← The Majority Report with Sam Seder
The Majority Report with Sam Seder
3528 - Trump-GOP's Supreme Court Rubber Stamp w/ Elie Mystal
01:30:31
It's Monday and the GOPs in Congress have been pulling all-nighters in an attempt to pass the SENR Bill and complete the largest upwards transfer of wealth in the nation's history As the legislative branch works their magic math to kill as many poor...
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- [00:00]
Sam Seder
You are listening to a free version of Majority Report with Sam Steder. To support this show and get another 15 minutes of daily program, go to majority SM please. The majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Monday, June 30, 2025. My name is Sam Seder. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, Ellie Most, correspondent and columnist at the Nation magazine, Author of Bad 10 Popular Laws that are Ruining America. Also on the program today, Senate Republican moves the big disaster bill into the Votorama. People are calling it the worst legislation arguably in a lifetime. North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis is the first Republican casualty. Slams the bill for devastating health care. Announces he will not be seeking re election. Senate reconciliation bill also a kill shot destroying thousands of solar and wind businesses and projects. US announces a date to deport nearly 500,000 Haitians after setting a temporary protected status deadline in September. Israel steps up attacks on Gaza, bombing at least 72 people, killing them. Settlers in the west bank are rioting. Trump administration building a centralized citizen data system. And as med schools renew focus on measles and infectious diseases. No one seems to know who's running the CDC. Nearly 300 EPA employees, half of more assigned that publicly issue a declaration of dissent about the new EPA directives world central banks to meet to discuss the end of dollar domination as Trump causes a massive investment in capital outflow to EU and Asia. Lastly, Trump threatens Mamdani with federal funds to be cut off unless he behaves. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. Emma is out still on vacation on honeymoon. It's been, I mean, over three days. What, what do you do on a honeymoon that long? Nevertheless, what's that?
- [03:32]
Emma Vigland
Check Twitter.
- [03:35]
Sam Seder
How do you. I don't understand. I just don't. I mean, she will be back next Monday and just a house cleaning. We will of course be taking a Friday off this week. A lot to get to the the Senate reconciliation bill which we have been telling you about for months, weeks now past the senators stayed over the weekend. When there's an opportunity to immiserate millions of people and enrich very wealthy people, these senators will go to the mat. They will give you 110, 120%. And they did it this weekend. They lost two votes on essentially moving the bill forward. In other words, ending discussion or cloture. The two votes they lost were Thom Tillis From North Carolina. Not super shocking, although wouldn't have been the first one, I guessed. And Rand Paul. Rand Paul didn't want to vote for this because it includes a debt ceiling increase. There were other senators who were prepared to vote against it, but when they saw that it actually would kill the bill if they voted against it, they didn't do it.
- [05:14]
Ellie Mystal
Do you see Josh Hawley's emo populism that he regrets that some of his constituents are going to be throwing off insurance?
- [05:21]
Sam Seder
But I think we have a clip of that. Don't we have a clip of that?
- [05:23]
Ellie Mystal
We'll discuss it later of Hawley?
- [05:25]
Sam Seder
Yeah, we should. I think that's in the. But yes, we saw that. It turns out that Josh Hawley, his populism does not run as deeply as he did when folks were attacking the Capitol on January 6th. Nevertheless, the bill, the cloture passed. That means it goes on to debate. But what the Democrats in the Senate did is said that the staffers in the Senate, the secretary had to read the bill. Usually this is skipped, but the bill is over 950 pages long and nobody had really seen it for more than 10, 12 hours by the time it was voted upon. And so the Democrats called for it to be read. It was read all through the night until Sunday at some time. And then as of this morning, the Votorama begins, which is essentially with a reconciliation bill. You cannot prevent amendments from being offered. And so what happens in these instances is that both the Republicans and the Democrats begin to offer amendments so that they can Republicans so that they can mitigate the disaster this bill is going to do politically to them, or at least that's the theory. I voted to have an amendment and it was shot down. I voted to, you know, make it possible for there to be green energy. I shot it down. I don't know that there would be any that would say that, although I think Thom Tillis had a big problem with the green energy aspects of this. And then the Democrats keep adding amendments, some of which are votes that Republicans don't want to have to take but will. But at the end of the day, this bill itself is so incredibly unpopular and people haven't even actually begun to feel the impact. If you were thinking about putting solar panels on your house and anticipating that 30% tax cut, then you were thinking, maybe, you know what, I can't afford it this year, but maybe in a year or two I can. That tax cut is going to end at the end of this year. If you are a solar company that started up a year or two ago and thought, I'm going to be able to make this business work because the government is essentially subsidizing with these tax cuts the rollout of this technology. If you're a massive wind farm and you were thinking of building or you were building or you are selling products to other people, I mean, this is going to devastate thousands of businesses. If you were Elon Musk and trying to salvage your failing electric vehicle business, you're screwed. And apparently he's a little bit upset about things. But the list goes on and on. Snap cuts, Millions of people will go without food assistance and it'll get even worse in a recession. Here is Harry Anton on cnn. And understand this is how badly people are perceiving this bill before they actually feel the pain itself.
- [09:22]
Thom Tillis
How do Americans feel about the big beautiful bill?
- [09:25]
Harry Anton
Yeah, if we're talking about adjectives, how about they think it's awful, they think it's horrible. And to quote our colleague Charles Barkley, terrible, terrible, terrible. What are we talking about here? Well, let's take a look at the net favorable rating on the big beautiful bill. I don't just got one poll for you, Omar. I got five of them. And the net favorable rating, minus 19 points, Washington Post, minus 20 points. Pew Research Center, Fox minus 21 Quinnipiac University, minus 26 KFF minus 29. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to know that when the net favorable rating of your bill is somewhere between -19 and -29 points that it is not a positive bill as viewed by the American public. The American public at this particular point, hate, hate, hate. The big beautiful bill as far as they're concerned in it's not a big beautiful bill. It's a big bad bill.
- [10:27]
Sam Seder
I was. It is a big bad bill. And it is amazing to me that you have mainstream media still referring to it as big beautiful bill. I mean, it was such a. I can't believe that worked. I can't see. I just started calling it the next bill we're going to try and pass is going to be good thing Bill.
- [10:55]
Ellie Mystal
The big beautiful Trump is king Bill.
- [10:57]
Sam Seder
Good bill. You wanted it, you got it. Trump is king Bill and also the.
- [11:06]
Ellie Mystal
Best businessman in American history Bill.
- [11:09]
Sam Seder
Of course, there's huge upward distribution in this bill. I mean, this is a bill that is pushing $930 billion worth of Medicaid cuts and providing $910 billion tax breaks for corporations and huge upward distribution in terms of taxes across the board. We know the vast majority both as a real dollar amount and as a percentage of tax cuts go to the very wealthy. Here is a taste of what Republicans who vote for this bill know. Thom Tillis is going to go in there. He still wants to have a future in Republican politics, mind you. So he's pretending that Donald Trump doesn't understand what he's doing, that he's being tricked by dumb advisers in the White House. No one's telling him the truth and he's being fooled. Now, listen to Thom Tillis here understand he was up for reelection in 2026. He is no longer going to be up for reelection. The rest of the Republicans are basically saying this is we are going to rob the bank and we get in the getaway car. Even if we lose the House and the Senate, this is going to have such negative impact on this country. They just don't think that any of this stuff can be reversed. And on some level, they're going to be right. Here's Thom Tillis.
- [12:54]
Thom Tillis
Between the state directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill, there's a reduction of state directed payments, then there's the reduction of the provider tax. They can't find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that, yeah, it's rough, but North Carolina's used the system. They're going to have to make it work. All right, so what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore? When the White House advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise. And you know, the last time I saw a promise broken around health care, with respect to my friends on the other side of the aisle is when somebody said, if you like your health care, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you could keep it. We found out that wasn't true.
- [14:03]
Sam Seder
Posit for a second that made. Now I just need to, because I had to go live through this era, make a correction to what Thom Tillis is saying. Obviously now he can't get up there and say either, A, the president is a inveterate liar, which we all know is the case. And in fact, in this instance, he lied against the people that support him, or B, he is a complete moron and has no idea what he's pushing, which, you know, arguably they don't have to be separate things.
- [14:41]
Emma Vigland
Right?
- [14:41]
Sam Seder
They're not mutually exclusive. But this point about you can keep your doctor if you want. Private health insurance does not let you do that every year. I can't remember when it is sometime I think around now, actually, you get notice your doctor's no longer in, in plan and if you go to them now, you get like only 25%, you know, coverage. And so when Obama said that he should have had an asterisk next to it, you know, to the extent that private insurance lets you do that anyways, which of course they don't, but that's their talking point. And Thom Tillis still has to go to the country club once he quits the Senate.
- [15:33]
Ellie Mystal
Continue back in the circle of trust.
- [15:36]
Thom Tillis
Like your doctor, you could keep it. We found out that wasn't true. That made me the second Republican speaker of the House since the Civil War, ladies and gentlemen, because we betrayed the promise to the American people. Two years later, three years later, it actually made me a US senator because in 2010 it had just been proposed and just anticipation of what was going to happen was enough to have a sea change election that swept Republicans into the majority for the second time in 100 years. Now Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betraying a promise. It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the Cabinet Room when I was there with finance, where he said, we can go after waste, fraud and abuse on any programs now.
- [16:46]
Sam Seder
Okay, now the irony is the Medicaid 630,000 that he's talking about that are going to lose their Medicaid, possibly under this. Likely they are on Medicaid because of the Affordable Care act, which expanded Medicaid. Now, of course, he's not going to tell anybody that, but he needed an analogy. And the fact of the matter is, once kicked in and people understood, at least it wasn't so much made health insurance significantly affordable. Well, it certainly didn't make it affordable for everybody who is not in the Affordable Care act, but for everybody who is not part of the exchanges, which is by 11 million Americans, they all got an upgrade on the quality of their health insurance. Insofar as there was no rescission, there was no lifetime caps, there was no annual caps. That's the patient protection part of the bill. But let's not lose sight of what we're talking about here. This bill is a disaster. Millions are going to get cut from snap, millions are going to get cut from Medicaid. So much of the tiny steps that we've taken in terms of Renewable energy is going to go exactly the opposite way with subsidies for oil and gas. Someone just asked, why aren't Democrats filibustering this bill? This is a reconciliation bill. It's a special type of bill that only needs 50 plus one in the Senate and they got 51 votes in the Senate. There are specifics that got wiped out of the bill because of it being a reconciliation bill, but that's what you're missing. Also, I don't know if that was a bolo tie. It could have been the microphone. I think it's the microphone. I can't imagine you go out wearing a bolo tie like that for your big swan song speech.
- [18:57]
Ellie Mystal
I didn't know North Carolina was a bolo tie place. I associate that with like Montana.
- [19:01]
Sam Seder
I feel like it was the microphone. Nevertheless, Thom Tillis just basically said, just told us. The Republicans know this may be incredibly politically costly and they don't care. They just robbed the bank and they're getting in the driveway car. They don't care. We'll talk more about this, obviously in the fun half and tomorrow in a moment, we're going to be talking to Ellie Mistel about the absolute crap show that the Supreme Court was in this term. This is what you get. This is what we all get. A couple of words from our sponsors. Few decades ago, private citizens used to be largely private. What changed? The Internet. Think about everything you browsed, search for, watched or tweeted. Now imagine all that data being crawled, collected, aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record. Your record. Having your private life exposed for others to see was something that only celebrities used to worry about. But in an era when everybody's online, everybody's a public figure. To keep my data private, I turn to today's sponsor, ExpressVPN. Visit expressvpn.com majority and you can get an extra four months free. One of the easiest ways for data brokers to track you is through Your device unique IP address, which also reveals information about your location. With ExpressVPN, your IP address is hidden. That makes it much more difficult for data brokers to monitor, track and monetize your private online activity. ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your network traffic to keep your data safe from hackers. When you're on public Wi Fi, ExpressVPN works on all your devices. Phone, laptop, tablet, you name it. Just one tap, one button to turn it on and you're protected. It's that easy. For me, it's all about the encryption it's all about keeping that data secure. I don't want to go on a public WI fi system like at an airport or in a mall or at the. I've been on one at a, what do you call it, Escape room. Saul likes to do escape rooms. And you don't want to feel like, whoa, if I send any information, somebody can hack this stuff. That to me is the biggest issue. You can also, yeah, obviously you hide your IP. You can spoof other IPs, but.
- [21:43]
Emma Vigland
For.
- [21:43]
Sam Seder
Me that's what it is. You can protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com Majority that's E X P R E S S vpn.com Majority and you can get an extra four months free. Expressvpn.com Majority also on the program today, I should say sponsoring the program. Adventure. Adventure in the form of you learning a new language. The world is literally your oyster when you learn a new language and it gives you an option of escaping quickly and knowing what you're saying as you leave this country. And I'm talking an easy way for you to learn is Babel. Babel is honestly a super easy way to learn a language. It comes in very like bite size lessons. So you can do this when you're on a small commute, you can do a lot of it on a long commute, you can do it when you're walking, you can do it in between, you know, making dinner for the kids, etc. You could start speaking a new language with confidence thanks to Babel. Babel's conversation based technique that quickly teaches you useful words and phrases about the things you actually talk about in the real world. There's over a dozen languages available to learn at your own pace, so you can achieve your goals with material tailored to your individual proficiency level, your particular interests and of course how much time you have. I mean you can sit down, you could do an hour's worth at any given time, but if you can only do 10, then you could do 10. Handcrafted by over 200 language experts, Babel's lessons are voiced by real native speakers and built with science backed cognitive tools like Spaced repetition. Interactive features to fit any type of learning style. Babel's got tips and tools for learning a new language that are approachable and accessible. It's like having a private tutor in your pocket without the uncomfortability of having a private tutor in your pocket. They have interactive dialogue so you can actually like engage in a conversation. You can do this right off the bat and they have speech recognition to make sure you're getting the pronunciation just right. Of course that is a big problem for me. I can't even do it in English. Pronounce things well, pronounce things pronounced I can't. Staying motivated to learn a new language has never been easier. Thanks to real time feedback, they got Progress trackers only 10 to 15 minutes a day on Babel's mobile app or website. One study found that using Babel for 15 hours is equivalent to a full semester college. 16 million subscriptions sold. Babel's 14 award winning language courses are backed by a 20 day money back guarantee. So get started talking with Babel. I want you to learn another language so I'm teaming up with Babel to give you gift you 55% off subscriptions@babel.com Majority get up to 55% babel.com Majority spelled B A B B E L B A B b e l babel.com Majority babel.com Majority rules and restrictions apply also. We will put the info in the podcast and YouTube descriptions. Gonna take a quick break. When we come back, Ellie Mistell, justice correspondent columnist at the Nation and Author of Bad 10 Popular Laws that are Ruining America.
- [25:40]
Ellie Mystal
It's Sam.
- [26:55]
Sam Seder
All right, we got a little bit of delay with Ellie Mystal. He'll be with us shortly. In the meantime, let's take a look at more senators talking about this.
- [27:09]
Patty Murray
Be.
- [27:10]
Sam Seder
Behemoth of a, of literally what could be the worst general worst legislation in a generation. Talking about this reconciliation bill which cuts taxes dramatically for the wealthy. It distributes money upwards to the rich. It cuts millions upon millions of people off of health care. It cuts millions of people off of food assistance. It cuts all of the subsidies that we have passed during the Biden administration to help wind and solar energy get a toehold. It provides subsidies to oil companies, still allows for the threatening of withholding of federal funds if states pass any AI legislation. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Here's Josh Hawley, the famed Republican populist who has been talking over and over and over again how he will not support a bill that would cut this many people off of Medicaid. His own voters are on Medicaid. He is not going to support this bill unless it's time to vote on it.
- [28:37]
Emma Vigland
We can't be cutting health care for working people and for poor people in order to constantly give special tax treatment to corporations and other entities. And we've, we've delayed that in this bill, but it will unless we take further changes or take those steps that will happen in future years. And I'm opposed to this. We. If we're going to be working with us party, we've got to protect working people. And I. The Medicaid stuff in here I think is bad.
- [29:05]
Sam Seder
Okay. All right. And I want you to know this is not video from a year ago. It's not even video from two months ago. This is video from yesterday after he voted for the bill.
- [29:21]
Ellie Mystal
Emo populism. He's sad about it.
- [29:23]
Sam Seder
He's not going to support it in an emotional way.
- [29:28]
Emma Vigland
Yeah.
- [29:28]
Ellie Mystal
He's not emotionally available for it.
- [29:30]
Sam Seder
He's not. He's not. Like, if the bill comes to me and says I need to borrow $10, I'm going to say no, but I am going to vote to pass it into law and remind my colleagues that I am not emotionally supporting this bill. It's upsetting to me, this bill. It's upsetting to me that I had to vote for this bill.
- [29:57]
Ellie Mystal
Oh, I should almost get credit for not voting for it.
- [30:02]
Sam Seder
It's. I mean, I just want my constituents to know that it was that much harder for me to vote for this because I'm not in favor of it.
- [30:11]
Ellie Mystal
I know all the bad things about it, and then I still voted for it.
- [30:14]
Sam Seder
A lot of people can vote for bills they support. That's the easy way of doing it. But I'm voting for bills that I don't support.
- [30:24]
Ellie Mystal
That's what it means to be a mighty man of valor.
- [30:27]
Sam Seder
You don't even have to play the audio sound anymore. You've basically adopted the voice. Here is Senator Patty Miller from Democrat from Washington State.
- [30:43]
Ellie Mystal
Murray.
- [30:44]
Sam Seder
Murray. Sorry, this is. Say, Patty Murray. When was this? Was this just after it passed? This is Patty Murray outlining the implication of these tax cuts. Oh, and I should also add, in addition to all of the other parliamentary questions, the Republicans unilaterally and somehow skipped over the parliamentarian in this one instance. And I don't know why there hasn't been more said about this and have decided for the first time in the legislative history of this country that the baseline numbers for the taxes that we are bringing in when this bill ends reflect the existing tax code. In other words, these tax cuts that we're operating under now passed in a similar reconciliation bill 10 years ago, and you cannot. You cannot, under the rules of reconciliation, pass any legislation that will impact the deficit 10 years out. And so this bill was meant to sunset and they're pretending it's not, so that the baseline of tax cuts that they're providing they save $4 trillion in their accounting. So the fact that this adds so much to the deficit is on top of another number that is almost like double that. Here's Patty Murray. Recognize the senator from Washington.
- [32:31]
Patty Murray
Mr. President, I've been here a long time. Not only have I been the budget chair, I am the longest serving Democrat on that committee. And in my 33 years here in the United States Senate, things have never, never worked this way. Where one party so egregiously ignores precedent, process and the party parliamentarian and does that all in order to wipe away trillions of dollars of costs for a bill that could just be the most expensive legislation this body ever passes. Forget Senate procedure for a minute. Math, Mr. President, has never worked that way. I taught preschool and I'll tell you, even our littlest kids knows the difference between a trillion and zero. It doesn't take a preschooler to tell you they're using magic math or that you can't just ignore the rules you don't like. How many times have my colleagues cried about the debt? How many times have they told me, I know you want to invest in child care, Patty, but we got to get this budget under control. But now that it's tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, suddenly the budget doesn't matter anymore. Suddenly the rules do not matter anymore. Suddenly a couple trillion goes away with a sprinkle of fairy dust.
- [33:58]
Sam Seder
And to be fair, it's not so sudden. The Republicans have been acting like this for decades, literally decades. She may not remember when Mitch McConnell said we're just not going to, we're just not going to allow the president to nominate a Supreme Court justice this year. We'll skip on that. Or when the Republicans fired the parliamentarian in George W. Bush's era to pass tax cuts. This is not sudden. They do this every time pattern.
- [34:40]
Emma Vigland
All right.
- [34:40]
Sam Seder
We'll talk more about this later in the program. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back with Ali Mistahl.
- [34:46]
Emma Vigland
It.
- [35:11]
Ellie Mystal
Sam.
- [35:37]
Emma Vigland
It.
- [36:02]
Ellie Mystal
Jam.
- [36:28]
Sam Seder
We are back. Sam Seder on the Majority Report. Emma Vigland out today for her honeymoon. Well, whatever also. But it's a pleasure to have joining us, Ellie Mostell. He is the justice correspondent columnist at the Nation, Author of Bad 10 Popular Laws that Are Ruining America. Ellie, how's it going?
- [36:54]
Emma Vigland
Congratulations to Emma. I hope her honeymoon is going fantastically. I brought my PlayStation on my honeymoon.
- [37:01]
Sam Seder
Oh, you did?
- [37:02]
Emma Vigland
Well, Emma brought Twitter, which was awesome. I had everything I needed. My wife and when she was busy just had My own entertainments. It was great. So I hope she's having a great time. I'm doing terrible, right? We are living in a kind of fascist, authoritarian state with a theocratic court. And last Friday was the court's last day and they released a slew of truly law breaking, mind breaking, terrible opinions. And some were worse than I even expected them to be. Right. You always expect the Supreme Court to do the wrong thing, but there's a degree of destruction that they can go for, and they went for the most destructive, the most chaotic versions that they could. It was really bad.
- [37:51]
Sam Seder
I have to say that as someone who reads a lot of folks like yourself who write about the Supreme Court and have been doing so for, you know, 10, 15 years, quite religiously. I don't remember a series of cases where the opinions drafted were considered to be so shoddy, like, like not even based upon made up theories, just sort of like, you know, alighting over like their problem, just ignoring it as if, like, it's like, well, nobody's going to ask, you know, nobody can question me anyways. There's a, there's a, there's a quality to what they're producing now out of this six that is, that has a definitive like, exactly like, it doesn't matter.
- [38:50]
Emma Vigland
Yeah, no, we are in, we are in the straight culture war Supreme Court. And what we saw at the end of the term was the Supreme Court kind of, it's, it's the kind of bizarro Michael Corleone, you know, this is the day that we handle all family business and it was just culture war decision after culture war decision where the, they're not even doing law anymore, right? Like the, like the idea that there are statutes and precedents and they have to analyze them, they're far beyond the pale of doing that. They are just imposing their culture war decisions upon the rest of us with no regard for President. They've been doing that for a while. I think the reason why the people that you're talking about, people like me, the reason why we're writing the way we are right now, is that for a lot of them there was this hope, right, that the Supreme Court would be kind of the final boss of the Trump administration, that it would be the thing that would slow down the Trump administration and his unconstitutional illegal activities. Sam, as you know, I have been saying from the jump that the courts will not save us, that the Supreme Court, I've always been saying the Supreme Court was most likely to rubber stamp Trump's illegal executive actions. Now they're doing that. And now I think a lot of other people are kind of catching up to the fact that, well, perhaps you thought the court was gonna help you, but it ain't. And this is what it looks like when it ain't.
- [40:18]
Sam Seder
All right, let's talk about this Planned Parenthood Medicaid ruling from the other day. This essentially is a state suing and saying that there is no right for. For a Medicaid patient to choose to get care from whatever provider they have access to, essentially, who will take Medicaid.
- [40:48]
Emma Vigland
So the thing about the Planned Parenthood case is that whenever you put Planned Parenthood in your case title, everybody thinks it's about abortion. And everybody kind of knows that the Supreme Court hates women, hates abortions, is not going to go for it. And this case does have something to do with abortion.
- [41:03]
Sam Seder
But.
- [41:04]
Emma Vigland
But this is the issue where Planned Parenthood does a lot of things that are not abortion. Right. They just provide a lot of care, a lot of health care for women and their lady parts. Like that's what Planned Parenthood does. And abortion is just one aspect of that. Right. So in 2018, South Carolina, the state of South Carolina, passed a law saying that you could not use federal funds that include Medicaid or for. At any provider that also provides abortions. Right. For a long time, there's been this thing called the hyde amendment since 1976 that says you can't use federal funds for abortion, including Medicaid funds. I think that's a terrible law. I literally wrote about it in my book about bad laws. I think the Hyde Amendment is terrible. This has nothing to do with the Hyde Amendment. Right. This has nothing to do with federal funding of abortion. That issue is settled. Settled incorrectly, in my view, but settled. Right. This is South Carolina saying, now, if you also provide abortions, you can't use Medicaid funds for anything else. Right. So what is that trying to do? It is trying to force medical institutions to not provide any abortion services at all, even in states where they are allowed to provide abortions, because if they do, they will get cut off in federal funding, including Medicaid. Right. So that's like what's happening at 30,000ft, but on the ground. Right. In the actual case, what this was about was a woman who used Planned Parenthood for regular gynecological services that had nothing to do with abortion. And South Carolina says it, saying, no, you can't choose your own doctor. Right. Well, the Medicaid act has a very clear provision that allows for freedom of choice. It says that if you are a state that accepts Medicaid funds, which South Carolina like, never forget, folks, South Carolina still wants the money. They still want the federal money and they're going to do everything they can to keep the federal money. So South Carolina wants the federal money and it says that if you take this federal money in the form of Medicaid reimbursements, then you have to let people on Medicaid choose whatever service provider they like for any medical treatment that the service provider is able to provide. Right. Is qualified to give right. That is in the statute. Right? But the Supreme Court says actually no, it's not. Neil Gorsuch, writing for the 6 to 3 majority, invented ambiguity in the freedom of choice provision of the Medicaid act, saying that actually Congress did not intend to include freedom of choice as a right in the Medicaid act, even though they say freedom of choice in the Medicaid Act. It is a classic kind of version of textualism, making things up as they go along. Right? Like people think that textualism is the most simple way of interpreting the law because you just read the sentence and what does it common sense say? But like the whole point of textualism from a conservative side is to pretend that there's ambiguity in very clear statements when that ambiguity is helps your side and pretend that there's no ambiguity in ambiguous statements when having no ambiguity helps your side. It is a method of interpretation that expands or contracts to fit whatever the Republicans on the Supreme Court want that day. And what Neil Gorsuch wanted that day was to take the freedom of choice provision out of the Medicaid Act. And so he invented some bullcrap where he said, oh, it's actually not at all clear what Congress wanted to do. So what can we do? There is no freedom of choice for Medicaid. Right? So it is about abortion, but it's not really about abortion. Right? Or maybe it's the other way around. It's not really about abortion, but it is about abortion, right? Neil Gorsuch wanted to prevent allow South Carolina to not only kill Planned Parenthood, but kill any other abortion provider in its state. And they will anyone want it to take the freedom of choice away from poor women on Medicaid.
- [45:08]
Sam Seder
And doesn't it also I mean, my understanding is that the precedent here in terms of the question of can I sue an entity that is inhibiting a federal right that has been granted to me by statute or by theoretically the Constitution in that in 2023 in the TAL Talesky case, I never know how to pronounce it.
- [45:35]
Emma Vigland
But yes.
- [45:35]
Sam Seder
Okay, that case, that they made a determination that if the law said that an individual is given the opportunity to, if it was phrased in that way because they're weird, then that right exists there. And in this instance, it is phrased that way. Like you say they just decided we're not going to do it. But doesn't this open up the. Basically the Pandora's box and say that it is really also chipping? Because I guess theoretically, you know, Planned Parenthood, I mean, although I don't know if they have the money to do this, but theoretically could like, split off. Planned Parenthood is one LLC or corporation, and then Women's Health, you know, is another, you know, that type of thing. But, but this seems to undermine, like, chip away at the ability of an individual to say, hey, you're not following federal law. And if you're not following federal law, I'm gonna sue the state for inhibiting what the feds intended me to do. And it seems to basically eliminate that right or cut it away. Seriously.
- [46:53]
Emma Vigland
Yeah, you're absolutely right. So the law that we're really talking about Here is the 1871 Civil Rights act, the first Civil Rights Act. You know, most people know about the 1964 one, but the 1871 one was the most important at the time. It is the one that we ratified the 14th amendment in order so we could pass that law. Right. The, the argument at the time was that you needed the 14th amendment because without the 14th amendment, the 1871 Civil Rights act wouldn't be be constitutional right. So that's kind of the backstory of the amendment. And there's a section in that, in that Civil Rights act called section 1983 that allows for a private right to sue when the government violates your civil rights right. And I've explained before that if you do not have a right to sue the government when it does something to you, then the law preventing the government from doing that thing to you is not a law. It's just a suggestion. It's just a hope, right. It's only through the ability to sue the government to enforce your rights that your rights become rights, that your rights become things that you can defend, otherwise the government can violate them willy nilly. And what the court said in the Planned Parenthood case was that Section 1983 of the 1871 Civil Rights act, this provision that allows for the private right to sue doesn't support the private right to sue unless Congress has been exceedingly clear that a Civil right exists. Right. And again, if you look at the Medicaid Act, I don't know how Congress could be more clear that you have a civil right for freedom of choice of healthcare provider. But Neil Gorsuch says, oh, that's not clear enough. And so it takes away this ability, this again, at this point, ancient ability that we have to sue the government for our civil rights. Sam, you're the first host to brought up Talbeski, which is super illegal, weedy. But another thing that, that, that's going on in this case is that Talbeski, the case that you mentioned, that was two years ago.
- [49:06]
Sam Seder
Yes. 2023.
- [49:08]
Emma Vigland
This court was like, actually, no, you have a private right to sue as long as Congress says you have a private right to sue. Right. And then two years later they're like, remember that President? Screw it, we're done with it. And so it's one of these, like, legal weedy situations where like just beyond the culture war issue about abortion and Planned Parenthood, beyond the legal issue of whether or not you have a private right to sue the government for violation of civil rights, there's also just at its core this, this clown show of a Supreme Court that can't even hold true to its precedence over a couple of years. Right. Because they literally settled this two years ago in Talveski. And now all of a sudden, oh, actually, Talveski doesn't make sense. So now whether or not Congress creates the private right to sue depends on how closely they follow the Supreme Court's words in this one case as opposed to what Congress was actually trying to do. It is a bonkers decision in terms of just its legal grounding, for sure. Before you even get to the larger social and cultural issues around the Civil Rights act and abortion rights, let's move.
- [50:26]
Sam Seder
On to the so called birthright citizenship case, which isn't, again, directly about. Well, it's not going to implicate birthright citizenship, I think as much as people maybe anticipate it might. But and I also got to say, just you know, as a note, like, you know, we talk about that section 1983, the assault on all of the laws from Reconstruction. Like, I have always considered reconstruction to be sort of like the actual founding of this country as we live it today. In the same way that, like Rabbinic Judaism is the Judaism that we practice today, as opposed to like when we had high priests and we were doing, you know, taking a lamb and then sacrificing it on the altar, we're living in a reconstruction world. But this Court really, really is trying to sort of bring us back to just like 1864.
- [51:29]
Emma Vigland
I argued, Sam, that people who frame this court as an attack on the 20th century, an attack on the civil rights era, an attack on the Warren Court, that's old news. The Supreme Court has won its battle against the 20th century. It is won its battle against the Warren Court. And talking about that is talking about the last war. The Supreme Court has moved on not to fighting the 20th century, but to fighting the 19th century, to fighting the Reconstruction era, to fighting what Eric Foner calls the second founding of this country. They don't like that either. They don't like the Reconstruction era either. And they have moved on to directly attacking the laws and amendments and statutes and precedents that came out of that second founding, came out of the Reconstruction era. And once again, they're winning. They're winning their second Civil War without firing a shot. So we are now literally relitigating things, not that we fought about in the 1960s, but that we fought a hot war about in the 1860s. And we're losing. We're losing to this new Confederacy.
- [52:43]
Sam Seder
And it feels like they're not even arguing their way through it. They're just going. It's like they're just flicking a switch, essentially, and saying, we're just gonna pluck you, just hitting these switches, and that's it. We're not going to have to argue or create some type of, like.
- [52:59]
Emma Vigland
I mean, we're just going to turn that off.
- [53:01]
Sam Seder
It would be fascinating if it wasn't so disturbing and, and having real world implications. This birthright citizenship case, it's unclear to me. It's unclear to me, like, does birthright citizenship still exist? Will it exist? Are there people now who are stateless or could be stateless? And then there's this. I mean, the main order question is, can a single judge issue an order to stay a law? And that, to me, seems unclear. Like, the whole thing seems still unclear where we're at.
- [53:41]
Emma Vigland
Yeah. So you're asking a lot of questions that, that are difficult to answer because the Supreme Court's opinion itself was gobbledygook. Right. Like, you're kind of forced to guess at what they could mean because their legal reasoning was so loose and clownish. Again, I'll try to answer the question this way. At the top level. If you are a child born in this country after June 27, 2025. So if you were born on Friday or Saturday or Sunday or today, whether or not you're a citizen of this country now depends more on the state or county you were born in than whether or not you were born in America. Right. Because what's going to happen is that some states, most states even will uphold the concept of birthright citizenship. But some states will not. Right. We'll have some localities. I can think of Texas as one that probably won't. Right. And so now as you take that child who's born yesterday, literally born yesterday, and you fast forward 15, 18, 20 years, their birth certificate might not be enough to prove their citizenship because they might not have gotten a valid birth certificate at birth because those random local official in Texas on Sunday might have denied them a birth certificate because the Supreme Court said they could. And the way that they said that they could goes to this nationwide injunction argument, right? So like the, for your listeners to understand, like an injunction is just saying that the government wants to do a thing and we decide as the court, the government cannot do that. Right. We preemptively decide the government's idea, law, program, whatever, program, whatever is illegal. Right. So if they had a law saying, hey, we're going to take all the Jewish journalists and kick them out of the country, right. You, Sam, might go to court and say, hey, that seems horribly unconstitutional. Hey, I would like a ruling stopping the government from kicking me out of the country just because I'm a Jewish journalist. Right. And a court might agree with you. A court might say, yes, Sam, you're absolutely right. They cannot kick you out of the country. Now before Friday, that ruling could apply nationwide. They can't kick any Jewish journalist out of the country just for being a Jewish journalist. But after Friday, according to the Supreme Court, that ruling can probably only apply to you, Sam. So you, Sam, went to court and you, Sam, got a ruling saying that you, Sam, as a Jewish journalist cannot be kicked out of the country. And that's great for Sam, but what about the next guy? What about the next guy? What about the guy living in Texas? What about the guy living in Michigan? They have to sue themselves. They have to personally go to court to sue again. This obviously unconstitutional rule. They have to personally go to go to court and sue for themselves again and again and again and again and again. And even if 99 of them, 99% of them win, 1% of them will lose. And then we will have a two tiered system where some Jewish journalists are going to be kicked out but other Jewish journalists are not. And that's how it's going to be according to the Supreme Court until sometime in the future, perhaps soon, perhaps by next year, perhaps not soon, perhaps in three or four years, the Supreme Court will come back in and weigh in nationwide on whether or not Trump's unconstitutional laws are in fact unconstitutional. Right. But in the meantime, there's going to be a lot of chaos and confusion and uncertainty because the courts took away this fundamental ability of courts to enforce the law against the president.
- [57:36]
Sam Seder
And isn't the sort of. The paradox here, and I can't remember if it was KBJ or Kagan who brought this up, is that, let's assume that to use your analogy, you know, you have Jewish journalists after Jewish journalists, they go, they win their cases, the government does not appeal them because they're like, look, there's, I don't know, clearly wrong. 10,000 Jewish journalists in the country or 5,000 Jewish journalists in the country. We know they're not all going to come to court. There's maybe like 500 will come to court. We just won't appeal that. It will not rise to the Supreme Court. I mean, it would involve essentially somebody losing that case and then appealing so that it would rise up. And it's quite possible that if it went up to the first appellate level, the government just says, we're not going to contest. And that way, it never rises up to the Supreme Court and we don't have a law of the land anymore for something that's in the Constitution for citizenship.
- [58:43]
Emma Vigland
And to go back to what we were talking about in terms of the attack on the Reconstruction era and the attack on the 19th century, we have tried to do citizenship this way before. We have tried to live in a country where whether or not you were a citizen of that country depended on the state you were living in. Right. We called that the antebellum period of America. That was the slavery period of America. That was the period where, as I as a black person, if I was born in Georgia, you know, I had one set of rights, and if I was born in New York, I had everyone, right? Just depending on the, on the happenstance of my birth. That way led to war. That way was so unworkable that it led to a shooting war. Because you cannot have a country where some citizens are more equal than other citizens. All right, we're not living on the animal farm. But the Supreme Court brings us right back to that situation of potential two tiered citizenship. In this case. The other thing that I've heard a lot from liberals, you were talking about how the government might get around this by just not appealing adverse rulings against it. The other Thing I've heard from a lot of liberals is this idea of a class action, right? That because the Supreme Court has made everybody sue individually, what needs to happen is that everybody needs to come together as a class of affected people and sue as a class action lawsuit. You see this all the time in environmental litigation. You saw it all the time in Big Tobacco litigation, trying to form a large class of people to tell the government that they're wrong on birthright citizenship. That's a great idea. That's a fine legal idea that this decision leaves open as a possibility, except that you have to remember that the exact same six people who just said the government could get away with this messing with a birthright citizenship can just as easily refute to recognize and what's called certify a class action. And the Roberts Court has been notorious historically in denying certification of classes for various suits, Right. For various things that are like much lower stakes than what we're talking about here. And the Roberts Court consistently denies class status to citizens. So there's every opportunity that we'll have. We'll be here next year talking about a Supreme Court decision that decertifies a Class 6 3. And we'll be trying to explain once again how that allows Trump to mess with birthright citizenship. Right? Because the Supreme Court, have they done it here? They can keep doing it, they can keep denying people their rights to sue the government. And just as the last point on that, Clarence Thomas basically says so in his, in his concurrence to this opinion, basically, don't you try the class actions. Don't you try it, because if you do, we're going to knock it down. He says that in his concurrence. Does he have five votes for that? I don't know, but I wouldn't assume that he doesn't.
- [61:53]
Sam Seder
And lastly, is there a scenario where, okay, I'm born in New York, but I go to Tennessee, they don't recognize, you know, birthright citizenship. Can they just in the same way that like, you know, in the early days of marriage equality, if I got into a same sex marriage in Massachusetts, but I go to, you know, Georgia and want visitation rights because my partner's in the hospital. You're not married to him? Well, I am. Well, you're married in Massachusetts. We don't recognize that. I mean, is there a potential scenario like, where it's just like we're going to deport, you know, we deport you if you're in, you know, if you travel to Georgia, even though you may be safe In New York, Sam, that's.
- [62:54]
Emma Vigland
The most likely scenario. That's the most likely thing to happen. That when you have.
- [62:59]
Sam Seder
And again, it's like a fugitive slave law type of situation.
- [63:03]
Emma Vigland
I'm about to say we've tried it this way before. It was called the Dred Scott decision. Right. Well, what was the whole point. What was the whole issue behind the Dred Scott decision? Right, that my man went to Missouri, Missouri was free state. And he was like, I'm free. And then they were like, no, no, no, you got to go back to. You got to go back to Kentucky. And he was like, well, no, I'm. I'm free in Missouri. And the whole point of the Dred Scott decision was that actually a black man has no rights the white man is bound to respect. Right? It was. It was to take. It was this person, Dred Scott, who did have citizenship rights, where he was. Could be recaptured and re. Pulled back in to a situation where we had no rights simply by traveling across state lines, that there was no such thing as forever free. That's exact. So when I'm saying it's the most likely scenario, the scenario that you outline is the most likely scenario. It is the one based on precedent in history. It is what this country has done before. So, absolutely, there's a situation. There's a possibility. There's a likely possibility that a person will have a certain suite of rights and protections if they stay in New York or New Jersey. But if they go to Pennsylvania, it becomes more questionable, and if they go all the way to West Virginia, they're done.
- [64:17]
Sam Seder
All right, let's just. I want to briefly talk about this. What amounts to me, from my perspective is a ban in elementary schools virtually across the country on having any gay or bi or lesbian or trans or queer characters in books in elementary schools. I mean, that's not exactly the ruling, but that's the sort of like. That's the de facto ruling, right? I mean, that's sort of like the Brandeisian analysis of this is what it's going to lead to, and it's nuts.
- [64:59]
Emma Vigland
On. On any other week, on any other day, this bigoted ruling would be the thing that everybody was talking about. Alito's opinion in this case is called Mahmoud versus Taylor and involves a group of families, Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox, I believe, families who sued the school because the school used a number of children's storybooks that depicted LGBTQ people existing. That's all they were doing. It was just. They. They were in the story. Right. It wasn't about being lgbtq. It wasn't like, hey, let's all be gay and have sex in the clock.
- [65:39]
Sam Seder
No.
- [65:39]
Emma Vigland
It was just, here's some gay people. Anyway, onto the story. And these parents, these bigoted parents, like, flip the bit. And these are public school parents, remember, that's that that becomes important and they sue to make. Force the public school to inform them anytime these books or texts were going to be used and to allow their children to opt out of any education involving those books. Well, if you've ever been in a public school or run a public school, you know that it's practically unworkable to have to clear your entire day's curriculum on a daily basis with a bunch of parents. This is in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is one of the largest public. It's a suburb of D.C. it's one of the largest public school districts in the country. And so the ruling saying that parents can opt out of these books essentially means that these books cannot be practically used in class. And that's the top line ruling. But like the. I cannot emphasize enough. I literally don't have the words to fully explain how bigoted and homophobic Sam Alito's opinion was in this case, one of the books, that he really has a problem. He spends most of the thing he's not talking about the law. He's fighting cultural war issues. He's worried about pronouns. I mean, it's like if, if. If a. If an AI Chatbot told you write a Supreme Court opinion in the Met in the method of the last 20 minutes of Fox News, that would be about what Sam Alito sounded like, like an AI Chatbot version of himself. But the, the, the level of bigotry is shocking. So one of the stories that he focuses on is the story called Uncle Bobby's Wedding, right? And it's just all it is is Uncle Bobby is getting. Having a same sex marriage. And the main character, Chloe, his niece, is very worried about them having the same sex marriage because he. She thinks that when Uncle Bobby gets married, that'll mean less play time for her. That is the plot line of like 11 billion children's stories, right? It's the plotline every time the children story about, oh, we got. You got a new sibling. Oh, what's that gonna mean for me? That's the plot line, right? It's the plot line of the Toy Story franchise, for God's sakes. It is a simple children's plot line. But Alito suggests, actually, no, Chloe doesn't like the gay marriage, but everybody else does. And they're forcing Chloe to accept universally approve of this gayness. Like, that is how Alito writes his opinion. And then he puts pictures of Uncle Bobby's wedding into his opinion as if, like, showing the pictures. And yes, the one of the pictures is Uncle Bobby with his husband. It's like, if that's gonna be proof, look at the subversive, horrible gay nature of this book. We have to ban is off the chain bigoted. It is off the chain homophobic. And as you say, Sam, the result is in public schools, you're not going to be allowed to use these texts. And there's a particular line that I focus on in the piece that I'm writing where he says that it's not enough to tell these people. Like, we should tell these people, hey, if you want to instruct your kids in a world that doesn't include gay people, homeschool them, you idiot. That's what homeschool is there for. So you can control what. Everything that goes in. Keep your child in the attic like it was done in ancient times, and leave the rest of us to our society. But Aliyah says, no, no, no, we can't tell them that because it's too expensive. It's too expensive to homeschool children. And so we have to allow public schools. So public schools have to provide kind of all of the protections for religious cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs people that a private school would provide or home school would provide. Again, it's an insane ruling, and it's one that you can't even justify legally. It only makes sense if you also agree with Alito's homophobic and bigoted premises. If you're not afraid of gay people, the entire ruling falls apart in terms of any kind of logic.
- [70:00]
Sam Seder
This may not come as a shock to our audience, but I will be explosive about this. I don't like Christmas. I'm not a big Christmas fan. I don't like Christmas trees.
- [70:15]
Emma Vigland
I actually like a Chinese food haver on.
- [70:19]
Sam Seder
I mean, what are my rights? I mean, it. I. It's not exactly a religious thing, although I would imagine, you know, absence my Judaism, you know, the idea of. But I certainly could make the case that it's a function of my being Jewish. I know Jews who do like Christmas, but I consider them fallen. The but, but. Well, where do. What's the limiting principle here for what we can, you know, they can decide that a religious can decide that they need this much. So much accommodation. Their religion requires so much accommodation that, in fact, we basically have to Ban the existence of gay people in elementary school.
- [71:16]
Emma Vigland
Under Alito's opinion, you as a Jewish person could absolutely sue the school to prevent them from having any book that mentions Christmas, discuss Christmas or even shows a tree with baubles on it. That would be enough for you to get the book banned according to Alito's decision?
- [71:36]
Sam Seder
I will testify as to way I felt when I had to, like, oh.
- [71:39]
Emma Vigland
Tannenbaum, the pressure on me that that would be enough. Under Alito's position, a Muslim family who wants to sue because the book depicts a woman with uncovered hair, that would be enough. A Catholic family who's like, that woman, is unmarried and owns property. Get that book out of the school.
- [71:57]
Sam Seder
That would be enough to say, right.
- [72:00]
Emma Vigland
There is no limiting principle in Alito's opinion, which means that the actual limiting principle is Alito's own Catholic bigotry and theocracy. Right. Because of course, Sam, if you do bring that suit, do you think you're going to win in front of Samuel? Do you think Sam is going to be like, well, as we said, in my mood to be Taylor, now we have to get Christmas trees out of the school. Do you think I'm going to win if I show up to court and be like, you know, slavery and white supremacy is against my religion. So I think any mention of the original US Constitution has to be banned in schools or at least my kids have to be opt out of any teachings about the U.S. constitution. Do you think I'm going to win that in front of Sam? Do you think I'm gonna win that in front of Amy Handmade Coney Barrett? No. So the actual limiting crit says there is no legal limiting principle in their decision. The actual limiting principle is whatever these six bigoted, you know, what's think that's the. That's the limit. So if they are not personally offended by Christmas trees, guess what? Christmas trees books still on the table. But if they are personally offended by like any. Anytime you have more than seven candles, right, then that book with a menorah, that can get banned.
- [73:19]
Sam Seder
It's nuts. It's nuts. All right, lastly, I got to ask you about this because Leonard Leo, the former head of the Federalist Society, really the one who I should know if he was the actual head, but the one who really took it into. Created it into what it is today. The one who created sort of the networking, the fundraising. He's the one who, when Clarence Thomas 20 years ago was complaining about being broke and that he might have to retire from the Supreme Court. Cuz he doesn't have any money. He introduced him to Harlan Crow and then what do you know, These guys just hit it off. And one of the benefits of being best friends with a billionaire is that he pays for your kid to go to private school, he pays for your mom's house, he takes you on private jets and takes you on vacations. It's a shame Leonard Leo doesn't pair us all up with billionaires. It would be very fun. But he also basically chose all the justices for the Trump administration first time around. And after Trump's trade laws were the tariff Court basically said these things are bunk. Trump had a fit, got into a fight with Leonard Leo. We should just remind you, Leonard Leo was donated a billion dollars a couple years ago to start a new organization. We don't know what he's doing with that money or I'm not aware of it. And what does this mean that they're having a fight? Is it going to mean something materially in terms of what we see courts do or the capacity of the Trump administration to appoint new judges?
- [75:08]
Emma Vigland
So I think that the fight between Trump and Leo is more important politically and legally for our country than the kind of real tech Bros of LA fight between Trump and Musk. Right. I'm sorry that the Trump and Musk romance is over, but the Trump Leo connection has far more impact on our polity because as you say, Leo invented and created the judicial making machine that is the federal society and he is responsible all these bad decisions that we've been talking about today. Sam Lenart Leo is one of the two guys most responsible for them, the other One being Mitch McConnell, of course. So if these two guys split, if Trump and the Republican political agenda split from Leo and the Republican legal agenda, it is potentially a huge rift. Now the reason why the rift happens is because Republican judges nominated or created essentially by Lido by Leo and Republican politicians now all under the thumb of Donald Trump, do not always agree. They aren't always working in the same way. They agree generally that gay people are bad and women shouldn't have rights and black people should be shot. They agree about the big ticket issues, but kind of operationally there are real differences there. What Trump wants are judges that are completely loyal to him and will do whatever he wants. What Leo wants are judges that are completely loyal to the Feller society and are always playing the long game about, like I said, relitigating now the 19th century. If they are split up, one of the things that's going to happen is that it's going to take Trump longer to find a point and confirm judges. Right? Because Leo, that all that's on speed dial with him. Right? All of that is, all of that is standardized with him. You want a judge in North Dakota, I can get you a judge in North Dakota. Don't ask me how I can get you a judge in North Dakota. Like, he's got a whole system in place now. If Trump wants a judge in North Dakota, how's he gonna find one? Right? How is he gonna find one that's loyal to him, that's going to be. And then gotta find one that's gonna be loyal enough to him, but also be able to pass the Senate confirmation process that are, that is, yes, controlled by Republicans, but controlled by Republicans who have gotten very used to just approving whoever Leo says they should approve. What's gonna happen if there is conflict? It could slow Trump down. Now, the kinds of judges that Trump will appoint that are loyal to him will be worse than the judges that Leo would appoint. Like, I shudder when I say that out loud because it's hard for me to think of anything worse than Fedsock judges. But there is something worse, and that's Trump judges, right? Those are judges that are completely loyal to Trump. They will be worse on these big ticket issues about Trump's personal powers and his personal ability to thwart democracy in the short term. But in the long term, the thing that Leo has done so well is that because he makes these judges basically in a lab, right? Because they're, you know, a Neil Gorsuch is a test tube amalgamation made by Leonard Leo. So he knows everything that Neil Gorsuch is going to do for the rest of Neil Gorsuch his life, right? He's, he's, he's read ahead in Neil Gorsuch's own obituary. And he knows everything that's going to happen next, right? He doesn't know everything that's going to happen with Eileen Cannon. He doesn't know how she's going to evolve and develop and whatever. And so while short term, Justice Eileen Cannon terrible on all these Trump issues, I don't know that Justice Eileen Cannon is worse than your replacement level Leonard Leo judge when it comes to 10, 15, 20 years out. I don't know. And I do know that it takes you a lot longer to confirm Eileen Cannon because she's unqualified, because she's just a Trump sycophant, because she doesn't have the Federal society backing. It takes you a lot longer to confirm her than it does to any one of 20 people that are sitting in Leonard Leo's pocket right now. So, long term, this is potentially a huge legal rift within the conservatives themselves, proving, as you know, the old adage, the revolution always eats its young.
- [79:38]
Sam Seder
So there's there, I mean, it sounds like there's two elements to this. One is that you're. You're cutting down on the network effect that exists with all the Federalist judges, where I'm going to go clerk for this judge, and that's the way that I move up within the context of the Federalist Society. And then I have the proper pedigree. You know, Emil Bovey may just, you know, his clerk may be just the dude that, you know, was his caddy at or whatever, who knows who it is. And then it also forestalls the ability of the federal society to move law in a specific direction because it's a two. There's two elements to it, if I understand what you're saying. You know, there's the judge and then, you know, there's the pitcher and the catcher in that sense. And it's like they need to know what cases they should be looking for one year out, two years out, five years out to essentially unwind, you know, 100 years of case law so that they can step by step, sort of move this along. But if you don't know their legal sort of like, pedigree and thinking, it's harder to predict what's going to change the law in the way you want it to.
- [80:58]
Emma Vigland
I love the pitcher and catcher analogy. I haven't used it before, but I'm just going to steal it now forever, because that is exactly right. Right. There's a reason why the catcher calls the pitches right. The catcher needs to know, is it going to be a fastball or is it going to be a curveball? If the catcher doesn't know and it's a curveball, guess what? It's a wild pitch. Catcher can't react in real time to that. They have to know before the pitch is thrown. That's exactly what it's like with Federal society judges and test cases organized by the federal society. Right. They have to know what pitch is coming so they can shape the law in the way that they want. And if you don't know, if you're not on the same page, that leaves open the opportunity for more wild pitches. Now, again, some of them are going to be wild pitches. Some of them are just like the liberal batter is going to get beamed in the head, like it's not going to be pretty all of the times. But you're adding, here's what I'm trying to say, you're adding more uncertainty into the situation. Right? And when you are in a fascist state, when you are in a theocratic state, when you have a court that has, in a Republican Party that has everything on lockdown, uncertainty is your friend. Uncertainty is actually a boon because not knowing if they don't know what they're going to do next, that creates then opportunities for resistance, for fighting for. I mean, you see Emil Bove, he'll probably get confirmed, but it's a much rougher ride than it would have been for any federal society judge. Again, of the 20 that are sitting in Leonard Leo's pocket right now. So that uncertainty creates more opportunities for resistance and fight back.
- [82:45]
Sam Seder
And to be fair, I mean, Bove, as the one of the top law enforcement officials in the country, and the DOJ was going to completely ignore a judge and then they completely tried to cover that all up. It's pretty extreme. But he's probably going to get passed.
- [83:02]
Emma Vigland
Through and also just want to really quickly argue that, like, it is possible that with the kind of disgustingness that Trump is going to put on the court without Leo trying to shape it and smooth it down, maybe Democrats wake up. Maybe Democrats are like, hey, if they're having people like Emil Bove on the court, maybe we got to take the court seriously. Maybe, I don't know, when we get in charge, we gotta expand the courts to deal with people like, I don't know. I mean, it's always possible, right? I live in the world where it's always possible that one day the Democrats will try on the courts.
- [83:43]
Sam Seder
Oh, Ellie.
- [83:47]
Emma Vigland
It could happen, man.
- [83:49]
Sam Seder
That was very sweet. I am so glad that you ended that on an optimistic note. That was all right. I'll tell you something, that you could be that optimistic by the end of the interview. I feel like I've taken you to another place.
- [84:13]
Emma Vigland
I've got to have some hope, man, or else it just, it's.
- [84:16]
Sam Seder
I understand.
- [84:17]
Emma Vigland
You gotta find some way to keep getting up in the morning.
- [84:19]
Sam Seder
Ali Mustal will, of course, link to all your pieces at the Nation and your book, Bad Law. Always, always a real pleasure to, to you and thanks again for coming on.
- [84:32]
Emma Vigland
Thanks so much for having me.
- [84:35]
Sam Seder
All right, folks, we're gonna head into the fun half. If Ellie's gonna use a baseball metaphor, he's gotta understand baseball. I think he does. Oh, boy. This is. Somebody broke the chat by putting in a massive link we gotta somehow fix that because I scream.
- [85:05]
Ellie Mystal
Because somebody could break it every single day and just massively interrupt our comms.
- [85:10]
Sam Seder
Yeah, folks, just. No, no, not, not. I mean, not. Not our. Our comms. But that. Whatever.
- [85:20]
Ellie Mystal
Comms with the members.
- [85:21]
Sam Seder
Comms with the members. Folks, it's your support that makes this show possible. You can join the Majority Report by going to jointhemajorityreport.com when you do, you not only get the free show free of commercials, you get the fun half and you get to. I am in the fun half. And sometimes, sometimes you can break the chat by putting in a, you know, massive fake link or whatever it is. Probably shouldn't have said that.
- [85:53]
Ellie Mystal
Probably not.
- [85:53]
Sam Seder
Probably. Also just coffee. Just coffee, co op, fair trade coffee, hot chocolate. Use the coupon code majority, get 10 off. Also, when you use that coupon code majority 10 off at Just Coffee, it breaks the chat. I probably shouldn't have said that. I probably shouldn't have said don't become.
- [86:16]
Ellie Mystal
A member just to break our chat, folks.
- [86:18]
Sam Seder
Yes, Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning?
- [86:25]
Ellie Mystal
Left Reckoning. We had a Sunday show for patrons. Patreon.com left reckoning. Talk about Zoron's win and Peter Thiel's little Antichrist freak out with Russ Douthat. Also, I was on with the Vanguard also talking about Zoran. So check that out. You can see my fresh sunburn from the Rockaways.
- [86:45]
Sam Seder
I was gonna say that's not a sunburn, that's a wind rash.
- [86:51]
Ellie Mystal
Yeah. I mean, you should see my back. I felt I could feel myself not getting certain.
- [86:56]
Sam Seder
Did you not put any sunblock on?
- [86:57]
Ellie Mystal
I did. I could feel myself missing certain parts of my back and I just thought they'll probably be okay. And turns out it was not really okay. So, yeah.
- [87:08]
Sam Seder
All right, quick break. Head into the fun half. 646-257-3920. We'll take some calls after a bit. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now. But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look back and go like, wow, what? What is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on for. Hold on for a second. Emma. Welcome to the program.
- [87:49]
Harry Anton
Matt.
- [87:52]
Sam Seder
What is up, everyone? No, Mickey, you did it. Fun half. Let's go, Brandon. Let's go, Brandon.
- [88:00]
Emma Vigland
And on half.
- [88:04]
Sam Seder
Bradley, you want to say hello?
- [88:05]
Emma Vigland
Sorry to disappoint everyone. I'm just a random guy.
- [88:09]
Sam Seder
It's all the boys today.
- [88:10]
Emma Vigland
Fundamentally false. No.
- [88:11]
Thom Tillis
I'm sorry.
- [88:12]
Sam Seder
Women. Stop talking for a second and let me finish.
- [88:15]
Emma Vigland
Where is this coming from?
- [88:16]
Sam Seder
Dude. But. Dude, you want to smoke this? 7A. Yes.
- [88:23]
Emma Vigland
All right.
- [88:25]
Sam Seder
This thing. Yes. Is this me?
- [88:31]
Emma Vigland
Is it me?
- [88:32]
Sam Seder
It is you.
- [88:36]
Emma Vigland
It's me. Hello? It's me.
- [88:37]
Sam Seder
I think it is you. Who is you. Out every single freaking day. What's on your mind?
- [88:46]
Patty Murray
Sports.
- [88:46]
Thom Tillis
We can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism.
- [88:50]
Sam Seder
I'm going to just know what. Liberal libertarians.
- [88:52]
Ellie Mystal
They're so stupid.
- [88:52]
Sam Seder
Though common sense says of course. Gobbledygook. We nailed him. So what's 79 plus 21? Challenge. Man, I'm positively quivering. I believe 96. I want to say 8 5, 7, 2, 1, 0. 35. 5, 0, 1, 1 half.
- [89:07]
Ellie Mystal
3, 8, 9, 11. For instance.
- [89:09]
Sam Seder
$3,400. $1900. 5, 4, $3 trillion.
- [89:14]
Emma Vigland
Sold.
- [89:15]
Sam Seder
It's a zero sum game. Game.
- [89:17]
Emma Vigland
Actually.
- [89:17]
Sam Seder
You're making me think less. But let me say this.
- [89:21]
Emma Vigland
You call it satire. Sam goes in satire.
- [89:24]
Sam Seder
On top of it all, my favorite part about you is just like every.
- [89:28]
Emma Vigland
Day, all day, like everything you do.
- [89:30]
Sam Seder
Without a doubt. Hey, buddy. We see you. All right, folks, folks, folks. It's just the week being weeded out. Obviously. Yeah. Sun's out, guns out. I, I, I don't know. But you should know, people just don't.
- [89:53]
Ellie Mystal
Like to entertain ideas anymore.
- [89:55]
Sam Seder
I have a question. Who cares?
- [89:59]
Ellie Mystal
Our chat is enabled, folks.
- [90:01]
Sam Seder
I love it. I do love that. Gotta jump.
- [90:06]
Emma Vigland
Gotta be quick.
- [90:06]
Sam Seder
I gotta jump.
- [90:07]
Emma Vigland
I'm losing. Losing it, bro.
- [90:11]
Sam Seder
Two o' clock. We're already late and the guy's being a dick. So screw him. Sent to a gulag.
- [90:18]
Thom Tillis
Outrageous.
- [90:18]
Sam Seder
Like, what is wrong with you?
- [90:22]
Emma Vigland
Love you. Bye.
- [90:24]
Sam Seder
Love you.
- [90:25]
Emma Vigland
Bye.
- [90:26]
Sam Seder
Bye.