Breaking Constitutional Boundaries with Elijah Emery

America's constitutional foundation is buckling under the weight of executive fiat, with a president governing almost exclusively through executive orders while Congress passes fewer bills than at any point in history. Elijah Emery comes back to discuss the following: 

• Executive power has been expanding since WWII, but the current administration represents an acceleration of this trend with open defiance of court orders
• Legal analysis shows virtually everything the administration has implemented falls outside statutory authority, representing unprecedented lawlessness
• The administration's tariff policies violate tax and spending powers constitutionally reserved for Congress, using emergency declarations without actual emergencies
• Courts have been ruling against the administration, but many orders are being ignored or circumvented through administrative workarounds
• The Alien Enemies Act is being misused to justify deportations without due process, with Supreme Court rulings being openly defied
• Civil society, including universities, law firms, and business leaders, is beginning to organize legal resistance as economic impacts spread to Republican states
• Traditional institutional checks are failing, but declining approval ratings and business community opposition suggest limits to how far this can go

If you're concerned about these issues, follow reputable legal analysis sources and support organizations defending constitutional governance. Register to vote and stay engaged with your local representatives.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to America's Constitutional Crisis
• 5:00 Executive Orders and the Fall of Congress
• 21:36 The Tariff Crisis and Legal Challenges
• 43:53 Impoundment Issues and Agency Firings
• 1:02:12 The Alien Enemies Act and Due Process
• 1:25:48 Civil Society Response and Future Implications

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:50

hello and welcome to varn blog and here with me today for what is likely to be a regular series for the next four to eight to well, indefinite.

Speaker 2: 1:03

The question is either when trump stops being president or when uh, the authoritarian regime is so successful that foreign vlog is shut down as a national security threat.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Which it's not beyond the realm of possibility, but it's also not likely even under an authoritarian regime, I think if I were moveonorg I think they're way up on the list before me. But to talk about this a little bit, one of the things I think that you and I may agree or disagree on is that for me, trump is the acceleration of a long, symptomatic crisis in the United States that I actually trace all the way back to World War II but definitely see accelerating after Nixon, and you can even see that in the number of executive orders issued by the government, from Reagan to Clinton, from Clinton to the Bushes, from Bush to Obama, from Obama to Trump, from Trump to Biden and back to Trump.

Speaker 2: 2:13

I mean now, basically, the federal government seems to be run almost by executive fiat, which is there's been, at my last counting, two bills passed by this Congress the Lake and Riley Act and the budget budget that was passed, which is way less than any congress in american history that's, the least productive congress in the entirety of american history instead just been running the government on executive order, which, it's worth noting, is not law, it's an interpretation of how the executive should carry out laws. So, yes, the practical effects are the government is being run by executive order, but you know explicitly, under the theory of how the American government should be organized, it's a no go. This is not what should be going on in theory, in practice, you're totally right going on in theory.

Speaker 1: 3:16

In practice, you're totally right. I mean, one of the things that I have thought about a lot was a lot of the deference given to the administrative state, which, ironically, is part of how Trump is doing a lot of this, even though some of those powers were wrested from the administrative state during the Supreme Court's rulings during the Biden administration. But you would barely know that looking at the way the government's functioning right now, because you have a re, a congressionally designed department in Doge. That was a completely different department and then it was rebranded, with temporary government consultants being given status that they, frankly, do not have the legal rights to have yeah um.

Speaker 1: 4:04

The violations of ferpa have been astronomical everything like.

Speaker 2: 4:09

It's kind of impossible for people, or not impossible. It's less frequent for people who are not in the legal realm to be focused on these nitty gritty details, but basically everything the Trump administration has done is completely lawless. It's just outside of statutory authority and the depths of that are, you know, unfathomable at this point. There's nothing like it which has ever occurred in the history of the United States. Right, go ahead. As you say, a lot of the specifics of what they're doing are outgrowths of a generalized trend towards uh executive power and away from uh congress following the second world war right, I mean libertarians when they still had a backbone, used to call that the imperial presidency, but they haven't had a backbone in quite a while.

Speaker 1: 5:05

Um, one of the things that I would like to like. This is interesting because, on one hand, I agree like we're going to agree with each other a lot here that the framework that allowed this statuess-less, lawlessness, administration of government to happen has been built in the past 50, 60 years. In the past 50, 60 years, however, if you want to look for the open defiance of the court, you have to go back to the Civil War, which again, that's a special state of exceptions, and even then they didn't like, for example, the denial of habeas corpus that actually didn't stand on the Lincoln for all that long.

Speaker 2: 5:53

And then it also wasn't an explicit denial of the court, like it was a case where the administration had not actually received the notice from the court that there was a court order about you know, about habeas corpus, so it wasn't purposeful.

Speaker 1: 6:10

It was a denial of uh taney's court order, but it wasn't one that was done on purpose in the way these violations of boesberg's orders uh have been done and I think maybe, um the other example you have to go back to andrew jackson, and that one is a little bit more substantive of a president ignoring the courts, although again not on this scale, not on this many fronts, etc.

Speaker 2: 6:39

So let's, get into it Go ahead, also not with the benefit of 200 years of precedent about the president obeying the courts. You know it's a very different thing to disobey the courts in the antebellum period, where we're figuring out what the role of the courts is in the American system, and to do it now when we have a clearly established role that the executive is going against.

Speaker 1: 7:02

So we'll get into it particularly problematic and why I personally and this is another mea culpa misgaged the second Trump administration before they came into power is I really kind of couldn't imagine that on so many different levels, the normal checks and balances within the Republican Party itself would allow them to appoint transparently semi-competent people or incompetent people to positions, clearly because they're political loyalists, because other political loyalists who were competent beforehand have stood up to the Trump administration and were why.

Speaker 1: 7:54

Increasingly, it is clear that in hindsight, the first Trump administration did not try a lot of the stuff, largely because, even though he tried to appoint people that were loyalists and, in many cases, that were not competent, the GOP itself did not allow that to happen. Um, and it's going to be interesting one thing that you know, when people think about this as some kind of authoritarian takeover and I think I'm actually going to be for the first time in my life saying that that is not outside of the realm of possibility I do think it doesn't help, however, how unpopular the regime is becoming, even amongst moderate Republicans. Yeah, and the business community, that's kind of unheard of. And if the purges in the even in Hegseff's team are any indication, Urges in the even in Hegseff's team are any indication. So there's been three.

Speaker 1: 9:01

Three staffers have been like Put on administrative leave and one has been asked to resign from, and these are not. These are high ranking senior people, but they are Trump's people. They are not part of the deep state resistance and they seem to be being purged by this administration, which indicates that actually, even within Trump people, there's division within the camps on what should be done. I think that that's going to be a bigger deal going forward.

Speaker 2: 9:31

Yeah, in terms of just that broad overview, I think what I would one person worse off and no one better off. And it's just very hard to successfully consolidate authoritarian power while isolating all elements of civil society, the military, the business community, etc. Which is not to say that Trump is not currently or will not continue to do a tremendous amount of damage to the world over the course of his tenure. It is to say that I just don't see him being competent enough to be, you know, reichsfuhrer for life.

Speaker 1: 10:34

basically, what this is. The issue is like um, uh, he does need the consent of his party, and there does seem to be. We're already seeing that start to deteriorate. We have seen growth, uh, in popularity of the mega base, but we we've seen Republicans also turning on their brand quicker. What that actually is is a concentration of the percentage of people identifying more ardently are the only people who are left. But we're kind of getting into the political elements of this. We're here to talk about the legal crisis and I I for one I'm going to say two things before we get into the specifics that may actually make you uncomfortable.

Speaker 1: 11:22

I hold a seemingly contradictory view.

Speaker 1: 11:26

Rule of law is super important and it is always fake, so so when people when I say that I do not have the super cynical view that rule of law never matters, but I do think we have to admit that government functioning is almost never entirely in the purview of rule of law and what and this makes some of the seemingly difficult things to understand from like centrists who've defended things that were questionably legal in the past or expanded and changed law in the past because we have an adversarial system based on English common law. One of the things that that means is kind of, if you get away with it, it becomes law anyway. Um, so, rule of law is always a little bit overstated, but that does not mean that it doesn't matter or doesn't exist on some level, if, if the, let's say, the illusion is not the right word and I shouldn't have said fake either but like, let's say, the aspiration of rule of law breaks down totally. Yeah, governments usually get into a spiral period and one of the things that I pointed out, people who are like you know, we'll have a thousand year Reich, I'm like I can't.

Speaker 1: 12:49

That hasn't really happened anywhere without significant portions of the of, of not just constituent political bases, but like actual, you know, oligarchs, you know lining up with this, and what we're seeing is like very few a la carte, especially benefiting from this yeah um so.

Speaker 2: 13:16

So in that sense that is some consolation, and the the other thing is, like the conservative legal establishment which in some ways empowered trump, seems to be getting sick of this very quickly I mean they want to, like, do evil procedurally, basically Right, and Trump doesn't want to use the procedures, which is so stupid because they've designed procedures that he could do a lot of what he's doing through over the past, you know, 30 years, and he's just choosing not to.

Speaker 1: 13:54

But not and also dismantle the administrative state entirely and like give it a and totally neoliberalize it. And, by the way, if anyone says trump is post-neoliberal again, whether it's jacobin or some other show, you should probably smack them.

Speaker 2: 14:01

Because, if anything, what we're seeing, the, is the massive acceleration of public private partnerships, and I guess the one point I'll argue against that on is that one of the underpinning elements of neoliberalism is free trade, uh, or relatively free trade, which trump is against, just because he's like a tariff otaku, like he loves tariffs, um, which is not to say he's like anti-neoliberal either. He just like hates international trade. So he wants to like do massive.

Speaker 1: 14:29

You know all of us. So of neoliberalism, he's buchanan and stalin versus versus.

Speaker 1: 14:36

You know the left yeah um, uh, for those people to get that. What I mean is he's saying we can do neoliberalism in one country yeah, which, when combined with terrorists which is part of why all the neoliberals have been like, even like singing the praises of alexandria ocasio-cortez is because I and I I hate to tell people this I don't think that's possible either. It like you could do some of it with targeted tariffs and an investment, but you cannot destroy the capacity of the state to act, destroy the monetary trust in bonds internationally and nationally, and people make all this hay about Japan and China, which is a big deal, but 70%, 75% of bondholders are still in the US, which also means that US citizens are beginning to go. We don't trust the bonds either, and which means we're in a black swan scenario economically.

Speaker 1: 15:44

Now let's get this into the law, though, because I don't want to get too sidetracked on the economics here, although we have to come back to this because the tariff laws. Why don't we start with the tariff laws? Yeah, let's start with the tariff, although we'd have to come back to this because the tariff laws. Why don't we start with the tariff laws? Yeah, let's start with the tariff laws before we get to Alien Enemies Act. So the tariffs are an interesting problem for the legal framework, since the executive has no power to tax. Smoot-hotley was not passed by the president, wasn't done by Hoover or McKinley, it was done by Congress. So that's different. So what do we make about this? So there's been suits, and there's been suits from people who aren't democrats.

Speaker 1: 16:37

I mean, the democrats have had a hard time messaging around this, even like like gretchen whitmer sounds like a like, like she's like and and sean fane and even half of jacobin is like well, but maybe we like tariffs, but not really. And then people be like but even the new deal decreased tariffs people tariffs are 90s cargo cultism, which was 60s cargo cultism in my opinion.

Speaker 2: 17:00

Um like broad, I also think it's good or just bad broad cares or what? Yeah are bad. They don't work um in this way, but anyway so, so, so basically I mean yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 17:16

In terms of the legal framework, there's a couple of places where the president does have the authority to impose tariffs. There's the Trade Expansion Act of 1932, which was actually passed in response to Smoot-Hawley repealing Smoot-Hawley which allows sanctions if goods are imported in such quantities or under such circumstances as threaten national security. There's the Trade Act of 1974, where the US trade representative can impose tariffs when there's unreasonable or discriminatory policies by other countries. There's a variety of other frameworks like this where Congress has delegated the power to the president to do tariffs. Trump is not using any of these mechanisms. The mechanism Trump is using is the is called AIPA, which is the like International Economic Emergency Powers Act, where if there's an emergency declared an international emergency amounting to an unusual and extraordinary threat, the president, upon declaring a national emergency, has pretty broad authority to do things like sanction other countries, which is what the Biden administration did in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now there's a problem. Under AIPA there needs to be a national emergency and Trump has declared a series of national emergencies. But, you know, a persistent balance of goods deficit doesn't seem to really be a national emergency, considering that we've had trade deficits since the 1970s. Uh, president Nixon did use a similar pre-AEPA statute to declare a national emergency and impose tariffs, um, to respond to a balance of payments crisis which was upheld by an appellate court, uh, during his administration. But this is like a totally different scale. Um, this intersects also with a couple of conservative rulings from the past decade, uh, around something called the major questions doctrine. So people might be familiar with that because it was utilized to strike down the Biden student loan forgiveness program and the clean power plan, a variety of liberal causes. The major questions doctrine basically says that if you're finding, like, a new power in a statute that's, you know, pretty old, you have to find a clear statement authorizing this power. So, in the case of AIPA, there's no clear statement saying AIPA is for tariffs and this is, you know, a really broad power which has been dug up in a 50-year-old statute where the president is asserting he has the authority to impose tariffs. So there seems to be a viable claim that this is a major question and therefore that the president doesn't have authority to do this.

Speaker 2: 20:10

There's a second problem, which is a delegation problem. So there's something called non-delegation doctrine, which basically says that there's certain things Congress can delegate, certain things Congress can't. Traditionally, the court post-World War II, as you were talking about earlier has been pretty permissive on delegation, allowing Congress to delegate a lot of different questions to the executive once they pass a law. But in recent years, especially under this decision called Gundy having to do with the registration of sex offenders in 2019, congress has said sorry. The Supreme Court has been more skeptical of delegation. So it's viable that under the non-delegation doctrine you can say well, this is a power which Congress doesn't have the authority to delegate to the president because it's a tax and spending power which the Constitution specifically gives Congress the authority to do. So that's kind of the background to the tariffs themselves.

Speaker 2: 21:15

Their animating element is the National Emergencies Act, and the National Emergencies Act is a very important element of this because there's an expedited process for review under the National Emergencies Act. So, before major questions, delegation these are ways individuals can sue the government. National Emergencies Act is a way Congress could, you know, theoretically stop these tariffs. There's an expedited process of review under the act for terminating an emergency which Congress has the power to do, meaning that, you know, termination of the emergency is filibuster proof. Basically, there can be a short filibuster but you can't have like an indefinite filibuster in the Senate.

Speaker 2: 22:03

So to pass an act terminating the national emergency you like really only need 50% of Congress. However, because of a different Supreme Court precedent, called INS v Chadha, if there's an act terminating a national emergency, the president has the authority to veto it, which means that functionally, you need a two-thirds vote to terminate this national emergency. Congress, in the case of the House, has already passed as part of their budget bill, basically a self-imposed rule, that they won't terminate the emergency in regards to the Canadian tariffs, but because they're very disorganized, they didn't do the same thing for the broader you know Liberation Day tariffs and, as a result, there's still a good chance for Congress to force a vote on terminating the national emergency leading to these tariffs, though I think it's unlikely, because of the veto power, for Trump to sign off on ending his own tariffs if Congress wants to.

Speaker 1: 23:12

Okay. So we're beginning to see both libertarian legal groups which you know, I guess they do the libertarians are now finally aware that maybe their detente with Trump isn't working out for them such as the Liberty Justice Center. And then there's also a suit coming from California, because California is an export hub, it's a, it's a manufacturing hub, but I put that in quotations because it is, but not in the way that people think about. It, is not like, it's not like Michigan in the way that people think about it. It's not like Michigan in the 60s, but it does export a whole lot of finished products in a complicated supply chain. That is how most of us have computers. They have grounds here for a variety of reasons. One, they I don't see how they don't have grounds for suit because they are directly affected by it.

Speaker 1: 24:18

And two, um, I have been thinking a lot about, uh, just the the incoherence of this tariff policy because, for example, if it was for re-industrialization, why in the world would you do blanket tariffs to everywhere? Uh, so that you can't get inputs to industrialize or machines to industrialize or to do any of that. And that led a lot of people to like, believe in the mar-a-lago Accord thesis which was floated by. It wasn't called that, but it was floated in the paper by one of Trump's economic advisors. But even that was dependent on people maintaining treasuries and also the US maintaining dominance in arms trade and Europe not saying, no, we'll buy from China and from European companies and whoever else.

Speaker 1: 25:18

And we've also seen this with Egypt. Egypt has now, in the Camp David Accords, actually money allotted to it specifically to buy US military products, which is why Egypt gets so much because it's money, because its money is allocated based off of the money sent to Israel and aid. So when they get a lot, when Israel gets a lot, egypt gets a lot. And, however, the catch of that is it's earmarked for secondhand US equipment purchases. And then I think they even offered Egypt the ability to make firsthand equipment purchases, buy new stuff with this money, and they didn't yeah To jump in on that.

Speaker 2: 26:08

I think it's important to say that one element of that is maintaining it's not just like a blanket part of US commitment to Israeli security at all costs, though that's definitely part of it. It's also about protecting access to the Suez Canal.

Speaker 1: 26:26

Absolutely, and that was the compromise there is. If, to protect access to the Suez Canal, we would ensure that Israel and Egypt couldn't go to war with each other in the campaign again. Exactly, and thus there is a little bit of than you realize, because it also means foregoing legacy advantages in your infrastructure. Yeah, legacy advantages in your infrastructure? Yeah, so the tariffs are having a big cost and they are not bringing in anything like the revenue predicted either, although, if you listen to the administration and their fans' justifications for this, it's hard to figure out what they actually wanted to do, because their two stated justifications actually are directly at odds with each other. As a revenue-raving service, figure out what they actually wanted to do, because their two stated justifications actually are directly at odds with each other.

Speaker 1: 27:34

As a revenue raving service, you shouldn't be able to negotiate, um, and also, you would want to encourage internal spending. You might even have to do massive stimulus to do that as a revenue, uh, in the beginning, because you, you have to get everything going internally. They didn't do that, um. And then, as a negotiation tactic, you have to be seen as a a steady negotiator, and these tariffs have changed for a while every day, yeah, uh, where, where do we think this stands now? I mean, um, with these two things, uh, going on here, yeah, so these suits are making their way through the courts.

Speaker 2: 28:25

I believe there was a ruling um allowing them or no. Sorry, the suit for the Liberty guys was initiated in florida, I think um the california one is is currently ongoing. Uh, I don't right now have a lot of information on them. Uh, I assume that they're moving forward uh ploddingly, which, in this environment, means that we'll probably find something out within you know, a month or so. Uh, if, if it makes its way to the shadow docket Um as is. These are basically just like. This is an overview of the likely uh arguments that will be made um regarding these issues. Uh, not, you know not what's happening now, which is trump has done a bunch of tariffs. He's canceled them, he's put them back. He's canceled them, he's put them back, etc.

Speaker 1: 29:22

Etc yeah, um, I guess that leaves me with a couple of questions. Like, this is based on expanded emergency powers, but they're expanded emergency powers that are easy to take away, and there does seem to be a small coalition of people in the Senate willing to team up with Democrats to do that. Rand Paul's also on this team. It's hard to call Rand Paul a rhino, but who knows how weird things are going to get. And when we talk about the budget, has the budget been passed yet or has the author? Has the resolution to pass the budget been passed?

Speaker 2: 30:10

yet the resolution, sorry. So the budget you know who knows what's going on with that. There's now they're saying they don't want to do like Medicaid cuts for like these 12 Republicans or whatever it's. It's a mess. We'll see if they even pass a budget. There's some like parliamentary games going on behind the scenes as to whether or not they can count what they're doing in terms of extending the Trump tax bill as zero dollars increase in the deficit or what it is, which is like five trillion or 10 trillion or whatever massive deficit increase trillion or 10 trillion or whatever massive deficit increase. So we'll kind of see what happens in regards to the budget and we might get some additional clarity on tariffs clarity on the tariffs, depending on what happens behind the scenes.

Speaker 1: 31:07

Right. It does seem like, with the poll numbers being what they are, that the GOP is declining rather precipitously Because while the Democrats are still in the toilet, it's beginning to look better for them. I don't know how I feel about that. I know you're kind of happy about it.

Speaker 2: 31:25

I just want the GOP at zero. I don't think they'll get to those votes so long as they're to the left of the GOP.

Speaker 1: 31:31

But the GOP is dropping.

Speaker 1: 31:33

It has now dropped its disapproval rate to lower than the Democrats in general, which is which is last time I saw was around 2004 or 2005, after the presidential election of George W Bush, second term GIT presidents and at least in the 21st century, have not tended to be, they've tended to be popular, actually legitimately more popular than they are in their first term.

Speaker 1: 31:59

Yeah, for about five minutes, yeah, so like. And Trump, and Trump starts at a lower baseline of disapproval than any president of modern history. I mean, I will say that Biden managed to dig himself down there, but Trump is dropping down to. I mean, he's got disapproval on the economy, even from Republicans, and that's the issue that he won on that, and, to a lesser degree, immigration, but mainly that, and with the immigration, most Americans do seem to. I just want to. The polls indicate that most americans do seem to support the immigration policy, but they are not so happy about this due process, el salvadorian prison, stuff, even in the gop they support immigration policy in general, like of the trump administration, but if ask them but any specific thing the Trump administration is doing, they oppose it.

Speaker 2: 32:56

Um, so it's like kind of a situation where I think a lot of Americans just don't know how bad it is Um cause they like were promised that all the violent criminals they hallucinated would be deported. Um, and they're like, yeah, violent criminals who are illegal aliens, yeah, yeah, let's deport these people. But when it turns out that you're just like nabbing people, random people, off the streets and deporting them, people are not such fans of that because it's cruel and it's stupid and you're using like chat, gpt I mean.

Speaker 1: 33:28

I mean, I know I've been listening to a lot of liberal activists think this is like deliberately silencing, and I'm not saying that's impossible, particularly now. I'm going to be much more cautious on either way, but I suspect what it is is chat DPG, hallucinating names that actually exist and then sending out stuff without verifying it.

Speaker 2: 33:46

Yeah, and there was also.

Speaker 1: 33:49

This is related to something else, and there was also. This is related to something else, but in this kind of chaos that we have right now, we also have people who are American citizens picked up on stings for unenforceable laws in Florida. They have been released, but they made it real difficult. I mean, ice basically released them. I guess ICE decided they didn't want that fight, but there have been so far two American citizens receiving self deportation notices to where, because they're American citizens they they were born here, where can they self-deport to? And then there has been one US citizen picked up at a check entering the state of Florida from Georgia, and he didn't have his documents, and then, when presented with his documents, they were told they had no jurisdiction, but then ICE released him a few hours later anyway. Um, so, uh, there's that. Um.

Speaker 1: 34:43

So the tariffs are interesting and they're tied into all this authority, and I mean, one of the things that you guys are, I think, you'll hear today is it's hard for us to disentangle this. I wanted to start with the tariffs, though, because this really is an area of law where, yes, there is some precedent. You can go back to Nixon, you can go to tariffs being adjusted by Biden, because he basically maintained Trump won policies and tariffs imposed by Trump and the first Trump administration, although they were much more than the normal view of law. Trump and and the first trump administration, although they were much more than the normal view of law. Um, these current tariffs also, the public was just lied about what they were and how they were generated and um, and it's just become very hard to predict what's going on from day to day and the white house is always announcing new deals that they can't seem to be able to produce evidence of materializing.

Speaker 2: 35:36

Oh my girlfriend goes to another school, you wouldn't know her Right.

Speaker 1: 35:42

Basically that, but with the global economy, the only people who are really super kowtowing to the Trump administration is Britain, because Britain doesn't really have a whole lot of options after brexit. Um, and one of the other things is, you know, we were first told that this was about, you know, national sovereignty and this or the other. But some of trump's tariff demands which he can do, this is legal, but it's just bizarre have been not about tariffs at all, like he's. He's like tried to tell starmer's government that they needed to drop, um, uh uh, their speech code laws. Yeah, I don't necessarily support the british speech code laws, but like he's basically trying to override parliamentary authority of a country that he's not an authority of in trade negotiations, I'm not even sure that Starmer's government can do that.

Speaker 2: 36:41

So I don't know. That's outside of my wheelhouse.

Speaker 1: 36:45

We aren't specialists in British law, so you know, I'm just I'm just saying like there's just been it is crazy, I'm just saying like there's just been weird demands, or when Vietnam was willing to drop its affected tariff rate to the United States to zero and was rebuffed. It's just like okay, so what do you want Reciprocal tariffs for people who don't know? And I do want to talk about this a little bit. This is a little bit off the law.

Speaker 2: 37:29

We talked about how the Democrats and the labor unions have been off message on this. I have been somewhat frustrated with Sean Fain and of the UAW although it makes sense for the UAW, because I hate to tell you guys, but the, the car industry, I I don't even think so based on the necessary manufacturing inputs no, I think it's actually, I think it's, I think it makes sense as an impulse for the car industry.

Speaker 1: 37:43

Yeah, but for people who economically.

Speaker 2: 37:46

and then right also definitely doesn't make sense for, like white collar you, you know members of the UAW, right, like it's not just people in cars, it's like grad students or whatever, and for their other members it really makes no sense, even as a rhetorical impulse.

Speaker 1: 38:04

Well, the other thing that's really interesting about it is the UAW pulled this statement down, but they originally congratulated Trump for the tariffs, with no caveat. And then, and the next two weeks, sean Fain while wearing a pro-Ross Perot shirt, which I think actually betrays a lot. People should go back and look at what Ross Perot felt about labor unions. Actually, ross Perot's politics are less hateful but very similar to Donald Trump's, without all the explicit xenophobia. And I remember when Donald Trump tried to take over Ross Perot's party back in 2000 when he ran against Pat Buchanan ironically as a third party candidate in the Reform Party and there was a split Reform Party ticket, pat Buchanan leading one side and Trump leading the other. Anyway, my point on this is that they keep on talking about NAFTA, and I do think NAFTA did a lot of negative things to all of the people involved, but most of that wasn't actually terrorists. It was about making people remove stuff like capital holdings requirements or making labor laws being unenforceable by lawsuit under the terms of the agreement. There's a bunch of other stuff in NAFTA, but when Sean fang described it, he described it as if nafta was what's called de-industrialization, and I'm sorry. The auto industry was de-industrialized in the 60s and 70s, yeah, and first, first in the inability to compete with japanese and german cars, and then when greater, greater deindustrialization in the 70s, and the auto jobs that have come back have not been UAW jobs, they've been Southern plants almost across the board. Yeah, which is one of the funny things is actually many of the UAW manufacturers their supply lines are more outside of the United States than foreign manufacturers are, so it's like I don't really understand what he thinks is going to be done here and it seems confused. Yeah, and I say this is a person who does think limited tariffing is justifiable in a democracy. It is a justifiable if dangerous policy. But across-the-board blanket tariffs is a bizarre way to think you can protect jobs when there's no investment going into it. I think maybe Sean Fain may be trying to prove that you need a union to really make this all better and that if you had unions and tariffs it would be better. But again, as I point out, reciprocal tariffs is actually what lowered the tariff regime of Smoot-Hartley when they did that in the New Deal, and the New Deal itself lowered tariffs reciprocal to other countries in bargaining exchanges, so the tariffs started going down as other people de-escalate. It was basically a controlled de-escalation of tariffs done under the new deal.

Speaker 1: 41:21

It was not done um by uh. You know, you know, free traders like like von hayek and the neoliberals actually Um, all right. So that brings us to the other economic uh thing that happens. It is tied into this. It's not terrorists, but it is impoundment. Doge, to me, brings up all kinds of impoundment. Cross means Um, and I have noticed that Doge is getting a lot less brave in what it's doing. In the last few weeks they did just fire everyone in the consumer finance protection bureau.

Speaker 2: 42:08

They're going after federal deposit insurance and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 42:12

That last bit seems insane to me. Going after federal deposit insurance and stuff like that. That last bit seems insane to me. Going after federal deposit crazy like do you want?

Speaker 2: 42:18

do you want 20s era bank runs maybe that's what they want, um, who knows?

Speaker 1: 42:24

uh why I did that. I don't even understand from them, because their stock valuations would also crash like um, and considering that a lot of these uh oligarchs are actually uh uh cash reserve poor, I don't know why they'd want that um, but maybe they want to.

Speaker 2: 42:43

It's all, it's all gender, it's. It's woke to have your deposits be insured. You should keep them under your big manly mattress instead, anyway.

Speaker 1: 42:56

The younger part of your generation. So we have a bunch of things here on the impoundments and I honestly will say, even though this has made a lot less news, both on the impoundments and we'll get to this in a second section the firings the Trump administration has had to backtrack and go through traditional methods, which they should have just done in the first place.

Speaker 2: 43:19

Yeah, yeah, there's been a lot of suits about this. The most recent important case is the Department of Education v California. So basically, impoundment is very clearly illegal. There's been a couple of Supreme Court cases dealing with impoundment on the shadow docket, uh, this one with california that I mentioned, and then the like aids vaccine coalition um which happened to like a month ago, um, where the government was forced to pay out a bunch of money. So, as with almost everything that the Supreme Court has been doing, it's really a jurisdictional question for them.

Speaker 2: 43:57

There's this thing called Tucker Act. It creates exclusive jurisdiction for claims of contracts, grants, cooperative agreement, termination, and this thing called the Court of Federal Claims, which is pretty slow judicial review process and a pretty slow relief process. The Court of Federal Claims can only award money damages at the end of a case and it can't raise constitutional or statutory claims. And the Shadow Docket case basically was about the fact that Administrative Procedures Act cases which had been previously brought had to be made through the Court of Federal Claims. So this is like the court saying, not that there's no relief, but you have to go through this really slow process. Um, and this is all because of sovereign immunity, which is something we have in our legal system that defends the United States government from having to pay out money damages, unless it says you can sue me, which I think is stupid, but whatever. So now we have the situation where, basically, in regards to impoundment, if you can't sue through the APA on the claims themselves arising out of contracts and stuff like that, you have to go through a couple of alternate routes. So one is that you can assert non-statutory causes of action, basically if you say that an action that the government is doing is ultra viris, meaning done outside of the ordinary business of the sovereign. So you can conceive of this very simply like a tax collector can't, it's not within their discretionary authority to blow up someone's house, right, like maybe the military could do that, depending on the situation. Like the point is that there's lots of things government officials don't have the authority to do, even within the ambit of their statutory responsibilities. So if you claim that grant cancellation is one of these things, then maybe what you can do is you can bring a case in the court of federal claims and then they'll say we don't have jurisdiction for this because this is a constitutional or statutory violation, and then what you'll do is you'll go back to district court because there's Supreme Court precedent saying that there has to be clear congressional intent to jurisdiction strip totally. So if there's no clear jurisdiction stripping, you got to bring this case somewhere. It'll end up in federal court. Then they can have a hearing on whether or not this action was ultra-virus.

Speaker 2: 46:39

You also have like a suit that you can do just against the shuttering of agencies. So if the main thing you're doing is you're saying, well, the Department of Education should be giving out all of these grants, we're not suing on the basis of the grant, we're suing the agency because they're not doing their statutory responsibilities, because they've been shut down, that can still be an Administrative Procedures Act case, meaning you can get around sovereign immunity and the court can order the agency to issue new awards, for example, even though they don't have to go to the same grantees as before. Go to the same grantees as before. So a lot of this is very difficult to square with other Supreme Court precedent, including the Department of State v AIDS vaccine case that I mentioned earlier, which denied stay of an order enforcing the disbursements. So one thing I think is worth considering is that the Supreme Court is trying to put this, trying to put this on the backbench, kind of that. They'll have a more full hearing after consolidating a bunch of these cases later on.

Speaker 2: 47:43

To go into more of these issues is that a lot of the people who have had their grants canceled are kind of in a limbo where what you can do is you can either you know if you need this money but you don't need it, like tomorrow sue in the court of federal claims and you'll probably get it back at some point, or they have to pursue one of these other tactics because the Supreme Court has made APA suits so difficult on this issue. So this is, you know, at worst a really like obvious defanging of the Impoundment Control Act and stuff like that done through the shadow docket, at best, really just, you know, a way that the Supreme Court is giving itself some breathing space to do a more full decision on the issue later. So that's where we're at with impoundments, basically.

Speaker 1: 48:39

Which is better than we were on impoundments, although I suspect that Doge is going to be doing all kinds of stuff and, like I said, for example, we know for a fact that there was FERPA violations in the Department of Education and there's even been people publishing like government documents, including stuff that I think might be somewhat classified in like public databases, without authorization.

Speaker 2: 49:08

This isn't like apartments, but like there's so many violations of just privacy laws, Like ways we need to go into detail on it. Like apartments, but like there's so many violations of just privacy laws. Um, like ways we need to go into detail on so. Like doge was like looking through the nlrb to find like unionizing workers that could send it to employers and then they like sent it to russia or something.

Speaker 1: 49:25

I'm not making this up, this is real no, no, there was also a whistleblower who started talking about, like russian ips trying to get into the back end of certain data consolidation and they didn't get in, but only because people were watching Using Doge passwords, by the way, yeah, no, using active passwords that were just established. So, like, their security is like basically non-existent. Yeah, and we are seeing them and this is legal. We're seeing this administration basically undo most of the security administration.

Speaker 2: 49:58

There's some stuff, like.

Speaker 1: 50:02

There's stuff I actually don't care about, like the defense against disinformation. I actually thought that was a politicized boondoggle itself. Not that there isn't disinformation, but there's always been disinformation. But even there, I think what we're seeing now is quite interesting. One thing that I've noticed for example, I thought the threats against Zuckerberg were all nothing and he came and kissed the ring and went away, but now that we're, now that there's stuff going on in inquiries about him, um, it does seem like he was giving information that he wasn't legally allowed to give to china.

Speaker 1: 50:43

Um, so it's, it's going to be interesting what these, what these people know and have leverage under each other about why this happened in this way on the firing. So this gets very interesting, because what we've seen is, like all, a lot of the people by a lot I mean most, actually, of the people who were initially done in the mass batch fire all probationary people, regardless of if they're a new probationary or just got promoted or whatever done with a false promise of a buyout that wasn't congressionally deliberable. Anyway. Those people have been reinstalled and stored and given their pay, but with administrative leave indefinitely, and then what they're going to do is they're going to reduction of forces people and do it the legal way, which is the way they just should have done it in the first place. Not that I support all this being done, but this seemed like a particularly stupid way to go about it.

Speaker 2: 51:44

There's stronger constitutional protections for ordinary employees than for officers. I think most of the interesting stuff is happening with officers In terms of that. What keeps happening is, like we had, like today, like the third temporary you know IRS appointee was fired. Um, it's since the start of the Trump administration. Um, so what this comes around to is the president has pretty broad authority to fire officers who have been confirmed by the Senate, and then they can appoint a temporary officer for between 300 and 210 days, depending on when in the president's term they do this, but they're supposed to put this person up for nomination in the Senate. So this is like a backstop, basically, where you have the government functioning but you also have like a little bit of leeway. If there's somebody who needs to be fired, is how it's going to go. Trump's not doing that. As with everything you know, he's just like firing people and putting in his own people, um, often with very little legal backing. Um, one thing which is important is this is like an agency by agency question. So the appointment and removal is based often on the organic statute of an agency. So like the statute establishing the EPA, or is the organic statute for the EPA For multi-member boards, which is relevant in the NLRB case which is going through the courts.

Speaker 2: 53:25

Usually this is a situation where there's, you know, strict removal limitations imposed by statute that Trump is just like ignoring, um, with you know the remedy being theoretically to put them back in place, but the Supreme court keeps like staying these orders, which again like maybe they're teeing up a case to just strike down these removal protections entirely. Maybe they're giving themselves more time for a full hearing? I'm not totally sure you know. But what Trump is doing instead is delegating, like for instance, in FEMA. He just like delegated the authority to lead FEMA to a special officer with no time limit, which is quasial. I guess you can't typically do this for multi-member boards, but you can do it for heads of departments which need to go through the Senate approval process.

Speaker 2: 54:27

In terms of the multi-member boards, you're not supposed to use acting officials or delegations. You're supposed to just go through the Senate and with a multi-member board, the justification for having a temporary appointee doesn't make much sense, because the reason it's multi-member is so that if there's a temporary vacancy, the business of the board can continue going on, which is the case for, like, the Federal Trade Commission or the National Labor Relations Board. So it's basically an attempt by Trump to usurp the power further. You know these boards typically have some Republican and some Democratic appointees. If you fire the Democrat ones, then you're left with the Republicans.

Speaker 2: 55:12

I don't see the reason why Trump would even feel a need to put in appointees other than kind of his own ego as a practical matter. But that's what he's trying to do anyway. So the TLDR on firings is firings are usually legal for principal officers and you can usually fill that vacancy temporarily without Senate confirmation, though you're supposed to go to the Senate eventually. In terms of inferior officers, if they're appointed by the head of a department being a principal officer with Senate appointment, you're not supposed to fire them. Trump is firing them anyway in the hopes that the Supreme Court will remove this limitation on his power. With multi-member boards, you're not supposed to fire them. Trump is doing that anyway and illegally attempting to fill these seats illegally attempting to fill these seats.

Speaker 1: 56:21

So how does that um play out exactly?

Speaker 1: 56:22

So I mean like, so we have these different agencies, so we've had people in certain agencies reinstated, kind of, but they're on administrative leave, but they're still getting paid, which in some ways is like it proves that this is ideological more than monetary, because that's the worst of all world scenario for monetary things.

Speaker 1: 56:36

Okay, so we have to pay them, but now we just don't really deal with any of this situation. I find this quite interesting because, on one hand, this is an area where I do think legally there's a lot like some of the liberal complaints is a lot less easy to stand on. The president does have broad executive powers here. On the other hand, there are hard statutory limitations about this that actually tie back into our empowerment discussions. Tie back into our empowerment discussions, um, and it's interesting where the courts seem sympathetic, whereas godis seems sympathetic to the trump administration, and where they don't, because one thing I have noticed is trump's received more, more l's and wins from these federal courts and from the supreme court lately, um, even both before and after his uh, you know, swearing my, my feeling on this is that it's probably more likely that scotus would uphold uh limitations on firings for multi-member boards than they would for inferior officers.

Speaker 2: 57:47

Um, so if I, if I had to predict how this would turn out, I would predict that I guess SCOTUS would probably say you can fire inferior officers because of the vesting clause, but you can't necessarily fire multi-member committees in the. You know, there's a different role basically for this type of agency. Um, though I don't know Cause like. One thing going on behind the scenes is that I'm I'm sure SCOTUS is keenly aware of the fact that if they do anything against Trump, it will be ignored. Uh, as we'll get to with the alien enemies act stuff next, uh, and then, at the same time, I assume roberts wants to defend the whatever shred of integrity the court has left. Um, and letting trump fire everyone would probably be a pretty bad way to do that.

Speaker 1: 58:47

Well, to me, this does bring up the cowardice of the democrats and not handling the courts within their legal purview, which they do not do. Yeah, and I think that, like, even though they were warned it needed to be handled, there was whole boards talking about this in 2020. They did nary a damn thing, nor did they try to fight the courts on pretty much anything. They decided uh, ever, um, so on. On that scenario, I am sort of like we need to really call the democrats out because they had a chance to do something about this and they didn't. On the other hand, I don't see the other than Alito and Thomas and Thomas, and even, apparently, on some lines, as we're going to talk about, when we get to Alien M's act. Even there, the court doesn't want to give up all its power to the executive, like.

Speaker 2: 59:47

I think, in terms of your analysis of like Democrats, should have been harder on the courts.

Speaker 2: 59:52

Your analysis of like Democrats should have been harder on the courts.

Speaker 2: 59:56

One thing I will say is like I broadly agree that the courts have not been doing a good job, but I think it's an easy tee up for them to do a bad job If all of your policies done through the executive, which becomes necessary in you know the current era of divided governance, basically so like for like the student loan thing. You know the current era of divided governance, basically so like for like the student loan thing. For example, I don't think the court would have struck down a student loan forgiveness plan coming out of Congress. I don't either. They did do it coming out of the executive under the major questions doctrine, and the major questions doctrine is also something which is like a new conservative development, basically to stymie liberal goals. So it's kind of a difficult situation because the motives of the court are not particularly positive in my view and their legal reasoning is overly political. But at the same time, the reason why the courts have acted so badly is because Congress hasn't made it has made it easy for them to act badly by not acting.

Speaker 1: 1:01:02

This gets me to something that will tie us back to it's maybe a transition to a few small topics and then getting into the alienation and immigration stuff, the alien impacts and immigration stuff. Congress, since World War II this is one thing we were talking about off air and at the beginning has abnegated, particularly on this point. Yeah, both to the executive and to the judiciary. But actually I think Congress has abnegated until recently, until, let's say, the 1980s. More to the judiciary. They have abnegated things that were clearly their job, because it meant making hard decisions that could put them back in the district. And I mean, I think we see this right now because, if I'm frank with you, the people that Trump is holding the most isn't I mean, it's his enemies in the personal sense, but it's not the states that are his enemies. I mean, like the tariffs are going to hurt california but like they're going to the nebraska and indiana, both, both. I think some like seven percent of ranchers are on the verge of bankruptcy already in nebraska and like there's a huge farm crisis coming because of this shit like right and it's just started yeah, like

Speaker 1: 1:02:14

um, so we are talking about like, and then, like, indiana is likely to like default. Um, so you're gonna see red states go into fiscal crises, um, pretty quickly, uh, um, and also they're being disproportionately hurt by the few things that Congress is doing. But it seems to me that that part of the reason why they've been so deference to Trump is when he has political leverage over them. If it, particularly if he still has much money to primary them, and even if you're down to like 32% general support that's still concentrated in the GOP and it will hurt them in primaries, yeah, which is? Which is this weird, I don't know. I might advocate that we should go back to the smoke filled rooms and and like the legislature actually appointing things, because the legislature is actually the representative of the people. But you know, actually the representative of the people, um, but you know all of a sudden varm becomes a 19th century small republican.

Speaker 2: 1:03:20

It's awesome. We're like, uh, we have like the fiscal debates of like, uh, like the william jennings brian era, where we're like the tariffs are too high and clearly the gold. You know that the monetary standard isn't working because of debates over inflation. Therefore, we must pick the best candidate possible in the smoke-filled rooms of Tammany Hall, right.

Speaker 1: 1:03:43

Well, it seems to have been better than what we've done since the 60s.

Speaker 2: 1:03:47

Yeah, primaries, I have my gripes um as a mechanism for establishing good governance, but the broad point is correct, which is that, like congress has attempted to avoid being, you know, losing their seats, uh, at the price of all civic virtue.

Speaker 2: 1:04:10

um, which is something what they're actually supposed to do, I mean be honest they're not doing their goddamn job yeah, um, I think, like some democratic representatives, have been better on this, like lately, and one thing I will say is, like you know, the the democratic congress under biden did actually bills, which is their job. They weren't like bills that I like 100% agree with. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, whatever, but, like you know, not to both sides set, because the Democrats have definitely been willing to give up broad power to the executive which is particularly during the Obama administration.

Speaker 2: 1:04:52

They were really during the Obama administration administration. But, like the republicans, just like, don't do anything now, like they did like one tax cut in the trump years and then now they're literally passing no bills.

Speaker 1: 1:05:04

Like they are very little during the during the biden years either I mean the republicans, just like don't do anything, like it's way worse with the republican electeds at this point than with the democrat electeds, even though both of them still have the same underlying uh issue of deference to the executive well, I have a theory about that, because one thing I'll say is because we because this is a demagogic party at this point, yeah, um, outside of the symbol of the man and whatever his weird, his base, will slabber about from day to day, which I mean um, which is interesting, because it's not just that they're against the rhinos at this point, they're like even against, like the chambers of commerce, which I'm like dude yeah, they're like we need to fire jerome powell yesterday.

Speaker 2: 1:05:58

Like right trump appointed, of course you know. Like right, um yeah, I mean like there is no animating philosophy behind the republican party at this point, other than like what does grandpa think is important today?

Speaker 1: 1:06:11

right, uh, which means that when grandpa inevitably dies from natural causes, um, they're going to turn on each other like the. Yeah, I know you told me that trump's dad lived to like 80, but I'm just like yeah, I mean he has like the worst diet known to man. Like I have no idea right, I'm just like it's, we also. We also know that, like His medical Stuff is just straight up propaganda, because he's like Standing by people who are taller than him or at the size that he's claiming to be.

Speaker 2: 1:06:42

I mean, it's so stupid, like it's just medically impossible.

Speaker 1: 1:06:49

I have a similarly Doughy gorilla man to Trump At 5'8 and I can promise you that man is not 220 pounds Like there's just no way if he's actually that tall. So unless he's like got no bone density and is just all fat, no, no, lee Muscle's heavier, oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:07:11

Muscle's heavier I forgot.

Speaker 1: 1:07:17

I'm in law school rather than med school, so like no if he, he would be.

Speaker 2: 1:07:22

Uh, what are they gonna do? Like I have no idea because clearly these policies aren't popular when other people present them yeah, I mean he's like the congress is debating whether or not to raise the tax rate on like the highest income earners right now, which is like anathema to republican views just like it looks really bad that the the highest income owners were going to have a lower tax rate than people making less than fifty thousand dollars a year.

Speaker 2: 1:07:51

Yeah, especially when you factor in the tariffs. Like I do think one thing worth emphasizing here is like the tariff situation is the most regressive tax in American history, most regressive and largest tax in American tax increase in American history. So, like they're they're just trying to, like you know, in the budget, meet budget requirements however possible and, and you know, trump probably had like a bad run-in with like a guy he met on the golf course and was like we're gonna raise this guy's taxes. Like I I don't ascribe any genuine change on the part of republican representatives, uh, it's just political expediency. Point is he has like absolute control over the republican party and they're all right.

Speaker 1: 1:08:33

Um, I mean there's like I've listened to this there are four senators that kind of stand up to him and then one senator, uh, lucy mccroskey, who's like on the verge of tears in a tall hall about how afraid she is about yeah not about like being deported to el salvador or whatever, but about like she might be primaried in six years yeah, because she's not up until like after 2028 or something. It's just, it's really kind of pathetic.

Speaker 2: 1:09:01

Um, okay, this brings us to birthright citizenship yeah, citizenship will go very quick on because it's easy. It's easy. There's a new case the supreme court is taking on birthright citizenship, which I talked about last time I was on the show. Um, this case is up to the supreme court now. They're going to hear arguments on it. They'll come out with a decision in may providing an update on this. I'll probably be back after that case because I assume it's going to be very important and they'll do a full opinion. My understanding of it is that they will probably uphold birthright citizenship because there's like no conceivable argument against it. That would not be like laughed out of a normal court.

Speaker 1: 1:09:46

That would not be like laughed out of a normal court, right? The only the only thing I could see them doing is a kind of first claim that they made about birthright citizenship, that somehow illegal immigrants are enemy combatants. Yeah, I mean. But even that doesn't make that much sense, because because I will, I will put this out. If they claim that, what it would actually do this is what's crazy. It would give illegal immigrants diplomatic immunity I would have to look into that.

Speaker 1: 1:10:17

I'm not sure about that um, well, I mean, obviously that's not what they want, so they'd have to like, carve it out. But like the wording is, this is a trump clay, that that one of the reasons that they can do this is we have no jurisdiction over illegal immigrants. But I'm like, yes, you do, you can arrest them yeah, okay, I get, I guess what you're I and if you're saying there, if there's no jurisdiction, that is effectively the same thing as we do apply to foreign diplomats, yeah, um, who have diplomatic immunity.

Speaker 2: 1:10:44

Yeah, I guess if we, if they were taking the law seriously, which they're not, no, but no, they would just put more to torture gulags.

Speaker 1: 1:10:52

So let's talk torture gulags all right, um, we'll come back to harvard and the law firms which are just retaliation, but okay, so, um, you and I have both been, broadly speaking, that a lot of the stuff around immigration is was totally legal as long as there was broad due process of bob. But I said I and I've said this with gene bajelon too that, um, with their hitting state capacity so hard that even, like, even with the military and whatnot, I don't know, even if they invoke, like the insurrection act at the border or something which they're probably they might do, people like it's martial law, I'm like, no, it's actually martial law, um, but, um, and for people who don't know, yeah, posse comitatus generally prevents that, but the insurrection act has been invoked in my lifetime like it was invoked during the Rodney King riots. It's not really martial law, it's just the ability to bypass posse comitatus for temporary relief in an emergency.

Speaker 2: 1:11:59

There's no mechanism for doing martial law, basically no easy one without which requires Congress to act Right.

Speaker 1: 1:12:10

Congress would have to do something.

Speaker 2: 1:12:12

Which we already know they're not going to do.

Speaker 1: 1:12:14

So I bring this up though, because I was like I couldn't figure out how they were going to try to do this, because they've. Usually, trump hurts the administration of the state so bad and Republicans do in general that actually Democrats are better deporters Because they actually use the apparatus of the state better and they don't defund the buried people. They need to do the thing. Now we've also seen that. Border Patrol, dhs and ICE, and, with the exception of Border Border Patrol, all these are post 9-11 agencies. I want to like remind people of that. These are not long-standing agencies. They do seem pretty much like Trump's private army. You will notice that he's doing a whole lot more with those agencies than he's ever done with the FBI or the CIA or the NH, the National Security Administration or the federal. Who knows? Federal marshals might be sent after him before it's all said and done.

Speaker 1: 1:13:14

They are talking I mean, we have judges talking about criminal contempt by Trump administrative employees and I was like man. Lately it feels like some of his staff is treating the courts like Alex Jones treated the courts. But anyway, back to this. So this seems to be the way they're trying to get around, that is, one having massive quotas, using chat DPT to just round people up, which that's never backfired before in either national or US history. To have quotas where you just have to round people up for stuff, but two using this argument that doesn't have a lot of precedent in US law. Although I was getting annoyed, I was on Blue Sky.

Speaker 2: 1:14:02

I love Blue.

Speaker 1: 1:14:03

Sky. I know you love Blue Sky. I like Blue Sky a little bit more than I used to, but I will say that I still seem to think it's sometimes true social for liberals and they're like we're not part of the western world and I'm like, uh uh, france, australia and Britain have all done this.

Speaker 2: 1:14:18

I'm not even talking about Nazi Germany.

Speaker 1: 1:14:20

They've all done this.

Speaker 2: 1:14:23

I like blue sky because I just follow a bunch of bots that tell me about legal cases and follow a bunch of bots that tell me about legal cases and then a bunch of guys who post about the military or whatever. So I'm not using it in the way. I'm not using it in the truth, social way. But my mom did just get an account so I'm worried that she will All right.

Speaker 1: 1:14:42

No, no, I mean, that's what I like about Blue Sky too. One of the reasons I like it is I still have control over what comes in my feed a whole lot more than I do on Twitter.

Speaker 1: 1:14:57

I haven't seen any Holocaust denial since I made an account, which I like. I mean seems to be the way they're getting around that they found Seacott. They're paying per person, I think, for people to be deported to Seacott. There's even since, I think today it came out that Black Rock is trying to get in on this somehow Not Black Rock, blackwater and Eric Prince's team. So very much this. This feels like like we have this weird term where the neoconservatives are now like split between we like this new Jack book regime or we're utterly opposed to it and we're going to like support AOC or whatever. But yeah, bill crystal actually there's a bunch of them, bill crystal, david from David.

Speaker 2: 1:15:47

Brooks. He quoted the Communist Manifesto in the New York Times op-ed pages Richard.

Speaker 1: 1:15:52

Hania was getting yelled at by MAGA people for saying like maybe something needed to be done.

Speaker 2: 1:15:58

I mean like Richard Hania is like the only people with a lower IQ than all the minorities.

Speaker 1: 1:16:03

I hate is the Republican Party iq than all the minorities I hate. Is the republican party like well, I mean, yeah, he just sounds like he's like uh, slightly more respectable which is spencer, then yeah, I mean, he's like a, he's total eugenicist, terrible guy but, but, but I did point out this is too far for him.

Speaker 1: 1:16:21

Yeah, like um, so let's talk about this detention agreement. So how is this working? How are they trying to get around? You know, because they're spending billions of dollars to revive Gitmo, which is totally legal. There's not much we can do about that, thank you. Patriot Act and other things. It's not just Patriot Act there, but there's a bunch that's legal and I hate to say it, but biden floated like doing it, um, but that still takes time to get get mo up to snuff for that, whereas a bunch of shiny prisons that they can put people in um don't even meet el salvador's own international law, as was pointed out by the senator from maryland, that they're not even in compliance with with stuff el salvador is signatory to.

Speaker 1: 1:17:15

Yes, um about ditto for our own deportations.

Speaker 2: 1:17:20

It's not complying things.

Speaker 1: 1:17:22

We're signatory to right so and that matters anymore. I mean like the UN has not mattered probably since the Bush administration but, like still.

Speaker 2: 1:17:31

Yeah, so basically, in terms of El Salvador, the detention agreement thing is something that people have floated the idea of, so this is relevant. We're going to explain the cases in a minute. This is relevant because it's a way we can get around claims that the administration is making in regards to those cases. There's this 2022 statute on transparency for international agreements, which would include any agreement we have with El Salvador, which makes it mandatory for the executive to disclose and publish certain agreements which are binding or non-binding, with foreign countries within specified time periods. So if it's a binding agreement, they have to report that they're doing it on a monthly basis and publish it within 120 days after the nature's force. If it's non-binding, it has to be published and disclosed if it can reasonably be expected to have a significant impact on the foreign policy of the US. Under that statute, committee chairs and ranking members of the foreign policy committees in the House and Senate have the authority to basically ask for this information, and Democratic minority leaders have done this. So Senator Shaheen has asked the Trump administration to disclose any agreements they're in with El Salvador. I don't believe they've complied thus far. It's kind of unlikely they'll comply, based on how they're acting, but you know, just another lawbreaking day for the Trump admin.

Speaker 2: 1:19:00

This is important because the executive, as people have been following the news, sees, uh see, has said like nobody's in custody of Garcia, for example, um, but if it turns out that we're paying El Salvador, as it be, it seems, uh, is the case to hold people in concentration camps, um, then there's a pretty good argument to be made that these detainees are in US constructive custody. Basically, we could say can we have them back? So that's, that's the important thing about the statute on transparency. This comes about in these two very prominent cases which just came out Trump v JGG and Noam v Garcia. So Trump v JGG is a broad Alien Enemies Act case, the one that Boasberg was handling. Alien Enemies Act is the 1798 law, excuse me, which allows deportation of like foreign nationals or enemies in cases of war, invasion or predatory incursion. There's not a war, there's not an invasion. Trump's claiming that there's a predatory incursion. This has been used a couple of other times. It's been used after World War II.

Speaker 1: 1:20:26

It's how you set up the Japanese internment camps.

Speaker 2: 1:20:30

Yeah, I think it was also used for that. So there's some precedent for it, but not precedent for it outside of wartime, which is relevant In Trump v JGG. The claim was much narrower. All of these are jurisdictional claims. So basically, the Supreme Court ruled 5-. All of these are jurisdictional claims. So basically the Supreme Court ruled 5-4, with these biting dissents, that APA, meaning Administrative Procedure Act, claims could not be brought in this matter.

Speaker 2: 1:21:00

There had to be these things called habeas petitions, but they did confirm that individuals subject to alien enemies act removal are entitled to due process, though again, they didn't provide specific checks, right? The background on this is, of course, boesberg ordered the government to halt removals. The plaintiffs won up to the supreme court, which then lifted the pause on removals but required habeas where the prisoners can find, which means that all of these proceedings will get shifted over to the Fifth Circuit, which is a very conservative appeals court circuit, to hear habeas cases, and there's not a separate inquiry on whether or not the government violated Boasberg's order on the plans was not handled by the Supreme Court case, which means that Boasberg is doing his own hearing on whether or not to hold the government in contempt. What's important about this is that there's like a couple of different elements. So, first of all, the Supreme Court is saying that there has to be notice and opportunity to be heard. Basically, there has to be a due process inquiry for anybody who the government wants to deport. They have to be given notice that they're subject to removal within a reasonable time and manner. So, like the Trump admin has apparently been going around in prisons in the US throwing, you know, papers entirely in English at mostly Spanish language speakers saying that they're being detained subject to the Alien Enemies Act as a mechanism of notice, this I don't think meets the standards set by the Supreme Court, but this is the way they're trying to meet that. That prong Lower courts are trying to give this teeth by ordering additional notice including Trump appointees are ordering this and also borrowing removal until this happens. In terms of the plaintiffs, the detained, you know supposed enemy aliens, they can do class actions in habeas, which is currently permitted. Supreme Court doesn't really like it but hasn't found a way around it yet. So you're going to see a lot of classifications. Bless you on habeas.

Speaker 2: 1:23:09

And then the second opportunity is review under the Alien Enemies Act. So if the APA is not a mechanism for reviewing these things. You have to say, first of all, was the Alien Enemies Act properly invoked and second, was its application to a particular individual problem? So the aforementioned precedent that Vaughn and I were talking about says that there's a pretty broad invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, but this has historically been tied to wartime specifically, and there's nothing, even including the use of force designation, obviously no declaration of war, which is the basis for this invocation. It's just another national emergency.

Speaker 2: 1:23:47

So the Trump admin is relying on the prong of the statute, which says that invasion or predatory incursion is grounds for the Alien Enemies Act, but it doesn't seem to me to be acceptable on an original reading of the statute and I think this could wind up being another major questions case. Um, though, again, we'll see what the court says. In terms of the second element, the application to a particular individual Um, there definitely needs to be better judicial review, because the Trump admin is like detaining people on the basis of like tattoos, uh, these like horrible checklists that they're going through, um which really like does not justify the deprivation of liberty and deportation that they're pursuing. So, under supreme court precedent like this is not sufficient process.

Speaker 1: 1:24:40

Um, this could be like both of a due process thing and a cruel and unusual punishment thing. I I mean to be quite honest.

Speaker 2: 1:24:46

Yeah, I haven't seen any cases on cruel and unusual yet, though it would be interesting if somebody brings that. But you know, as a due process matter, like clearly insufficient due process. And then, in terms of other limitations, there's a question of how international agreements that the US is subject to because they've been passed by the House and Senate or by a Senate treaty, interact with us. One element is that we have signed on to obligations under international law which prevent removal to countries where there's a risk of persecution, to countries where there's a risk of persecution, and that suggests that, say, deporting Garcia, who's from El Salvador and faced risk of persecution there, to El Salvador was illegal in and of itself, even though he was not deported subject to the Alien Enemies Act.

Speaker 2: 1:25:41

The Garcia case is separate from the Alien Enemies Act case. This is a case where they just deported this guy for like no reason, with no justification, and this reached the Supreme Court and they ruled 9-0 that the government needs to facilitate the release of Garcia. There's not a clear outline of what this means. The court says they have to effectuate release, but that district courts have to show due regard for deference owed to the executive in foreign affairs and that the government has to share what it is, what steps it's taking concerning facilitating this release?

Speaker 1: 1:26:17

Right, and then two days later, we had that.

Speaker 2: 1:26:20

The shameful Oval Office display where Trump wasn't the case.

Speaker 1: 1:26:26

Bacali, and then Bacali is like you know, and then they called him a terrorist. One of the one of the interesting things about this is, like I find this interesting it's not legally actionable but, like terrorists, actually does have a definition of the U S law, Like and we just started, I mean, and I will say the left has done this the left, as in Democrats, you know, has done this too.

Speaker 1: 1:26:47

They've called people terrorist who do not meet the definition. But I'm like, I'm like man, you guys are really expanding your claims here. Yeah, I mean the specific on the Garcia case and this wouldn't matter. Also, I mean as a, as the appeals court said today, like a Reagan appointee said, or not today, but yes, this is the end of the last week for those you don't know. Huh, when was it today? Yeah, um, god, so much, so crazy.

Speaker 2: 1:27:19

um, like it always feels like I've been through a few years of this shit. That's been three months, um, just imagine being in law school for him okay, law school and history people are just like jumping.

Speaker 1: 1:27:26

I'm not even talking about the people who are like Fascist spotters, you know which some of those people I think Are a little bit aggrandizing, but like Although I'm okay with just saying this government is authoritarian Outright and I'm okay with calling them fascists. I mean I like yeah but you're close enough to Democrat. Now here's my thing.

Speaker 2: 1:27:53

We're having debates on whether or not this is a concentration camp barn. That's pretty bad. Well, we'll move past this.

Speaker 1: 1:28:01

No, no, no. This is what I'm about to say. I, at this point, am not going to correct anyone. Yeah, whatever, um, uh, I think you know I, I was about to actually bring up the same thing.

Speaker 1: 1:28:16

It's not a great sign when we're arguing over the definition of a concentration camp and the definition of, uh, a gulag, like who and it could like um, because I was telling, I was trying to tell people like you can coup even when you're democratically elected with a democratic mandate, which you know. Trump's mandate was like 1%, but he didn't have it. Um, I doesn't have it anymore, but that doesn't matter in the US system. Nonetheless, I just think, I do think sometimes these words we get into this debate and it's more of a sign of how bad, how degraded things are becoming that we're even having this stupid debate, whereas right now, we just need to be clear on this.

Speaker 1: 1:29:12

The Garcia case you have a person who was arrested and I can go through the specific case, because I see this getting misrepresented online by a patrolman who has actually been, uh, removed um from office for all kinds of irregularities, who claimed that he might have one tie to ms-13 but, like in 2017 or whatever, he did cross the border initially illegally, but then was granted a stay, and that's partly because of our weird way you have to get like.

Speaker 1: 1:29:56

There's really not a way to declare asylum in the US without crossing over illegally, which is also bizarre, because he was threatened by El Salvadorian gangs. He was never found guilty of this at all and there are some things that maybe aren't great about him. For me it's like whether or not he's a saint is irrelevant to this and clearly a whataboutism charge, but they're just asserting now, uh, that he is both a terrorist, which we have absolutely no evidence of I mean, there's no world in which he meets the legal definition of and that he is a like an ms-13 yeah, an ms-13 member again, of which they haven't submitted any proof.

Speaker 1: 1:30:46

Yeah, um, um and and if they did given the I mean like, here's the thing the docket in the federal courts would be in their favor if they had any evidence at all definitely.

Speaker 2: 1:30:57

I mean like, like there's plenty of people, I think under the statutory authority that trump is using, who he can deport. Like that's something to make very tons and tons and tons and tons of people, and I don't have a problem with many of these people being deported If the government goes through the legal process.

Speaker 1: 1:31:16

I kind of do have the problem being deported to Seacott, but but no.

Speaker 2: 1:31:21

I'm just I'm not saying like Seacott, specifically, like I'm. I'm just saying like, under the legal process, I don't even know if we're allowed to deport, to ccot, right like right like there's a bunch of reasons for that, one is due process is absolute and applies to all persons, not all citizens, um as long as you're in the us border as long as that is clear.

Speaker 1: 1:31:41

Under what in the fifth amendment that's absolutely stated with clarity?

Speaker 2: 1:31:45

Yeah, no-transcript and, like US officials, the court can't order El Salvador to return him, but they can order US officials to return anybody, which they have done before.

Speaker 2: 1:32:13

The US government has routinely sought to return improperly removed migrants. In the pre-Trump era, the government has invoked Rumsfeld v Padilla from 2004 to argue that the immediate custodian is where the case needs to be brought. So this is relevant for two reasons. One is that for people in the US, they have to bring cases where they're being detained and sometimes it's hard to locate people and mostly they're being detained in conservative Southern states with conservative judiciaries to make things easier for the government, but in this case, more immediately they're like things easier for the government, but in this case, like more immediately, they're like he has to bring his case in El Salvador. I have no idea what El Salvadorian law is, but I am willing to 100% say that it does not have, as good of due process is being followed. So basically, the government is relying on an argument of like well, we can't do anything now, he's far away and no one can reach him, which is total bullshit right.

Speaker 1: 1:33:36

Well, one, uh, republicans have been going in and out of ccot lately like doing tours, uh, of the parts of it they want to show.

Speaker 1: 1:33:39

Two we now have a democratic senator, who was, who was first denied any entrance to ccot but then, I guess, to avoid what, for McKellie, would have been an international incident of clearly picking partisan spies in another country, garcia was produced Because, I'll be frank with you, I assumed he was dead and that was why they were doing this.

Speaker 1: 1:34:02

I suspect, actually now that it's something in that agreement that would be legally thrown out, which is why they are doing this, because this is a weird, this is a weird fight for them to pick. I mean, I know a lot of leftists think that this is about their ability to deport anybody, which, by the way, again I'm not ruling out, again I'm not ruling out um, they want to do that. The, the homegrowns talk, even if I don't think it's just his political enemies. I think it's like, uh, that would set up a it wouldn't matter if he currently intends it to just be for him, for, uh, like, um, severe gang members that he wants to get rid of, or whatever it would that would eventually set up President to do was deport anyone, because there's no way to prove you're innocent.

Speaker 2: 1:34:49

It's also patently illegal. You cannot deport a US citizen. There's no grounds for that.

Speaker 1: 1:34:55

You'd have to remove their citizenship first, which is hard to do. Yeah, it is like, and it hasn't been done since god. I'm trying to think of what I last time has done. And it hasn't been done since God. I'm trying to think of what I last time has done. Is it like Aaron Burr?

Speaker 2: 1:35:08

I don't know there's ways to do it if you fraudulently say something on your citizenship application. It has been done.

Speaker 1: 1:35:18

Denaturalization is possible, you would also be talking about doing it to birth-born citizens.

Speaker 2: 1:35:23

Yeah, but birth citizens, it's like. So I have no idea how they would do it legally and at that point you are in a.

Speaker 1: 1:35:35

I mean, honestly, at that point, if I'm, if I'm honest, I, I, once you're there, I, I don't see us avoiding a civil war, but, um, uh, we'll see, you know. Um, the thing is I, the courts have clearly made a stand on this. Even even the most conservative members, um, and, and that was with them, giving this is a thing. They gave trump an out in that weird wording of facilitate, um, and he's not even doing that the.

Speaker 2: 1:36:08

The weird wording of facilitate is basically like them being like. Well, the court does not have the power to ask the president to have 700 marines invade seacott, um, which is true, but like also like it was very easy for trump to like. Just be like. All right, we respect the supreme court's order. We got this guy back, um, especially now that we know he's alive, and they're just choosing not to. They're like picking a fight with the supreme court over this issue, which I am under the impression is not very favorable to the trump administration. Um it, I mean, it's just like there's no reason for it, basically um, unless unless they are literally trying to undo judicial review altogether yeah, I mean like I don't know, like I I'm back and forth.

Speaker 2: 1:36:58

I I really don't think they like necessarily even want to put in a formal authoritarian government, like some of them do, but like I think others are just completely delusional about what the us public wants and believe all of their opposite. You know opposition or aid actors and stuff like that, and once you're like assuming that like that's hard to hold on to now.

Speaker 2: 1:37:30

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, or it's just whatever grandpa's up to today. That covers like most of the big legal issues going on right now, I think. Is there anything else you want to say about the immigration stuff?

Speaker 1: 1:37:57

I mean, there's Harvard. There's Harvard and the law firms. Oh, the immigration stuff is so fascinating to me because they're like I said earlier, it's clear to me that that this sets up terrible precedent. That would be totally lawless if, if actually followed through, um, they're getting this.

Speaker 1: 1:38:16

This weirdly is, politically speaking, even this is turning what was a popular one of their, one of the few things trump had, that was popularly supported. I, whether I like it or not, I have to admit that. What is it? Even a large minority of democrats, and like all republicans and most independents, are fairly, uh, supportive of a strong border regime and I don't love it. But if it's democratic, I have to argue for that in a democratic manner. You know what I mean. But this is making this unpopular. This actually is. I mean, we saw Chuck Grassley getting roasted in red, red, red, red areas over this stuff, red, red, red, red areas over this stuff. Um, and and just like in the beginnings, with all the doge stuff it's and fears over these tariffs. And you know, today, I mean, bank of america says that the stock market may be still 40 overvalued. That came out today.

Speaker 2: 1:39:21

Um, uh, what will happen to it if they fire powell?

Speaker 1: 1:39:26

you know like no, I mean, even even trump's appointed the person he's looking at the most to replace powell has said to please don't do that. Yeah, yeah, just wait. You got a year, like um, if they fire powell, you might see massive treasury dumps. And the question is, I actually don't know if Trump has the power to fire Powell.

Speaker 2: 1:39:51

I don't know, Not legally. Well, what does that mean? That's the thing, right Practically.

Speaker 1: 1:40:05

I'm not sure he does either. But the Fed is independent of the government, even though the Fed chair is appointed by the president. But yeah, I mean this is going to have a lot of repercussions. I do think a lot of my prescriptive MMT friends are going to have a lot of things to answer for after this administration. You know, not my descriptivist ones, but my prescriptive ones who are like, oh, we just need to ignore the bomb market. I'm like, good luck with that. But the thing is with the, if the bomb market tanks, yeah, dollar value is going to go down, but it might not lead to lower interest rates, even if the Fed drops them.

Speaker 2: 1:40:52

Well, especially if the tariffs are ongoing and the inflation rate is high.

Speaker 1: 1:40:55

Right. So the private sector can keep the interest rate high if it wants to. Anyway, Like good luck with the president fixing that.

Speaker 2: 1:41:07

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:41:08

Um, so, and he seems to be alienating a lot of his bajillionaire allies. So it's, it is interesting. Harvard's an interesting case. Um, in some ways it rhymes with uh, with the implication of legal malfeasance during the Obama administration against the Tea Party, doing tax stuff against them for direct advocacy. But let's be clear, even though Trump is now saying he's going to go after left-wing NGOs and all this.

Speaker 1: 1:41:47

Harvard can withstand this, even with the worst of it, but if they start doing this to all these private universities, they're going to collapse the US university system which maybe they want to do, I don't know. You want to talk about it. This does seem like at this point, you are completely delusional about about what you think you're going to rebuild if you do that.

Speaker 2: 1:42:12

yeah, like um, I mean it also speaks to like his terrible instincts and building an authoritarian government, right, like with the columbia deal, for example. Um, he took away 400 million, they signed this agreement with him and then he didn't give the money back. And if they had given the money back and said here's an additional $100 million for the center for real American studies, then a lot of universities would have felt compelled to to sign deals.

Speaker 1: 1:42:44

No, but he's a bad faith actor and he he treats the government like he treated his businesses which, by the way, six of six of them went bankrupt.

Speaker 2: 1:42:51

Yeah, I mean, like the Harvard case, I think is important, not like as a legal matter, but more as a a SIG, you know, in terms of its significance to civil society, the fact that those like the big 10 are are, you know, like the Big Ten are creating a mutual defense pact to handle legal cases. Right now, harvard and other universities are preparing suit. This is relevant because it's an element of civil society with a lot of sway.

Speaker 1: 1:43:18

Yeah, and I don't even like Harvard.

Speaker 2: 1:43:35

And I'm one of those people who's even said that I'm OK with removing their tax exemption status for their endowments because they're so crazy. Well, yeah, I, I think, like this I'm I don't really have a strong opinion. Uh, in the current moment, like, I think, like in normal politics, that's like a useful debate right now. Harvard, you have all this money, great, great, use it to sue the government, you know? Same thing with the law firms. We're like I think you know there are a lot of problems with the way that the law firm apparatus is set up, but I'm very happy for any law firms that are suing the Trump administration, because it's important to maintain an independent legal system in our society.

Speaker 2: 1:44:13

The big divide so far on the law firms that are signing deals versus not signing deals seems to be how reliant they are on their corporate practices. So a lot of it is what clients want. And then, in terms of the law firm deals, I think they've been a little bit overhyped in the media, mostly their commitments for the law firms to do things they were already doing. But Trump doesn't seem to be treating them that way. Like he's like we'll have law firm attorneys who signed on to our deals defending the administration in court or negotiating trade deals or opening coal mines or whatever trade deals or opening coal mines or whatever stuff which is just outside of the agreement. And I think that was pretty foreseeable, because I didn't think that those agreements were worth the paper they were signed on, because Trump's a total bad faith actor. But anyway, the fact that more law firms are suing and more universities are suing or preparing to sue is a good impulse in terms of civil society fighting back.

Speaker 1: 1:45:14

I think civil society is going to start to. I also think, as Trump's popularity dives, even amongst Republicans which it is, I mean, just like it's hard to deny reality that he made promises about lowering prices and everybody can see that he is doing things that would actively exacerbate the opposite, there's no way around that.

Speaker 2: 1:45:35

He did a giant announcement that he would raise prices. You know like it's hard to ignore.

Speaker 1: 1:45:43

And that they're not doing any like again. His harebrained tariff scheme would be a disaster in most scenarios, but it could be less of a disaster if they weren't also going after every bit of public infrastructure funding that isn't for the military. At the same time and in fact and they didn't even want to do that that was from the Senate, I think, smartly realizing if we funnel this to the military, one, we might keep the military a little bit more loyal, because there's a real chance of problems there. And two, it will still get this money into the talk about oh, we're going to defeat China.

Speaker 1: 1:46:34

China was having an economic downturn during the Biden administration. I don't celebrate that. I don't have anything, you know, against China. Personally, I think they're a fine technocratic state as far as that goes. I guess I don't absolutely love their human rights record, but at this point it's better than ours. Um, so, and they're? They're responsible international power, um, trump has managed to do two things. One, he's managed to move russia and china further apart, um, and I don't think people are noticing that, but I am. Two, he's because of china as association with russia, even though it was neutral in the ukraine war. Uh, that meant that europe was very hostile to china. That's over now, um, uh, and that may even be over with canada and mexico, um, which are two countries in the US spear. Now, I don't know how much faith we should put into that. That Trump, really, like he said he's not going to militarily invade Canada. I don't think he'll wag the dog, but who knows?

Speaker 1: 1:47:42

The one thing I will say is, on this, I'm going to do me a cope. I've done it several times. I'm going to do me a cope. I've done it several times. I'm going to do my last one, but it is the real one. I assumed that there were other actors in this universe who were not that delusional. I mean, hegsef is being one of the most delusional ones. Even he has a Princeton and Harvard degree. He can't be that stupid, and yet maybe he can. And that's where I am torn. Um, like, like. I know that they are loyalists, but I'm like you guys, you guys are so loyalist you're not even protecting your dude. Yeah, like, I mean, like it, like this is a problem with having, yes, men of that kind of caliber. They're not even protecting the president's interest from himself in some way. I think we're going to look back and realize how much Ivanka and Jared actually did during the first administration to ring stuff in.

Speaker 1: 1:48:48

I know a lot of people worry about he's going to be cleared dictatorship for life when he's 78. I'm not that worried about it too, I think, if they won't have the legal proceedings to do this and I do think you get into real issues because I don't think their pull in the military is total so if he tried to A constitutionally have a military coup and establish himself as a dictator, that would be very hard for him to do. Not impossible, nothing's impossible. I do think we have to. I'm working a very fine line here, elijah.

Speaker 1: 1:49:29

And on one hand, I think there are some people, particularly, if you like, on blue, tiktok, space or blue, who are rightfully freaking out. And I always say, even if you are living in a police state, freaking out like this will not help you survive it. It just won't. As I've said a couple of times, you don't want to be the right woe society. They all died, yeah. So your grand resistance narratives, you've got to be a little bit more subtle than that.

Speaker 1: 1:50:11

On on the other hand, um, my priors are totally, are totally, screwed right now, except for the james carville ring of the democratic party is literally trying to do the same thing it always does, yeah, which is just let their opposition blow everything up and then hope that we can come back and clean it up and do nothing beyond that.

Speaker 1: 1:50:24

Which, look, it worked for kira starmer for a little while, but that government's already unpopular in the uk, um, so it's just going to be interesting. Uh, where, where this goes, I don't think we know anymore, and so, on one hand, I'm trying to tell people not to freak out. On the other hand, I'm also saying we can't continue to pretend in economics and law and anything that our priors really can hold. We don't know anymore. We really are in uncharted territory. I felt like we've been building toward. I mean, we didn't go to all of it. I was talking about going into, uh, md versus runfeld and the way the patriot act, and you know we'll do this another times because basically, elijah, I'm probably going to have you on every three weeks for the way, the way the court system is working.

Speaker 2: 1:51:14

I'll be here.

Speaker 1: 1:51:16

Right, but I don't want people to think that I think that I want. This is one of these weird scenarios where, on one hand, this really is kind of one man and a regime around that one man. On the other hand, this could not have happened without years and years of both the Republicans and the Democrats letting everything decay off, of post-Cold War hubris. Yeah and yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:51:54

I mean, I think that's right. And I think one thing which it's difficult to draw the line between is, as a matter of historical analysis, putting the blame where it deserves to go. Putting the blame where it deserves to go. But, as a matter of present action, saying anybody right now who is on board with, like, getting us back to a semblance of normal politics, come along, you know, like and normal politics obviously is a bit of a misnomer but like a functioning court system, a functioning state, not deporting people without due process, you know, like these very, very basic asks. And that's a line that's difficult to walk right now, but it's one which people have to get good at because it's a big tent. It should be as big a tent as we can foreseeably get to without sacrificing our principles, uh, and there's a lot of battles to fight right.

Speaker 1: 1:52:57

I mean people often take to talk, to talk obscure left stuff and then I'll translate into normal person because I'm trying to not limit my audience to only weird, arcane, historical reenacting nerds. I'm still not a popular frontist. I still don't think we subsume ourselves to the Democrats or the neocons who are finding their conscience all of a sudden after decades. But I'm also of the. You can't always throw them away. I remember when there was this movement in blue YouTuber world where people that who I might respect for other reasons, but I don't tend to respect their politics I won't name names, but we're going to not accept X MAGA in our movement or you know, x, x man are still racist and I'm like that kind of shit doesn't matter.

Speaker 1: 1:53:57

If you're right about the situation that you're in. If you're right about the situation that you're in, you don't have to endorse them. You don't have to like them. You don't have to endorse them. You don't have to like them. You don't have to pretend you're part of the same overall positive movement, but you at least have to quit aiming for them and focus on what your enemy actually is. If your enemy is the degradation of the state, or even if you want a new state to replace it. I don't know. There's people who listen to me who do. You've got to have a more positive, proactive thing than whatever ideology that you think you have, because you're going to need leverage and if you don't have leverage through social and civil means, historically that leverage is violence, and I don't think most Americans, despite what Zoomers on Twitter may play at and the other 21 black, have any idea of what that really means. I have seen it and I barely do, and so you know.

Speaker 1: 1:55:05

I think we're going to have to think about that and and following all this stuff. And I think also people need to be smarter. Like I don't, you know, you're too. You're young enough that you can't really speak to this, but I will say, like I mean you, you are definitely an adult for part of Trump, at least part of Trump one, but yeah, um, an adult for part of Trump, at least part of Trump one, but yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:55:28

But like there was a lot of political capital, emotional capital, blown on the wrong things during the first Trump administration and ways that are really damaging now, administration in ways that are really damaging now, and I also want people to take this at heart to a little bit degree. We're all going to have to rebuild these institutions. Let's say we weathered this, democrats come back, but we get a James Carville, we'll get this again unless they change. I think that's got to be held. I mean the.

Speaker 1: 1:56:17

I think the gop is going to be in like disarray for a long time after this, but like we'll get something like this again unless things are fundamentally changed and people actually try to like start demanding things of their politicians or we're just going to decline into utter irrelevance, which okay, um, you know, I would love for the american empire to kind of die down a little bit. It's going to one way or the other, but I would like it to do so in a way that doesn't like potentially destroy half the planet or impoverish every single person here. You know, um, like you don't have to choose the worst option of a multipolar world, and we seem to be actively doing so. All right, and even when I say we, I'm like I'm not even sure it has broad popular support in the united states.

Speaker 2: 1:56:58

It's just what's happened yeah, I mean, I think, like in terms of to bring the conversation back to the bush years a little bit, nobody ever went to jail for get ma. Uh, these guys need to go to jail for what they're doing now.

Speaker 1: 1:57:16

I don't, honestly they should have gone to jail for getting no, no, I, I'm, I'm agreeing with you.

Speaker 2: 1:57:22

I'm saying like people were willing to paper over these things in the past. This cannot be papered over and if, at the end of the trump regime, at the end of the trump years, people want to just go back to normal without changing anything, it's going to come back and it's going to keep coming back.

Speaker 1: 1:57:51

Right, you just need something like you don't even need a particularly good demagogue, you just need a demagogue that people can attach to Anyone with lizard brain intelligence, because Trump really does have that. I mean, like when I, when people talk to me about like, oh, are these people stupid? I'm like, well, what they're doing is dumb, um, but they do have a. You know, and I've actually been kind of shocked at how unstrategic some of this shit has been. Uh, and like the amount of cope, both the left and the right, and people like, oh, it's just the right, no, there's been leftist try to be like are, and I think for for reasons that kind of make sense, you don't want to think you got beat by a carnival barker, but you did, and that's on you, and maybe you should respect the kind of lizard brain intelligence of carnival barkers more, but that doesn't mean that they know what they're doing when they're actually ruling. Particularly when you remove collective. This is a problem in general. When you remove collective checks and just have positive feedback loops, things fall apart and that's what's happening.

Speaker 1: 1:58:57

We live in a place where people aren't willing to tell each other no and they're also willing to just outright lie, and I don't just think it's conservatives. I'm tired of pretending it's just conservatives. They're worse. This is not me saying they're equal, but you know, like the whole people projecting what they want to believe on the executive. Oh my God, did Democrats do that during Obama and to some degree until the last year to Biden, and that gave Biden a lot of cover for I don't know, just actually being senile, literally, and I think we have to deal with that.

Speaker 1: 1:59:33

And I and I'm like you know that's my end rant, I just want people to know Vard hasn't gone soft. But I'm also like you can't. You can't play purity politics when you need allies, and I know there's going to be some from the very, very, very far left who think I'm betraying principle here. But I've always been a united frontist, and by that I mean you don't have to agree with someone to make common cause with them on a specific thing. If libertarians come over here on our side on one issue, I'm okay with that. I don't trust them on other issues, but on the specific issue, I'm okay. I don't think that's a principle. It would be a principle to pretend we agreed on everything during the same time. I do think we shouldn't be doing that, but that's a different question.

Speaker 2: 2:00:22

The one thing that we should just give the neoconservatives if they come over to our side is El Salvador. They can do whatever they like there.

Speaker 1: 2:00:38

Lovely, lovely. It's like the miniature, tarnished version of a new American century, but just in one country in Central America. Oh man, I personally would like to respect El Salvador Serenity, because part of how I think they got into this situation with Bacalli is our fault. But that's just me, you know, when you, I don't know. I do think one of the things that I do think that, hopefully, I think what we've lived through, elijah, is a time where there's been extreme rhetoric but very, actually, milk toast or empty politics. Like, like democrats in 2020 were like abolish ice, defund the police although defunding police is always stupid but like also like not really willing to even sort of kind of deal with the implications of what they were saying, which tells me that they didn't really care.

Speaker 1: 2:01:49

And, similarly to a lot of the GOP, for a long time, has been willing to push all these delusions. But I'm like, eventually you drink your own Kool-Aid and this is where you end up, and I really worry about that. And people are always like oh well. I've seen a lot of are always like oh well, the MAGA. I've seen a lot of leftists say, oh well, the MAGA, people will never go, you know. And I'm like okay, that's true. A lot of the MAGA people won't. That's not who got Trump into office. I hate to tell you that, like you know, he kind of needs him to get into office. But 20% of any population is kind of authoritarian. That's been my experience. Like everywhere on Earth, it's the 30% who think they have immediate venal needs to be met. That empowers that, and that's also true for the Democrats.

Speaker 1: 2:02:47

I don't want to give them a pass on this, and so I think we're going to have to. I hope this is a big enough wake-up call, otherwise the world may not be doomed. We may not, as individuals, be doomed, but this polity is doomed. And yeah, I mean, you know, I know some people who won't be too sad about that, even in the U? S, but, like, I think you have to be responsible when you talk about these kinds of things and talk about what declined and collapse actually mean. Um, uh, I, I don't even like, uh, if we go, if, like, if. My analogy, which is often Trump, is our Yeltsin. I don't think people get how grim that like. They're like oh, that's not like I'm. Like you have no idea how grim I'm actually. That prediction actually is. But anyway, on that happy note, thank you, Elijah, for coming on.

Speaker 1: 2:03:44

I'm going to have you on again soon because I can't even keep up with it and I try, and I try to keep my critical faculties about me. So I'm reading all kinds of news sources. I'm even watching, reading what comes out of Fox. I will say this it is very bizarre for me for Sebastian Gorka to be using war and terror rhetoric, but for everything we do have that period to thank for, even if the neocons are on our side I don't know that they really are, but even if they are we should not forget that they did lay the groundwork for a lot of this. All right, thank you, elijah, for coming on. One, two, three.