← Deadline: White House
Deadline: White House
"The final day of the Supreme Court's term"
00:42:27
Today on the final day of the Supreme Court's term, over 100 years of Court precedent survived by the skin of its teeth.
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- [00:00]
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Nicole Wallace
Yeah.
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Nicole Wallace
Hi there everyone. It's four o' clock in the east today, on the final day of the Supreme Court's term, more than 100 years of court precedent survived by the hair of its chinny chin chin as the nation's highest court upheld the principle that almost everyone who is born on American soil is considered an American citizen. In doing so, the Court overturned Donald Trump's executive order, which would have eliminated birthright citizenship as we know it. The decision was 6:3 Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson were all in the majority. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in part. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts writes this quote, we have repeatedly understood the precedent of the Supreme Court to guarantee citizenship to all children born in the US and subject to its power. We see no reason to depart from that view today. In a concurring opinion, Justice Jackson puts a sharper point on it by writing this quote. The ultimate irony is that for all the talk about the detestable Supreme Court decision that slaves were not citizens, the government and the principal dissent propose a return to its core tenet. Their bottom line is that for certain, people being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship. It is that odious conclusion that the Constitution plainly rejects. As the Court explains, the America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result. Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our nation's founding that all human beings are created equal once more. Three of the conservatives on the Supreme Court made no secret of their contempt for that decision today. In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito writes this quote, this is one of the most important decisions in the history of the court. And in my judgment, the court has made a serious mistake. Alito adds that the majority's interpretation of the Constitution, quote, degrades the concept of United States citizenship. In his own separate dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas adds this quote, today's opinion devalues citizenship. While Justice Kavanaugh agreed in part with the majority opinion overturning Donald Trump's executive order, he did not agree that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right. Kavanaugh left the door open for Congress to act, one of the many warning signs that today's decision may not be the final word in our country on the issue of birthright citizenship. While the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to Donald Trump's attempt to define who gets to be an American for now, it also wrapped a term defined by massive expansions of Donald Trump's presidential powers, including just yesterday when the court handed Trump the ability to fire independent government regulators on a whim without cause, despite federal laws protecting their jobs. These warning signs about just how far the Supreme Court has lurched to the right and how much further they could go to continue in enabling Donald Trump and his allies is where we begin today. Joining me is senior editor and legal correspondent at Slate, our friend Dalia Lithwick. She's been following and writing about the court for more than two decades. Also joining us, former deputy national Security advisor to President Obama, now the co host of Pod Save the World. Our contributor Ben Rhodes is here and Cody Wofsi is here. He's the deputy project director of the ACLU's Immigrants Rights Project. The ACLU represented the plaintiffs in this case before the the court. Cody, I start with you. Your reaction?
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Cody Wofsi
Yeah, absolutely. This win before the Supreme Court today is an absolute vindication for generations of Americans who have fought for full and equal citizenship and for millions of families across the country. This executive order was absolutely lawless and it threatened to strip citizenship of from tens of thousands of babies being born every single month in this country. Supreme Court's majority opinion closes the door on that threat and ultimately, as you say, reaffirms that what the Constitution says about citizenship is exactly what it means. If you are born in this country, you belong here.
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Nicole Wallace
What do you make of the way the justices organize themselves with six in the majority, not the five, four, Nail biter, but not nine to nothing on something that I feel like you learn in elementary school, the concept of birthright citizenship.
- [05:49]
Cody Wofsi
You're absolutely right. This should have been a nine to nothing opinion. The constitutional text is clear, the history is clear, and the Supreme Court precedent is clear, going all the way back to the 1898 decision in Walmart Long Kim arc and I think that the majority opinion very ably explains the ways in which all of those ways in which we interpret the Constitution and decide constitutional questions all point in exactly the same direction. Everyday people on the street understand the rule. If you're born in this country, you are a US Citizen. Unfortunately, there were justices who saw it a different way, but those are dissenting opinions. And the Court's decision, the majority here reaffirms this really bedrock constitutional rule and ensures that these children will remain citizens for the rest of their lives.
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Nicole Wallace
Dalia, let me ask you about something that's come up every day this week, and that is the personal nature of the text of the decisions. I mean, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson making no secret about how she sees the dissent. Samuel Alito calling the majority quote, wrong. What stands out to you?
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Dalia Lithwick
I mean, I think if you read Justice Jackson, first of all, to be clear, it is a clinic on how to do constitutional text and history and originalism and how to do it right. And so for folks who want to read, like if you really believe that, you go back to history and you go back to text and meaning, should read Justice Jackson. But she's very clear. This is a direct response to what she thinks. Justice Thomas has just gotten woefully wrong in his dissent and in a sense, that feeling that she has to take him on on his own terms. It's not that we never see this, but I think you're right to say aggregated over the last few weeks. Right. You and I talked last week about sniping between Justices Alito Sotomayor over a dissent that she read. There just seems to be a sense that trust is broken among the Justices and that there is a feeling that the skin is very, very thin and that everything is personal and everything is expressed personally.
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Nicole Wallace
I want to read from Justice Jackson's concurrence, the part where she calls out Justice Clarence Thomas. She writes this despite his long standing endorsement of a colorblind Constitution. Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the citizenship clause was a race conscious remedial measure relating only to, quote, freed slaves such as Dred Scott and those who shared with them certain characteristics. It is for this Reason he says that, quote, children who were born in the United States but to parents not domiciled here are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship. But that narrow vision of the 14th Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification. Even worse, Justice Thomas telling leads the entire point of the second Founding. The Reconstruction Amendments were an anti caste, anti subordination reset for the nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery. She seems to be getting at something, and again, not a lawyer, not a Supreme Court journalist like you are, but she seems to be getting at something that kind of hovered over the voting rights decision as well. What is this about?
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Dalia Lithwick
It hovered over the affirmative action decision. I mean, this is to the extent that there is a progressive originalist on the Court. And by the way, it hovered over her confirmation hearing as well. She is very committed to the principle that if you are going to say you're a textualist and originalist, that the meaning of the drafters of the Reconstruction Amendments matters, then be true to that. And I think that for her, again, the only word I can keep using is gaslighting, that this very cramped, very forced, utterly ahistoric, utterly indefensible reading of the Reconstruction Amendments to her, she experiences it like a wound. And so I think that what you are seeing is her pushing back on, again, an idea of a colorblind Constitution or colorblind Reconstruction Amendments that has kind of been plucked out of thin air and pushed to its maximalist extreme. And for her, I think she really feels like, if you are going to write those out of the Constitution, I am going to fight you. And it's become extremely visceral and personal for her every time they do it.
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Nicole Wallace
I mean, let me just take a short detour with you, Dalia. If you take the Kagan and Sotomayor dissents in the two cases, I guess it was late last week. It feels like the 11th day of the same week, but I think those were last week. And you take Ketanji Brown Jackson's concurrence today and you take the voting rights decisions. I mean, the liberal justices are telling a really stark story to anyone who's listening.
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Dalia Lithwick
I think they each have a tell. I think they each have a pain point. I think if you read Kagan today on campaign finance, for her, corruption is always gonna be things she cares deeply about. I think both Sotomayor and Kagan care deeply about public regard for and continued respect for the courts. And I think that, you know, they each kind of come to this from their own places, but I think you're exactly right that they have in some sense divvied up the workload as between the three of them. And for, you know, Justice Sotomayor, it's often, you know, about race. For Justice Jackson, it is frequently and I think, again, sort of viscerally and existentially about the claims that the Reconstruction Amendments have to mean what they say they mean. The Civil Rights act has to mean what it says it means. And so I think in some sense, they've all picked some component of what has been dismantled by the Roberts court supermajority, and they just go to town on it every opportunity they can. And again, it is not common to read dissents from the bench. When you hear them reading from the bench, that's one of the things they're pointing up, is kind of yelling into the void, this is wrong.
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Nicole Wallace
Yeah. Ben Rhodes, I want your take on all of it, but let me just add a little bit of the New York Times reporting on this topic. The justices pride themselves on reaching unanimous results, often publicizing their ability to find common ground in a surprisingly high number of cases. But in just the last week, seven of the nine decisions announced by the Supreme Court split the justices 6, 3. With all Republican nominees in the majority and all Democratic nominees in dissent. The divisive rulings illustrate how the Court six Republican nominees are routinely controlling the outcome in decisions large and small this term and moving the law steadily to the right.
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Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I want to start by building on something that Dalia said in response to this, Nicole. And as you know, even though this isn't my normal area of focus, I just spent four years in American history on the book I just finished, and there's a line from Frederick Douglass I'm going to paraphrase here that I think is very relevant, and it ties into what Dolly was just saying. He was talking about people who were trying to gut the 14th Amendment back in the 19th century. And he said, how is it that these people on the right try to divine the original intent of the founders who wrote the Constitution, but they ignore the intent of the people that drafted the 14th Amendment, that essentially, in our system, we have a Constitution that was allowed to be amended that was by the design of the founders. And I think the reason that you have such intense divisions on the court right now, I want to say, first of all, I believe that it's the progressive judges who are acting in line with American traditions. And we are talking about very big questions. What does it mean to be an American American? Who is an American who gets to decide those questions. And I believe it's Justice Jackson and Sotomayor and Kagan who are actually in line with our constitutional traditions, including the amendments of the Reconstruction era, who are saying, you can't just come in here on the right wing of this court and seek to rewrite American history. There is gaslighting going on here. This is not just about trying to kind of ram down a right wing agenda on the rest of us. That's bad enough. It's about trying to kind of claim that as the kind of patriotic basis for what the court is doing. And the other thing is they're twisting themselves in knots. I mean, the degree of inconsistencies here. You know, we believe in states rights only when it's a states rights agenda that the far right supports in this country. You know, we believe in original intent only when it's the original intent of the people that we agree with. There's this kind of picking and choosing and selective use of the law in American history just to dress up Donald Trump's agenda in the best way it can appear. Dress up things like unlimited, you know, campaign finance that is clearly corrupting our politics in ways that support the right wing in this country, kind of dressing that up as free speech, dressing up the radical gerrymandering of districts for partisan and sometimes racialized purposes as somehow in line with American traditions here. And so I think that there's a reason it's so intense. And what it says to me, Nicole, is that the court is broken. And that's what these justices are trying to tell us as best that they can.
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Nicole Wallace
We have to deal with the Kavanaugh concurrence, which seems to be an instruction that Donald Trump has taken as such an instruction. He's already said, I hear you, Justice Kavanaugh, on it. How does that impact the perception that the court is working in concert with the Trump White House? Ben?
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Ben Rhodes
I think what it tells me, Nicole, that is kind of alarming, right, is Kavanaugh's almost signaling. Well, I can't quite go this far because as you point out, the birthright citizenship thing should be a slam dunk. But, you know, maybe, you know, I'm gonna urge you to push your agenda through Congress in this way. You know, it's. It's like I'm aiding you. I'm trying to kind of, you know, pass the puck and you can skate to it to get the thing done that you want to get done. The Supreme Court is not supposed to be helping to facilitate the implementation of the agenda of the president. It's supposed to be, as John Roberts famously said, calling balls and strikes. And we kind of see this a lot with this court, where they seem to be trying to signal sometimes to Trump, we're going to be with you on almost all of these things. And, oh, when we are not with you, we're going to kind of signal to you how you might better go about getting this done. And that, to me, kind of speaks to the breakdown of how the system's supposed to work. Just because they're right wing justices appointed by Republican presidents doesn't mean that their job is to try to help kind of facilitate the implementation of an agenda by signaling, well, this one you should take to Congress. It should be an open and shut case that if you're born in this country, you're a citizen. That was the intent of the people who wrote the 14th amendment. And there's no overturning that, even through an act of Congress.
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Nicole Wallace
Yeah. I mean, some of the opinions have sounded like job applications to work in the policy shop, like Stephen Miller were hiring. They're writing policy explanations. Makes you wonder not just who's writing them, but who's editing them. Before they go public. I need all of you to stick around. There's much more. On this final day of decisions from the Supreme Court, Trump and his loyalists on Capitol Hill say they will, quote, correct the court's ruling today on birthright citizenship. We'll talk to a senator about the fight ahead on that front. Plus, another decision today impacts how much money is spent in politics, a decision that struck down limits on campaign finance and potentially opens the door to more corruption. And later in the broadcast, brand new reporting on just how secretive Donald Trump and his administration are being when it comes to the cost of his gold gilded ballroom that he promised his donors were going to pay for. All those stories and much more. Deadline White House continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere.
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Mark Elias
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Cody Wofsi
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Nicole Wallace
Yeah.
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Nicole Wallace
I want to play for you what the director of the aclu, Cecilia Wang, said on our earlier today about the case.
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Cecilia Wang
This is something that's so meaningful to all of us, really, all of us in this country who can trace our ancestry to that first American ancestor. Whether it's your parent, whether it's your great great grandfather or your great great grandmother, there was someone in your family, if you have an immigrant background, who was the first American. Today's decision is a very fundamental repudiation. Trump's efforts going into this holiday weekend with the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, I feel an extra sense that when all of us band together to fight back against government officials who are trying to take away our rights, we can win. So it'll be a really special Fourth of July for all of us.
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Nicole Wallace
Cody, I want to come back to something that Dalia said about gaslighting. There's something, I don't know if the word is gaslighty or the moving of the Overton window that this was covered like a jump ball. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Nail biter Clarence Thomas was wandering around Capitol Hill yesterday and people are like, I wonder what he's there for. Why are we in a moment where things like this are so closely watched and decided, Yeah, I think it's a
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Cody Wofsi
great question, you know, this idea that we're going to rewrite the words of the Constitution and change who counts as an American, rejecting this really fundamental American principle. Decades ago, this was, you know, bubbling up in far right anti immigrant circles Way, way out of the mainst. And today it was decided at the Supreme Court. Now, thankfully it was correctly rejected by a majority of the court. But it's extremely troubling that we even got here. And I think that a huge amount of the blame for that lands at the foot of the Trump administration. This is the most anti immigrant administration in at least a century and maybe ever. And what we've seen is just a relentless series of attacks on immigrant communities and on mixed status households in this country overall as an attempt to change the demographics, to turn back the clock to a time when this country was less free and less equal and more than anything was more white and birthright citizenship. This effort to change the constitutional rule, that was the tip of the spear when it came to Stephen Miller's vision of, of a whiter America. It is extremely troubling that those ideas have made it into the mainstream enough for the Department of Justice to be making the arguments it made in this case. But I think it's absolutely vital that we held the line on this critical issue and that the rule that has formed the foundation of so many of our families, as Cecilia pointed out, going back generations, will continue to shape America and continue to bring the beauty of the American experiment into the future.
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Nicole Wallace
Dalia the case started its way toward the Supreme Court when immigration was divisive in the two years since Trump has been there. The question of is immigration good or bad was asked by the New York Times after the killings in Minneapolis. And I think 80% of respondents somewhere around there said immigration is good. Trump's radical policies have actually lifted people's beliefs about the benefits of immigration. What do you make of the court once again standing in the three justices that write for the dissent? The arguments that they made that they released publicly are so far out of the mainstream mainstream of public thought again, and they're getting publicized in part because the justices publicized them. What do you make of the Court's indifference to how it's viewed by the vast majority of Americans in the mainstream on this question?
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Dalia Lithwick
It's a really important question and I think I would say sort of two responses. There is a chicken egg problem here insofar as I completely take Cody's point that this is a MAGA project, this is Project 20. This is Donald Trump and Stephen Miller all the way down. But it has been aided and abetted at every turn, even before this term by this Supreme Court. And this Supreme Court has been willing, for some of the reasons that Ben suggested, has been willing to engage in a decades long project to write maximalist presidential power plenary powers that didn't exist. You can think about the immunity case. So I just want to be really, really precise that it's not one or the other. It's not the White House versus the court. It's the two of them working hand in glove on virtually every issue that Trump hustled to the court this term and last term to do the same things. And so I think it's just important to see the symbiosis that's at work here because they work together. And I think it's important to understand there's an entire legal industrial complex. Right. Of amicus briefs and law professors who support that. I think your, your sort of bigger point is, does the American public balk? Now, knowing what we know, does this seem like the court got out over its skis? And if you read these opinions which were drafted in the last couple of days and these dissents, clearly the dissenting justices don't think so. Clearly they feel that this massive wholesale rewriting of the Constitution, the wind is at their backs. And that signals to me they don't feel accountable to the public or anyone else about the positions they take. They don't feel as though they're taking a risk right now.
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Nicole Wallace
Ben, it brings the politics into this. You and I worked for different political parties at a time, but now I think I don't wanna speak for you, but I feel like I am part of the same pro democracy coalition. We're on the same side. And why doesn't the pro democracy side make more overt, persuasive messages to the electorate? I mean, these are so widely outside of the mainstream of American public opinion on immigration, on birthright citizenship, on temporary protective status. I mean, the, the, the conservative justices are so detached from. And again, they'll say they're not political actors. The things that they put in writing make it literally sound like they want Capitol Hill policy jobs or leg affairs jobs. I mean, they certainly aren't acting like they're not political actors and they're not writing like they're not political actors. And they talk at events and they sound like the most thin skinned politicians you and I have ever encountered in our political lives. So why can't a better argument be made to the vast majority of Americans who are sort of under this pro democracy 10 that electing more Democrats is the only way to sort of move the court back into the mainstream?
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Ben Rhodes
Look, I think you're right, Nicole. I'm gonna take the ball from Cody and then Dalia and take it one step further.
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Cody Wofsi
Right.
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Ben Rhodes
Cody talked about the Trump administration. Dalia talked about the legal industrial complex in the court. I'm gonna talk about the Republican Party here because there's been a decades long effort by the Republican Party to rig the entire system to entrench themselves in power and to be able to ram through minority views on the rest of. Whether they do that through presidential power, whether they do that through the court. We see that time and time again. And we're left in this place where we're celebrating when the Supreme Court doesn't do away with birthright citizenship or doesn't overturn the result of the 2020 election in line with Donald Trump. Those should be absolute slam dunks. And meanwhile, everything else is them upholding or ramming through very minority views on the rest of the country through often dubious legal reason. Let's just take Money in Politics, which also featured, you know, Americans are sick of money in politics in both parties. Nobody thinks it's a great idea that every special interest group in this country can just pour unlimited dark money into the political process. You know, this is something that happened in the Obama years. They weren't deferential to the presidential prerogative when the president was a Democrat. You had justices sitting in the audience at Obama's State of the Union, you know, reacting visibly angry when he suggested that dark money was gonna flood our politics, which has. Look, the point, Nicole, for Democrats, is there is no longer a question of a democracy agenda and then a kind of kitchen table agenda. You see Jon Ossoff doing this. Well, the reason the system is rigged is because the whole system is corrupt. And if we're going to have better outcomes in policy, then we're going to have to change how our democracy works. We're going to have to change how the Supreme Court operates. There has to be Supreme Court reform. We just can't sit here for decades and allow people that have no regard for the Constitution or public opinion to sit in judgment of our lives like this. And so I think what Democrats have to do is, you know, they keep having these kind of separate silos. Like we're either talking about the court, or we're talking about abortion and Roe v. Wade, or we're talking about corruption, or we're talking about, you know, your prices. You know, it's all one big thing. And the reason that the system feels broken is because it is. And part of the reason that the system is broken is because this Supreme Court has been packed and orchestrated over decades by the far right. In this country. And if that's gonna be the case, you're gonna have to ref how the democracy functions or else we're going to keep getting outcomes that are wildly out of step with public opinion.
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Nicole Wallace
Yeah. And they're the ones telling us that they are making policy choices, making policy decisions. It is remarkable. Cody, thank you so much for starting us off. Dalia and Ben, stick around. When we come back as Ben just set up perfectly for us. The court also today handed a major victory to Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party and their attempts to inject more money into our elections. We'll tell you about that next.
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- [33:22]
Nicole Wallace
in another supreme Court decision announced today, the court upended decades of its own precedent with a ruling that will have an immediate impact on how tens of millions of dollars flow into this year's midterms. In a 63 decision, the justices struck down caps on federal campaign finance spending, clearing the way for major political party groups to now spend unlimited amounts of money in coordination with a specific candidate. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan argues that the majority's opinion, quote, jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy's integrity. Justice Kagan writes, quote, here the subject is campaign finance law for those who think there is too much of it in this country, for those who would prefer even more money to be pumped even more easily into politics despite the danger of corruption, this overruling is for you. I want to bring in voting rights attorney and founder of Democracy docket Mark Elias. He argued this case before the Supreme Court. Dalia and Ben are still with me. I know you usually win. Of all your wins, it's unfortunate that this was not one of them. We need more money in our politics, said no one ever. Who is this for, this really?
- [34:36]
Mark Elias
Republican Party. I mean, look, the Republican Party have been trying to strike down this particular limit, this particular law. They have been trying to strike down as long or longer actually than I've been a lawyer. In fact, the very first brief I ever filed in the United States Supreme Court was in a case in the mid-1990s where they were trying to strike down this provision and they failed. Then they tried to do it again in the early 2000s and they failed. And the only thing that's happened since then and now, now is the composition of the court. You know, Congress passed this law all the way back in the 1970s, and it was upheld in the original Buckley case. It's been upheld since then, as I mentioned. And it's just like the conservatives on the court saw an opportunity to get rid of a provision that the RNC is not liked, that the national Republican Party is not liked for forever. So they did it. And they did it, frankly, on the thinnest of theories of standing, which is that J.D. vance intends to run for U.S. senate. That's literally the basis upon which they found this case was even justiceable.
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Nicole Wallace
I want to read you more from Kagan's dissent, Mark. She writes the First Amendment permits campaign finance restrictions that are narrowly tailored to protect against quid pro quo corruption. And its appearance caps on a party's coordinated expenditures passed that test with flying cops, sellers. That's not my personal theory. It is now. Was the courts 25 years ago in a case called Colorado, Colorado 2, the court considered and rejected the same arguments it finds irresistible today. What we've been talking all, you know, term about the contortions that the justices put themselves in to make this about anything other than policy and politics. Just explain how they contorted themselves to disagree with themselves from 20 years ago.
- [36:32]
Mark Elias
Yeah. So essentially the campaign finance law is going all the way back, like I said to post Watergate, when Congress held hearings. And based on a real life example of a president actually abusing his political party to raise money in order to sell policies to wealthy individuals and corporations, passed a law that limits the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates. This does not prevent them from running independent expenditures. This simply prevents them from spending unlimited amounts of money to pay the bills of campaigns, to essentially just do a wealth transfer to campaigns. This has been on the books since the 1970s. In the early 1990s, the Republican Party decided they wanted to do away with this in a case called Colorado one that failed. Then in Colorado, it failed again. And the Supreme Court made very clear that this limit on unlimited expenditures, contributions essentially in kind, contributions essentially to candidates, served several important purposes, including preventing the parties from being used as a mere conduit of money. Since the contribution limits to parties are so much larger than they are to campaigns, it prevents donors from just giving large checks to parties as a pastor through to the candidates that they prefer. And that rationale stood several times. The Republicans went back to lower courts and failed. And, you know, John Roberts and, and, and Brett Kavanaugh and the, and the rest of the conservatives, now they have control of the court. They decided that they were going to undo that and unleash what is going to be a torrent, a torrent of new money. And in the case of Donald Trump in the Republican Party, just another vehicle, vehicle to put money in the pockets of these campaigns and the people who benefit from them,
- [38:29]
Nicole Wallace
which is stunning when taken side by side with all the corruption we're seeing in full view in Washington and Donald Trump's Washington and White House. I have to sneak in a break. I want to bring Dalia and Ben in on this and broaden the conversation to what we now understand about the court. Well, I'll be right back. Foreign. We're back with Mark, Dalia and Ben Dahlia and this topic that I have an bottomless appetite to understand. Here's Justice Kagan's dissent. I'm not sure what to call a remnant of a remnant, but that's what the court has left today. And the result will be what Justice Breyer warned, warned of a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption and thus to preserve our institution's democratic legitimacy, basically arguing that with this decision, we are where we've been warned we would end up in a legal structure where corruption is inevitable and institutions become illegitimate. That is a sharp, stark, and unfortunately, likely accurate one warning.
- [39:45]
Dalia Lithwick
If I can marry what Mark was just saying to what Ben said earlier when we were talking about the court, I think it's really important to understand that this Robert's 6 supermajority was put in place by design at great expense. Right? We know the kinds of money from big donors that went to seating this court. And they were put in place in many ways to break democracy, to ensure that democracy can't function. And they've done that. Right? Partisan gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, vote suppression by the skin of our teeth. Mail in voting survives this week, but I think it's really important to understand that for democracy to succeed is for these wildly unpopular off the wall ideas. You've made the point nobody wants big slushing money driving politics. Those ideas gain salience, they gain traction because they get welded to ideas about what the First Amendment requires and then over years and years, they get bootstrapped to existing remnants of remnants until there's nothing left. But I think the really important point that Ben made, that I really think is at the core of this is, is that anyone who actually believes in democracy, that democracy has to keep working, needs to connect it up to what the Court has done in this particular case to make sure that big money keeps polluting politics, but also to utterly and completely undermine confidence in institutions. And the way to think about that isn't to say, therefore we don't fight for democracy or we don't fight for a better court. It's to say this is by design. Fine, it's worked. And now we have to figure out a way to kind of strip it down to the studs and get it to do the thing it was meant to be doing from the jump.
- [41:53]
Nicole Wallace
Ben, you get the last word.
- [41:56]
Ben Rhodes
This is the, I think the biggest issue in the country right now, the unlimited flood of money in politics is connected to everything else that we don't like. It's connected to runaway inequality, it's connected to high prices, it's connected to racial gerrymandering, it's connected to kind of brutalist immigration policies. It's connected the fact that the President's family is making billions of dollars off the presidency. And all of it, as Dalia points out, it's meant to make people cynical. It's meant to make people think that they have no power, they have no agency power has been removed from them and has been put in the hands of a handful of Supreme Court justices, Donald Trump and his family, people like Elon Musk, who's a trillionaire. Now, that would be impossible without his capacity to influence politics through hundreds of millions of dollars in donations like this is all by design, unless and until we address this fundamental corruption and cynical corruption of our system, we're not gonna get better outcomes. We're gonna be fighting over scraps in policy and politics in this country. And so I think that this question of money and politics, it's fundamental to everything that the court does. It's fundamental to everything that is going wrong in the country right now. And anybody who wants to fix this democracy or make better outcomes for the American people is gonna have to redesign how this system. System works as it was intended to work by the founders. I want to stress this, this is the patriotic position. Sometimes people say, well, if you want to reform the court, you know, you're the one messing around with democracy. These are the people that broke the democracy. If we're going to make it work again, we're going to have to redesign the system.
- [43:35]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah. And we're going to have to, you know, peek at what the day to day news cycles look like in Hungary leading up to the people rising up over all of these obstacles. They had enough time to put all these hurdles in place and the people said, no. Thank you. Marc Elias, Thalia Lithwick, Ben Rhodes, the best of the best. Thank you so much for your time today. After the break. Also out of the court today, a blow to LGBTQ rights in this country will bring a reaction from the family of one of the teens who brought that case to the court. Next foreign. There's another Supreme Court ruling to tell you about today. This one upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, marking another setback for transgender youth and people in this country. The court's six conservative justices ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia do not violate the Constitution. One of those cases, the one challenging West Virginia's ban, was brought by a 16 year old girl, Becky Pepper Jackson. She has publicly identified as a girl since she's been eight years old. Here's part of what her mom wrote about the decision today. Quote, Becky's smile is also her most powerful response to the cruelty coming from the sidelines. She keeps her head high. She cheers everyone on. That is what a good teammate looks like. That's what a winner looks. Looks like. When I watch from the bleachers, that's who I see. A teenager with an extraordinary capacity for kindness and perseverance. A kid who loves her team, her coaches and her school and who never asked to be in this fight. I won't pretend this outcome doesn't hurt, but in my book, Becky had already won the moment she stepped onto the field long before the courtroom was ever part of the story. She simply showed up to play, taking on something bigger than herself. Just came with. But she never flinched. And she's still smiling. We'll stay on top of that story. Another break. We'll talk with a United States senator on the birthright citizenship victory from the Supreme Court. But why the fight is still far from over. The next hour of Deadline White House starts after a quick break.
- [45:48]
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