No guests were guests go oh I'm the guest. Oh okay, but I'd finally been elevated to host.
You could be the host. I can be the guest.
No, no, ask.
Not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Mister garbach Off, Tear down this wall.
Hits the Ricochet podcast where the brother Rob Long he's back, and John.
You he's back as well, and James Lenox that we're.
Going to talk about everything that's going on. So what's that results a.
Podcast on this vote. The a's are two hundred and twenty two. The a's are two oh nine. The bill has passed, the motion is adopted.
We're placing a two trillion dollar deficit.
So I don't think we're gonna.
Get out of this annual deficit.
By taxing people.
Now, the tariffs are out there, the presidents saying tariffs are his favorite word.
He loves tariff's.
Replace the word tariff with tax and you would think.
Oh my God, and his Republicans love Jackson's.
Welcome everybody.
It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and sixty five. I'm James Lilax here in Minneapolis. Rob Long is back. Brother Rob is amongst us. I don't know where he is. We'll find you in the second. And also joining us is Schrodinger's pundit, John You.
Is he a host? Is he a guest?
Is he alive?
We don't know exactly.
We're going to consider him a host because after all of these years, it just seems ridiculous not to grant him that honorific.
So welcome John, Welcome Rob.
It's okay about damn time.
Granting John Henny honorific if this comes down.
Although I feel like this is the last week of the major league season, this is when they pull all the people up from Triple A.
Indeed, well, here you are, and we're glad to have you. And there's so much to discuss today. We haven't had Rob on for a while, and so we'd like to get Rob's take on things as they have been I this topic comes up an awful lot.
I know it's important, but I cannot gin up the.
Passions exactly to discuss the before, the after, the during, whatever of the shutdown, because the shutdown just seems like such theater and I tire of it. But you know you can't do that with this This is the Ricochet podcast. We've got to have an opinion, we've got to set forth what we believe. So government's back forty three days.
Wow, I don't know. We made it.
President signs of funding bill late Wednesday, fund the government through well through January thirtieth.
So yeah, you know, here we go again.
The agreement reverses the mass federal layoffs, and I seem to remember that there was something brooded about that this would be the opportunity to just decap well not decimate, but decimate plus large sections of the federal government by just saying, oh, we're going to zero you out.
You can't come back. That didn't happen. What do you think, guys, win loss? Let's look at it this.
Two ways, the actual winners and losers and what are now being thrown to us as the perceived winners and losers in the spin game.
Robi, you go first, it's been a while.
Well, I mean, you know the reason you're sick of it talking about these is we have them every year practically, I mean, we should start to number them because like World War one, world War two, so so we give them track.
No give names like given names like hurricanes.
Yeah, exactly.
This is a shutdown, you know, Charlie birth or something, and I am baffled by them.
I'm baffled by why they keep happening.
The really the political rule of thumb is and I could be wrong, but I sort of like did.
Some very fast research on this last week.
The party not in the party in the White House during a shutdown almost always wins politically or comes out slightly ahead. Doesn't matter who that person is, doesn't matter who the president is. But usually the president comes out
ahead politically. Everyone else loses because, of course, it's never an opportunity to cut government, and it's never an opportunity to rethink priorities, and it's never an opportunity to cut the budget and all the things that all the levers that people use, and the jeopardy they put into it
never quite comes true. And what it really does is it's forty three days of just these hysterical dramatics, often from the party in Congress in this case, the Democrats or the party you know, not in the White Housers to say complain predicting all sorts of disasters. Planes are gonna fall out of the sky and children that go hungry and I mean, whether we're losers or not, we have we must at some point confront the fact that as a culture, as a people, we love the dramatics
of this. We seem absolutely dead set on having these dramatic confrontations about nothing every couple of years. And I think that if you're a normal American, you just tune it out. You tune it out. You know that things that it's never going to be a disaster, but you also should know it's not going to lead to anything better. Yeah, And that that I think is the sort of the exhausting part of it.
James, Well, try to explain why you're exhausted to clarify there.
You said we love it, and then you said the American people tune it out. If by we you mean those who are obsessively following politics and the rest of it, I don't. I find it all a bunch of tiresome nonsense. And I think the we in the general national sense is that people. Yeah, that people tune it out because if anything, there's a lesson to be learned about exactly how much impact the federal government has on you in
a day to day basis. I know it is funny because we talk about the you know, the the heavy hand of the state is.
Always pressing down upon us. In Menion goes away for forty three days, We're like.
Oh yeah, okay, yeah, John.
I put my thinking in military terms, tatics, operations, and strategy. Oh, by the way, when it comes to naming, I'm surprised Rob didn't say we should name them like professional wrestling meets, right, don't they always have some clever name like Lola Palooza fat guy rolling around on other people number seven? But that would be ZBC and would be in fitting with this administration's favorite sport. It seems so. I think technically
what happened here is I agree with Rob. The Democrats in Congress won because they juiced to turn out for the elections, and I think that's what this was all about, which is why the deal was reached right after the elections are over. They made their base angry. They got them to the polls. They won huge margins in places like New Jersey and Virginia, way more than two years ago or four years ago. That might go blow back on them because now their base is really angry because
they had heightened expectations. I think at the higher level. What this shows is how Congress as an institution has failed because the reason why you do shutdowns, and I was around for the first one. I was actually working in Congress during the Gingrid shutdown, and so I remember the very first shutdown. The reason why is because everything now that gets decided by Congress is folded into gigantic spending bills. You don't have any individual bills anymore. There
are no more individual appropriation bills. There's very few authorizing bills like the Voting Rights Act, which we'll talk about later. All legislation gets rolled up into these spending bills. And so if the spendingbles weren't as important, you know, if you didn't have everything in one omnibus bill, then it wouldn't cost as much to have the blocked. But now everything shuts down because Congress as an institution doesn't work. It's too easy to get it to stop. The larger
thing is an American citizen, you know, taxpayer. This is not, as Rob said, is not going to solve the budget deficit. You could shut down the operations of the government for years and never solve the budget deficit because the budget deficits being produced by one thing. Which is entitlement programs, and those are on automatic spending no matter what happens. So yeah, you could have the government could have been shut for the next decade probably, and still we would
have this enormous budget. That's it because Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security of what driving the country bankrupt?
Doing my part, Well, is there any hope ever, at any point, at getting rid of these blob debus crs, these continuing resolutions, these massive things that contain universes and multitudes and going back to this dare I say an archaic method where you actually have a bill that is about a thing and there's a debate about the thing, and then there's another bill that is about a thing and we have a debate.
About the thing.
Is there any appetite for that in either party or are they just simply too comfortable with tucking all the stuff that they love into this thing and not scratch my back all scratch yours it goes through. I think it's hopeless. I don't think there's a chance in hell of ever going back to something where we're voting on individual bills for everything.
Well, the reason we don't do that is because we can't afford too. We can't afford it. It's a shell game for the federal budget and for chet government expenditures in general. And so the more complicated you make something the harder, the easier it is to ignore the problems. Right, so, the more ornaments you put on the building, the easier
it is. To easier it is to realize that to discover that the building isn't, you know, sound, And so it's kind of this like general understanding that we all have that you know, eventually the music's going to stop, but it hasn't stopped yet, that well, we'll fix this later.
We'll kick this cant down the road. And at a certain point that makes some sense, you know that sort of the Reagan Bush even Clinton years kind of you could kind of do the math and say, well, you know, we could maybe grow out of if we hold the line on spending kind of, we can kind of grow out of our deficit and lower the debt.
That's sort of happened.
But it's essentially a demographic problem because there are more old people taking Social Security than there are young people kicking into it, and it's been a pay as you go program pretty much forever, so what the people have
to decide. And this is sort of where I put the blame is that they they recognize it, accept that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that that they are going to have to give up the free lunch, and that none of the people they hire, these sort of craven publicity hounds and attention seekers in Congress and the Senate and in the White House, none of those people is going to have the courage and the probably I think, and the truth to tell you the bad news, which is we can't can't, we can't
afford to do and promise what we've been promising the way we've been raising money.
And it's I mean, I mean, this is a horrible thing to say.
Right, I'm a Republican basic, well not anymore, but basically a Republican, right, and I would say, you're either going to cut titlements, as John says, or are you going to raise taxes? And if you're a liberal Democrat, that's a perfectly fine outcome. Like if you talk any liberal Democrat, they don't think we have a problem.
If they think it's an.
Accounting problem the government has as far as they're concerned. One hundred percent access to one hundred percent of your net worth at any given time. So, yeah, you just raise taxes is seventy and debt to eliminated. It's only conservatives who believe that that would be a huge, huge mistake.
So and that number is dwindling.
The number of people who believe that is dwindling smaller and smaller and smaller to a tiny remnant of people who believe that actually taxes and fees are bad.
So I think there's a moral case there to be me. You're the moral expert problem I've heard of you. No, definitely, I'm just a simple utilitarian, evil utilitarian.
You're just sure you've got a law clerk.
I'm sure in your seminars you have an effigy of a utilitarian you whee allowed on salt Verrgin.
It's a picture of you.
Two things about what what Rob said. One is there's a morald case to be made that I think you're hinting at, Rob, which is, why does the government have the right to do that? Why does the government have the right to take money out of one person's pocket and use it to pay for the healthcare for another person?
Right?
And Reagan used to be so good. Now. Reagan's forty years ago, but he was the last leader I remember who really made against this. Well, for you, Rob, everything's eternal, that's the marble. This is all just, this is all just passing moments on the way to a big time the show. And so but here's the other thing. I was just giving a talk in Arizona at the University of Arizona. I talk with some undergraduates there. They are angry.
I think that's one thing this shows is that they're pissed at the Yeah, you guys, I'm not in your guys generation, the baby boomers. They are so angry because I.
Think my friend excerpt, I think that they.
Understand that Social Security, Medicaid, the Medicare, these are all just massive transfer programs from them. Right, the young people are taking their money's being taken away from them. All their opportunities are being narrowed to pay for the Baby boom generation's retirement because they didn't save, because they didn't take care of their own health care. I think they're
very aware of it. That's why you have other eruptions like the election of a socialist in New York City, even though he's an anti semi the anger that you see is there, and I think the Democrats you saw some of that. Now that's why they're getting so much blowback on caving on the shutdown, because that generation thought actually something big was going to happen, and they're ticked off.
Maybe this is the opportunity for conservatives now they're going to have this debate about Obamacare subsidies is why should we still give out healthcare subsidies that were designed to take care of the COVID emergency and make them permanent. Why is it okay to take money from young people and to narrow their resource their opportunities in life. Seventy five and eighty year old people can you know, have their healthcare paid for and have a comfortable retirement. It
should go the other way around. The old people should be the pre way for the young people.
And you know what I mean. I this is not a digression.
It is a digression. But what you just you said two really important things. One just always triggers me, is this talk about Obamacare, because Obamacare was a failure from the DNA of Obamacare does not work, and we knew it didn't work, and everybody who could do math, those it wasn't gonna work, in the same way that people knew Social Security wasn't gonna work either, because you can look at actuarial tables and you look at the way you look at the population growth.
Right, you just know, right. But what I what was so dishonest about Obamacare?
At least with the Social Security people, they kind of knew, well, this is you know, in fifty sixty, seventy eighty years, it could be a problem and we'll solve it. Then with some magic we'll be living on venus or something with jet packs. Right, Obamacare, they knew it wasn't gonna work, and the lies were so deep.
Do you remember.
It's the famous picture of the little the boy in pajamas and he's like, yah, a boy, when you pajama boy, when you go home to your parents, you remember, you should talk about health care.
And it was this idea.
Somehow it was so inverted that the that the solution for America's healthcare crisis was getting old people and your parents to sign up for Obamacare.
That is a total falsehood. It was backwards.
They should have had a picture of an old man in pajamas saying, when your kids come back for the holidays. Make sure the kids sign up for Obamacare, because it's the young people who are going to support this program because they don't use health insurance and they don't actually they don't get sick mostly they don't need to. They don't have all the problems that old people have. Old people like John's like, you know, you look at it.
He's like, I don't know how. I don't know how you're hanging on.
They don't have a Korean skin cosmetics, my friend.
I mean, health insurance of the kind that we have designed only works if we make sure that young people pay a lot of money for it and they don't need it, and that that this honesty was baked in. And I do think that there is that. I mean, I think the larger issue is you're starting to see this the socialists being elected in Manhattan or New York.
I think you're seeing a lot of young people on the right who are really, really angry and furious at the lies they've been told and are continuing to be told.
And I at some point.
As I said, I gave a talk the other day and I just said to a bunch of young people, said that the only solution for you.
Is you got to take the car keys away from Grandpa.
You got to you got to kick the generate, the sclerotic, large generation at the top that refuses to leave, and you got to kick them out. And that's the only way this is going to change, because old people are never going to sit there and vote to raise their They're they're to lower their their entitlement check. It's always going to be bigger.
Well, they had the opportunity in New York to do that, and they they took it. The Cuomo guy to the curb Mandami, they got him in. And even though you said before that we all know that eventually this thing is unsustainable. It's a paraphrase Heinland that there's no such thing.
As a free bus ride. Yet there it's going to be. There's all of these.
Things that they're going to be given free or heavily subsidized because they're good, shiny things and they want theirs, and somehow the money will come out.
Of the air.
But it is strange to me that we say that we are supposed to tell the young people that they we have to get rid of this generational transfer whereby you are paying into social Security, that you never see in medicare that will be probably too expensive, and we're going to get we're taking money from you and we're giving it to the old people. And then at the
same time say, but don't go for socialism. I mean, that's exactly supposedly what should what should be along their credo where the money is pooled and given to those in the most need and those in the most dire straits.
Et cetera.
You'd think that they'd before it, but they're not.
And the reason that they have this as you point as John was pointing, oh no is rob which one of you are pointing about the people that you talk to who are mad, the young folks who are mad.
I think people both talk to me, Okay, we're mad.
For because I was in Tucson, Arizona, and I would just be pissed to be there.
So the mad for a variety of regions, and one of them is Arizona.
One of them is that yes, one of them is that indeed, yes, why am I paying for this in these programs? But the other has to do with a sense of stagnation, of cultural immobility of the idea, perhaps that they've done all the right things they went to school, they got the degree, they have the credential. But yet somehow, if you're in Brooklyn, you're paying four thousand dollars for a two bedroom house. You're on some bs job that really doesn't do anything. The consist of shuffling emails around
or running grants or something. Are if you're of the elite, and the whole access and upper mobility and the rest of it seems to be denied to them. They don't think they're ever going to have a house. They're going to be stuck in a flat forever. So they hate the boomers for a variety of reasons. One of them is that they're having to pay for Social Security too.
They think that somehow all the boomers squatted on the houses and grow the prices up, and that the boomers just look at them and say, well, don't have your avocado toast and you can afford it. That we're clueless and not of touch. And also because generally the collapse of the very institution's credibility that they want to be part of. They want to be part of the credential
important class, the technocratic managerial class. At the same time that we've just seen the whole reputation of that class dissolve after five ten years of of COVID and everything else. So yeah, you can understand them being mad, But the solution is not free bus rides. The solution is not what California is proposing now, which is a new billionaire's tax. Of course, they want a billionaires tax. They want to tax five percent. I think of the net worth and
they qualify that's land stocks, art everything. Liquidate your stuff, pay it off and this will generate supposedly a whole bunch of money which will then be used.
To go to healthcare for illegals. And that's not going to I mean, if you can try that once and.
Then everybody's gone, if everybody isn't gone from California already. So none of their ideas are sustainable. But rob is right the basic idea that everything that you own actually already blown belongs to the government and we can just continue to print money through magical quantitative easings or modern monetary theory or whatever.
The only thing we lack is will. The only thing that really is holding.
Us back is a will to socialize absolutely everything and go full Nordic country on you, you know, to apply the lessons that worked for a while for a country of six million people to somehow translate that to a nation of three hundred and fifty. Well, the affordability issue is big. Trump sat down with Laura Ingraham recently and was talking about the whole affordability thing. Apparently, the stats say that the voters blame Trump, not Biden, to the state of the economy.
Which some people regard is more perils than I do. I don't know. I drift farther and farther from these things, because what do I care. I got my fixed income checks coming in.
I'm good.
But I did notice the other day at Trader Joe's that the bananas, which had been nineteen cents forever their version of the Costco hot dog, were all of a sudden twenty three cents, which used to be the price of the organic bananas.
I noted that.
I noted that the meatballs that I used to get that I would put into my spaghetti that used to be six dollars in ninety nine cents are now ten dollars in ninety nine cents. And I'm thinking, well, we don't import a lot of pork. I'm noticing these things I'm wondering why exactly this is still a problem. I'm kind of sort of blaming tariffs, and I'm pretty damn sure that if this is not feeling better by nest next election cycle, it will.
Be a bad of blood.
Can I be baby economists? Baby baby economist? Is that this is inflation? So inflation is under control? Right, it's below I think just below three percent, and it was right hitting nine percent ten percent under Biden, which is ridiculous. That doesn't mean the prices go back down to the way they were in twenty twenty or twenty nineteen. It just means they grow more satily.
They did with eggs eight they did with eggs.
Everybody was telling me when eggs were five ninety nine or four ninety nine for a back of twelve that they're not They're never going back down, that this was the new standard.
I'm sorry, but they did. They're a buck ninety nine. Now do go on, God, useless?
Are you are you buying those old eggs where you open it up and there's like a baby chicken inside? I mean, eggs aren't that cheap. But I'm in California where you're sight that Gus had fallen to four dollars a gallon, so I was like, wow, I gotta take a picture of the pump. It's four dollars a gallon.
Yeah, but you know, I guess, you know, I guess is going up though, don't you.
Actually it's going down California. But that's because people. I don't know why. Actually why it's gone down. I think because there's more oil being produced by the United States and coming onto the market, which is great.
Well, there's been a thirty thirty Well there's been a thirty cent jump recently. Part of that may be do switching over to different blends, part of that may be whatever. But what the instability in the oil market because of Russian production is a whole interesting asset we can get to later anyway. So no, yes, gas is not where it was. Eggs have come down, and I'm not buying the discount dollar store eggs.
I'm buying them farm fresh.
Your be more expensive because California has laws to say that each chicken has to have seventy five yards in which to walk or something like that.
But yeah, it's more space than a studio apartment in San Francisco.
These eggsactly, exactly right, exactly right. But it doesn't feed does it. It's a feel thing.
It's whether or not people feel that things have gotten better. And apparently this you know, the polls are showing that they don't, which I don't think is actually a reflection of reality.
Well, I don't think. I think it's hard for political leaders to plane that you can get inflation under control, but that just means prices are going to grow most more slowly and that your salaries would keep up. The thing and Biden never was able to handle this is that wages did not go up as fast as prices, So people were getting real wage cuts throughout the Biden
presidency and it may be going on. We still might be living with the overhang of that during the beginning of the Trump administration, just like remember Reagan, we were around for that. Reagan had to take drastic measures to kill off inflation. He got clobbered in the eighty two elections because it took, yeah, three years basically for the
real results of those tough measures to come into effect. Now, the problem is, I don't see Trump and anyone in Congress wanting to reduce spending and so right, that's going to still keep inflating the economy. Inflation might be just under three percent now, but you could see it continuing to get worse, and you could see these measures just being short term unless they take some, you know, dramatic
structural changes. Because look, if you reduce them on supply lower interest rates the way Trump wants, and you keep engaging in humongous deficit spending, inflation is going to still keep going up. It's going to be worse.
Yeah, two plus two is always going to be four.
And it doesn't help matters if you're going to send everybody a two thousand dollars check. But you know, whatever you want to call it, that's that's basically Bidenomics again.
I mean, unless unless you get it in McDonald's gift cards like the students gave me in Arizona. See I do that.
Those nice they know you, they know you're you are literally definition of cheap date. If I look at my dictionary under cheap date, I see a picture of John, I hear.
The mcribs back man, everyone knows where to take me.
Here's the thing that if you if you wait a second, Rubb, if you order that make rib in some selected restaurants, you'll notice, of course, you're not going to talk to a human being.
You're going up to a.
Kiosk, right, and you're using that that incredibly germ flecked thing. I always love to see people punching the kiosk thing with their index finger that they will then later use to strack the French fry and eat it. I mean, I'm not a germfull but no, use your knuckle, buddy, use your knuckle. But I saw a great story about New York, which has of course instituted all kinds of high wages for people who stand behind the counter and punch things into a computer into a pad. That some
of these places are no longer using actual cashiers. They have a video screen, and behind the video screen is somebody from the Philippines who's paid about eighty cents an hour.
So they get around the whole high cost.
Of things by putting in a video screen that pipes a person from Manila in there and volah.
It's almost like it's an unintended consequence of raising the cost of doing business a great deal, and then people complain that the jobs have fled anyway, So that's my thing about McDonald's Robbi. You're going to say about it, well, I just could.
Go back for a minute. I mean.
I I because you when you mentioned the productivity gains, the productivity gains that we experienced for fifteen twenty years slowly from somewhere around late nineties, mid to late nineties to two thousand and something, that were brought upon by computing and the Internet and all sorts of a decentralized, distributed sort of thinking. We had a hard time digesting them.
In many ways, we have not yet digested them. But the productivity gains that are going to happen are are happening now with AI, are happening massively and measured in months, and so they are measured in a time in a time frame that we have never experienced before, and a workforce has never experienced before.
And that is not.
That is not a recipe for stability. And the strangest thing about American politics for the you know, I don't know, since nineteen ninety four, we'll say, just because since since New gingriche won that historic house you know, midterm and the Republicans took back took control of the of the House of the House for the first time in half a century. A Marion Popkins has been incredibly volatile that
it swings back and forth. We've had like speakers of that more Speakers of the House in the past decades than we had before we had growing up it was just Tip O'Neil, right, And that volatility was not necessarily reflected in a cultural volatility. I mean, Americans still kind of went to work and you know, things were changing, but it did not reflect it would seemed to be this weird circus going on in DC. And I think that's going to change, and unfortunately, I think I don't
think we're ready for it. I think right at the time that we need sort of sort of sober, thoughtful, compassionate, but realistic leadership where we're going to have real volatility in the workforce and real volatility in our economy.
I don't think there's anybody in d C right now who has the character, really.
Two or the credibility to speak to the American people as a whole and tell them the truth, which is going to be that the future is going to be a little rougher than the past. And that's a new concept for Americans, not necessarily forever. But I don't think that we're prepared as a nation, as a modern nation, for this kind of change. I really don't, and you just see it all the time. There's radical, radical changes
in the workforce because of AI. And you can't pass a law to repeal the future, and you can't build a wall to keep technology out. It's just going to come in and we just have to be prepared for it. And I don't think we are.
If only there was some smart, charismatic tech guy who understood AI down to the bones and was launching his own effort in that way, who was in government somehow.
Oh, we had one of those, and he gave a Nazi salute.
So never mind that, Johnny, you were about to say something, But I have to tell you that as long as we have you here, we.
Got to ask you actual point of law.
Yeah, we had get our moneys were that No, you know what that.
We do because I've been told I'm to ask you about equal protection versus v R.
And I have no idea.
I have no idea A big important case school is all Professor, you can I.
Just say one last thing about what Rob was saying first before I answer your question. Just one real is that's what connects all this to the guys in DC, this humongous intra conservative fight about Kevin Roberts and heritage and Tucker and you know Nick fuent Days and whether
there's Nazism in the Conservative movement. These are all the same responses you saw the last time there was this huge change, this revolution that Rob's talking about, which was nationalization of the economy in the Industrial revolution the turn of the last century. And you saw a huge changing economy, and you saw populism rise, and you saw right exactly this anti semitism, and you saw and there were even religious leaders like Fatherlin, which it will not be Rob.
Rob could be the next Father Cofflin, but I don't know, he might go a different direction. But you saw these q long, these populous leaders FDR who responded to this and figured out how to appeal to people who are dislocated from out of work, from dislocated comedy. But anyway, the law, this is a huge Supreme Court term. Now I know every time you have me on, I go this is a huge Supreme Court term. But this is
really a big one. The last case from last week, just the tariffs, we may not even remember that case by the time this term is over. So one of the big cases you've asked about is this case called Louisiana versus Calais, which is about whether a very important
part of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional anymore. And it does involve the California redistricting and all these other redistrictings that are going on right now to increase House delegations for Republicans or for Democrats, because the Voting Rights Act basically says there should no longer be barriers to people to vote based on race. That's basically what the
Voting Rights Act is about. And you can see after the Jim Crow South engaged in all kinds of ridiculous things to try to prevent blacks from voting or diluting their votes, the government responded with measures that would never normally be allowed. One of them was struck down about ten years ago, which said that any Southern state that wanted to change any voting rule, anything involving elections, that had to get an approval from a federal court or
the Justice Department. That's incredible. There's nothing like that in any other area. Law that got struck down by the Supreme Court. Much whaling and rending of garments. I'm speaking in the language that Rob understands.
Thank you.
And then but still, what the Justice Department courts have been forcing southern primarily Southern states to do, but it applies to the states all over the country, is to try to draw congressional districts in states to maximize the number of minorities that get elected. That I think is offensive to minorities because the thing, like, I'm a minority. I don't feel like all Asians vote the same way. If we did, I'd be really worried if we did
all vote the same way. I don't think blacks all vote the same way, or you white guys, you guys just definitely don't vote all the same way. But that's the theory underlying this part of the Voting Rights Act is oh compact all the blacks into one district in the South, and then they'll elect a black member of Congress. Why that's the purpose of the constitution or should be the point of federal law is beyond me. All that I think the law says is stop any barriers to
people voting. So this law, this case that you mentioned, James, asks whether that part of the Voting Rights Act or the way it's being enforced, at least should be thrown out, which would overturn Yeah, about sixty years of president if going back all the way to practice, all the way
back to the civil rights movement. But that's just the first of a whole series of huge, blockbuster cases coming down the road, which could do a lot to determine the success of the Trump administration, for example, for the rest of the next two years, three years.
Rob or just no more can be said.
You know, they say unto you, truly, truly, I tell you, John, I think you're correct. I mean, it's funny about the outcome. Basing your legal philosophy on outcomes and using outcomes as the metric for whether it's true, fair, or true or not. It's such a strange way to think, and it only comes from people who believe that they're always going to
be in charge. And it's surprising to me is that the history of American politics is if there's anything you can say about it is that you're not always going to be in charge. And the reason that we have the rules is because you're not always going to be in charge. And I think that we have this. Certainly we do this. I mean you get any college class, certainly the most college classes all was I went to, and I'm sure what they try to tell you is that there's some systemic evil that's permanent.
It started in sixteen nineteen. I'm just to use a number, and it's it's and it's always going to be there.
And so it's okay to bend the rules and twist the rules because we're never going to be in charge, and we're not in charge now, We've never been in charge, and the system is always the way it is. And the problem is that then you have moments like the court cases that the John was citing that seemed to just simply respond to seem to just reiterate the fact that you can't you can't make a law based on an outcome, and the people who have been living that
way go absolutely bananas. So you read, if you read the New York Times, the headlines are always a Supreme Court sets back civil rights. Sure, the conservative Republican Department of Justice turns the clock back on civil rights. And then you get you know, you read the third paragraph
and you realize it's not true. But this apocalyptic need to make even your tiny little adjustments or even your major adjustments that are not legal somehow not only legal, but imperative, not only imperative, but morally important, not only morally important, but if not happened, but a return to Jim Crow, if not enforced, you know, first of all,
exhausts everybody. So those that language no longer has any power, it creates a reaction formation, which we're seeing now on the right and I think parts of sort of the extreme left, and it just it corrupts the currency of the law, the currency of the language, which we're you know, that's that's all we have at the end of the day, right, I mean, I mean, John, I'm sure I would get
an F in your class. But what I'm always struck by the Supreme Court is that the Supreme Court decided it had the power to review legislation in Marbury versus Madison. It just it chose that for itself and it made sense. And so that's what it's got. And if we sort of let the language be sort of debased and the way we talk about rights and civil rights be debased like that, I think, you know, we end up where we are now, which is that people screaming at each
other about essentially nothing and certainly not the law. I mean that was a very rambling way of agreeing with John, which I'm sure he would.
No, no, no, I can first of all, Rob, yeah you get f I don't because I would suspect you of using AI to do all your exam answers anyway, that.
Is a concern.
Yeah, oh no, I don't know. We don't know how to fix it. Actually, actually you know what we're doing. We're bringing back blue books written exams.
That's what I've been saying.
Yes, we have, we have been. We have been bringing back the blue book exam and timed examed sessions. And you're in the room with everybody else and writing in pencil.
Now.
So AI has forced us back to the educational stone age. But can I just make that point what the Rob actually makes a very important point about judicial review, which is, you know, the courts don't have any power to back up what they say. So right, the President has the sword, as Hamilton said, and the Congress has the purse. What does the court have. It can't compel any of us to bay it. It only has This is Alexander Hamilton's
famous words. It says, it only has reason. It can only persuade us that it reached the right answer, and we voluntarily obey the courts. And I think Rob's right. The left has been on this campaign to devalue the meaning of language and to make everything relative, and the more they succeed, then the more force becomes the way our society governs itself, not persuasion and argument, because the words don't mean anything.
Well, if the system does not provide the desired results, then the system is illegitimate, must be changed, ignored, or.
Done away with.
Also on the docket or maybe coming up, I should say there's another strike.
I think it's twenty strikes now.
And the guys who are driving boats out of Venezuela, I think the New York Times did a profile and said, well, they're not cartel members. I mean they don't have they don't have cards, right the tattoo.
They don't. They don't get benefits, but you know they're just working for friends.
Say that, yes, he moved a lot of drugs from here to there, but you know he just had to.
He loved bowl, he was a fan of.
Okay, fine, so they've whacked about twenty of these things, and the Democrats are appalled and I'm sure the fig leave is that they are appalled by the extra what they perceive to be the extra legality of it. But I think it's just the general idea of what they're doing is, you know, we're being mean to these guys.
And there will be a court challenge, John, won't There will there not be some something that floats up some I mean, I don't imagine the survivors of one of the Venezuelan power Vot's be an outstanding, but what can we expect on this fraud?
So, James, eventually, I think you're right, there will be a case. It probably will work its way to the Supreme Court. Remember, we have faced a similar issue. I was at the Justice Department on nine to eleven and we had to make a similar decision. Can we have war against the terrorist group not a state. We've always had wars against other nations. And in nine to eleven, the last thing people would have thought of is, well, two years from now, will there be a Supreme Court
case that will challenge all the decisions we make? But there was because we captured somebody and that person wanted to be released and brought a case that made it always Supreme Court. You could see that happening here. There could be survivors that will be brought on board and then they'll file to be released. Or the family members are the people who are killed, they could sue and
that could get to the Supreme Court. And this is actually was a subject of my talk at the University of Arizona this week, which I gave unusually not at a law school, not at the school at Divinity, but in the engineering department.
The division school guaranteed.
That why wouldn't be rolled out and attacked? Does the resident utilitarian come.
Ond, Well, you've struck by lightning.
So the this is a really difficult but very important question, but I think it has actually a straightforward, simple answer. In the end, we can't be at war with every drug cartel, drug gang, drug runner, right drug seller on the street corner. There's a line between what's war and crime. Crime is governed by the Bill of Rights and all the protections that the courts have, you know, labored to
build for every criminal suspect. When Rob gets pulled over speeding between New York and Princeton, you know, back and forth, you have all these protections. The government can't say, oh, a lot of people are killed by speeders on the highway, So we're just gonna use military force on speeders, right, Just because something causes harm to the country doesn't mean it's war and that you can use military force. It's reserved for enemies. So I don't think that drugs strikes
just on every drug boat are actually legal. I don't even But here's why I think there's a straightforward answer. I think we're really at war with Venezuela. We're at war with another nation, Venezuela. We're not war with drug dealers, because if we were, we would be bombing fedinol factories in Mexico. That's where the real harms come from. The drug boats. Apparently these drugs are headed for Europe. They're
not even headed for the United States. If we really are, though, at war with Venezuela and the yeah, it's like a one hundred percent terror right, And the head of the head of Venezuela's also head of one of these drug cartels, and the drug cartels are like an arm of the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan intelligence. Then actually, legally this
is very simple and straightforward. Where we're in Venezuela, and we're attacking elements of the Venezuelan government and armed force, which is totally legal.
In a way.
It just it's nice that we have somebody here on this podcast who is part of this argument. So it in just to go back to two thousand and one, two thousand and two in a way. So Venezuela, the government of Venezuela, is in your argument like the government of Afghanistan.
It is, yes, it is.
The large, it is the it is the organizational name for a bad actor, and it is their bad luck that they can't they can't legally define blowing up a Venezuelan boat or invading Afghanistan as a police action, right, because that was the big question.
Then was it a action as a military action? Well?
I think also the reason they're doing this is that they don't politically want to say to the American people, we're at war, right this president doesn't want to start any new wars, so we are conducted. We have the most modern American aircraft carrier that gerald Ford is sitting offshore of Venezuela right now. Like we have a huge military force that's trying to coerce them to get rid
of Modera Maduro. That is, you know, Joe Ford is not going to be helpful chasing little outboard boats, you know, like Rob's pleasure craft from his you know, prep school days around the lake because they might have drugs in it.
I mean, just for the record, it definitely did.
Right. It's not it's not you know, for you know, it's good at you know, attacking other countries armed forces and overthrown regime maybe, but not for chasing down you know, small pleasure crafts concealing drugs. So yeah, I think your work exactly are we we It is a war, but politically the president doesn't want to call it the war. But when you look at all the elements of what's happening, it looks to me like a war. And that's legal, so he has a legal problem.
Let me let me let me ask you this as a law professor, I'm your student getting an f and I'm just trying to make you like me again. Is the question is do I have I am my summing up the situation accurately or something accurately what we're really talking about? And I believe this is also the case in Afghanistan and definitely an interact. But uh and in Venezuela's what we're talking about is is in fact an
international but still a police action. The there is no legal legal ability for the president to do this, so he is calling it a police that he's keeping it murky because he can't call it a police action because that's illegal. If he called it a war, that'd be perfectly legal, But he can't call it a war because politically that's untenable for this process, and so he's in this weird he can't call it anything.
Yeah, no, how about special military operation? Right? Right?
But I mean you have to invent some kind of weasel word so that you can thread the needle between the thing that you can't do politically and the thing that you can't do legally.
Is that a fair assumption? Is that a fair and that's yes.
And because of that, that's what's causing all these legal doubts and will cause right soldiers and agents to say, you know, and I am I allowed to do this? Right? And that's in fact happened after nine to eleven there were soldiers and agency said, are we allowed to legally fight al Caeda? Or you know, is this like pre nine eleven where we would, you know, catch suspects and bring them back to the US for trial, not shoot
them with drones. And so part of what Trump's not doing, which we had to do then, was we went to Congress and explained it all and got Congress to pass a law authorizing it. So that when we all this got challenges in court, that became extremely important. The Supreme Court's not going to second guests the President and Congress in wartime when they agree. But here this might not happen.
So this might be legally more problematic unless, as Rob says, the President comes out in public and says we are at war with Venezuela.
And admits what And I'm just thinking the analogy here, the comparison to me right now, because we brought it up earlier and I'm still mad about Obamacare, the Obama administry. You kept saying, this is not a tax, this is not a tax, this is not a tax, and I think this is what happened and to the Supreme Court and they said, oh, by the way, it's a tax, because I know we can't do that.
And then the Supreme Court.
Agreed with them, said yeah, it's a tax, and then they could they could do it because.
They argued in court that it was. They argued in court that it was.
A thing that they absolutely denied it was in public exactly. And so in this case, we're going to have a president arguing in court if it gets there, that he's doing a thing that he's allowed to do because he's the president of commander in chief and it's a war. But that he but publicly he won't say that.
Is that I hadn't thought of that parallel, But that's exactly true. That, yes, that happened in Obamacare. Politically, they said it wasn't a tax, but when they got to the Supreme Court, they argued that the Obamacare system was all built on this coercive tax to force people to buy health insurance. And the Supreme Court, you know, you know, Rob's favorite Chief Justice Justice, Chief Justice and squish John Roberts, agreed with Rob. Greed with Rob, and yes, uh ull
Pell's time, and yeah, that's that's unfortunately happening here. I think you're right Rob, that he doesn't want to politically call it a war. All the things he's doing are warlike actions. And if it goes to court, that's the first thing the administration is going to say, and in fact, this is already happening. Remember we talked about this earlier months ago, the case of the Venezuelan right deportes who
are sent to El Salvador. That's being litigated right now and in court right now under oath that Trump administration is saying we are at war with Venezuela, and that we are and Maduro is the head of a drug cartel and the head of Venezuela, and because of that, we can trigger something called the Alien Enemies Act, which applies only in war time, and kick every Venezuelan out of the country.
Well, we also have.
The administration today or yesterday or recently declaring Antifa to be a terrorist organization and also declaring a whole bunch of Antifa adjacent organizations in other countries to be foreign terrorist organizations. Does this mean then that we can use the Venezuelan example and start using military force to go after them or is that bright dividing line still in place Domestically?
I think that's another species of what Rob was just talking about, but in the other direction here, I think the Trump administration is rhetorically over promising when the law doesn't allow it. It doesn't make any difference for our domestic law whether the President wants to call Antifa a terrorist group or not. The criminal laws just apply to them normally. Whether what they did was they also designate
all these foreign Antifa groups as terrorist organizations. That does give the government a lot more power against them abroad, but I don't think it really changes what's going on domestically. I mean, still, the question is can the president call out right the National Guard to restore order in these cities where Antifa is using violence to attack federal officers
or block the execution of federal law. Calling them terrorist organizations or not doesn't change that fundamental question, which also is another one you start all this up with the Supreme Court. That question is heading steadily to the Supreme Court too, and may be decided in this term because
you've got two appellate courts that disagree. Strangely, the one out here in California says that the government can deploy the National Guard to the cities that there is sufficient unrest violence domestically in our cities to use military protection of the federal government, whereas Chicago, the courts there have
blocked President Trump so far and not allowing deployment. So Rob happens to live in the mid and I'm sorry, James happens to live in the Midwest, where I guess chaos will continue to be rampant.
That's exactly what I'm experiencing at this very moment, looking at the flaming mobs coming down the street now here in Minneapolis. Actually it's been quite nice for the last few days. But still where you mentioned fundamental questions, there's no more fundamental questions and the things that brother Rob grapples with a divinity school. So we're going to ramp
up by asking him a few things there. First of all, how are the people in your school viewing what seems to be a resurgence of anti Semitism in new places, which are of course the same old places.
But is this much of a discussion? Does this come to the fore?
Are they aware of it or are they just so isolated in their in their you know, theological bubbles up there in the Ivory Tower that the vaggaries of methy daily politics haven't penetrated up there yet or are they all next foy inties fans.
Oh are you asking me? I thought you were asking John.
Yes, of course I would ask a series of questions about things in the theological institution.
Well, for a minute, I thought you'd have a students.
In general, the benefit of Divinity School, certainly Princeton is that everybody here has a purpose. Like it's either your I mean, sometimes the purpose is you're just a you know, an ancient language nerd or an archaeology nerd, and you just want to like look at Cuneiform and old Akkadian. And sometimes you're just a theology a theologian, and you just this is a wonderful system and you want to like write you know, long multi volume essays on a
you know, call bart and people like that. But the rest of us just are there because we have a purpose, and so everything is seen through the lens of what we want to do with this learning, and that does kind of keep things on the rails.
So there's a general you know, and also what we're studying.
Mostly is everybody everybody who's a student is a professed Christian. Is that we struggle with more more more than we struggle with societal problems and culture problems, although some people do. We struggled personal things and your your personal relationship and relationships, and that I think also kind of keeps can can order the mind and keep people from.
Uh, you know, sit.
In encampments and a lot of noisy and you know, incredibly aggressive behavior. It's a smaller community, and there isn't any benefit. There isn't any philosophy that encourages that kind of behavior.
So but you know, it's.
Interesting because just just because you mentioned Nick Quente's anti semitism, it is a.
It's something that we all have to think about. Certainly. I just came.
I mean, I have my morning class here on Friday. Mornings is next to Jesus a John. Gospel of John, and John has been used in Good frid A liturgies and beyond and and it has been used as a text John, especially although Matthew too, as a text to justify incredible anti semitism and unpacking that and sort of like trying to un untease the strands of that is really really hard and very very difficult.
And and and and you can lead you down the wrong way.
And so I don't know, if anything, what we're experiencing today in the culture or what we what we or the evidence of the the evidence that people are pointing to I'm not.
I'm not. Maybe I'm not quite ready to call it a giant crisis.
It may be, but I'm not sure it's there yet or it's gonna get there.
I still have hope that people will, of course correct.
But all of those things are things that people have been struggling with forever and and failing at in many ways, in many instances in history.
But it is a This is not new, and it's not.
And it's not something that people haven't been thinking about and struggling with for forever.
I mean, since the you know, since the beginning, since.
Paul right, not new.
And I can't imagine that theological institutions are known for turning like a dime. They're fairly stately organizations, right, That's it's it's like getting the Titanic to do a full circle.
Depends depends on which one you're talking about.
Yeah, the invocation at Yale Divinity School last year apparently was a wick In prayer.
Oh well that's novel, okay, yeah, yeah, so yeah really yeah.
And one of the most popular classes I hold at Union Theological Seminary, and apparently it's a really good class, is witchcraft. But but you could do a concentration in witchcraft, which is very strange thing.
I mean, your enemy yet, I mean, but it does seem to be drifting from the central eye is But I'm not surprised every institution in the West seems to have forgotten why I was founded in the first place, which was to protect and advance the West, and instead turns on a critique of it, often banal, often juvenile, or usure.
But that's how they get there.
You know, the eternal post nineteen sixties shock, mom and Dad, everything sucks has become the dominant cultural theme, and until we get away from that, we are going to have a difficult time of preserving and reviving this great republic of ours. On the other hand, if you want to talk about these things more with actual human beings, you the listener, can take a Ricochet cruise. That's right, there's going to be a meet up December thirteenth of the
twenty Ricochet at Sea Hall in America. Lion is going to cruise through the Eastern Caribbean. I've taken it many times. I absolutely love it. I'd be there if I I'd be there if I could. But alas I'm going to be elsewhere and also Florida Centric February sixth through the eighth Florida Space Coast Space Coast.
Don't you love the sound of it. They're going to have a meet up at Cape.
Canaveral and I'm will have to remember when Cape Canaverl was the actual name.
Of the thing.
And I love the fact that we went back to it. No, no slight intended JFK. But Cape Canaverl is just just baked into the bones and a lot of us that's you know, that's it's it.
Yeah, yeah, that I'm just looking at my cat because I was, I was so spacing on looking at my calendar.
Oh, that'd be great. Why do I can make that? I'm gonna try to make that one. I am too, because by February.
I think I'm gonna need someplace warm to be with what with all that's going on here and ending as well, also ending this podcast. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go to Apple Podcast and give us five stars.
Boy, we'd appreciate that. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go to Ricochet dot com. You should.
You can read the front page for free to listen to the podcast, but if you sign them for just.
A few meager minor coins.
You're gonna have access to the member feed, which is a whole different community, and it's where friendships form.
The things that we discussed there, there are no limits.
Go there, see what I mean, and and and well all see you there. Because I frequently write a Ricochet, John you, I know, reads it, and Rob along as well as one of the founders of this institution. So between the three of us, if that's not three good reasons to go to Ricochet, don't know what it is. I'd asked Charles C. W. Cook if we were here today,
what version of Ricochet we're off. It's probably four point six point zero seven, always improving, always tinkering, new stuff coming, and uh, no matter how much it changes, the basic idea mission of Ricoget will always be the same people there who have skin in the game, as Rob used to say a long time ago, and it keeps the conversation civil and polite and interesting that it's like no place else on the web.
I mean, James, I think this has been fun. I think John, you, I think brother
Rob for joining us today, and we'll see everybody in the comments said Ricoget four point oh Bye bye bye DIA.