Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Lucretia, the International Woman of Mystery and
Speaker 1: co host of The Three Whisky Happy Hour. We've got
Speaker 1: a great show for you tonight. We're going to be
Speaker 1: discussing tariffs and the Supreme Court's opinion on tariffs today,
Speaker 1: telling Trump he can't use the IEEPA as justification for
Speaker 1: his universal tariffs. It came down that Democrats were celebrating,
Speaker 1: some conservatives were celebrating. Other conservatives are looking at it.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's not such a bad thing. We're going to
Speaker 1: discuss all of that and the Three Whisky Happy Hour.
Speaker 1: But if you enjoy those kinds of discussions, if you
Speaker 1: enjoy hearing conservatives with different points of view, different perspectives
Speaker 1: coming together and having friendly disagreements about important matters within
Speaker 1: the conservative movement, then I have a suggestion for you.
Speaker 1: You should watch or listen to Conservative Crossroads, which is
Speaker 1: Henry Olson's whose senior fellow at the Ethics and Public
Speaker 1: Policy Center. He's one of the smartest guys you've ever
Speaker 1: want to talk to, and just the really nice guy.
Speaker 1: But he's able to disagree.
Speaker 2: He likes to disagree.
Speaker 1: They hash things out on Conservative Crossroads. If you've been
Speaker 1: hoping for a series like this, I encourage you to
Speaker 1: join Henry Olsen and his guests at Conservative Crossroads every
Speaker 1: other Monday as they hash out the ideas and principles
Speaker 1: that will decide the future of the right. So download
Speaker 1: Conservative Crossroads from our partner Ricochet or any platform where
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. Conservatism is that a crossroads, which
Speaker 1: is why all conservatives need Conservative Crossroads.
Speaker 3: Listen today, Why think alone when you can drink it
Speaker 3: all in with Ricochet's Three Whiskey Happy Hour.
Speaker 4: Join your bartenders Steve Hayward, John You, and the International
Speaker 4: Woman of Mystery Lucretia.
Speaker 2: Where they slapped it up and David h leave me
Speaker 2: on the shoulder tops got to give me.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to this edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour.
Speaker 1: It's been a big day for all of us, especially
Speaker 1: for our media gad fly and very famous personality, my
Speaker 1: co host John Yu who has been uh lately the
Speaker 1: the person go to choice for Fox News, especially for
Speaker 1: the women on Outnumbered.
Speaker 2: They love him. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was on today with with what's the what's the
Speaker 1: beauty Queen's name?
Speaker 2: Why do you need to be which one? The blonde?
Speaker 2: The lawyer, the lawyer which long lawyer.
Speaker 1: Oh that you were on TV with several today.
Speaker 4: So John, did you have to cancel your afternoon squash
Speaker 4: game because of all this? Today?
Speaker 5: I think I know this all this The Supreme Court
Speaker 5: interfered with my leisure activities today. Yeah, but I was
Speaker 5: on basically from when the opinion issued, which was seven
Speaker 5: am my time, until about lunchtime. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so you missed the this is a bad joke,
Speaker 4: but somebody sent it to me. You missed the news
Speaker 4: that McDonald's is coming out with a new sandwich. It's
Speaker 4: going to be it's going to be a sandwich with
Speaker 4: rabbit meat called the mcribbitt.
Speaker 5: Oh, now you got me excited. Actually, can I say
Speaker 5: substant I actually had a new fast food thing. I
Speaker 5: was at a club in San Francisco for lunch visiting
Speaker 5: one of my professors from law school is eighty five
Speaker 5: years old, and they had something new called a burger dog.
Speaker 5: Have you ever had one of these?
Speaker 4: No, I want one hamburger amy.
Speaker 5: It was hamburger in the shape of a hot dog.
Speaker 5: It was amazing. I'm already plotting how to get back
Speaker 5: there for more. It was I'm surprised McDonald's doesn't make these. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I've actually seeing good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not sure what a difference it makes. But okay, Well, because.
Speaker 5: You got the hamburger meat, but it's in the shape
Speaker 5: of a tube, so you can broad a bun, the
Speaker 5: hot dog bun, put all the hot dog toppings and
Speaker 5: you can eat like a hot dog and it will
Speaker 5: be grilled and it's much flatter, so you get more
Speaker 5: burnt surface cerea on it than a hamburger. I thought
Speaker 5: about it. I analyzed why was this so good?
Speaker 4: John? That's I can't believe you haven't figured out that's
Speaker 4: just a halfway house to a Philly cheestick.
Speaker 5: Well, there you go exactly.
Speaker 1: I do have to say that one of I'm not
Speaker 1: a hot dog fan, but the Alice Cooper's restaurant Cooper's
Speaker 1: Town that was used to be right outside the baseball
Speaker 1: stadium in Phoenix.
Speaker 2: It's gone.
Speaker 1: It left during COVID unfortun But we used to love
Speaker 1: when we were Phoenix going there. And I have a
Speaker 1: picture of a good friend of mine, it's actually his
Speaker 1: avatar on the phone and they would they had a
Speaker 1: foot long hot dog and it was genuine.
Speaker 2: It was on a oh rinch like a sour billy, Well,
Speaker 2: what do you call it? Yeah, but yeah, that's the
Speaker 2: word I'm going people.
Speaker 1: But it was like across the hot dog it was
Speaker 1: like six different kinds of hot dogs. Like this one
Speaker 1: was a part was a chili dog, and then this
Speaker 1: one was sour kard and it was this huge, long
Speaker 1: hot dog that had just mustard on part of it
Speaker 1: and onions, you know that sort of thing. And I
Speaker 1: would get that every once in a while, even though
Speaker 1: I'd never probably order a hot dog from anywhere but
Speaker 1: Dodger Stadium.
Speaker 5: I have to say, the best hot dog. I'm curious
Speaker 5: what you all think and crysl Lakrischi question where you
Speaker 5: really are a woman of the people if you don't
Speaker 5: like hot dogs. But the best hot dog I ever had,
Speaker 5: I think is New York City Papaya King. How many
Speaker 5: fans of Papaya King Wow, had these? And you have
Speaker 5: a little sign out front, Oh there's Papaya King and
Speaker 5: then there's Grace Pia. But there's so made me laugh
Speaker 5: so much. The sign on the front of Papaya King
Speaker 5: would say the filet mignon of hot dogs, maybe immediately suspicious.
Speaker 4: I thought Sabrats was the best, best thing you could
Speaker 4: get in New York, right.
Speaker 5: Oh no, no, they.
Speaker 2: Put papaya on their hot dogs, have.
Speaker 5: Some strange juice. People from New York City grew up
Speaker 5: in New York would notice too. They have the strange
Speaker 5: papya drinck. I'm not sure there was any papaya, and
Speaker 5: it was some kind of hoop juice. But the hot
Speaker 5: dogs really long and skinny to maximize the chart grilling
Speaker 5: of the hot dogs. Skin Oh okay.
Speaker 1: So the Democrats are partying across the country and we're
Speaker 1: talking about hot dogs. The Democrats are holding celebrations with
Speaker 1: I don't know what do you celebrate? What do you
Speaker 1: celebrate with if you're a Democrat?
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 2: But anyway, because.
Speaker 5: Marijuana, no, no, not anymore.
Speaker 2: No, I really don't know.
Speaker 4: I'm doubling up on Lafoyd Lefroy all the way down
Speaker 4: to because I am so happy about this decision, believe
Speaker 4: or not.
Speaker 1: But I don't know that's a decision to be happy about.
Speaker 1: It's just probably no one to be broken hearted. But
Speaker 1: let's have John at least explain the basics to us.
Speaker 4: What is rare?
Speaker 2: A breed that's.
Speaker 4: Weirdy okay, Yeah, that's that's for sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're labeling them celebrating liquors because now we're going
Speaker 5: to be able to export bourbon to Canada again.
Speaker 4: So getting angry.
Speaker 2: While you're while you're getting ready to talk to now,
Speaker 2: I don't care.
Speaker 1: First of all, congratulations to the women's team, the American
Speaker 1: women's hockey team.
Speaker 2: I don't really know.
Speaker 1: I haven't watched one moment of the the Olympics except
Speaker 1: the you know, highlights reels. But uh, I'm I'm very
Speaker 1: excited about the women's team. About that woman, Alisa Lu,
Speaker 1: the half Chinese woman, that was so awesome, especially in
Speaker 1: comparison to the similar story where she decided to become
Speaker 1: a Chinese spy plant and so that was wonderful. You
Speaker 1: couldn't have written a better story. But now I'm to
Speaker 1: understand that the American men's hockey team will be going
Speaker 1: up against the Canadian men's hockey team and I might
Speaker 1: actually have to watch that, so I don't think I
Speaker 1: have the ability to. So anyway, we'll be cheering for
Speaker 1: the men's American hockey team, and I'm hoping that it's
Speaker 1: going to.
Speaker 2: Be a route of Canada across the course.
Speaker 4: Of course, it's see I'm better than being the Soviet
Speaker 4: Union forty six years ago.
Speaker 6: These days, I think so I would have kind of
Speaker 6: looked with Helena Gou, You guys would be buying my
Speaker 6: idea of birthright citizenship now, because right, Lucretia's referring to.
Speaker 5: The freestyle speyer who's he's born in America. But now
Speaker 5: she's playing for the Chinese Olympic team and allegedly must
Speaker 5: have given up her citizenship in some way or is
Speaker 5: it only a Chinese citizen? So I would have thought,
Speaker 5: you guys, I'd like birthright citizenship because she'd have to
Speaker 5: be an American citizen and then we could try her
Speaker 5: for treason.
Speaker 4: But wait a minute. But by the way, John, did
Speaker 4: you say Helena Goo? Is that her name? I thought
Speaker 4: Helena Goho was one of our stings.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I'm so sorry Helena. Oh my god.
Speaker 5: We can only hope she's not student in our natural
Speaker 5: law class.
Speaker 2: That's right, Eileen, I believe is her first name.
Speaker 5: That's it. There you go, right.
Speaker 4: I caught John in a rare blunder of memory because
Speaker 4: he's usually got to steal from you say something interesting.
Speaker 4: Democrats are celebrating it. I don't think they should be so.
Speaker 1: But yeah, go ahead, let's have John John j just
Speaker 1: give us the basics.
Speaker 5: AH of the case today, learning resources versus Trump. So
Speaker 5: it's interesting when I was on Fox this morning and
Speaker 5: people were looking at it, they're saying fractured core, fractured court.
Speaker 5: But it's not. Actually when you read the opinion, there's
Speaker 5: six clear votes for I think actually a fairly modest opinion.
Speaker 5: The opinion doesn't say Trump can't declare national emergency. The
Speaker 5: opinion doesn't say the president doesn't run national security of
Speaker 5: foreign affairs. The opinion actually has several things I think
Speaker 5: everyone agree with. You know, One, Congress has the power
Speaker 5: over tariffs under the Constitution. Two, Congress can delegate the
Speaker 5: power over tariffs to the president. So this case is
Speaker 5: only about did Congress intend in this emergency statue called
Speaker 5: AIPA to delegate the power of tariffs to the president.
Speaker 5: The statute gives the president the power to regulate all
Speaker 5: exports and imports with foreign countries, all transactions and transmissions
Speaker 5: with other countries, but it didn't say the word tariff.
Speaker 5: So six justices six three conservatives, Roberts who wrote the opinion,
Speaker 5: and then Gorsich and Barrett, and then the three liberals Soda, Mayor, Kagan,
Speaker 5: and Jackson agreed that cause this statute didn't specifically use
Speaker 5: the word tariff in this case, Congress didn't give the
Speaker 5: president that power. Now, I think this is a fairly
Speaker 5: limited significance practically, because, as President Trump announced in his
Speaker 5: press conference today, there are other statutes which give the
Speaker 5: president the power to tariff. So it just requires you
Speaker 5: to take about a year to do it. And these
Speaker 5: laws require you to pick country by country and explain
Speaker 5: why you're targeting that country, whether it's because they're national
Speaker 5: security risk, or they're engaged in unfair trade practices, or
Speaker 5: there's some kind of surge of imports from that country
Speaker 5: in a certain product category. But Trump is eventually going
Speaker 5: to get a large majorities of these tariffs through the
Speaker 5: countries that he may not be able perhaps to impose
Speaker 5: tariffs on like he did before. Would be, say, countries
Speaker 5: that are allies that are not national security threats. I
Speaker 5: don't know, like what would well, Canada, I don't know, because.
Speaker 2: You know I'm serious.
Speaker 5: Actually, yeah, no, this is this is This gets to
Speaker 5: something the court did not address, in which the lower
Speaker 5: courts have generally until Trump been favorable to presidents, which
Speaker 5: is usually when presidents make these decisions that depend on
Speaker 5: the facts of the world, the courts usually say, we
Speaker 5: can't tell what the facts of the world are. We're
Speaker 5: going to defer to the president, and if the president
Speaker 5: and if people disagree, then Congress can stop him. But
Speaker 5: right it's up to the president usually to decide whether
Speaker 5: another country is a threat and what measures to take
Speaker 5: in response. The court didn't get into any of that.
Speaker 5: All they said today was this statute. This AEPA statute,
Speaker 5: which is a very broad emergency statute, just doesn't give
Speaker 5: the president the power paraphy now. Personally, I think this
Speaker 5: is an unduly now reading of the statute because under
Speaker 5: the statute for its entire history, and under the statute
Speaker 5: before it that it replaced, presidents Congresses have authorized president
Speaker 5: to impose complete embargoes on countries. So under this law
Speaker 5: right now, we don't allow any trade, zero trade with Cuba,
Speaker 5: North Korea, Iran. So it's weird. The court is essentially saying, well,
Speaker 5: you could impose in a complete blockade and embargo on
Speaker 5: a country, but you can't tax their exports to US
Speaker 5: by ten percent or twenty percent so I don't think
Speaker 5: that's a very plausible reading of the statue, but that's
Speaker 5: what the majority wanted to do. But in the end,
Speaker 5: that's why I say, legally, Trump's going to be able
Speaker 5: to do this in about a year if he just
Speaker 5: takes his time and uses these other statutes.
Speaker 1: So Steve, I know, is going to roundabout way praise
Speaker 1: Roberts a little bit here. So before he does that,
Speaker 1: I'll do my usual thing with the dread pirate Roberts.
Speaker 2: I'll say he had dread powered Roberts. Sorry that two things.
Speaker 1: One, John, I've already brought this up to you once
Speaker 1: and you denied it, but I'm going to bring it
Speaker 1: up again. You and I had a lovely conversation walking
Speaker 1: through that part of Berkeley where it's completely run down
Speaker 1: and all the windows are boarded up on the west end,
Speaker 1: and we were walking to a restaurant, and we had
Speaker 1: a conversation.
Speaker 5: I deny neither confirm nor deny that the right now.
Speaker 1: This is probably two or three years ago, and and
Speaker 1: we were we were talking about the probability that that
Speaker 1: Roberts would in these big cases coming before it. And
Speaker 1: this was before Dobbs and and and before the Harvard
Speaker 1: case and so on, that he would do this balancing thing,
Speaker 1: that he would, you know, give this side some and
Speaker 1: give this side some to try to maintain what his
Speaker 1: in his skewed inappropriate view as the independence of the
Speaker 1: court and the integrity of the court. Okay, I don't
Speaker 1: know if maybe that's part of it. You were the
Speaker 1: one who said in your Fox article that this at
Speaker 1: the very least take some of the wind out of
Speaker 1: the sales of leftists who keep claiming that somehow this
Speaker 1: court is very pro trumped.
Speaker 2: So I think there's something to that.
Speaker 1: Whether that was Robert's particular motivation behind it, I couldn't.
Speaker 1: None of us can say, really, But I wanted to
Speaker 1: bring up this one point to follow on what you said,
Speaker 1: and that is that the court looked for every possible way,
Speaker 1: the majority opinion Roberts looked for every possible way to
Speaker 1: find that there was a problem with Trump's tariffs by
Speaker 1: calling it attacks, so that he could in fact overturn it.
Speaker 1: Let me recall your attention to a case some years ago, Sibelius, where.
Speaker 2: And let me get one more thing about that.
Speaker 1: Before during the oral arguments, one of the justices I
Speaker 1: don't remember whom asked the Solicitor General, Well, how can
Speaker 1: this not be a revenue mechanism? Because all Trump is
Speaker 1: doing out there is bragging about how much revenue that's
Speaker 1: bringing in, and that by definition makes it a tax,
Speaker 1: and that is something that Congress has the power to
Speaker 1: and the president does it.
Speaker 2: That's that. So they brought up the pre.
Speaker 1: The political side of it, I guess the best way
Speaker 1: to put it. So remember in Sibilius, in the Affordable
Speaker 1: Care Act case, the Obama administration, Obama himself score over
Speaker 1: and over and over again that the individual mandate was
Speaker 1: not a tax.
Speaker 2: It was not a tax, it was not a tax.
Speaker 1: And I believe probably maybe wouldn't have been able to
Speaker 1: get it past if he had admitted it was a tax.
Speaker 1: And then Roberts went out of his way to do
Speaker 1: the opposite and call it attacked so he could come
Speaker 1: up with a way to uphold the law he desperately
Speaker 1: wanted to uphold. Do you think that's unfair?
Speaker 4: No? No, no, So look, I you know when I
Speaker 4: first saw the headlines, that started looking through it and
Speaker 4: seeing what a lot of our friends were saying and
Speaker 4: anticipating what you would say. It's like, well, Roberts has
Speaker 4: done it again. He's you know, done fancy footwork to
Speaker 4: read a certain way. And I'll add one more detail
Speaker 4: about the Sabelias case affordable care at case John.
Speaker 5: Type of a quieter by the way, I'm typing, can
Speaker 5: you believe what Lucretia just said?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, but look, I mean, I remember the day that
Speaker 4: decision came down. I remember hearing the agregious Jeff Rosen
Speaker 4: on NPR saying, gosh, I love Roberts. He reminds me
Speaker 4: of John Marshall and the way he twistified things in
Speaker 4: Marbury versus Madison, and so, by the way, in an
Speaker 4: odd way. The more I thought about it, the more
Speaker 4: I think, Oh, and I think I said to you
Speaker 4: in a text chain, Lucretia, that or both of you,
Speaker 4: it would have been better if Roberts had had gorseus
Speaker 4: right to the majority opinion and not him doing it,
Speaker 4: because it's just the lightning run now for the whether
Speaker 4: he bends to political pressure. Except then I started noticing
Speaker 4: that maybe Roberts decided to write the opinion himself because
Speaker 4: he wanted to rest it partially on the major Questions doctrine.
Speaker 4: And what that did was flesh out the three women
Speaker 4: who said, oh, we agree with the holding, but no,
Speaker 4: we don't want to know. We don't need the Major
Speaker 4: Questions Doctrine. Why would they say that, because the Major
Speaker 4: Questions Doctrine, which emerged two years ago now in that
Speaker 4: statute I'm now calling the Bear Fair Act whatever.
Speaker 5: To confused, John, you knew you were going to work
Speaker 5: it in some Yeah, of course I was right.
Speaker 4: The Bear Keen Act. That's it, Keen Bear Act, whatever
Speaker 4: it is. The point is is that the Major Questions
Speaker 4: Doctrine is an ongoing dagger at the heart of the
Speaker 4: administrative state, and the left really wants to resist that
Speaker 4: because that is the thing that is going to unravel.
Speaker 4: And by the way, it gets back to the whole
Speaker 4: climate thing from last week. John, you know, I think
Speaker 4: Trump's move may hold up, but there's been talked previously
Speaker 4: under Biden. It will come back. If we get President Newsom,
Speaker 4: there's gonna be pressure to declare a climate emergency, and
Speaker 4: one of the remedies would be a border adjustment tax,
Speaker 4: a tariff on China and India and other countries that
Speaker 4: aren't going along with carbon suppression. This decision today both
Speaker 4: on AIPA but also the larger doctrine of the Major
Speaker 4: Questions Act just laid a roadblock in the way of
Speaker 4: that happening three four years ago or ten years from now,
Speaker 4: whatever it is. So maybe Roberts has been clever after all,
Speaker 4: and you know, all right, we're gonna throw shade at
Speaker 4: him and beat him up for it. On the other hand,
Speaker 4: that's something that after a couple of hours, I thought, oh,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, this is why I concluded this was
Speaker 4: a no lose case in a lot of ways. But
Speaker 4: I'll just stop right there.
Speaker 5: And I think you Roberts screwed up again. Well really
Speaker 5: one on the logic that he if you remember Sabelius,
Speaker 5: which Lucretia brought up, his main point was the tax.
Speaker 5: There was a tax, and the taxing power is essentially
Speaker 5: not limited by subject matter and not a regulation. Ah okay.
Speaker 5: And he said the reason why was because taxes are
Speaker 5: just there to raise money. They're not there to regulate
Speaker 5: policy purposes. Everyone knows taxes can do that. For example,
Speaker 5: if you break a regulation, you have to pay a
Speaker 5: financial penalty. You could think of that as a tax
Speaker 5: if you wanted to. But Roberts says those aren't taxes.
Speaker 5: Those are not there to raise revenue. That's what he's
Speaker 5: trying to do here. But I think he's wrong because
Speaker 5: his argument essentially is this just like Sabellius, because these
Speaker 5: tariffs are like taxes, they're not really regulations. But the
Speaker 5: whole point of these tariffs is to manage our foreign
Speaker 5: policies to achieve certain kinds of goals and national security.
Speaker 5: They're not just to raise money. I think Roberts is
Speaker 5: quite wrong about that. I don't think I don't think
Speaker 5: Roberts was I think Roberts just like actually is arguing
Speaker 5: the opposite of what he did in Sabellius. Strangely, but
Speaker 5: the second point in large paint I think Roberts really
Speaker 5: screwed up here is if you're like Steve and you
Speaker 5: care about the Major Questions doctrine because you think somehow
Speaker 5: it has to do with particles in the air, I
Speaker 5: don't know. He produces more or less particles. That's what
Speaker 5: he's obsessed with. So Roberts actually divided the coalition on
Speaker 5: the Major Questions doctrine here that part of the opinion
Speaker 5: only gets three votes. Right, So Roberts said in the
Speaker 5: opinion the Major Questions Doctrine which is as Steve described,
Speaker 5: it means that we won't allow cop we won't infer
Speaker 5: in a vague statue that Congress meant to transfer this
Speaker 5: fast power. So if they wanted to give Tariff's power,
Speaker 5: they should have said tariff. Notice that the three Liberals,
Speaker 5: of course, were never going to agree to that. But
Speaker 5: he also lost Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito on that too.
Speaker 5: They also believe the Major Questions doctrine doesn't apply. So
Speaker 5: Roberts actually succeeded in narrowing the scope of a Major
Speaker 5: Questions doctrine and breaking up this coalition, which I agree Steve.
Speaker 5: If they could stick together, they could really roll up
Speaker 5: some of the administrative state by sticking to this Major
Speaker 5: Question doctrine. And maybe, you know, maybe Lucretia thinks, well,
Speaker 5: Roberts was so out to, you know, slap Trump in
Speaker 5: the head or give Trump a loss that he or give.
Speaker 1: I don't interrupt you, but all I want to say
Speaker 1: is it's actually a little bit more subtle than that.
Speaker 1: It's look as if he's giving Trump a loss that
Speaker 1: seems to be very.
Speaker 2: Important to him.
Speaker 1: And you know what, I will for just for once,
Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily taking the dread coward Roberts side on this,
Speaker 1: but there has been so many very partisan and almost
Speaker 1: dangerous attacks on the court that I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: it isn't a bit justified.
Speaker 2: Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: And if the Democrats are stupid enough to believe that
Speaker 1: maybe this is, you know, the end of Trump, then
Speaker 1: maybe Roberts has the freedom on some more important things.
Speaker 5: I mean, the only thing I would say about the
Speaker 5: opinion along those lines is it doesn't do a very
Speaker 5: good job of it. It's actually very spartan and doesn't
Speaker 5: have all these like Roberts one liners, and then doesn't
Speaker 5: accuse the president of you know, argrogating or arrogating too
Speaker 5: much executive power. You know. It's actually very minimal and
Speaker 5: really portrays itself as a very narrow decision. It doesn't
Speaker 5: have all the usual language you see in these Roberts opinions.
Speaker 5: This are grandiose opinions trying really hard to be like
Speaker 5: Chief Justice Marshall, but always failing.
Speaker 4: John, Are you playing with a fidget spinner or something?
Speaker 4: Thank you for hearing his crunching noises without the thing
Speaker 4: you're playing with in your hand.
Speaker 5: This is this is what I do when you start
Speaker 5: talking about the environment and all there keep the particle
Speaker 5: levels of certain pollutants down.
Speaker 1: One last technical question for you, John, because I think
Speaker 1: people will be interested and tell me if my understanding
Speaker 1: of this is wrong, which it probably is, and that
Speaker 1: is that because of those other statutes which Trump could
Speaker 1: use to, I guess, reimpose tariff's under different under different justifications,
Speaker 1: what happens with the paying back the money that he
Speaker 1: has raised with TERA so far? So what I understand
Speaker 1: is they would say they didn't speak to it. Cavanaugh
Speaker 1: did in his but they didn't speak to it. So
Speaker 1: that goes back to lower courts to decide people have
Speaker 1: to sue to get their money.
Speaker 2: It could take years. I don't know the exact way
Speaker 2: it would work. That's why it's you know on.
Speaker 5: This is never This has never really happened before, so
Speaker 5: there's no pre existing refund system usually these cases. By
Speaker 5: the way, I do teach trade law because I don't
Speaker 5: know from my sins at Berkeley, they don't let me
Speaker 5: teach constitutional all the time, so I have had to
Speaker 5: teach this and so usually when this happens, it's like
Speaker 5: an individual product and an individual importer, and it's easy
Speaker 5: to figure out how to refund to that person, that importer.
Speaker 5: But we've never had a case where, you know, this
Speaker 5: level of tariffs economy wide have been struck down, so
Speaker 5: this is not unusual. Though the Supreme Court just said
Speaker 5: the Trump adminstration is wrong, and then it's going to
Speaker 5: be up to the lower courts to figure out how
Speaker 5: to construct what we think of what we call remedy
Speaker 5: the reef, which could be a refund process. It may
Speaker 5: be that a lot of people who paid more for
Speaker 5: the goods than they normally would have because the tariffs
Speaker 5: aren't going to get any relief at all. It's very
Speaker 5: hard to see how consumers would get any kind of refund.
Speaker 5: Maybe import companies, you know, maybe companies that paid more
Speaker 5: for raw materials they use in their products, if they
Speaker 5: kept track, they might you could, I don't know. You
Speaker 5: could also see a lower court saying it's too hard
Speaker 5: to figure out. We're just going to create what we
Speaker 5: call forward looking prospective relief well, which is that we
Speaker 5: won't allow the tarffs to continue, but we can't figure
Speaker 5: out how to do a refund, so we're just not
Speaker 5: going to have what we call retrospective backward looking relief.
Speaker 5: We could run a lot of people the wrong way.
Speaker 5: But it might just be too hard for the lower
Speaker 5: courts to figure out.
Speaker 4: I keep channeling the great Paul Dooley and breaking away
Speaker 4: that almost fifty year old movie Refund Refund. You don't
Speaker 4: know that movie, John, It's it's about the bicycle racer
Speaker 4: in Bloomington, Indiana.
Speaker 5: Anyway, everything he just said is a reason not to
Speaker 5: watch the movie. Oh no, it's a classic movie, Bicycle
Speaker 5: Riders in Bloomington, Indiana.
Speaker 4: Well, you know that was a hard Actually the rider
Speaker 4: of that movie is long passed away. But he was
Speaker 4: an American spectator guy when a spectator was based in Bloomington.
Speaker 4: So really, wow, see things you don't know because you're
Speaker 4: too young and call well. But I did enjoy Elizabeth
Speaker 4: Warren Day saying, you know, there should be a refund.
Speaker 4: It should go for the people who are you know,
Speaker 4: the middle class people who are hurt by the tariffs.
Speaker 4: And I'm like, oh, you'd be kind of like Trump's
Speaker 4: proposed two thousand dollars rebate to Americans for the revenue race.
Speaker 4: But okay, let's just go do that. The whole thing
Speaker 4: is hilarious to watch.
Speaker 1: I have to say, yeah, I agree, but you know what,
Speaker 1: the one thing here's so Trump gets around this, and
Speaker 1: I want to compare that for a moment, because one
Speaker 1: of the supposedly compelling moments was when one of the
Speaker 1: justices asked the Solicitor General would this if we were
Speaker 1: to ruin Trump's favor on the tariffs, would this mean
Speaker 1: that a future president could create a climate emergency? And
Speaker 1: supposedly the Solicitor General had to say yes. The point
Speaker 1: of the matter is they would do it anyway. And
Speaker 1: my best example for that is what happened when Biden
Speaker 1: was told he couldn't do student loan refunds.
Speaker 2: So, so that being said, I'm going to change the subject.
Speaker 2: Unless you guys have more to say.
Speaker 5: On your point in cretia, the court does not reach
Speaker 5: that question. There's a lot of conservative commentators out there saying, oh,
Speaker 5: this was very important so that the left couldn't declare
Speaker 5: a climate change emergency. The decision does not address this
Speaker 5: question about what's an emergency or whether Trump was an
Speaker 5: error for declaring an emergency. Now, it basically says, assuming
Speaker 5: there's an emergency, you still can't do this. So this
Speaker 5: idea that has any influence on future presidents declaring it
Speaker 5: preventing them from declaring climate change emergency. It's just not
Speaker 5: born out by you just have to read the opinion.
Speaker 5: It doesn't say that.
Speaker 4: Well, can I just one more observation on the politics
Speaker 4: of it, how it fell out today, So you know,
Speaker 4: Trump didn't do a rage tweet on true social It
Speaker 4: took three hours and it came out in his press conference. Obviously,
Speaker 4: he huddled with advisors and lawyers who said, look, you
Speaker 4: have always fallback provisions that can be used, and and
Speaker 4: of course the media and there was oh it isn't
Speaker 4: Trump terrible? He saying mean things.
Speaker 2: About patiotics, Supreme Court.
Speaker 4: All the rest of that.
Speaker 5: Well, know, you guys think that was over the top.
Speaker 2: And I'll be honest and I don't think.
Speaker 4: It's a that's true. Okay, yes, stipulate that. However, again
Speaker 4: the media asymmetries.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: I ran back, as I always do to Franklin Roosevelt
Speaker 4: a cress conference in nineteen thirty five after the Scheckter case.
Speaker 4: Now quickly for listeners, the Scheckter case was the nine
Speaker 4: zero decision nine zero, meaning the liberal justices ruled against
Speaker 4: Roosevelt for his signature New Deal initiative. The National Recovery Act,
Speaker 4: which essentially was a government takeover of the whole economy.
Speaker 4: And it was that completely idiotic idea, and in fact,
Speaker 4: there's no official transcript, but it was recorded. There was
Speaker 4: laughter in the courtroom, and how preposterous the government's defense
Speaker 4: of this was so nine zero. What did Roosevelt do?
Speaker 4: He raised against the courts at much longer length than
Speaker 4: Trump did today, taking us back to the horse and
Speaker 4: buggy era. He made arguments that paralleled Trump's in some
Speaker 4: ways in different circumstances. That was about near state commerce
Speaker 4: and the fifty state, the forty eight states that.
Speaker 5: Would run wild and so work.
Speaker 4: Of course, was there any press criticism of FDR attack,
Speaker 4: Of course there was not. Right now, the most judicious
Speaker 4: historians like James McGregor Burns said, the court did Roosevelt
Speaker 4: a huge favor by striking down that idiotic piece of
Speaker 4: New Deal policy, because he would never been able to
Speaker 4: get his way out of it for a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of reasons. And I won't say it's quite the same here,
Speaker 4: but the fact that now we're going to go back
Speaker 4: to applying well established trade powers much more clearly specified.
Speaker 4: You know, John, you mentioned Section two one three, one, two,
Speaker 4: three two, all the others. Trump can do almost everything
Speaker 4: he wanted to do, with some limitations that I think
Speaker 4: he can deal with for all the things he wants
Speaker 4: to do, is my guess. For example, my first thought was, well,
Speaker 4: there goes threats of tariffs against India for buying Russian oil.
Speaker 4: But maybe not. And by the way, all the people
Speaker 4: say Trump is too soft on Russia, there was a
Speaker 4: very effective and powerful thing against Russia which the court
Speaker 4: theoretically was taking away today. So it's anyway, I'll just
Speaker 4: stop there. It's a sorry.
Speaker 1: Let me just ask do those agreements go by the wayside?
Speaker 1: Do they have to go on the wayside an agreement? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would seem to me to take it completely if
Speaker 1: there's an agreement on some so he imposes these tariffs
Speaker 1: and then walks them back when he gets an agreement,
Speaker 1: do those agreements have to go by the wayside?
Speaker 4: Well, I don't know. I mean it could be in
Speaker 4: a case of India saying yeah, okay, we won't buy
Speaker 4: Russians day right, well, a few days ago, but who
Speaker 4: knows what you know? Trump days are in dog hears right.
Speaker 4: The only question now is if India says well, gosh,
Speaker 4: maybe we go back to buying Russia. Well, because you
Speaker 4: can't slap us with a thread of a tariff. I
Speaker 4: don't know, but those the agreement of India is probably
Speaker 4: a fay of complete so I think it's probably fine.
Speaker 4: But still it's interesting to ponder again the confusion and
Speaker 4: the hypocrisy of the left on this.
Speaker 1: So that's all seems like the right seems pretty confused
Speaker 1: these days too, except John.
Speaker 2: Of course.
Speaker 5: I just think it's a mistake to attack the corn
Speaker 5: the way he did because the court has been so
Speaker 5: far very favorable to Trump white issues. And you know this,
Speaker 5: He's got a lot of important pending cases like the
Speaker 5: ability to fire the heads of commissions, ability to fire
Speaker 5: maybe the members of the Federal Reserve Board, the ability
Speaker 5: to end the use of racing districting, and so on.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of really important business he has for court.
Speaker 5: So I wouldn't say things like I think the three
Speaker 5: courts being influenced by foreign nefarious interests and things like this. Well, John,
Speaker 5: here isn't there You're cringing because you still got a
Speaker 5: lot of things you want to win on at the court.
Speaker 4: Well, well, you made a very good point today John,
Speaker 4: I don't think you've made here, which is this blows
Speaker 4: up the talking point that the Court is in the
Speaker 4: bag Ford fromp on everything right.
Speaker 5: Or we're living under or we're living under this authoritarian
Speaker 5: government and the end of constitution on all this, you know, sir,
Speaker 5: well exaggeration.
Speaker 4: Well, one last one, last little comment. So earlier in
Speaker 4: the week, I think I sent the link to you guys,
Speaker 4: there was Jeffrey Tubin, he of the famous Tuban missile crisis,
Speaker 4: as I call it.
Speaker 5: I never heard that before.
Speaker 2: He doesn't listen to you.
Speaker 4: He had this article in the New York Times that was,
Speaker 4: you know, a liberal alternative to originalism. And I read
Speaker 4: the article and there was no theory, just said we
Speaker 4: should just oppost Trump and we want justices who oppost Trump. Well,
Speaker 4: after the day, that lame talking points kind of blown up.
Speaker 1: But that that kind of brings us to an interesting point,
Speaker 1: and that is that it's I hate to say it
Speaker 1: like this, but if the left didn't have standards, so
Speaker 1: they're all in favor of the Supreme Court when it's
Speaker 1: against Trump and they're celebrating out there. But one of
Speaker 1: the things that Steve and I said we were going
Speaker 1: to discuss was a recent commentary by the egregiously awful
Speaker 1: Susan Rice, She of the lying, uh dissembling fame, who said,
Speaker 1: by the way, guess what, when we get back in power,
Speaker 1: and we will meeting Democrats and when we take over
Speaker 1: this country again, we're going to undo everything, not only
Speaker 1: undo everything that Trump did in terms of DEI et cetera,
Speaker 1: but we are going to make people pay. We are
Speaker 1: going to uh what did she What were the actual
Speaker 1: words that she used, Steve John?
Speaker 4: Do you read something about, you know, accountability for corporate America?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: And I think and ooka. I think she's responding to
Speaker 4: two specific things. So there's two headlines from the Wall
Speaker 4: Street Journal this week. One is Goldman Sachs plans to
Speaker 4: scrap DEI criteria for its board. You may know that
Speaker 4: California passed the law, and I don't remember. I know
Speaker 4: it was challenging and that maybe it was stuck down.
Speaker 4: I don't remember where it stands John, but they were
Speaker 4: going to mandate it's still the lower courts. Okay, Well, well,
Speaker 4: the law they passed was you have to diversity on
Speaker 4: your corporate boards in California corporations. So and then the
Speaker 4: other hand line a couple of days later, also the
Speaker 4: Wall Street Journal DEI rules that change corporate boards are vanishing.
Speaker 4: I think when Goldman Sacks says we're not doing this anymore,
Speaker 4: and other corporations are following suit, and so Susan Rice
Speaker 4: comes along and she's essentially sending a missile at all
Speaker 4: these companies saying, don't you dare, because we're going to
Speaker 4: come after you in three years if we're back in power.
Speaker 4: And this is a part of a larger story, which
Speaker 4: is they're digging in for the long haul.
Speaker 5: They're going to ground.
Speaker 4: They're not going away. The people I mean, I celebrate
Speaker 4: vibe shifts and point to things like these headlines, but
Speaker 4: the left is not gonna go quietly here. We have
Speaker 4: not won anything. The people who think just because Trump
Speaker 4: won in twenty twenty four and he's going hard after
Speaker 4: these things that we've won are making the same mistake
Speaker 4: that we made in nineteen eighty nine, nineteen ninety ninety
Speaker 4: one and thinking the defeat of the Soviet Union meant
Speaker 4: that we had defeated leftism, and they went to ground
Speaker 4: then the nineties and now it's worse than ever. Same
Speaker 4: thing is going to happen now if we don't double
Speaker 4: down on going after the heart.
Speaker 1: So I guess the point really quickly, John. The point
Speaker 1: I would was trying to. The additional point I was
Speaker 1: trying to make, is we actually have a final say
Speaker 1: from the Supreme Court on this issue of dei and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, preferences on the basis of race and so on.
Speaker 1: I guess it, maybe when it comes to corporation is
Speaker 1: not completely final. But the official position of the United
Speaker 1: States Supreme Court now and the official reading of civil
Speaker 1: rights law, the fourteenth Amendment, is that you do not
Speaker 1: discriminate on the basis of race at all. And in
Speaker 1: other words, you know, color blind approach to the question
Speaker 1: of racial discrimination.
Speaker 2: Why is it that? Go ahead? Yeah, go ahead, John Well.
Speaker 5: I wish I could be as optimistic, I guess is
Speaker 5: how i'd say it, because I think you're right. Of course,
Speaker 5: the Supreme Court has said that the government cannot use
Speaker 5: race now in any circumstance.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: The Harvard case was important because strangely, the court which
Speaker 5: had struck down these race in all these areas had left. Strangely,
Speaker 5: emissions and hiring and higher education is the last major
Speaker 5: area except for voting rights, which I think we're going
Speaker 5: to see struck down this year too, But it left
Speaker 5: that is really the only area where the government could
Speaker 5: explicitly use race to make decisions. So I agree with
Speaker 5: you that at the top the message has gone out,
Speaker 5: But I think DEI is so deeply ingrained in all
Speaker 5: these institutions, is going to be trench warfare for ten years.
Speaker 5: I wish there were a vibe shift, and I wish
Speaker 5: that right companies and universities are going to voluntarily uproot
Speaker 5: these DEI programs before people have to sue them one
Speaker 5: by one. But I hate to say, it reminds me
Speaker 5: of the effort to stop brown versus border with education
Speaker 5: in the South. You know, the Southern has called it
Speaker 5: massive resistance. Gosh, that seems to me still to be
Speaker 5: what going on in universities today. I mean, yeah, we
Speaker 5: see some reports here and there of schools like the
Speaker 5: University of Texas, I think, aggressively trying to get rid,
Speaker 5: But most universities haven't changed a thing.
Speaker 2: They just called it something else.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they's called something or I don't think at Berkeley
Speaker 5: they've changed anything. We still have diversity offices and diversity
Speaker 5: programs and diversity still statements and consideration and hiring and promotions.
Speaker 5: I'm sure the emissions proportions by race are going to
Speaker 5: be look roughly the same as they always have. I
Speaker 5: just think it's going to take years of trench warfare
Speaker 5: to get to uproot it. I wish it could be
Speaker 5: done by a vibe shift.
Speaker 1: Can it be done by that that civil suit that
Speaker 1: our friend encouraged us to be thinking about? Could I
Speaker 1: could I bring a civil suit against my university for
Speaker 1: all the areas I know?
Speaker 5: Well, I assume that's I assume that's why they're trying
Speaker 5: to get rid of you before.
Speaker 2: You They don't have to.
Speaker 1: I quit, John, I put in my respirement paperwork.
Speaker 2: I'm done soon anyway.
Speaker 1: No, but I get that. But the bigger question is
Speaker 1: I agree with everything you said. Has there been a
Speaker 1: vibe shift amongst the American people? And if if it's
Speaker 1: a fight once the Democrats sneak their way back into
Speaker 1: office because Mitch McConnell is so brain dead, his stupid
Speaker 1: ass staff is running things and the same act won't
Speaker 1: go to a filibuster on the floor and it doesn't
Speaker 1: get passed in the Democrats cheek from now until doomsday
Speaker 1: and pretend that, as a result of their electoral victory,
Speaker 1: the American people really want DEI back.
Speaker 5: Detective Vibe successful. Why do you detective vibe ship? I mean,
Speaker 5: did you see the halftime super Bowl show? You know?
Speaker 5: I mean, I don't know, or these the what the
Speaker 5: Grammy Award? You know, the sort of culture watch telling me,
Speaker 5: you know is upstream of politics. I don't know if
Speaker 5: there's a vibe shift happening there yet.
Speaker 2: I don't know either that.
Speaker 4: Let's confine us just slightly. The super Bowl halftime show
Speaker 4: had the largest fall off in the people viewing of
Speaker 4: any halftime show in super Bowl history. So I don't
Speaker 4: know if that was turning point having a thing or
Speaker 4: people saying, you know, I'm just gonna do something else
Speaker 4: because I don't want to see this in Spanish? And
Speaker 4: how did I end up on Univision instead of NBC. Okay,
Speaker 4: but let's look at one particular subset of this. So
Speaker 4: we're talking about DEI on campuses. There is the whole
Speaker 4: gen transgenderism business. And so I think we already mentioned
Speaker 4: you've had the first significant malpractice case settled, and I've
Speaker 4: been saying for five years it's a trial lawyers who
Speaker 4: might end this, although there is a problem there of
Speaker 4: statutes of limitations might bar some suits and we'll just
Speaker 4: have to see how that plays out. And a lot
Speaker 4: of more medical groups here and abroad saying we're not
Speaker 4: doing this anymore. And then, but here's the important thing
Speaker 4: I am. I try to keep up with some of
Speaker 4: the smarter progressives like Josh Barrow. Megan mccardial wouldn't say
Speaker 4: she's aggressive, but Ben Ben Dreyfus is Richard Dreyfus's son,
Speaker 4: has a pretty interesting substack and commentary, and he's a liberal.
Speaker 4: But the point is they're all saying this is crazy,
Speaker 4: it went too far. Why can't Democrats say we screwed
Speaker 4: up and we're not going to insist on women boys
Speaker 4: and women's sports. There's huge resistance to that, but the
Speaker 4: smarter ones are saying, let's not do that again. So
Speaker 4: the big question to me is, if they do win
Speaker 4: the election twenty twenty eight, are they gonna go full
Speaker 4: speed ahead of what they were doing under Biden? And
Speaker 4: I think that's an open question. It's gonna be. Is
Speaker 4: it gonna be like Clinton in ninety two? Remember Clinton
Speaker 4: saying we don't need a distance this ourselves from Jesse Jackson.
Speaker 4: We need to disagree with Jesse Jackson, who just died
Speaker 4: a few days ago, right, which Clinton did spectacularly. Is
Speaker 4: there gonna be a Democrat who was a sister Soldier
Speaker 4: moment with all the identitarians and the Democratic Party. I
Speaker 4: think that's what they need to do to win and
Speaker 4: govern successfully. And so.
Speaker 2: When the primary, well, I don't know that's right.
Speaker 4: It could be yeah, well, I I won't truss that,
Speaker 4: but that's the question.
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know the answer to it. You know,
Speaker 1: where Michael Lee and I going back and forth about Virginia.
Speaker 1: But Virginia really was an odd sort of situation, and
Speaker 1: I wonder what will happen as things go to Arizonas
Speaker 1: are pushing back against their ridiculously stupid valley girl governor
Speaker 1: woke for aggressive governor, yep, you know. And and I
Speaker 1: think we'll see something happening there Virginia.
Speaker 2: You know, too many people were I'll just leave it alone.
Speaker 1: But but how about this one gender affirming care for minors.
Speaker 1: I can't even believe I used that term that in
Speaker 1: the just in the last few weeks, you are seeing
Speaker 1: hospitals stop the practice. Uh, and so and and people
Speaker 1: less and less on the left, not the far left,
Speaker 1: but less and less left to me being willing to
Speaker 1: defend it, at least for children. I saw a state
Speaker 1: legislator somewhere today said that she had introduced a bill
Speaker 1: that would make the a parent who does some kind
Speaker 1: of gender affirming care to a minor in a custody battle,
Speaker 1: that would be determined as child abuse. And so it
Speaker 1: would be the case that the other parent would get
Speaker 1: custody because the parent affirming the gender affirming care would
Speaker 1: be accused of child abuse. So there is a change.
Speaker 1: People are no longer afraid to come out and say.
Speaker 2: And you know, by the way, when some trans nazi.
Speaker 1: Who's married his cousin decides to go crazy on it,
Speaker 1: people are looking at that everybody but the mainstream media
Speaker 1: and saying, this is we got to do something here, folks,
Speaker 1: We got to do something about this. There's got to
Speaker 1: be some that We had to talk John really quickly.
Speaker 1: We had to talk a few some episodes ago. And
Speaker 1: you said, why doesn't somebody do a study about the
Speaker 1: ratio of transgender mass murderers to the to data and
Speaker 1: and I said, the end is too small, But the
Speaker 1: end keeps getting bigger. There's been three of them since
Speaker 1: you and I had that conversation. And I don't know
Speaker 1: what the actual percentage of transgender persons in the population is,
Speaker 1: but it's infinitesimally small, whereas the number of mass murders
Speaker 1: is not much larger.
Speaker 2: I'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 4: What do you guys think, Well, I've seen some of
Speaker 4: those numbers too, and I'm trying to master them. And well,
Speaker 4: there's three or four levels of this, and you know,
Speaker 4: I don't want to run ahead of the data, right
Speaker 4: because I'm not much of a social scientist. One is
Speaker 4: you have to break down people who are a caught
Speaker 4: up by a contagion, right, you know, the it's like
Speaker 4: said this a couple episodes ago. This is like anorexia
Speaker 4: thirty years ago, where suddenly you're this epidemic of anorexia
Speaker 4: among young women that wasn't really a medical condition. It
Speaker 4: was spread by the precursion of social media. Right, So
Speaker 4: while that's going on. Second, people who really do have
Speaker 4: serious psychological problems, I think this is going to fix it.
Speaker 4: And then third, I think the really open question is
Speaker 4: are some of these aggressive hormone treatments actually making people
Speaker 4: like steroids do. We've known for a long time that steroids, steroids,
Speaker 4: especially for young bodybuilders, turns a certain number of them
Speaker 4: to be very aggressive and violent. And I don't know
Speaker 4: that that's been studied. That's the kind of thing that I.
Speaker 7: Said, no, no, no, no, no no, although that's figured right,
Speaker 7: you get the point, right, as you know, I bet
Speaker 7: that issue has been deliberately avoided.
Speaker 4: By the medical community because of what they might find
Speaker 4: that would be disturbing.
Speaker 2: Okay, you guys can't say this, but I can. I
Speaker 2: of course refuse.
Speaker 1: To acknowledge that that female male hormones have anything to do.
Speaker 1: You know, you need to be studying no matter what
Speaker 1: the circumstances are. But we do know that the whole
Speaker 1: idea of female hormones is very much related to women
Speaker 1: being bitchy.
Speaker 2: How to believe it that?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: At certain times?
Speaker 5: I know, I've.
Speaker 2: Is normal.
Speaker 1: Natural hormonal changes cause behavioral changes. Imagine what you're doing
Speaker 1: to someone if you're pumping them full of artificial hormones.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just you know, you don't even have
Speaker 2: to have the scientific background to think that one through.
Speaker 5: I guess I feel somewhat like I did on the
Speaker 5: question of DEI sometimes I worry that you know, we're
Speaker 5: getting that there's too much triumphalism. I'm not so sure
Speaker 5: that this is over. Basically, what the Supreme Court has done,
Speaker 5: as it did with abortions, returned this question to the states.
Speaker 5: And there are states that govern a large number of
Speaker 5: people in this country which still have very extreme policies,
Speaker 5: like California and New York, right, two of the four
Speaker 5: largest states, and probably I don't know Illinois. I bet
Speaker 5: Illinois with them too. So three of the five largest
Speaker 5: states in the country probably have not changed and have
Speaker 5: not had a vibe shift. So I wonder whether you
Speaker 5: know there have been signs of a turnaround. But it's
Speaker 5: not I unfortunately think that it's not that the country
Speaker 5: has fully come to its census yet.
Speaker 1: No, but there is a possibility that it strips moving
Speaker 1: in that direction.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm hoping for.
Speaker 1: I agree with you, John, I I just choose to
Speaker 1: be optimistic on something that important.
Speaker 2: Now the food pyramid that they turned out to be
Speaker 2: so wrong.
Speaker 1: The whole point of all of this is you add
Speaker 1: the food pyramid, you had a gender firming care you
Speaker 1: ad what happened with COVID. You add the climate change
Speaker 1: vibe shift that one. You have to at the very
Speaker 1: least say that from a completely publicity point of view.
Speaker 1: Everybody's pretending like they never actually believed that the Earth
Speaker 1: was gonna end in ten years if we didn't ban
Speaker 1: all fossil fuels. They're all, oh, well, you know, they're
Speaker 1: equivocating and so on. My point to all of this is,
Speaker 1: I'm never gonna believe a damn scientist ever again, as
Speaker 1: long as I live.
Speaker 2: That's all there is too.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna throw a dart
Speaker 1: at the wall and say that it makes as much
Speaker 1: sense to me as anything. I'm not gonna believe a doctor.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna believe a scientist. I'm just gonna do
Speaker 1: what makes sense. Because they all lie, they all dissemble,
Speaker 1: and they all do it for political reasons. There's my
Speaker 1: sermon for the night, and look there's speechless, guys, there's speechless.
Speaker 4: Well, there's parts of that we can't touch for reasons
Speaker 4: John already articulated or reticulator or something I don't know.
Speaker 1: And for financial Oh yeah, I saw a thing that
Speaker 1: there's a doctor. I think it's in Washington State. Who
Speaker 1: is doing I can't even say this word out loud.
Speaker 1: Five vagino plasties. Sorry, this is a family show, I know,
Speaker 1: but I don't know what else to call it. A
Speaker 1: week on on state prisoners in the state prison system
Speaker 1: being paid to do you know, one hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of dollars per surgery to do those gender transition surgeries
Speaker 1: on prisoners.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and and in ten years from now they'll be
Speaker 4: suing for an Eighth Amendment violation, right.
Speaker 2: And I'll laugh about it.
Speaker 1: All right, we're getting close to the end. Guys, what's
Speaker 1: your last word on the subject today.
Speaker 4: I've said all my last words.
Speaker 1: I'm happy, you're happy you managed on a historical analogy.
Speaker 4: I did, and uh and you didn't. And you know,
Speaker 4: you didn't chastise me too much, so.
Speaker 1: I felt bad about forgetting to remind you to say it,
Speaker 1: so I didn't chestize. Okay, John, what do you think
Speaker 1: is going to happen with tariffs?
Speaker 2: Is the economy going to crash?
Speaker 5: I actually thought this might be a blessing in disguise
Speaker 5: for Trump because we saw today I think the Trump
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, the Tart decision wiped off the front page
Speaker 5: that economic growth was really weak last year. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: shockingly weak, and it says, well, it's like what like, wow,
Speaker 5: well it well, now this would take a while.
Speaker 4: It was the New York fad, I think, and I'm
Speaker 4: just I'm not going to go through the arguments. I'm
Speaker 4: surprised no one has ever done a study on the
Speaker 4: different fads. So you know, there was the Dallas FED
Speaker 4: in the nineties under Richard Fitcher, Richard Fisher, who did
Speaker 4: these killer studies that had to drive the Twin administration
Speaker 4: out of their mind. The Saint Louis FED today does
Speaker 4: these great analysis and data analysis. The Atlanta fad has
Speaker 4: been very bullish. They were predicting like four percent growth
Speaker 4: for last year and that looks like it is now wrong.
Speaker 4: And then the New York Fed, well, look that's where
Speaker 4: it's ron pal came from. The New York Fed. Okay,
Speaker 4: there's some politics there, and nobody wants to study this
Speaker 4: and say why this is happening. I in general, I think,
Speaker 4: in general, I think tariffs are a bad idea.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, I looked it up. The growth last year
Speaker 5: last quarter was one point four percent. It's not what
Speaker 5: we want.
Speaker 4: That's right. And you know the Atlanta Fed was saying, oh,
Speaker 4: it's going to come in at four or something because
Speaker 4: the previous quarter had been previous quarters.
Speaker 5: Are around four percent. Yeah. Right, Well, look, if you
Speaker 5: if you favor Trump, you want the Republicans to do
Speaker 5: better in the midterms. You don't want there to be terriffs, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: you think about the tar ending the tariffs is like
Speaker 5: a huge fiscal stimulus because you're taking away attacks. It
Speaker 5: might be right, people, So I think it's like a
Speaker 5: from the economic perspective, not politics, not legal, but it's
Speaker 5: a blessing in disguise for Trump. The similar thing for
Speaker 5: him to do would be not to replace the tariffs
Speaker 5: or take his time doing it and let the economy
Speaker 5: economy really grow as a result.
Speaker 4: That's a longer subject for some other day. That Lucretian
Speaker 4: will not way too late for tonight.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sorry, And when it comes to you guys in your
Speaker 1: supposed how much growth we had those immediate kind of things,
Speaker 1: back to my darts on the wall.
Speaker 5: No, look, the American people, I do think that the
Speaker 5: left has put their finger on something, this affordability idea,
Speaker 5: which is just a different way saying inflation is still
Speaker 5: not low enough. If you take away Terraf's help lower
Speaker 5: the cost of things, that will is by definition, will
Speaker 5: reduce the inflation rate. That's good for Trump.
Speaker 1: The affordability thing is more a matter of young people
Speaker 1: not being able to buy.
Speaker 2: And that's not the problem of tariffs. That's a multifaceted problem.
Speaker 1: That's mostly uh, you know, a local state issue, regulation issue,
Speaker 1: and so on.
Speaker 2: But anyway, you're right, too late, too late, Steve has
Speaker 2: an ai for us.
Speaker 4: I could do it now.
Speaker 2: No, No, so I wanted to get sorry because we're
Speaker 2: getting close.
Speaker 5: To Yeah, you're not gonna do the Babylon Bees.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do the babbon be because there are so
Speaker 1: many good ones. No, absolutely not. I stopped with enough time.
Speaker 1: California truck driver cited for being legal US resident.
Speaker 2: It took you a second.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Gavin, I'll make it click. Gavin Newsom's presidential
Speaker 1: ambition sunk after nation discover he's the one running California.
Speaker 4: Yeah that's true.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is very near.
Speaker 1: John furious Trump imposes one one thousand percent terriff on
Speaker 1: Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: He would if he could, if he could, this.
Speaker 1: One you won't get because you didn't know what it
Speaker 1: meant last time when they made fun of him.
Speaker 2: But I'll say it anyway.
Speaker 1: Canadian you guys heard about you know, the Canadians have
Speaker 1: gone crazy with this whole euthanasia thing. Right, Canadian government
Speaker 1: praised for euthanizing Nickelback. Yes, right, And another one for you, John,
Speaker 1: I know you wouldn't. You had to be explained that
Speaker 1: Nickelback anyway. Desperate John Bolton throws stink bomb into Trump's
Speaker 1: Board of Peace meeting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, I should have.
Speaker 1: I'm almost embarrassed to make this one because it's such
Speaker 1: a serious thing. But leave it to the b Prince
Speaker 1: Andrew joins UK Muslim rate gang so you can keep
Speaker 1: abusing young girl.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all that is, I mean, yeah, a double scandal there,
Speaker 4: that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, And you know we didn't we didn't talk
Speaker 1: about the whole Culbert thing and not not inviting on
Speaker 1: old Jasmine Croft. So if he could answer questions, I'm
Speaker 1: not that interested in it, except that all I want
Speaker 1: to point out is that imagine if Greg Guttfield had
Speaker 1: had refused to bring on somebody because he didn't want
Speaker 1: to bring on Jasmine Crocket. That's all I'll say. But
Speaker 1: actually Greg could get away with it because he's just
Speaker 1: so great. New Yorkers with a picture of Mindami Mendomiami Swami.
Speaker 1: New Yorker's report Warmth of Collectivism feels strangely like a
Speaker 1: crushing tech tax hike.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well that's served some right. They voted for him.
Speaker 4: It's amazing how fast that's happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my gosh, it does. It does.
Speaker 1: But AOC, this is my last one. AOC condemned Spain
Speaker 1: for stealing Mexico's language.
Speaker 5: That's good. I like that one. That's a goodness. John, Okay,
Speaker 5: always drink your whiskey, meat, buy more books, and Steve,
Speaker 5: what is the latest message from your AI overlords?
Speaker 4: Okay, so this is interesting. I asked chat GPT to
Speaker 4: produce a parody of Alexandria Acasio Cortez as a starfleet officer,
Speaker 4: and then Froze I said it said there's a problem,
Speaker 4: and it couldn't do it. I thought that's interesting, so
Speaker 4: I asked Gora, Gora, no groch, Grock. Sorry, Gora's a listener. Sorry, Cora,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna blame the whiskey. I asked Groc and Groc
Speaker 4: came through. It was a long thing. I'll just give
Speaker 4: you one paragraph. It's got a Vulcan and Captain Jean
Speaker 4: Luke Icard by hologram, and then I'll just give you
Speaker 4: one part of it. AOC bursting in without knocking gold
Speaker 4: uniform slightly askew, holding a pad like it's a protest sign. Captain,
Speaker 4: with all due respect to the Vulcan lady who's been
Speaker 4: measuring carbon parts per million since the twenty third century.
Speaker 4: We cannot just observe another planet cook itself. Well, the
Speaker 4: Federation keeps subsidizing di lithium refineries that are literally owned
Speaker 4: by the same three Orion crime families who bankrolled the
Speaker 4: last Romulin Senate election. I think that's actually too intelligent. Good,
Speaker 4: well it is, except it's too intelligent for her right
Speaker 4: has to be stupider than that. But okay, that's okay.
Speaker 1: So we did this. This came out after we after
Speaker 1: Valentine's Day last year. We recorded on Valentine's Day and
Speaker 1: we had to end early because Steve had a hot date.
Speaker 1: He actually takes his wife out on Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2: Imagine that.
Speaker 1: But von b provided I know exactly eh, a few
Speaker 1: Valentine's Day cards that you could print out and send
Speaker 1: to people, full by famous people, and I just a
Speaker 1: couple of them to end this this love fest that
Speaker 1: we had here today.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a picture of Kamala Harris saying Valentine's Day is
Speaker 1: a big day. It is bigger than smaller days. Valentine
Speaker 1: starts with the V.
Speaker 2: And then we have.
Speaker 1: Tom Honan and this is for you, Gora, you have
Speaker 1: crossed the border of my heart. Wait, wait, two more.
Speaker 1: It's a picture of Elon Muss, Hey, girl, want to
Speaker 1: help me reverse the Earth's imminent population collapse?
Speaker 2: And then finally this is for you too. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a picture of Mitch mcconnall going and this says nothing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've seen that one right. This is why we're
Speaker 4: gonna win, by the way, because we're funnier than they are.
Speaker 2: And we are definitely funnier.
Speaker 1: But I do have to make fun of the disinterreed
Speaker 1: Mitch McConnell to prove that.
Speaker 2: I am not like a democrat.
Speaker 1: I have standards and I stick to them, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make fun of Mitch McConnell for being brain dead
Speaker 1: the same way I did Joe Biden, and it's egregious
Speaker 1: and problematic in both cases. And on that happy note,
Speaker 1: have a wonderful week everyone.
Speaker 2: You know we're still in shutdown. You don't have to
Speaker 2: go to the airport.
Speaker 4: Well, okay, right bye everybody.
Speaker 8: Actually, Sean Monaghan Millennial misused the five shift.
Speaker 9: Neologismology to refer to general trend shop when it describes
Speaker 9: a much more contemporary phenomenon of radical pivots and culture
Speaker 9: are self organized.
Speaker 8: Almost instantly and with a single without a single specific catalyst,
Speaker 8: by small groups of intimately engaged posters, a phenomena only
Speaker 8: possible in the at work era. I'm sorry, I ride
Speaker 8: a branch like.
Speaker 5: Ricochet. Join the conversation