it look glamorous being an alcoholic. But he derived his ability to do the work that he did from the same source as tormented him for so much of his life, and it

really did tormenting me. He had to drop out in the mid sixties from the Beach Boys tours, just as they hit peak popularity, and that allowed him to produce Pet Sounds, which was basically a Brian Wilson project, and then everyone thought, well, here we go. We're going to see the sort of second half of the Beach Boys career that you saw in the Beatles, where from nineteen sixty six on which the Beatles just went super and over,

but Brian Wilson couldn't do it. You get good vibrations and then he falls apart, and he spent the rest of his life falling apart. He couldn't work for most of it. He had rare flashes of genius. He spent years trying to produce one record. He was setting fire to things in the recording studio, putting his feet in sand. But undoubtedly one of the great songwriters of all time.

And if you had told his family in nineteen sixty six that he would live till eighty two, I think they would have been shocked, especially given his drug use and his alcohol use. But he did, which is a happy ending of sorts.

Smile Sessions. It's big, long collection, and you have in there some of the outtakes of early cuts of Good Vibrations and some of the narration, and you get some appreciation for how painsticking and demanding and Perfectioncy was, but also wanting to do something new and different that just had a sound that nobody else could come close to. I mentioned to somebody recently that you know, the other imitating imitators the Beach Boys in those years was jan

and Deine. And the only reason I remember Janetine is their great. One of their great hit was The Little Old Lady from Pasadena, and since I lived in the Pasadena area, I sort of remember that. But they weren't even close, of course. I mean they can kind of imitate a little bit of the sound. But nobody remembers Jan and Deine today. But we're gonna remember Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys for a long time, I think.

I'm a horrible dancer. I'm a very good musician, but for some reason, my sense of which I do have in my hands when I play instruments, just doesn't translate to the rest of my body. So I end up looking like some sort of stick insect, having a stroke, but my wife still.

for civil center right conversation on the web. And as James also likes to say, and I will like to say it too, please take a minute to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you source your favorite podcast material. Your reviews help us get more listeners, and that keeps the show going. And so we will see you in the comments. Everybody on Ricochet, what are we up to? Four point oh?