I really believe there's this dynamic in politics, and that it happens all the
time, That it happens all the time in local politics, national politics,
that people will say words, experts will talk about certain kinds of words and
terms, and a lot of people will sort of nod their head about it
but not actually understand what it is. One of these terms that I bet
if you went to one hundred California citizens, one hundred California legal residents,
voters and well citizens, hopefully in voters. Being a legal resident is not
enough to be a voter. You got to be a citizen, all right.
If you go to one hundred California voters and I put them on the
spot, I stick a microphone in their face, and I ask them,
can you define for me what a bond is? I'd bet that a lot
of them, I don't know, maybe the majority of them, maybe not
quite the majority of them, I don't know. I'd say at least thirty
of them would not be able to define for you what a bond is very
clearly. And yet it's a major vehicle. The bond is a major vehicle
that's used by both local government entities and it's going to be a massive thing
statewide coming up. We're gonna, apparently, according to news that's been broken
by Ashley's Valla, who's a great Sacramento area journalist who's constantly breaking things at
the Capitol, there's going to be a ten billion dollar Climate and Environment bond
that will be presented to the voters of California as a ballot initiative, along
with another ten billion dollar bond ballid initiative for schools for new construction, modernization,
testing for lead and water and remediation for charter schools, and career slash
tech education. A bond, let's let's define it. I want everyone listening
here to be able to define it. A bond. It's not very complicated.
It's alone. A bond is a loan. It's a loan made to
a governmental entity a city, a county, a school district, or a
state. That's what a bond is. It's alone. So it's made to
a governmental entity. But how does a governmental entity get money to pay back
a loan, Well, it's pretty straightforward. They get money to pay back
alone through taxes. Your taxes. Now, with any loan, it's not
just that you know, here's you know, It's not like when you're getting
a mortgage and you buy a house for three hundred thousand dollars. It's not
like the bank says to you, Okay, here's three hundred thousand dollars to
buy a house, you gotta pay me back three hundred thousand new you have
to pay back interest. Theory goes that your use of this money right now,
in the here and now, your ability to enjoy this house in the
here and now, is worth something to you above and beyond that principle that
three hundred thousand that you just paid, so you gotta pay me back,
not just the three hundred thousand I loan. Do you got to pay me
a little extra something something, And that is in the form of an interest
rate. We bought our house with a three point five percent interest rate.
Nice deal in twenty nineteen. If we were to try to buy a house
now, maybe it's more like eight percent. Bonds are no different bonds loans
made out to a government entity. Bonds have interest rates, and when you
think about this in the context of the bang for your taxpayer buck, a
bond is actually a pretty inefficient and over the long haul onerous way of having
taxpayers pay for stuff. Why Well, because if you're taking out a ten
billion dollar bond, and most of the time bonds that are made out to
governmental entities, it's a loan that has a thirty year repayment cycle. So
most of the time with a thirty year loan, so most of the time
the loan is thirty years, and you're paying a certain amount of interest on
that loan. Well, the amount that you are going to pay an interest
is going to be much more than the amount of money that the government receives
for whatever service. Okay, when Clovis Unified, for example, had one
of their you know never end every ten years or so, they builk the
voters in Clovis Unified into a four hundred, five hundred million dollar bond measure.
You know, oh it gets it gets message to the public as this
is a five five hundred million dollar bond measure, all five hundred million dollars
for Clovis Unified. Hooray, who could vote against it? It almost becomes
like a good like it's a sign that you're just a good neighborhood citizen that
you voted for a bond initiative and you have some nice attractive yard sign that
you put in your yard and oh, it's so wonder Oh, five hundred
million dollars for unified. What no one says is that with interest, over
the course of thirty years, we're going to have to spend maybe nine hundred
million dollars to get this five hundred million dollars. So over the course of
thirty years, taxpayers are going to have to pay nine hundred million dollars so
that we can have five hundred million dollars right now. Oh and by the
way, with Clovis Unified, with President Unified, with all these school districts,
these bond measures stack up on each other faster than we pay them off,
so we're still Clovis Unified. Area residents are paying in their property taxes
for like the last two or three cycles of Clovis Unified bond initiatives. So
it's a scam. And I think what I despise about these bond initiatives is
that they're just presented to voters and it's almost like it's kind of like a
gun to your head. Approach ten billion dollars for schools, for example.
Okay, so we're gonna have a ballot initiative this year ten billion dollars for
schools in California. Wow, that's a lot of money. And let's think
about it. I mean, especially with interest rates nowadays are higher than they
were in like twenty nineteen. I mean, I did look. Interest rates
are around eight percent. I found a loan calculator online Google loan calculator,
and I put in a loan amount of ten thousand dollars a loan term of
thirty years. I put the interest rate at six percent. I think probably
these bonds that we'd be voting on for the state, it wouldn't be six
percent. I think it'd probably be more like eight percent. So I said
it at ten thousand dollars rather than ten billion, just because there's only so
many, so much room for so many zeros on this on this calculator here.
So if you do payment every year with a total of thirty payments,
if the loan is ten billion dollars, we're gonna wind up paying an additional
twelve billion dollars in interest. So when it's proposed to you, hey,
we need the schools need ten billion dollars. Oh do you not like schools?
Are you voting against teachers? You know, as if every teacher is
mother Teresa. You're voting against teachers, You're voting against students, You're voting
against schools. What are you, Adolph Hitler? You are a monst ow?
Could you You hate teachers, you hate schools? You're gonna vote against
Yeah, you're asking me to pay twenty two billion dollars or whatever the amount's
going to be. I know it's gonna be way more than ten. You're
gonna ask me to pay twenty billion dollars over thirty years in taxes to get
ten billion dollars worth of benefit right now? No, No, And it's
being foisted on us as if what are all of our tax dollars paying for
right now? What are all of our property tax dollars paying for right now?
If not? Our local public schools aren't our public schools are all doing
these local bond measures just a couple of years ago, within me starting the
show in twenty nineteen, Like there was one year where Clovis Unified, President
Unified, Central Unified, all had a ballot measure, all had a bond
ballot measure within two elections that all passed. But this is the way that
direct democracy works. In California. I mean probably it's this thing of first
of all, if you don't own your home, you're not really seeing the
property tax that you're paying. If you're renting, then you're indirectly paying for
the landlord's property tax because that's probably baked into the rent he's charging you,
but you don't see it. So you think, ah, whatever, yeah,
just another increase in property. Oh it's just a couple percentage points.
Who cares? You realize those percentage points add up. So and I think
again, though, when people introduce these bond measures, they are playing off
of the ignorance. They're banking on the ignorance of the average California about understanding
what a bond measure is. I almost wish I think using the word bond
almost makes people more confused. I wish these kinds of measures were called a
loan in interest measure, because that's what it is. That's all a bond
is. A bond is just a loan that's made to a governmental entity that
there's nothing different about it. It's a loan that California or Clovis Unified School
District or President Unified School District. Essentially, whoever gets they get all the
money up front, and then they got to pay it back over the course
of usually thirty years with interest. And if you've got a five percent interest
rate, even then you're going to be your interest amount is going to be
as big as the principle. You're going to be paying back two dollars for
every one dollar you get. And again, it's not Clovis Unified paying that
back. It's the taxpayers who happen to live within the Clovis Unified map who
are paying that back. It's the taxpayers of California who are going to have
to pay this back in a state that is already the most taxed state in
America. And I just hate hate again the way this is going to be
presented, the way the teachers unions are going to message this teach and let's
remember the teachers unions they got more money, they got more power than any
other political entity in the state. They're the most powerful lobbying entity in the
state. They're going to present this as, oh, this is here to
support our teachers, are heroic teachers and give them the resources they need.
You already have the resources you need. The idea that the resources we are
expending in California, where we're spending at least ten thousand dollars per it's more
than ten. It might be twenty thousand per kid. At this point,
I need to look up what's the average cost of tax dollars per kid for
public schools in California? Okay, look in this up. According to an
article from the California Policy Center, this is back in twenty twenty that California
is k through twelve spending exceeds twenty thousand dollars per pupil. This is right
before COVID, So we're already spending over twenty thousand dollars. We can't make
this happen. Why can't we Well, because teachers' unions are really powerful.
So what do they do? They create more jobs for themselves. And this
is true across education, whether it's higher ed, secondary schools, primary schools.
Is that the number of non teaching staff massively increases. Why well,
if you're a teachers union, any job at the school can be a teacher
union job. And the more members you have, the more power you have,
the more money you get, the more members you get, the more
members. Yeah, it's that is the self interest for a un union.
That's people seem to confuse the role of a union versus the role of a
teacher is the role of a teacher is to teach kids. The role of
a union is to get more money, more jobs, better hours, better
conditions for its membership. That that's its end goal. That's the goal towards
which it's oriented. That is its te lose. What's the purpose of a
knife. It's to cut things. You can have a pretty knife. You
can have a pretty knife with a pretty damasked blade and a little elaborate ivory
handle, and you know whatnot. But the point of a knife is to
cut. If it's good at cutting, it's a good knife. And so
the teachers' unions are going to present this as if California public schools aren't funded
enough. I say, well, this is this is for teachers. How
could you oppose this kind of funding? When we return, connected with all
of this, this is for the environment, how could you oppose this?
When we return, I want to talk a little bit about teachers and all
professions. Really, the kinds of pious fables that we tell ourselves about certain
kinds of jobs. That's next time on The John Jerrardy Show. I have
I think a good deal of filial respect and piety for actual like religious stuff,
for the stuff that's actually affiliated with, like the Catholic faith and Catholic
belief and Catholic worship. I'd like to think that probably I'm not as pious
as faithful as I could be. I want to be more so, but
I've I'm super suspicious of piety, sort of subservient reverence towards various kinds of
human institutions, human institutions, and human jobs especially. I've noticed this as
a trend, and that you notice this a lot when you're talking about education
policy. You know, we're going to have on the ballot this November a
ten a billion dollar bond initiative, which, again, let's remember a bond
is a loan to some government entity, and like other loans, you have
to pay it back with interest. So we're going to get ten billion dollars
for public schools around California, well ten billion dollars worth of benefit for about
twenty billion plus worth of taxes. So to get the benefit of that ten
billion dollars that will get right away, we the taxpayers of California, will
have to pay twenty billion dollars worth of taxes over the course of thirty years,
because that's how bond measures work. The government gets ten billion dollars of
benefit right away, but you, the taxpayer, have to pay ten billion
dollars plus interest over the course of thirty years. So we're probably gonna have
to spend twenty billion dollars over the course of thirty years to get ten billion
dollars worth of benefit right here and right now in twenty twenty four or I
guess in twenty twenty five, whenever that would kick in. But the messaging
that we will get is we're doing this for the teachers. These teachers in
California, they're working so hard, they're doing such heroic work for our kids.
Do you do you not want teachers to be paid well? Do you
not support the teachers the teachers? Think of the teachers? Now, First
of all, a large number of the union member employees of public schools are
not teachers. So let's cut through that little bit of piety. It's not
like every single person who's gonna get who works for our public school is a
teacher, and therefore, you know, mother Teresa. Secondly, is this,
and this is maybe the main point. I don't think teachers deserve the
kind of universal societal reverence that they get. Not to say that everyone needs
to dump on teachers as being a bunch of losers. And I'm not saying
teacher is the easiest job in the world, but it's a job. And
I think, like with most jobs, there are some teachers who are awesome.
I think there are some teachers who are pretty good, fine, middle
of the road. And I think there are some teachers who suck. And
I think that that distribution of awesome mediocre suck. I think that's true about
pretty much every job in America, pretty much every job in the world.
I think there are some doctors who are great. I think there are some
doctors who are mediocre or they're fine, and I think there are some doctors
who suck. I think there are nurses, Oh, nurse, nurses are
the truths heroes. Well, I don't know. There are some nurses who
are awesome. There are some nurses who are in the middle and pretty good
or good at this or good at that, not so good at this,
not so good at that. And there are some nurses who suck. There
are medical assistants like that. There are cops like that Paco bald Rama.
Okay, And it's sort of this thing where liberals have their jobs that they
hold in such reverence and piety. Teachers usually or you know, oh,
social workers or you know, things like that. Conservatives have their jobs that
they hold with this kind of bizarre reverence. Oh, members of the military,
cops. And I just think that across pretty much any job, there
are some people who are good, there's some people who are in the middle,
and there's some people who stink, and then everyone works hard. Well,
really good people work hard, but not everyone does. Not everyone works
that hard. I know there are people who work harder than I do.
And by the way, I'm not acting like I'm the greatest nonprofit director's ever
existed. So in short, don't get guilted into a ten billion dollar bond
measure for California public schools on the basis of but wow, could you be
against the teachers? These teachers work so hard? Okay, Yeah, I'm
sure. I'm sure a lot of teachers work hard. You know what.
A lot of people work hard. People working hard all over the place.
Marketing managers work hard, lawyers work hard, Doctors, the nurses work hard.
Everyone's working. Everybody's working for the weekend, all right, everybody needs
a second chance. You want a piece of my heart, get it right
from the start. So everyone's working hard. Stop acting like teachers are some
combo of mother Teresa and you know Florence ninety. I don't even flip and
know they deserve respect. But this idea that we're going to make this massive
public policy decision, get spending twenty billion dollars being taxed for twenty billion dollars
to get ten billion dollars worth of benefit as is going to be on the
ballot this year this November, seems like a stupid solution. Seems like a
dumb solution for California public schools, which already get over twenty thousand dollars per
kid. Wait, in return, I want to try to start to make
heads and tails of the Supreme Court's ruling on President Trump's official immunity for official
acts, and I'll explain that after the break. This is the John Jurarney
Show on Power Talk. The Supreme Court has issued a ruling just today and
this is sort of the seems to be the capstone of the whole term for
the Court. The Supreme Court over the course of June and into July,
as they wrap it up in July, issues all their big decisions for the
judicial term. So the Supreme Court year runs from I believe it's about October
through the end of June, and that's kind of the schedule for their hearing
and briefing and deciding major cases. They get emergency appeals and things like that
kind of throughout the year, but this is the time of year when a
lot of big decisions come down, and perhaps one of the most politically significant
is Trump the United States. So this is a case about Trump's claims in
the context of his January sixth prosecutions. Trump's claim that as president of the
United States, when he committed the actions that are the focus of the indictment,
that he was president and he was therefore entitled to various kinds of immunity.
Community means someone can't prosecute you, people can't use your conduct as evidence
against you. So Trump is trying to claim I'm the president of the United
States and I have immunity as president from criminal prosecution. The federal government prosecuting
Trump in this case, led by the Special Counsel Jack Smith, is arguing,
no, there is no immunity that presidents have for official acts. Now,
I think this is a very convenient. It's very interesting how Trump is
taking this super duper broad, expansive approach to does the president have immunity for
his official acts while he's in office. The Biden administration, really, through
its Attorney General, who appointed this special council, Jack Smith, is taking
this incredibly narrow position that no, presidents don't have official immunity, which frankly
seems like a very myopic position for them to take. I mean, they're
representing, you know, the prosecution here represents, among other persons, Joe
Biden, it represents the It's it's arguing for a certain precedent to be set
for not just Donald Trump, but for any president, any and every president,
for Joe Biden, for whoever could be the next president. Okay,
And so I think I find it interesting how the Biden administration has basically taken
the pasture that there have been a bunch of things like this where Biden has
waived certain kinds of executive privileges and things like that just in order to go
after Trump in the here and now, in ways that seem like it sets
for the executive branch being protective of itself. Seems like it's setting a bad
precedent down the road, like if Biden were ever to be charged criminally with
something. Uh, you know, he's knocking down his all his own walls
of protection basically in order to get at Trump. So the Supreme Court issued
this ruling saying that presidents have immunity for their official acts. And basically,
the the idea here is that and this, by the way, patterns what
has already been established in law about presidents having civil immunity. So there's civil
cases and then there's criminal trials. Civil cases are I'm suing you for X,
Y and Z. A criminal case is you did something wrong and some
governmental entity is prosecuting you, either a state prosecutor like Lisa Smith Camp from
Fresno County prosecuting you for violation of California crimes, or a federal prosecutor the
US Attorney for let's say we live in president where within the where within the
boundaries of the US Attorney who governs the Eastern District of California, Okay,
so he could prosecute us. It's been well established that presidents have immunity from
civil lawsuits already within the context of their conduct. As president. Trump is
trying to make the argument, well, it's not just civil immunity, it's
also criminal immunity. I have criminal immunity. I can't be prosecuted for the
actions I take while in office, for my official acts. And the court
wound up largely agreeing with President Trump. So specifically, in Jack Smith's and
Diamond, he was charging Trump with various kinds of discussions. Basically, he
said Trump had this scheme to unlawfully overturn the results of the election. He
had conversations with It wasn't Bill Barr, I guess it was whoever the acting
attorney general was after Barr quit, that he had conversations with the acting attorney
general to see if he could convince state legislatures not to certify their election results.
Jack Smith is charging Trump here that those conversations were part of this unlawful
scheme or constituted this unlawful scheme to overturn the election results. And the court
is saying, well, no, you cannot prosecute the president for conversations he
has with executive officials. And the reasoning is, well, the structure of
the constitution demands that we have a vigorous, independent executive branch that is able
to vigorously engage in conduct without constantly being afraid that its conduct is going to
be the subject of criminal prosecution five minutes later. So the separation of powers,
arguments and all kinds of things militate towards this conclusion that presidents in their
official acts are so object to criminal immunity. But that is distinct from non
official acts. Okay, So official acts would be something that arises from the
president's own constitutional powers. Non official acts would be something different. If it's
Trump talking with say, his campaign manager and strategizing something, then that would
not be something that's protected by presidential immunity. And what the court's going to
do is send this case back down to the district court. In this case,
it's the district court in the District of Columbia the federal district court in
the District of Columbia. To have the federal district court suss out you need
to determine which of which of Trump's actions are official acts and which are not
official acts. So a bunch of Democrats are acting like this is the absolute
end of the world. But it's kind of remarkable to me the way that
Democrats, I mean, I guess I admire the Democrats as far as what
they want is their end goal achieved, and they don't care about process,
they don't care about precedent, they don't care about anything other than their end
goal achieve. And what is their end goal that they want achieve. They
want Donald Trump convicted. They want Donald Trump convicted of this January sixth stuff.
They want a scalp or a combover. They want a scalp pinto their
wall, right orange scalp. So they don't care about president at all.
They all they are myopically, myopically focused on in the here and now is
can we get Donald Trump for this stuff right now, right now? And
Conservatives constantly just take this attitude of, well, we need to think about
president, and we need to think about structure, and we need to think
about uh, you know, up up, up up bah. It kind
of impresses me how Democrats just don't care about that, but it also sort
of astonishes me, like you want to knock down here are all these walls
that protect Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, whoever, whatever future
Democrat president X state your name. We did, and the Democrats seemingly just
do not care about those walls of protection falling down, and maybe they just
think, you know, we we've so effectively captured so many institutional sort of
areas of power, whether it's you know what, you know, eighty percent
of federal employees are super duper liberal. You know, they just don't feel
they just don't fear repercussions the way that conservatives do. They just don't.
I mean, they talk about the idea of, well, we should have
a Department of Justice that's independent from the presidency. That's insane. If you
have a free floating, free wheeling and dealing department of Justice that isn't really
accountable to the president, do you realize what kind of a tyrannical thing that
could be? How much power the Department of Justice has. The Department of
Justice can prosecute people, they can throw people in jail, they can they
can tap your phones, they can investigate, they can do all kinds of
tyrannical things against you without some political accountability, which is what the president gives
the Department of Justice. Because the head of the Department of Justice is the
president who appoints the attorney general, without some the Department of Justice being dependent
on the president. It's this free floating entity that can do all kinds of
stuff. The military is the same way. Well, we need to have
the military to be independent from politics. No, I want the military to
be sort of attached to politics, namely in that it has a commander in
chief who is politically accountable, who runs for elections and stuff, has to
keep the American people happy. I don't want an independent military unaccountable to political
actors. But Democrats just don't fear that because they feel like they've sufficiently captured
a of these officials in the DJ all up and down, all the career
people, mid range, all up and down. They've so thoroughly captured the
military all up and down the chain of command, that they think, well,
yeah, I have it be independent. It'll never hurt us. And
maybe when Trump's in power, they'll hashtag resist what Trump wants to do from
within. I don't know how it got on this topic at any rate.
When we return, I want to talk about how maybe this case won't be
as big a deal as Democrats are making it out, or as Trump is
making it out. That is next on the John Girardi Show. I'm not
sure that the Supreme Court's immunity case is going to be quite the seismic political
event that it's going to be made out to be in the media today.
And I'll give you my reason. So here's why Trump's lawyers during the oral
argument of this case. And by the way, what this is about is
does the president have criminal immunity for his official acts that he takes while he
is in office? The court says yes. But what the court says is
there's official acts and there's unofficial acts. Unofficial acts is stuff that the president
does that doesn't directly arise from his constitutional powers. Okay, So does the
president have immunity from criminal prosecution for his unofficial acts? Oh, the president
does not have such immunity. Trump's lawyer's at oral argument conceded that a bunch
of the conduct Trump had done in the context of the January sixth litigation was
official was unofficial conduct. So we're gonna see how smart, slash practical,
slash impractical Jack Smith is. And he's been fairly impractical, frankly, with
some of Trump's criminal prosecution stuff. He's gummed up a lot of stuff relating
with Trump's prosecution down in Florida for having all the unlock the classified documents.
Smith could have gotten Trump convicted for stuff out of the mar A Lago documents
if he had not waded into the whole. If if Smith had just said,
I'm not going to charge Trump with retention of documents, I'm going to
charge him with obstruction of justice because he was asked by the court to provide
all the classified documents he had, He gave some, he said he gave
them all, and then when we looked, we found he didn't give them
all. If he just did that, he could charge Trump with obstruction of
justice. But instead Smith wants the whole hog down in Florida. He wants
everything. He wants to get Trump with retention of all these different classified documents,
and he wants a bazillion gazillion gazillion years. But that's a trial.
It's going to take a really long time. The election will be over by
then, and clearly Smith is running up against the clock. He wants Trump
convicted of something before the election. Clearly that's his marching orders, or the
marching orders he gave to himself, because we're going to pretend that Merrick Garland
is not at all wink wink overseeing this anyway, Trump conceded. His lawyers
conceded of the oral argument that a lot of the stuff Trump's being charged with
in connection with Jason with January sixth were unofficial acts. So, from what
I'm hearing from some legal folks, there's possibly a possibility that if Smith just
cuts out a lot of his indictment and just says it's a loss, I'm
not gonna have the judge suss out what stuff is official and what stuff is
unofficial. There are some charges I can bring right now if I just cut
this away and don't make the district court spend all this time trying to suss
out what parts of Trump's conduct were official, what parts of Trump's conduct were
unofficial. If I do that, it's going to take too long, and
the election will have happened already, and Trump will either win or lose.
But if Smith just charges the stuff he has left, he could have a
trial, he could maybe even have a conviction prior to election day. And
of course, looming all over all of this is July eleventh, when Trump
will be sentenced for his Manhattan conviction. So, by the way, that's
why I didn't really talk much about Biden's debate performance and whether Biden's going to
be switched out. I don't think any of this matters until we know whether
or not Donald Trump's going to jail on July eleventh. That'll do it.
John Dierlady Show, See yall next time on Power Talk