Speaker 1: Unfortunately, you make them sound really cool when you say
that I don't like.
Speaker 2: These people, but that makes me sort of think that cool.
Speaker 3: Well, they aren't.
Speaker 4: And here we go ten nine eight seven RS twenty
five injuries, late four three two one, Booster, Ignition and
lift off.
Speaker 3: The crew of Artemis two.
Speaker 5: Now bound for the Moon.
Speaker 4: Humanity's next great voyage begins.
Speaker 3: It's the Ricochet Podcast with General C. W. Cook and
Stephen Anerton.
Speaker 6: James Wilax did theay we talk to John Malcolm at
the Institute for the Rule of Law, So let's.
Speaker 3: Have results a podcast.
Speaker 7: Our enemies are losing in America as it has been
for five years under my presidency, is winning and now
winning bigger than ever before.
Speaker 6: Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast Episode build for
seven hundred and eighty three. Why don't you join us
at Ricochet from When's the Springs and you two can
be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on
the Internet. I'm James Alyx here in Minnesota for not
the penultimate but soon to be penultimate and then ultimate
episode from.
Speaker 3: Minneapolis, and I'm joined by Charles C. W.
Speaker 6: Cook in Florida and Stephen Hayward, who I believe is
broadcasting from John at Hugh's office, which may explain the.
Speaker 3: Tie on the wall on the hangar? Is that actual
you neckwere that we're seeing here in the video feed.
Speaker 5: It's actually you neckwhere and you books and you everything
behind us.
Speaker 6: So you go for you, good for you. I will
get to the president's speech in a bit. He finally
made that bully pulpit speech about around that people have
been asking him to do. But first and foremost in
my mind is the fact that.
Speaker 8: It didn't blow up on the pad.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry, We're going back to the moon. That was fantastic.
That was absolutely stunning and stunning and brave, as they
say the things that are neither, and we are indeed
going back to the moon. And I'm curious with you guys,
how you think this plays in the America consciousness right now,
because I think this is a great moment to do it.
I'm all in favor of spending huge amounts of money
to put people on other planets. I always had been
when I was a kid, I was just a space nut,
and the site of them were rocketing into the heavens
still thrills me and makes me glad to be an American,
what say you?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I was the same as you, James. I
would get up at on the West Coast at five
thirty in the morning, which is a lot for an
elementary school kid to watch the Gemini launches and the
Apollo launches. And partly that's because my dad actually worked
on the project, like you know, many thousands of other
Americans in those years. My dad had a small company
that made some parts for the rocket stagings and even
the parachute released timer and relay for the Apollo capsule,
which was kind of an important thing if you think
about it, right, yeah, right, right, And so you know,
he was in the middle of the whole Apollo thirteen
story that's dramatized in the film. Not in Houston, but
you know, up all night with his engineers testing and
retesting to see how low on average the thing would
still work in that desperate situation. But I remember my
dad saying later, I said, oh, why aren't you bidding
on and trying to work on a space shuttle? And
he said, NASA's becoming too bureaucratic and difficult to deal with.
In the sixties, they were in a hurry, and they
didn't have time to build in the stupid bureaucracy and
slow things down and make it more expensive. And so
my dad said no thanks by nineteen seventy four, and
so that's where we are today. Are the costs for
NASA's projects were way hired. And SpaceX and the other
private sector efforts, and some of the stuff they're using
they're contracting out to the private firms, as they did
with the rockets in the sixties and seventies. But you know,
I do think that NASA became ossified. But one story
you may know about was Apollo twelve, the second mission
to land. I don't know, a minute after takeoff or
thirty seconds the rocket got hit by lightning and everything
went dead. And you know, today you would have said, well,
you got to pull the punch the abort button. And
instead they look aroun and the astronauts are rebooting things.
And I have a bunch of twenty eight year old
engineers with pocket protectors and I'll look around and do
this and that, and I say, yeah, we're good to go.
We would allow that to happen, right, I mean, now,
we've had two bad accidents with the Shuttle of course,
and so we're more risk averse than we were then.
But still that was a different world then, and I
think a better one.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they had to reboot the operating system, all six
hundred and forty two kilobytes of it, right, Charles, you
know this is how I don't know how you feel
about these things.
Speaker 3: Growing up as a brit as you did.
Speaker 6: You may have felt part of the anglosphere that made
this possible, but you didn't have the same sort of
flag waving raw rah, here we go go eagles sort
of thing. I like Stephen, believe that Elon Musk is
probably the future and he's going to get us to
a Mars base. Starliner is an incredible piece of machinery.
But still still I'm happy artemism in its way will
be on its way.
Speaker 2: I love it, I always have. I didn't feel part
of it.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was one of the things that made
me realize how awesome America was. That's the kid, as
they were the only country that had been to the
Moon and they had the Space Shuttle, so I didn't
have any stolen valor. I thought this was a distinctly
American achievement. I wanted to be a part of it,
but I wasn't.
Speaker 2: Living in Florida.
Speaker 1: It's been really fun because I'm in North Florida, so
I'm not too far away from the Kennedy Space Center,
and I'm close enough that i could just walk out
the back of my house and.
Speaker 2: Watch it go. And it looked pretty close.
Speaker 1: So what we did is we put on the NASA
app on the Apple TV, and then I sent the
audio from it to every Sono speaker in the house,
so it felt like we were in the control room.
And then when it started going, we walked out the
back door and watched it actually go up. It was
immense fun. My kids were enthralled. Actually one of them
there wasn't here with me. He was at a baseball
practice and he said, and this is the most American
thing I've ever heard in my life. My wife said,
all of the kids at the baseball practice drop their bats,
stop playing baseball for a moment, and looked up at
the sky to watch the rocket go up.
Speaker 6: That is America. That is absolutely America. Although you know,
to be somewhat dark here for a second, I can
imagine you watching it go up, and then there's a
bright flash as it explodes and there's three seconds before
your Sono's feed changes and you think, oh, I've got
a lag problem here. I'm curious about what we're going
to get for new technology. Are we going to get
any tang out of this? Are we going to get
the space pens that write upside down? And by the way,
I'm always reminded that anecdote that people tell, you know, well,
the Americans, the Americans, in their way, with all of
their money and their desire to solve problems that didn't
need to be solved, invented the space pen that could
write upside down and have ink go flow to the
ball at any single angle. The Russians used a pencil,
and we're supposed to say, oh, those crafty you know,
those Russians really cutting through it, until somebody pointed out
that's the worst thing you want to use because it
releases microparticles of graphite which get into everything and clawed relays,
which is why you know, the end of going down
in flames and them telling nobody anyway.
Speaker 5: So well, James, I'm looking forward to that old newspaper
cliche from the sixties to make a comeback. You remember,
it is any country that can land a man on
the moon can solve x social problem? I always said
the best version was any country that can land a
man on the moon can abolish the income tax. But
then the problem that cliche was, we couldn't land a
man on the moon for another fifty years.
Speaker 9: So we can.
Speaker 5: We'll bring it.
Speaker 6: Back, We'll bring it back, and we'll so we'll have
people with slide rules who are then trying to figure
out exactly how to balance the federal budget. Right right, Well,
enough about space, let's get back to Earth.
Speaker 3: With John Malcolm.
Speaker 6: John is vice president of the Edwin Meathes, the third
Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom.
John wilcome, Hi, good to see you guys.
Speaker 8: Well, a little bit of shift at DOJ bondy out.
Speaker 6: Reports are the President gave the news as the two
drove to hear initial oral arguments before Scotus in that
birthright citizenship case. What would you say about her performance
and what do you believe was the reason that she
was shown the door?
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, Oh, a whole variety of reasons. She obviously
hasn't had a great deal of success in terms of
indicting some of the people on Donald Trump's enemies list.
Certainly her handling of the Epstein files was something of
a fiasco, but she helped drum up a lot of
interest for the whole thing by, you know, saying that
this was just a cover up and the Biden administration
was hiding all of these records.
Speaker 10: And then at one point she was talked about, you know.
Speaker 9: A client list, and she said, it's right here on
my desk and sitting right here, and you know, we'll
be releasing all of this stuff soon. And then it
came out in dribs and drabs and she said there
was no client list, and there were all kinds of
problems with the redaction. And so no matter what she
did at that point, she was accused of covering up,
and no doubt infuriated Donald Trump. And that's probably just,
you know, one of several things that she did. She
I think he tried to be a loyal soldier pursuing
all of these investigations into the twenty twenty election, which
clearly obsesses the president. She actually got indictments returned against
Jim Comy and Latsia James, but they were dismissed and
so for that and various other sundry reasons it was
time for her to go.
Speaker 5: Well, John can given the Trump really wants to use
the DOJ to persecute his enemies, about which I have
a certain political sympathy with. But the question is can
anyone do the job that he seems to want done
by DOJ?
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think it's going to be very, very hard.
Speaker 9: I mean he fired the US attorney, the appointed US
attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, because he said
that he wasn't going to do it, that the evidence
wasn't there to indict either Comy or James. He then
installed somebody who had been a personal attorney for him,
who had not been ever been a prosecutor at any
point in her life, and got those indictments returned. And
then a judge ended up saying that they were that
she had not been validly appointed and threw the indictments out.
At this point, with Respectacomy, I mean he was charged
with perjury for testimony that he gave before Congress. The
Statute of Limitations has run the charges against Letitia James.
You hear that you might be they're looking into the
same kind of charges against Senator Adam schiff from California.
All I have to do with mortgage fraud kind of
you know, weak charges. And then they attempted to bring
an indictment against these six Democratic senators who had put
out a video, you know, that said that soldiers should
disobey illegal orders. And not only did a grand jury
refuse to return an indictment.
Speaker 10: But you're hearing that not a single grand juror.
Speaker 9: Voted to return that indictment, which is remarkable. I mean,
I'm a former federal prosecutor. I mean, you have a
room of about twenty four citizens. You have to get
sixteen of them to say just that, you know, it's
more likely than not that a crime was The presentation
is made entirely by government lawyers and government investigators, and
not a single one thought that there was a case there.
Speaker 5: So the head the headline, the headline is ham sandwich acquitted.
Speaker 9: Right, that's exactly right, and sandwich not even presented on
the menu.
Speaker 6: Well, how much of that has Bondi's fault and how
much of that, perhaps is just the case itself where
people were disinclined to get the administration what they wanted
for reasons.
Speaker 9: Well, I think a lot of that had to do
with had nothing to do with Pam Bondi in the
same sense that you know, Janine Pirot, the US attorney
in the District of Columbia, tried to bring felony charges
against the dojmployee who has since been fired for throwing
a sandwich at an ice officer.
Speaker 10: Grand jury refused.
Speaker 1: To let the ham sandwich off and then thrown at
the officers.
Speaker 9: They actually brought misdemeanor charges against him, which doesn't require
a grand jury to return an indictment.
Speaker 10: And the guy got acquitted for that. So you know,
some of these cases.
Speaker 9: I do think that with respect to the Epstein files
and the halting release of this and the over promising
what they were going to show, she bears some responsibility
for that.
Speaker 2: I see a certain paradox here. On the one hand,
a lot of the blame.
Speaker 1: Has to be at Trump's feet, because Trump's obsessed with
silly things, and he's asking his attorney general to do
silly things, and when you ask somebody to do silly things,
they very often get silly results. On the other hand,
the conservative movement in general, and Trump in particular in
some senses, has.
Speaker 2: Goals that are quite hard to accomplish.
Speaker 1: I think most of them are correct, but they are
hard to accomplish because they require the unsettling and often
the reversal of lots of precedents and bureaucratic habits. And
you really need someone deft to do that. You need
an Edwin Mees.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: How much is this the product of Because Trump has
a lot of silly ideas as well as good ones,
He's not picking someone who he can tolerate, who is
really exceptionally good, like you know, Bill Barr. I just
looked at Pambondi, and I have nothing particular against her.
I live in Florida. She was fine here, but she's
not the person who's going to upend America in the
Trumpian mold, right.
Speaker 9: I think what you're talking about when you're talking about
a Bill Barr or an Edwin mess it's a very different.
Speaker 10: Kind of nominees.
Speaker 9: So it was it used to be the case, particularly
in a post Watergate era, that while attorneys general are
part of the administration, are supposed to implement a president's
policies in terms of, you know, defending laws that he's
gotten passed or changing priorities in terms of prosecutorial direction
that presidents were under no circumstances supposed to get involved
in criminal investigations, and that was largely done to protect
the integrity of the investigation and also protect them from
political fallout. Donald Trump has blown through all of those barriers.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 9: It used to be that you could only the president
could only talk to the Attorney general, maybe the deputy
attorney general. There were protocols in place, you know, for
how these things go. And now my understanding is that
Donald Trump calls whoever he wants to in the Justice
Department about anything he wants to. If he doesn't like
the way the banner that they've hung of his face
outside of the Justice Department, which I face by the
way from my office, he can call the.
Speaker 10: Janitor and ask him to, you know, rearrange it. And
he just doesn't care.
Speaker 9: I mean, he has supporters who will sit there and
say that the Biden Justice Department, with some justification, weaponized
the justice system, and that he is out to rectify
all of that. And you know, certainly the way he
appears to be rectifying it is by exacting enough pain
against his Democratic opponents that everyone will cry uncle, and
no one will ever do this again.
Speaker 10: I don't think it's going to work. But anyway, so
a Bill Barr and an Edwin.
Speaker 9: Meses, they honored those limits and they said this is
for your good to protect the rule of law, and
you will not ask questions about these investigations. And Bill Barr,
of course had the guts to stand up both when
it favored the president, by for instance, saying we're not
going to diet on either the Russia Gate allegations or
the obstruction of justice allegations, even though Muller had at
least suggested that the latter was potentially prosecutable. But he
also had the guts to stand up to Donald Trump
and say, there is no evidence of massive fraud in
the twenty twenty election, and you know, we're not going
to pursue it, and if you want my resignation, here
it is.
Speaker 10: And the president accepted it.
Speaker 1: But they're also brilliant, right, I mean, there were brilliant people.
And I think that's one thing I'm driving at is
I found it really frustrating with Trump because he won.
He got his revenge in my opinion, by winning, and
he has all of these ideas, some of which are important,
some of which are the ideas that the conservative movement
has had for years and that he has just picked up.
And I just I'm asking that's not going to get
done by Pam Bondi or Matt Gates who never got there.
You need someone who is a hard core heavyweight. And
I'm just is Trump going to pick this guy or
is he going to fail? Because it seems to me
that he's going to fail.
Speaker 10: Well, I'm not so sure.
Speaker 9: The company who's intelligent is going to still get him
what he wants. I mean, look, there are many many
respects in which this president is exerting executive authority. He's
challenged all kinds of norms in coordinat He's actually won
a fair number of these challenges, and he's likely to
win more. He lost on the tariff case, he may
lose on birthright citizenship, he might lose Lisa cookcase. But
he's going to win more more often than not on
the cases that he has been bringing, and they have
certainly been very, very aggressive.
Speaker 10: But whether he picks Todd.
Speaker 9: Blanche or Harmie Dillon or Zelden or Janine Piro, you know,
I these kind of personal vendetta stuff.
Speaker 10: I think that the I of the person whom he appoints.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, I don't mean stuff that's all silly.
Speaker 1: I just mean the rest of the agenda that he
has is benefits from a very smart ag.
Speaker 10: Oh that is true.
Speaker 9: Anyway, Look, they've been very good about the cases that
they have been bringing.
Speaker 10: I mean, they're losing in.
Speaker 9: All of these district courts because the challengers are being
strategic about where they're filing these cases, but they're winning
most of them the appellate level and certainly at the
Supreme Court. And that shows there's some very smart attorneys
who are picking and choosing which cases to bring and
when to file.
Speaker 5: Well, how about this John If we want a big
name or Charlie. If we want a big name for
ag why don't get one from the past. How about
a guy named Robert F. Kennedy.
Speaker 10: He's a big fact that I know.
Speaker 5: I know, I can I switch gears to the Supreme
Court John for a bit, because that's the other thing
on our mind this week. So, I mean, everyone I
think in the media would say Pam Bondi had the
worst week in Washington, but actually I think Katanji Brown
Jackson had the worst week in Washington. Because going to
last a lot longer. And so first you had the
eight to one decision early in the week on the
Colorado statute that tried to ban conversion therapy, and not
only was she the soul of the santan a rather
dumb one, but even Justice Kagan couldn't take it any longer.
And then a footnote swattered her down. I thought, boy,
that really shows you what what a blunder Biden made
putting her on the court. And then in the birthright
citizenship case, she said some of the silliest things. I
want to go through that case more seriously with you.
But so there's that, And you don't have to spend
a time en if you don't want to. But let's
go through these two cases. I think that first one
being eight to one was pretty significant because a lot
of Blue states want to I tend to avoid the
language of the LGBTQ agenda, but there really is one
at worked behind these statutes, right, They're trying to really
enforce a specific ideological, identitarian orthodoxy, and the Court did well.
Inness I think I assume you're following all of these
as you usually do.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Look, a Colorado in particular is aggressive in this agenda.
They went after films, the baker, they went after the
woman who had three h three creative, the website, and
now there's there's this case Childs versus Salazar. Look, I
Kittanji brown Jackson would not have been my pick. My
former employer has said that I actually said that she
was a good pick. I never said that she was
a good pick. All I said was since she was
not the most radical nominee in the history of Supreme
Court nominees, that probably could have easily gone, for instance,
to Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Katanji Brown Jackson. But she's
there now, she is life tenured. An eight to one
decision doesn't always mean that you are wrong. I you know,
Justice rolled her in Morrison versus Olsen. I think that
that time that his descent has stood the test of time.
But you know, she's not only going to be there
next week or next month, giving someone else an opportunity
to take her place as having had the worst month.
But she's going to be there for as long as
she wants to be there. I suppose now that Pam
Bondi is on the hot seat, the two people who
are most happy about that are Christy Norman, Corey Lewandowski.
Speaker 5: Well right, I say that Katanji Brown Jackson will be
longer legacy of Biden than Hunter Biden's paintings. Yes, that's
not right now. The birthright citizenship case, I was on
an airplane and so I couldn't hear it. So I've
caught some snippets, but it doesn't sound like it went
very well. What and you know, brena tea leaves is
always a doubtful thing to do because they often surprise you.
But what's your sort of first pass handicap of the thing.
Speaker 9: Well, going into it, I thought it was highly likely
that the administration would lose.
Speaker 10: I think, by the way, they actually have a very
strong argument.
Speaker 9: I mean, you know, people like my colleague Amy Swearer
has written Lord of your articles on this, Ywan Worman,
Randy Barnett, Kurt lash and very very serious scholars. I
think that there is, you know, within the raised subject
to the jurisdiction thereof a notion of allegiance that was
discussed in the fourteenth Amendment was adopted, and there were
a few of the justices, Justice Alito, Justice Thomas, although
he didn't say a whole lot who you know, appeared
to take those arguments seriously.
Speaker 10: I still think that it's.
Speaker 9: Likely that the administration will lose this case. Jonathan Turley
thinks that the administration actually is going to win, but
he appears to be a sole voice out there. But
you know, as they dig into these briefs, there were
a lot of Amikis breeze files.
Speaker 10: Some of them were really quite good. You know, they
may change the mind.
Speaker 9: I mean you mentioned before about the child versus Salizar case.
I mean, if you had told me after that oral
argument that Sonya Soto Mayor was going to join with
the majority, I would have said you were crazy, based
on the questions that she asked. And yet she did
end up joining the majority in that case. So I
think it's likely the administration will lose a birthright citizenship case,
but I think it's closer than many people think and
will soon.
Speaker 5: Well, now you make an interesting point. You mentioned Elan
Worman and Richard Epstein has joined the right, and this
used to be a very fringe theory limited to my friends,
who really I think in the first to come up
with a thirty years ago Editler and John Eastman right,
and now it's kind of gone mainstream, and you have
people like Richard Epstein and Illin Worman and several other
people you mentioned. I also think back to a case
and I wonder if Trump loses this case, I wonder
if it might have the effect of the loss in
the Kilo case twenty years ago. You remember that case
that ij brought for using emminent domain, and they were
sure they were going to lose. And I thought they'd
be lucky to get two votes, would be ecstatic with three,
and they got four yea. And what happened then was
a political backlash, right, A lot of states changed their laws. Now.
I don't know if a loss in this case, I mean,
I think if if you lose, it's going to propel
this argument forward. And I keep going back to what
I hear about in California lot and Trump's talked about.
It is the birthright tourism of the rich Chinese. For example, right,
see how under any common sense understanding of subject to
the jurisdiction or off could apply to people who come
here for a week with you know, companies that organize
this in China to have a baby. So you can
get the option of the United States citizenship later and
then just leave on the next plane out of town. So,
you know, other aspects of this. For you know, a
Mexican family it's been living and working here for two years,
that's that's different and more difficult. But it seems to
me that at least on that birth rights tourism phenomenon
going on, that somewhere, there's got to be a change
in that. And maybe it's legislative, maybe it's constitutional, always harder,
but it seems to me that even a loss is
going to be advanced the ball down the field.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, certainly as a political matter at my birth
tourism is a reality. You know, it depends did Trump
administration loses. It depends to some degree on how it loses.
Speaker 3: Whether they write, well, just as.
Speaker 9: A constitutional matter, anybody who's born on our shores, except
if you're an ambassador's to or an invading army, you
are a citizen.
Speaker 10: Then that's it. It would require a constitutional amendment.
Speaker 9: If they sit there and say, well, you know, if
you're a temporary sojourner here and you really don't have
any status, you're not domiciled here, you haven't been there
for a while, that maybe Congress under you know, Class
five or the fourteenth Amendment can pass some legislation on that,
then maybe you can do something legislatively.
Speaker 1: Do you think that the Trump administration's position, which is
in line I think with the mainstream rights position on
the unitary executive is going to survive. We've got a
case with the Federal Reserve where I think that the
argument shouldn't be any different for the Federal Reserve than
for any other agency. But I suspect it will be
practically just because the Federal Reserve of works well and
there's so much faith in it, and the United States
has the reserve currency and so forth.
Speaker 2: I'm very interested in this because I'm very much.
Speaker 1: Of the view that the unitary executive theory is correct.
But I'm a little bit nervous that we're going to
start seeing these exceptions which over time will eat away
at the whole.
Speaker 9: So I don't you know, Look, I don't think there's
anything particularly novel about the unitary executive theory.
Speaker 10: It wasn't hatched out of thin air.
Speaker 9: I mean, it just is, you know, article to invest
the executive hour in a president of the United States,
So there's nothing magical about that. I think you are
a right, and it's there's the one case involving the
head of the marriage System's Protection Board, and you know
the the FTC about whether you can fire somebody from
an independent agency for a cause the Federal Reserve. That
case is different against Lisa Cook because the president is
according to have cause against her and it says I
get to make the determination about what's caused and how
much due processes do. I think he may lose that case,
but he didn't attempt to fire her without cause. Now,
John Sower was asked during that argument, Hey, what's the
diff you know, I mean, you're arguing.
Speaker 10: That we could fire her, you could fire her without cause.
Speaker 9: And he said, no, we're not making that argument, and
it was just kind of left hanging out there. I
don't see what the big difference is other than the
political argument that you make, which is some people may say,
you know, the Federal Reserve is just too important touch.
But look, that did not stop Janine Piro, probably at
the direction of Pam Bondi, from issuing subpoenas to the
Federal Reserve that basically implied that they were going to
charge their own Powell with perjury. That's certainly an attempt
to Many people said, well, this is really just an
attempt to bully the Federal Reserve. They weren't firing thro
home Powell, but they were just threatening to indict him
of bringing pressure. But if they win that pace against
you know, on the independent agencies and the ability to
remove somebody without cause, then I suppose the Federal Reserve
is fair game and the future president maybe this one
will decide to test it out.
Speaker 5: Trying to think of what other big ones are left
out there? It's only early April. Are there anymore big
cases still to we argued John, I know we're going
to wait till the end of the June as usual
were some of the big ones. But what's still left
to we argue, that's a big one. I've lost track.
Speaker 9: Well, the president just granted not the president, the court
just granted cert like two weeks ago, but ordered argument
for the second week in April for a case about
whether the president can end the temporary protective status right
or for all kinds of you know, aliens from different countries.
You know, it's supposed to be temporary protective status, but
of course in Washington there's very very few temporary things,
and people have been there for years and you the
presidents have said, okay, I'm going to end through the
secretary who was Kirsty Gnome now would be Mark Wayne Mullen.
We're going to end temporary protective status for all these
people who they're no longer in danger.
Speaker 10: National disasters, natural disasters are over. You know, we're ending this.
Speaker 9: And a bunch of lower court judges said, oh no,
you can't do that. You didn't follow proper procedure. Well,
there's a statute in place that says that a judge
cannot question the Secretary of DHS secretaries discriminations to grant
or terminate or extend temporary protective status. And twice the
Supreme Court lifted injunctions by lower court judges, but that
that did nothing. District Court judges kept right on granting
these injunctions. The Second Circuit allowed that injunction to stand,
and I think the Court is going to say enough
is enough. This statute is very clear that judges have
no role in this, and that's what it means. So
that's an important case. Obviously, millions of people will be
affected by that, and that's going to be argued I
think next week.
Speaker 1: So That's quite an interesting issue because we had a case,
the first birthright citizenship case that wasn't where the matter
of injunctions was raised and supposedly limited. And yet I
still see people throwing their hands up and saying, Ah,
the lower courts are out of control.
Speaker 2: They either won't.
Speaker 1: Uphold president or they keep intervening and arrogating themselves and
enjoining clear legal uses of executive power. So did that
casse A case have a lot less force than we
were told it did, or are we just seeing the
around the edges?
Speaker 10: Except well, I think it was an important and important case.
Speaker 9: I mean, nationwide injunctions have been around for a while,
but they were really just out of control in this administration.
But there were still other avenues, uh, class actions, et cetera.
A state or a judge determining if there were many
states involved that you couldn't grant complete relief without basically
imposing a nation wide injunction. That left room for this
sort of sort of shenanigans by lower court judges. And
you know, the lower court judges will sit there and say, well,
all of these rulings are not the CASA case, but
these rulings lifting these injunctions, you know, their interim orders,
and we're not really getting any reasoning as to why
they're granting these issuing why they're granting these different orders.
So hey, we're trying our best until you give us
greater clarity. I think some of that's a bit nonsense.
I mean, you know, you can hear the music as
well as anybody and know what kind of tune they're
playing and should be able to govern yourselves accordingly.
Speaker 10: But you know, district court judges their life tenure too.
Speaker 9: They're going to do what they're going to do, and
I think the Supreme Court this time is going to
put an end to this. John.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about where you work advancing American freedom.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 6: According to my little website here, you're located on eight
to one Pennsylvania Avenue, right next to the FBI building,
which some regard as restricting American freedom. So there's a
nice little, you know, push pull thing going on. There
must be some static electricity in the middle of the street.
Tell us more about this institution, and specifically the Institute
for the Rule of Law, because that is one of
the things that we like to think characterizes the United States.
Imperfect though it maybe separates us from other places. And
is it inherited tradition that goes back to Roman times?
Is it imperiled this rule of law? Has it always
been so? And people always looked upon it a bit
of scance and say, it's two tier, it's rigged. Where
are we Let's let's start there. Where are we rule
of law wise in America is compared to where we've been.
Speaker 10: Well, it's interesting you talk about the push and pulse.
Speaker 9: We're across the street from the FBI, we are caddy
cornered to the Department of Justice. And we're also across
the street from the National Archives where the Constitution sits.
So the Mease Institute for the Rule of Law obviously
named after Edwin Mee, seventy fifth Attorney General of the
United States. I used to be in charge of the
meet Center at the Heritage Foundation. We've all come over
to Advancing American Freedom. The organization doubled in size when
we did, and it's was founded five years ago by.
Speaker 10: Former Vice President Mike Pence.
Speaker 9: And in terms of the rule of law, you know,
we care about things like the issues that we've been
discussing judicial overreach. Executive Branch overreach, re empowering, or giving
Congress a backbone so that it starts to exercise it's
constitutional prerogatives. We care about things like judicial interpretation, promoting
originalism and originalist scholarship. You know, that's important, the non
weaponization of the Justice Department. I'm a former federal prosecutor.
I was for seven years. I was an assistant US attorney.
I was a deputy Assistant Attorney General, just like John
Yut in the Bush administration. We were colleagues, you know,
very important that the rule of law be upheld, particularly
when you have the ability to incarcerate someone and take
away their liberty interests. And we work with the conservative
people in the conservative legal movement to try to bolster
their efforts to put forward what we think are correct
and defensible positions in a whole host of areas.
Speaker 6: Is there a golden moment in which the rule of
law in America was probably at its apex?
Speaker 3: It was applied fairly behind the scenes.
Speaker 6: There were no men meeting in rooms with cigars and
whiskey to determine how a case should go. Or is
it pretty much always been an imperfect thing, you know,
this crooked timber, etc.
Speaker 9: Well, I think there used to be a perception that
when you were appointing life tenured federal judges that you
look for things like qualifications and not for things like
you know, do you think they were going to agree
with you as a political matter on this issue or
that issue. That certainly appears to have broken down. So
you have some judges who I don't think ought to
be on the bench. Who are they are? And they're
going to do what they're going to do. But look,
I think this Court is a solid court. Certainly from
the perspective of being an originalist. It's the strongest the
court has perhaps ever been. I mean, even a Katachi
Brown Jackson during the confirmation hearing talks like an originalist.
In Helena Kagan says, we're all originalists. Now, some are
more rigorous in how they practice it. But I think
the Supreme Court they are not cowed, particularly by this president.
I mean Neil Gorsichi Cony Barrett, he said after the
Tarwer cakes that they were an embarrassment to their families.
I don't think that either that or his showing up
at court the birthright citizenship case is going to make
any difference in.
Speaker 10: Terms of how they're going to rule.
Speaker 9: I think they have a backbone, So I think the
rule of law is in pretty good hands at the moment.
Speaker 10: With the Supreme Court at the lower court, it's more
of a mix.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about advancing American freedom at the of the
organization under which you are tucked or in which you
are tucked. If you had one issue that you had
to work upon to advance American freedom, the one thing
that says this is where we're losing the most.
Speaker 3: What would it be?
Speaker 9: Well, the thing about advancing American freedom and with with
Mike Pence, is that you know, it is a principled
conservative organization, unapologetic about that. And there are times when
the president does things which we support, when they attracted
Nicholas Maduro from Venezuela fighting the war in Iran. There
are times when he does things that we do not support,
the tariffs, taking equity positions in companies, and we feel
we feel free to advance arguments to support our positions,
and you know, let the chips ball where they may.
There are other organizations that are out there that do
not follow that practice.
Speaker 6: This may sound petty and small minded, but sometimes those
of us here, you know, think that the restrictions in
an American freedom can be something as quotidian as a
light bulb or the ability of the chargement to flush
with gusto. Is this one of those things that you
look at. I mean, when you cast your eye upon
the great American country, you can see, of course, legislative
initiative laws things that restrict American freedom.
Speaker 3: But there's also the matter in.
Speaker 6: Which the regulatory state has so many little effects on
people that we get pinned in a little bit more
by these things.
Speaker 3: Trumps did a lot to take to get rid of that.
Speaker 6: I would saying, but is that a plane in which
you involve, engage or are you more concerned of things
at a more stratospheric level.
Speaker 9: Oh no, no, no, We certainly fight back against overreach
by the administrative state. It's not only President Trump in
terms of his deregulatory effort that I think made some
significant advances there.
Speaker 10: The Supreme Court has tried to return power.
Speaker 9: To Congress through the Major Questions doctrine, through overturning Chevron
deference with the Lower Right, and relentless cases and sitting
there and saying, you know, look, Congress, you can't just
pass vague laws and then go home and fundraise. You know,
if you're going to hand over vast quantities of power,
you're going to have to be explicitly clear that you're
doing that and why you are doing that, and lay
down some intelligible principles that an agency can impost. And
then we'll decide whether or not you had the you know,
the Congression, whether you had the consers and authority to
delegate that. So all of this is an attempt to
reign in the administrative state. I hope that Congress seizes
that opportunity. I hope that the courts take loweror Bright
seriously and say, Okay, we're now going to look at
laws and implementing regulations, and we're going to come up
with our best interpretations and not just defer to an
interpretation by an agency that walls within the realm were reasonable,
even if it's not the best interpretation. In terms of
things that I worry about, I worry on both the
right and the left that there appear to be arguments that,
you know, I'm not that apocalyptic.
Speaker 10: I think that we've had tough.
Speaker 9: Times and we're going to continue to move along throughout
different administrations. But to have people on the right and
on the left who seem to think if we don't
seize the reigns of power and do absolutely everything we
can now during the Biden administration, during the Trump administration,
all is lost and we might as well just, you know,
give up and cease being a country. And I fight
back against against that. I think these are important fights
that we have.
Speaker 10: But I do not believe.
Speaker 9: I do not believe that everybody who espouses a different
view from me is necessarily evil. Nor do I believe
that if I lose an argument on a particular issue
at a particular time, that that's it.
Speaker 10: The world as we know it will never be the same.
Speaker 6: Well, I agree with a lot of what you say,
particularly having Congress voting on these things as opposed to
delegating to an EPA guy who says that your backyard
inflatable kittie pool is a wetland and can taken away.
So yes, indeed, all right, John Malcolm, thanks a lot.
Usually on the way out here, we say, and don't
forget to read his book or his recent paper. And
so the next time we have you, we would like
you to have a book done so that we can
read it.
Speaker 3: More about the Rule of Life.
Speaker 10: I tell you what a good thing to start a
right here? Yeah, well, is the Heritage Guide to the Constitution.
Speaker 9: This is something that I edited with Josh black Men
while it was still at the Heritage Foundation. I'm very,
very proud of this, and anybody who wants to understand
originalist arguments and understand the Constitution better, they can look
at it clause by clause, and I would encourage people
to get this book and read it.
Speaker 5: But I edited it heatedly endorsed John. I assigned that
to students. I use it myself a lot. It is
one of the best resources. And I'm so glad you
guys did the new edition.
Speaker 6: Thank you fantastic, John. Thanks for joining us today. We
hope to have you back in the future. Good luck,
and we'll.
Speaker 3: Talk to you later. Bye bye.
Speaker 10: Sounds great.
Speaker 8: Well, before he mentioned there.
Speaker 6: Briefly the one in Iran, which apparently advancing American Freedom
is for we are at war in the prision and.
Speaker 3: Finally gave that bully pulpit speech.
Speaker 6: A lot of people that had been asking him to
do stood up there and uh restination and said, and
I quote here, I said a lot about things about
the you know armed forces, swift.
Speaker 3: Decisive victory.
Speaker 6: It's the Navy's gone, air force and ruins. He said,
their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard course
is being decimated as we speak. And then talking about
the Strait of Horror moves, he said, you know, when
it comes to that oil, we don't need it. We
don't need it to We've he said, quote, we've beaten
and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated both military and
economically in every other way in the countries of the world.
Speaker 3: To receive oil to the.
Speaker 6: Strait must take that passage. But take care of that passage. Uh,
use it for yourselves, he said. Iran has been essentially decimated.
Here we have the clip from the Princess Bride where
you keep using that word. All right, and I know
this is the least important thing upon which to fasten,
but I have would either like you to weigh in.
Speaker 3: On whether we've lost the word decimate as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sadly, I'm afraid we have. It's like using impact
as a verb. I've been against that forever and I've
lost the other phrase that's now thirty years old, is
we're going to grow the economy. It's just it's fingernails
on the blackboard to me, I wash all these.
Speaker 8: I be amused by what you said.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 1: Yes, nauseous nauseated one upon which I insist, but I
have lost there's all manner of these, and I drive
my kids crazy by insisting upon them.
Speaker 2: But yes, we've lost.
Speaker 3: That nauseous and nauseated.
Speaker 6: Of course, if you are not if you are poisoned,
you know, poisonous and poison poisonated. Yeah, somebody corrected me
on that once and I can't not undo it. And
it's it's a it's a tremendous burden.
Speaker 3: Isn't a gentleman to watch?
Speaker 2: Momentarily, James? Momentarily? There is another one that is wrong.
Speaker 1: But I feel bad about this because at Disney World
they still have that old great voice that they had
from the fifties.
Speaker 2: They still use it.
Speaker 1: On the trams that take you from the parking lot, and.
Speaker 2: It says the tram will be here momentarily, which.
Speaker 1: Is wrong, which is wrong, But I mean, we can't
go back and get him to re record because he's dead,
but he should re record it. It won't be here momentarily,
it will be here in a moment and then it
will stay here until it's taken you to the front.
Speaker 8: Who is that Paul Footies who did the voice for that?
It might be it might be because Paul Freeze.
Speaker 6: Did the Haunted, did the Haunted mansion quite quite nicely.
He was all over the place, the man of a
thousand voices, they call him. You know, I think I've
heard four. But he was great and distinctive.
Speaker 8: All right, war, So.
Speaker 3: What do you think of the whole speech? Did you
like it? Was it? Mission accomplished? Was it? I may
keep hearing we're going to talk. We're not going to talk.
We're talking to them, We're not talking to them.
Speaker 6: All I know is that they're continuing to pound and pounded,
to pound and degrade, and the.
Speaker 8: Straits of Hormuz. Thing is very interesting this before.
Speaker 6: We don't need the oil, we don't need it. We
don't care what effect it's going to have. And you
gas goes up for a little while, gas goes up
for a little while. Let's use this all as an
object lesson to show how absolutely toothless the European military is,
and how China doesn't want to seem to tiptoe over
and do something in concert with the Americans. I have
nothing new to add on that, but to you, gentlemen, mind, well, Charlie,
what did you think.
Speaker 5: I know you've been wanting the president to say something,
and I have own thoughts, but since you've been demanding it,
I want to hear your evaluation.
Speaker 1: I thought, as the English say, it was rubbish. Ah,
I thought it was rubbish. And it's not because I'm
against the war. I think the case is quite strong.
I think we're doing quite well, with the exception of
the straight offorme message is big. I do there's a
big political price being paid, but that's what power is for,
you could argue. I just think the Trump's unfocused and
he has never created a coherent framework for the war.
I wish for the entire thing that Marco Rubier was speaking,
because he would.
Speaker 2: Have done it so well.
Speaker 1: Trump is, in his own way, a really good communicator,
but just not things like this.
Speaker 2: The bread and butterer of being.
Speaker 1: President eludes Trump, whereas the bread and butler of running
for president and introducing new ideas into the national bloodstream
is natural to him. But this where you have to
be really focused. Reagan was an absolute master at it.
Franklin Roosevelt unfortunately was a master at it. But Trump
can't do it, and so I felt having called for
him to do it, as if I was perhaps wrong
or he should have let ruviwed it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think I said last week or
one of these recent episodes, and I think Trump is
not good at this kind of speech, the Oval Office address,
or even Harry's standing, and the same idea, that's just
not his strength. I don't go in for the Trump
plays for DJSS, although sometimes it kind of works out
that way. I think for instinctual reasons, not deliberate reasons,
but or mind that, I do suppose that I could
be persuaded that he is being deliberately inconsistent as a
way of keeping the Iranians off balance. At some point
that's got to end or resolve itself somehow. There are
two pieces of news I saw reported first thing Friday morning.
One is on the straight of Horne moves. Our European
and Far Eastern allies had a virtual meeting to talk
about it that we declined to participate in, didn't send
anybody to listen. Even that. Maybe that's true, but it
does suggest that the wider story you hear that Trump
is really using us to bash NATO or maybe even
get us out of NATO or cut our commitment to
NATO by some significant portion. You know, maybe that's possibly true,
and he's trying to keep our allies off balance, which
I think is possibly ill advised. The second thing reported
Friday is that our intelligence, or maybe it's foreign intelligence,
thinks Ron still has half of their weapons in inventory.
And so while we've graded lots of capacities and all
the rest, they still have a lot of armaments. And
I don't know what's going on, but it sure doesn't
look like they are getting ready to surrender any moment soon.
So well, I'm not sure. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3: Sorry.
Speaker 6: If if half of the stuff is in underground cities, yeah,
what are they going to do?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Fortunately, you make them sound really cool when you say
that they have weapons in underground cities. I don't like
these people, but that makes me sort of think that cool.
Speaker 3: Well, they aren't.
Speaker 6: But they looked around and they saw the best thing
to do was to hold it. It was to have
these underground complexes and then just take them out and
load them on the missilelaunchers. From what I understand, so
we've been bombing the entrances and the exits, and they
get them construct you know, the construction crews out and
they dig them out, and then they do it again.
So if they have half their stuff and it's still buried,
they can't get to it. Yeah, that's bad. But if
you notice the number of missiles they've been firing, have
been dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping. Yeah, it
seems to be brutal, but then it seems to be resilient.
And again, we're five weeks into this, and I think
to expect anything else is a bit much. But attention
is going to flutter and fade, I think.
Speaker 8: So it's good that he talked about it.
Speaker 5: Now, it's pretty clear that he's not calm. Well, the
epicyclic head going for a couple of weeks of calming
the markets by making some urnic statement about we're about
to win, they're about to I think that has dissipated now.
And then that's so that that doesn't work. You can't
call the markets now with just another happy talk statement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is something I must say I dislike
about Trump because it is so detached from reality. I
follow the stock market quite closely and I read the
Wall Street Journal's stocks page, and every day for the
last three weeks, it's the most short term nonsense.
Speaker 2: You've ever seen. For a start, and this is.
Speaker 1: An indictment of people who are criticizing the war. For
a start, every small thing gets reported as if it's
breaking these the DAO with up five hundred, the Dow
drop five hundred today, mortgag rates have gone up point
two percent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that it's not very annoying if you're
buying a house right now, or if you're liquidating your
stocks right now, or if you need to fill up
your car in the next few weeks.
Speaker 2: But the hanging on the small changes.
Speaker 1: In the markets is irritating, and Trump indulges it. And
what he really should say is, guys, we're going to
get this done, and it will be too long because
I'm not in favor of forever was, but we do
have to finish this. But instead, what I read is, well,
he's trying to send signals to the market, so we'll
go up again for.
Speaker 2: What a week, then it goes back again.
Speaker 6: I know, I know, all right, Well, we have a
couple of things here that I want to mention to you.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 6: Here's a headline on USA Today's page. This was put
in my show notes that I should say this quote.
Gucci Maine allegedly robbed, kidnapped at studio by rapper Pooh
Shisty DOJ says. I thought immediately of this tweet, which
floats a run from time to time. It came out
a couple of years ago a guy named Damon Owens
who said, I'm fifty All celebrity news looks like this
quote curtains for Zusha case smug and bat boycott, flip
and a grunt.
Speaker 8: Right, He's absolutely right, absolutely right.
Speaker 6: The other thing I wanted to mention, of course, is
that if you would like to flip a grunt, you
can do so with fellow Ricochet people in Milwaukee. Do
you like twenty four to twenty six You've got plenty
of time to get there, to get your trick, your
plane tickets, hope the price of jet fuels come down by.
Speaker 3: Them, or just take the train.
Speaker 6: It's the twenty fourth, twenty sixth of July. And if
you're wondering, what do you mean meet up, that's because
Ricochet members get together in person in person with others, occasionally.
And if you're thinking, oh, I want to go, I
love the place.
Speaker 3: I love the people, and I go some more talk politics.
Speaker 6: I found that I have absolutely never talked politics at
a rickshan.
Speaker 3: It's been everything.
Speaker 6: But it's like getting together with people you've known for
years but haven't met in the flesh.
Speaker 3: It's great fun do it.
Speaker 6: And if you're a Ricochet member and you would like
others to come to you, well, you know, just call
one in your neighborhood and you'd be surprised how many
people show up bearing hot dishes and smiles and the
rest of it. It is a strange and wonderful thing
about Ricochet. And if you don't know what Ricochet is
and you just stumbled into this by some tw trick
of the algorithm, well, first of all, there's seven hundred
and eighty two podcasts for you to listen to. Secondly,
there's lots more at ricochet dot com.
Speaker 3: But behind the wall, the member.
Speaker 6: Feed is a whole community, and yes you have to
pay a little to get to it, but that means
it's self selecting. There's a code of conduct, and you
will find and meet wonderful people who talk about absolutely everything.
There's more to life than politics. There's moonshots and Charles
telling stories of boys in the baseball field dropping their
bats and gloves to regard with reverence as American power
thunders into the imperium again.
Speaker 8: Ah, all right, well.
Speaker 6: We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four point
whatever it is. Give us that five point rating if
you don't mind, Steven Charles, it's been great fun and
we'll see you next week, and we'll see everybody in
the comments, said Ricochet four point whatever.
Speaker 8: Bye bye,