Speaker 1: And hello, welcome to the Big Podcast on this Tuesday.
Today is the last day of the quarter. It's the
thirtieth of June, last day of the month. Year of
Our Lord, twenty twenty six. My name is Tom Sullivan.
So more court action today. Supreme Court wrapping everything up
today with some big decisions. We have the housing bill
and maybe moving along. They're in the negotiators are all
in Doha, but they're not talking to each other. And
we got some Lebron James James news. Hey, we don't
do sports often, but you know, so let's uh, let's
start off with the Supreme Court because the decisions today
were the big ones that we had been waiting for.
First of all, birthright citizenship. This case this goes back
case law over one hundred years. I wasn't expecting it
to be over to be changed, but it was.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: You, birthright citizenship is something that is legal, and that
is what's The Supreme Court ruled that, yes, if you
are born in the United States, you are automatically a citizen.
And the ruling the Court voted six to three.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: The three that that dissented was Justice Alito, Justice Thomas,
and Justice Gorsic. So it was Roberts and Cavanaugh and
Barrett sided with the three liberal justices to come to
that decision. And I was surprised by that because I
thought this thing was a slam dunk. But apparently, I mean.
Justice Clarence Thomas was very adamant in his descent about
the fact that nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, back when this was
designed to basically say children of free slaves were American citizens.
It was designed for them, and that when they came
up with this amendment, there was nothing about that. He
called it birth tourism or illegals. So that's what his
descent was all about. We also have today a couple
more decisions, one of them about trans athletes, and the
Court said that it is okay for a state to
ban trans athletes, but up to the state to do that.
So where do you want to start. Let's start with
Shannon Breem, who covers the court for Fox. He's also
a lawyer. This is her reaction to the decision about
the trans athletes.
Speaker 3: Interesting opinion in that there are all kinds of splits, concurrences,
and descents, but nearly every justice, every justice is signed
onto concurring at least in part. We'll have to read
the different concurrences and descents here, but all of them
support this decision, at least in part from the majority opinion.
It says sports are highly competitive and generally zero sum.
At almost every turn, someone wins and someone loses. Every
athlete who makes a team takes a roster spot from
another athlete, and every player who earns playing time reduces
the playing time of a teammate. Every player who makes
the starting lineup sidelines another who remains on the bench.
They go on to say this, like every student who
earns an athletic scholarship takes that opportunity away from another student,
and so on. Women and girls who play sports care
deeply about all of these things. They obsess about them.
They spend extraordinary time and effort in the heat and
in the cold to work out early in the morning
and late at night to get a little faster, a
little stronger, jump a little higher, shoot a little better.
And it goes on from there. But essentially says they
have to savor these athletic accomplishments and cherish them. And
what these states have done here, they say they should
be allowed to have these life changing opportunities on an
equal playing field without fear of physical injury from biological
males or being forced to compete against biological males. They say,
consistent with Title nine, which we know was created to
protect women's sports opportunities and the Equal Protection Clause, we
hold that the States may maintain women's and girls sports
for biological females. So big wins as we expected here
for West Virginia and Idaho, and a recognition that there
are differences in sports and when you give us a
lot to someone else, it costs someone else. And in
this case, they say women and girls should be protected
from that. If these states choose to do that, they
have a right to do so.
Speaker 1: So that was Keith what she just said. If the
states choose to do that, they have a right to
do so. So it's going to be up to the
states to say, yeah, you trans athletes cannot compete in
girls' sports. So Carrie Severino, she was a clerk for
Justice Clarence Thomas and she runs a legal foundation as well.
Let's listen to what she says.
Speaker 4: This is an absolute win for women's sports. I've got
a daughter who plays sports, and this is showing that
the Supreme Court understands that you know this the Title
nine Equal Protection Clause protect women as women.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: I think that it seems like there were some really
great concurring opinions there. Justice Thomas points out transgender status
is not a protected status, and even it's it's significant.
Even Justice as Sodomio or Kagan and Jackson concurred in
part on this, they acknowledged that the athletes have said
that Title nine means says sex, and that means biological sex.
So I think that's actually an amazing result here. That's
a win for reality because we know that when this
law was passed, that's absolutely what Congress understood sex to mean.
We can't take the words of the statute and then
try to redefine them to mean something else. If Congress
wants to pass a different law, okay, but the Court
can't redefine that right.
Speaker 1: So we got the birthrights citizenship that was turned down.
President wanted that to pass, it did not. And again
it was a strange combination of conservative and liberal justices
on these groups. There's also the trans case we got,
and then that wasn't one of the big cases, but
I think it's a very important ruling by the Supreme
Court today on campaign finance. If you go back, a
lot of people, especially Democrats, complain about Citizens United. President
Obama at stated the Union, with the Supreme Court sitting
right in front of him criticized him for that. Citizens United.
What it did was it opened up the opportunity for
corporations to make political contributions out of their money, and
before that, the labor unions could, and so it was
designed to kind of even stephen the whole thing. Well,
today they threw the gates open, and the Supreme Court
basically said that any limitations on campaign finance money is
a violation of somebody's First Amendment rights. Money is speech
and if you have a lot of money, you get
to talk loudly. So here, let's see you. Let's go
back to Shannon Breem and get kind of a rundown
of what this case was all about.
Speaker 3: Yes, it says the First Amendment provides that Congress will
make no law abridging the freedom of speech. And they
go on to say, the Court is determined that political
parties make unlimited independent expenditures during the campaigns, and that
by putting limits on them, it essentially it sounds like
what they're saying is immense to amounts to a violation
of the First Amendment. So we'll keep reading. But they
say it's a constitutional issue, and you know, this court
has handled a lot of First Amendment issues with regard
to political speech, meaning campaign spending, donations as political speech.
But here they say, we're basically leveling the playing field.
Doesn't matter your party. We're taking off these restrictions on
the parties coordinating with the candidates in a way that
would impede for speech.
Speaker 1: So it stand by for the next well, I don't
know it could apply for the midterms. I will but
if you think you see a lot of political ads,
now this weight, this basically opens it up corporations, labor unions, individuals,
rich people, poor people, Democrats, Republicans, it doesn't matter. Craig Goudi,
the former federal prosecuted former congressman, that's the way he
looks at it too.
Speaker 2: For even more money. It opens them all. It opens
them all because it removes the barrier of no coordination.
And if you talk to political campaigns, they've been pretty
assiduous in saying, look, we can't coordinate with this with
this group. Now I think that wall is gone. You know,
Republicans kind of laughed at the Citizens United a little
bit because labor unions could do what they want, and
some leftist groups could do what they want, but the
parties could not. I think it's clear that money and
speech are interchangeable when it comes to politics. They're worried
about corruption, which is why you and I have a
limit as to what we can donate. Apparently they're not
as worried about it when it comes to you and
I giving one hundreds of millions of dollars to the
DNC or the Origency.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So if you want to get money to a
political party, Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian, whatever you like, the
limits are limited now. So I'm sure this is going
to make it even worse money in politics, but it's
something that has been defended by the First Amendment rights
of people with money to be able to donate their
money wherever they want. Carl Rove, who's very much involved
in raising money for political campaigns, had this reaction.
Speaker 5: I have one question, which is I think this removed
the limits on how much the parties could spend in
coordinating with candidates. I don't think it removed the limit
on how much individuals can give to the political parties,
which is I think combined total of three hundred some
one thousand dollars. So look, I'm in favor of this.
I think this will strengthen parties. One of the money
is speech. Citizens United said that the labor unions had
already grew on their corporate treasuries to influence political campaigns,
and so they extended that right to go beyond any
labor unions to everybody, businesses, individuals, and so forth. This
created the era of super PACs. I helped create one
of the larger super PACs, Ed Gillespie and I organized
American Crossroads, which became Senate Leadership Fund. So we took
advantage of it. But as we did, I became concerned
that we were weakening parties and strengthening these independent groups
which were by and large run, many of them by
the consultants for the consultants on behalf of their favorite candidates.
And cottage industry arose and we had to have that
happen because of Citizens United. But at the meantime, I
continue to believe in strong parties. I think the country
has advantaged when we have a strong National Democratic Party
and a strong National Republican Party, as we did in
the nineteen thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, where were
it mattered who was the Republican Party or Democratic Party
national chairman. Bob Strauss made a big difference as the
chairman of the Democratic Party. Similarly, Republicans made a big
difference and the quality of leadership. And I think this will,
by giving the parties a bigger role, will over time
lead to the parties being more concerned about who leads
their national party and if and thereby strengthens the two
individual parties.
Speaker 1: What Carl's talking about is back in the old days,
the parties would get into a back room, smoke filled
room and determine who they wanted to be the candidates
for their party, whether they're from dogcatcher all the way
up to president. And the beauty of that system is
we got a lot of great presidents out of it
in those days. There were some bad ones, but we
got we got some very good ones. But what the
beauty of it was, and I've always posed it this way,
is that at work, wherever you work, you know from
your fellow co workers which ones are really good at
their job and which ones are slackers. And the police
people know the same thing about which people are really good,
solid leaders that would make for national or state or
county or city leaders. They know who's good and who's not.
The problem with that is that what about we the people?
And that's where the Constitution is pointing towards us. We
are the ones that need to determine that. Well. The
problem with us is that we don't really get to
know the candidates. We are influenced by influencers. We're influenced
by campaign ads, we're influenced by cable television, We're influenced
by all kinds of things. But that doesn't mean that
the candidate that you might think, oh, that person looks
pretty good may may not be anywhere near what you
think they are. When I used to do local radio
in California, we would invite candidates in and one of
the things that I was one of my producers was
always just slack jawed because she said, the candidate is
nothing like what their ads are like. And I said,
the beauty of having Matt actually having them coming to
the studio and meet them physically, meet them, ask them
questions was phenomenal, and I guess you could still do
that through town halls for a lot of the electeds.
But do you ever go to campaigns? Do you ever
go to a rally? Most people don't, which also brings up,
if I may, the whole business about the Democrat socialist
movement and the fact that it is growing rapidly, And
we'll get into there's another big contest today in Colorado.
But I want to go back to the New York
story because it got a lot of news and there
were three Democrat socialist candidates that won. The turnout. I
said this the other day, I double triple checked myself.
The turnout for the elections here in New York for
our local congressional representatives was seven percent. That's right. It
was a mid term primary. Nobody cared about it, and
so as a result, you've got three people. I hear
people since then going around going, oh, there is a
strong movement in this country towards Democrats socialism, and I'm thinking,
I don't think so. Keep hearing these people talking about
broad support for the new far left faces. If you
get seven percent turnout, seven percent of registered voters, not
even seven percent of population, it's seven percent of registered voters.
That means, I know you're good at math. That means
ninety three percent of the people did not Chew did
not vote, And that is exactly the same. It was
a little different. Want I want to believe I'm doing
this for memory. When AOC was elected as a New
York congresswoman, it was nine percent of the population turned out,
and so the Democrat Socialist got to give them credit.
They are good at getting people who support their agenda
getting them out to vote, but nobody else seems to care.
So I don't think there's a broad agenda for the
far far far socialist we got, Like I said, there's
a primary today in Colorado. Go back to here in
New York. Chevalier. She deleted tweets favoring Karl Marx, abolishing police.
She doesn't want any prisons, not just some, no all
of them. Close them down. And what bothers me about
this is she deleted those tweets. And the same with
this lady running in Colorado today. It's the same kind
of deal where she has a bunch of tweets and
she has deleted them, and I shame on them. They
should be proud of and promote their beliefs. This woman
in Colorado, her last name is Keiros and she is
a lawyer, a PhD student. She's twenty nine years old.
She's a Democrat Socialist. The first time she's ever run
for anything. She was a barriist. Well, guess who else
was a barriista aoc Her family immigrated to the United
States from Ethiopia when she was a baby. She lost
her campaign last year, and she is going against a
woman I don't know her first name, Congresswoman to Get.
Congresswoman to Get is sixty eight years of old, sixty
eight years of age. She has been a congresswoman from
Denver for fifteen terms. That's thirty years. Oh and by
the way, Congresswoman to Get is a long time far
left progressive, but she's not far enough left for the
Democrat socialist. So this young lady I don't have first
names written down Kiros, lawyer, PhD student, barista immigrant. She
is blaming the establishment Democrats for being beholden to corporate
interest and that the longtime congresswoman from Denver has lost
step with its roots. So I think the new ones.
That's a whole new root system. So it's it's interesting
to watch the elections. I really do think they should
by the leading tweets. Shame on them. That should be,
that should be well known that they put this up.
They're afraid to say it now that they're going to
in the November election, they'll get more than seven percent response.
But this is another one that's a doozy out there.
So Hello, Colorado, will find out tonight what you came
up with. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this
Kiros lady wins, beats the lady who's been there for
thirty years. Okay, it's it's kind of elections related, it's
politics related. The Housing bill. The Housing bill is coming
back around again. Apparently they were going to have a
big signing ceremony last week. They had the whole thing
set up. They had a little table for the President
to sign the bill, and with an hour to go,
the President said, nope, I'm not signing it until you
people in Congress passed the Save America Act, which is
a voting bill, and he wants it, and there's a
lot of people in Congress who don't. It doesn't have
enough votes in the Senate for even Republican senators. So
it's it's an uphill battle that doesn't look like it'll
be won. So Mike Johnson, the Speaker, has got the
housing bill back around again and is going to present
it to the White House. The President was asked about
it in the Oval Office, and this is what he said.
Speaker 3: Will you sign that housing bill?
Speaker 6: And I have not did.
Speaker 1: It hasn't been sent to me yet. It's coming, I understand,
and then I'll make it.
Speaker 5: Then I'll make a different Here's what I would like
to sign much more than a bill, that big deal.
Speaker 2: It's a yawn.
Speaker 1: Something was just wonderful to me, compared to the Save
America Act. Just about everything is a big yawn. Okay,
so the left is going crazy. You said, did you
hear what Donald Trump said? Everything's a big yawn. This
is about affordability. This is about people trying to find
a home that they can buy. Well, it's a perfect,
perfect silver platter for people to criticize the president, but
it's the housing bill is not what you think you think.
All right, People are having a hard time buying houses,
especially young people. It's always been difficult, but it's more
difficult now. So the Housing bill will bring a housing
affordability to people. And there's a lot of people out
there that are trying to afford a house and would
like to buy one, and they're going, oh my gosh,
Congress finally did something. Is bipartisan. It was written by
Elizabeth Warren. That should give you a clue about its origins.
She's far left. And when you look at the bill,
this is not going to help anybody anywhere anytime soon.
It just won't. I mean, when it comes to what's
bad about the housing bill, it's basically a socialist agenda.
It doesn't affect affordability of homes, it doesn't affect the
monthly payment problem. Housing is a local issue. What's going
on in your town is not the same as going
on one thousand miles away, and housing is intrinsically tied
to local zoning ordinances, land use laws written by cities
or counties or states. Federal level legislation has never really
done anything about housing affordability, about high density, about missing
middle income houses. So what this involves is trying to
help the lowest income renters. So this for that, fine,
but that's what this is. This is a program that
supports public housing operations and housing vouchers. So for a
lot of really low income people, this might help. But
this is not This is not the solution to the
housing problem in this country. The housing problem is we
don't have enough houses. And who's standing in the way
are your cities and counties and their land use laws
and they're permitting laws and all those things. So this
also what this also does is it requires them to
be able housing people to be able to access cookie
cutters where there would be one design of housing and
you multiply it, so it would be really cheap just
to keep cookie cutting the thing. So we're going to
wind up with a bunch of cities and counties that
all have cookie cutter homes. I don't know if I
would even want that if I was on my starter home.
But this is a bad deal. It just is. And
the President is going to be criticized because it's easy
to criticize him when he doesn't sign the housing bill
when we have a housing shortage. So Jackie Cascinach from
the Boston Globe, this is her view.
Speaker 6: Oh my gosh, Mike Johnson hasn't had a good day
and so long, so this is a bill we should
go back. This is a bill that passed with bipartisan majorities,
and we actually were told that President Trump was going
to sign this bill. The White House has supported it
in several different forms, as the House and the Senate
has actually worked to get a compromised bill, and then
at the last minute the President decided to blow it
up because of the Save America Act, and this was
going to be an easy win, another piece of legislation
Republicans could hold up other than the big beautiful bill
and say, look, we're trying to address what some of
the concerns one of the major concerns of the country are.
And right now it's in limbo. You know, might the
President beto it, Might he just wait those ten d's
and so it would become law. Maybe he'll sign it.
They don't know. And in the meantime, Democrats are getting
all of the all of this fodders of what he's
saying publicly to make their case in the Mitium election.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the gist of what you just heard from
Jackie Cascinach is that the Republicans could have held this
up and said, CCC, we're doing all these wonderful things
for you. One in fact it would. It'd be a
total charade. It's a total charade that the Republicans would
even go with this thing. They're just looking for a
political pr stunt. But this housing bill doesn't fix in
the slightest. But that's what they consider. I guess doing
a good job in DC sad it really is all right.
We haven't talked to Iran. Iran is sending a delegation
to Doha today and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are
also going to be in Doha today and they're going
for meetings. And the Iranian delegation is going for meetings,
but they're not going for meetings with each other. They're
going for meetings with other people. So the delegation from
Iran is in Doha today, they're not talking to wit
Coff and Kushner, and it's just it's just boggles my mind.
So talking about gamesmanship, I guess that's what you do
in politics, is you just play games. And so they're
playing games. We sent people negotiators to Doha. Wall Street,
you want to talk about let me look up the
numbers here, because we've finished a quarter. I want to
give you the actual numbers from that now that we've
got this three months under our belt, the Nasdaq had
the best quarter since twenty twenty. Let's see some of
the other numbers. The Dow. Let's sit the numbers I
found were for the first six months. The Dow gained
eight point nine percent for the first six months of
this year. That's the best first half performance since twenty
twenty one. The S and P five hundred climbed nine
point six percent in the first half, and the NASDAK
performed with a little more than a twelve percent advance.
The Russell two thousand gained almost twenty two percent. That's
the best that they've seen for first half results since
nineteen ninety one. I don't want to bore you with
a lot of numbers. So that was the first half,
but obviously the second part, the second quarter was a
lot better than the first quarter, because for the previous
three months, well that's when all the tech stocks and
the AI stocks have just been on fire. For the
second quarter, the Dow was up thirteen percent, the Nasdaq
was up nineteen percent, the S and P was up
fourteen percent. So great second quarter overall, it was better
than the first quarter. But the first quarter was nothing
to sneeze at, so good for the overall stats for
the first half of the year. Other economic news to
day Japan. The Japanese yen dropped to a forty year
low versus the US dollar. So, I mean, you've got
a lot that has changed over the last forty years.
There and then one sports note. No, there's nothing you
can buy or sell on Wall Street on this. Lebron
James made an announcement today He's not going to play
for the Los Angeles Lakers, but he's not quitting. He
said he will play his twenty fourth season somewhere else.
I don't know where that else is, but Lebron is
leaving LA. I don't know something about LA basketball. I mean,
remember Magic Johnson and diagnosed with AIDS, and he retired,
and then he came back a year and a half later,
and then retired, and then came back a year and
a half later. He retired three times. I guess hard
to leave Los Angeles NBA basketball. It's tinseltown and they
get a lot of perchs and a lot of attention
out of what they do there. All right, So Wall Street,
let's talk about today. Now finished with the record high
up one hundred and thirty six to fifty two in
three nineteen s and p up fifty eight, Nasdaq up
three hundred and ninety three. Price of gold fell thirteen
dollars down to four thy twenty five, and oil down
a little less than a dollar still with a seven.
It's seventy dollars for one barrel of West Texas Intermediate.
So that's it for today. Thank you for coming by.
We will be back again tomorrow and I hope to
see you then