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The Opinions
The Trump Administration ‘Is Mocking the Power of the Supreme Court’
00:33:05
Another week, another show of contempt for the rule of law.
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- [00:00]
Josh Haner
Hi, I'm Josh Haner, and I'm a staff photographer at the New York Times covering climate change. For years, we've sort of imagined this picture of a polar bear floating on a piece of ice. Those have been the images associated with climate change. My challenge is to find stories that show you how climate change is affecting our world right now. If you want to support the kind of journalism that we're working on here on the climate and environment desk at the New York Times, please subscribe on our website or our app.
- [00:32]
Michelle Cottle
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
- [00:47]
I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for Times Opinion. Since Donald Trump came roaring back into the White House, there has been a looming question about how far his administration will push against the rule of law, the Constitution. Constitution and the democratic norms that have bound the country together for generations. For a lot of people this week, a line was crossed.
- [01:10]
David French
A stunning admission from the Trump administration. It admits in a court filing that.
- [01:16]
Michelle Cottle
A Maryland man was sent to the.
- [01:18]
David French
Notorious El Salvadorian megaprision Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake.
- [01:23]
Jamelle Bouie
Because of what they describe as an administrative error, the Supreme Court decided last.
- [01:28]
Michelle Cottle
Week the US Government must facilitate the return of Garcia. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Garcia's return is at El Salvador's discretion.
- [01:38]
And things escalated this week when a federal judge threatened to open a contempt investigation into whether the administration has violated a judicial order. So we find ourselves now in this extremely surreal moment where we are actually having to ask, can the government stiff arm the nation's highest court? And what happens if it does? To tackle these questions, I am joined by two of my brilliant opinion colleagues who've been digging into this whole mess. David French is a former attorney who's been looking at how Supreme Court could and maybe should respond. Jamelle Bouie covers politics through a historical lens and has written about where this whole case fits in American history. Guys, welcome, and thank you so much for coming to help me make sense of this message.
- [02:30]
Jamelle Bouie
Our pleasure.
- [02:30]
David French
Thanks, Michelle. It's. I would say it's a pleasure, but it's kind of a grim pleasure, right?
- [02:38]
Michelle Cottle
Yeah. Nobody's having much fun with this, but we might as well dig in and pick it apart as best we can. So I guess starting out, I want to ask both of you, so what's happening with Abrego Garcia is unprecedented. I know we use that word a lot. I kind of Hate it, but it seems justified here. A man was deported to a country where a judge specifically said he could not be sent. Judges have ordered the administration to return him. And the administration's response has essentially been nothing we can do. So, sorry, what is your top line reaction to all of this?
- [03:09]
Jamelle Bouie
I mean, my initial reaction to all of this is just that it really demonstrates the administration's just breathtaking contempt for the rule of law. I mean, the entire way these operations are unfolding, where people are being essentially whisked off the street, and then, you know, obviously, without any opportunity for hearing, any opportunity to disprove that, the government says who they say they are, and then shipped off to this prison where they are essentially. I mean, they are not essentially disappeared. They are disappeared. Right. Disappeared in the way that you would associate with the Soviet Union. And even then, people got out of the gulag. It took a while, but it happened. It's just a. It's breathtaking for anyone inclined to give the administration the better of the doubt to say, well, maybe they've gotten some things right on some issues. This is the kind of thing overrides all of that. Who cares if they're making the right moves on trade policy? Like, who cares if what they're also doing is like renditioning people to be disappeared?
- [04:15]
David French
David, I don't think folks understand how completely the Trump administration is demolishing the Bill of Rights here, because when you really dive into the legal doctrines, the first thing you have to know is that the protections of the Bill of Rights, as a general matter, accrue to persons, not just citizens. So if you're a human being in the country, you enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights. So this sort of argument that, well, this is awful for this undocumented immigrant, but I'm an American citizen, this couldn't happen to me. It's just completely wrong. I mean, Trump is already talking about bringing American citizens that may have committed particularly heinous crimes and sending them to this El Salvadoran prison. And so when you have a human being taken from the United States against a court order, sent to a prison, and this prison, by the way, would violate cruel and unusual punishment standards in the United States. And then what he's saying is, well, now he's in a foreign country, and so this is all just a matter of foreign policy, and you can't make me do anything. And of course, you can't enter an injunction order against El Salvador. So think this through. If human beings, and you're one of them, if you're listening to this podcast right now. If human beings who are covered by the Bill of Rights can now be whisked away from the United States of America, dumped into an inhumane prison, and then an American government just washed their hands of it, now it's not a matter for the courts to intervene because it's a matter of foreign policy. You've just hacked the Bill of Rights. I mean, there's just no other way around it. And so, you know, as Jamel said, this is far more fundamental than swings in the stock market or the unemployment rate. This goes to the core of who we are. This goes to the core of the American national promise.
- [06:08]
Michelle Cottle
Okay, before we get into more of the legal ins and outs, which I want to do, I want to ask you both. My suspicion is just that the capriciousness and unpredictability of this is kind of the point. You know, a little bit like we talked about, the cruelty is the point with the kids in cages during the last Trump administration. My assumption is that they want everybody unsettled. They want to send a warning shot that if you cross this administration, anything can happen to you and they're not going to sweat the details about it. I think that's intentional, that they are more than happy to freak everyone out.
- [06:47]
Jamelle Bouie
I think that's right. Sort of. Two thoughts. One, building off of what David said earlier, I think it's really important to underline how many of the Constitution's fundamental protections, as David said, accrue to persons. It's not about whether you're a citizen. And in fact, there's something I think, truly profoundly un American in the assertion that only citizens have any sort of full rights or protections under this system of government. Part of the whole point, part of the thing that's supposed to make the American experiment distinctive in world history is precisely that we protect those who don't necessarily belong to the polity in a formal way. Simply being here grants you these rights and protections because they, again, they accrue to people on the basis of their personhood, on the basis of the fact that they are alive and human beings and they deserve, as on a fundamental level, a specific set of protections and rights. And so this idea that exists on the make America great again, right, that like, oh, no. In fact, whether or not you have rights is entirely a function of your citizenship or even. Or even if you're a citizen, whether or not you have some sort of organic tie to the soil, it's just like a rejection of the whole American project. Like, at that point, Go. I mean, no offense to our European listeners, but like go, go emigrate to Europe. That's their whole deal, right? Like it's not ours. The second thing is, I think you're right to say that this is intentionally capricious, intentionally chaotic. I mean, they're not competent either. But I think they do want to create an environment of fear. And this too, it gets to the character of this administration. They're not even operating in the realm of trying to in good faith lead a representative government, in a representative system, in a system of government. They understand their role instead of dominating the people within the society, which is just like at odds. Again, what this is supposed to be about, right? This is supposed to be a cooperative endeavor. This is supposed to be a collective endeavor. Like the American system isn't. The boss man tells everyone what to do and if you don't listen to him, he renders you socially dead. Like that's not how this is supposed to work.
- [09:12]
Michelle Cottle
Yeah, I don't think their version of American exceptionalism looks anything like that, Jamal. They don't dig that point. So going back to the legal ins and outs, David, what did you take away from, from Tuesday's hearing with the district judge?
- [09:26]
David French
Well, you know, look, the district judge can see what is playing to everyone, which is the administration is just not acting in good faith here. I mean, this is, this is a situation where in any normal American administration, Republican or Democratic, if they had sent someone overseas in defiance of a court order, they would immediately get them back. I mean, this would be a one day story. It would be mistake made and there would be efforts to address the mistake. But what is very, very, very clear is that this administration is just not, it is acting in open defiance and then when being called on, it is appealing to sort of some vague language. In the Supreme Court case, what does facilitate mean? Who's to know? As if the meaning of the word facilitate has been like lost to time. So on the one hand, you know, in the legal sense, they are making these very technical legal arguments that while it's plain to everyone, they're not operating in good faith, they're not really, technically, truly, really defying the court. And then they're turning around in the court of public opinion and just being much more brazen about it, you know, insulting the judges that are hearing the cases, mocking the very idea that these judges have the power of judicial review, which has been settled since Barbary vs Madison in like 1803. In court, they come in with very hyper technical arguments to try to get the judge to avoid seeing what's as plain as the nose on her face, that they're just mocking her power. They're mocking the power of the Supreme Court.
- [10:55]
Michelle Cottle
I mean, and one of the big challenges here is that the Supreme Court doesn't really have enforcement tools, right? I mean, it. It doesn't have the power of the purse, it doesn't have the power of the sword. So what power do their decisions have?
- [11:08]
David French
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question. I had the privilege of talking to Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who's a chief judge of the 6th Circuit, on an opinions podcast not long ago, asked him this very question, and he said, you know, look, we don't have the power of the treasury, just like you said, Michelle. We don't have an army. Their actions depend on enforcement by other branches of government. So enforcement by the executive branch primarily. And so if the executive branch of the other branches of government don't enforce, then the court rulings have little practical meaning in the short run. But that's not the end of the story. I wrote a newsletter that came out recently that said, look, we have a pretty recent history of massive resistance to a court order, and that was the massive resistance to Brown versus Board of Education. That order was not enforced for years fully. I mean, I think the last school district to desegregate in the US happened in about 2016. So this was a very, very long process with an enormous amount of resistance. But the Supreme Court did its job. It did what it was supposed to do. And so I think the court needs to focus on doing its job, issuing the rulings that it needs to issue far more than it needs to try to think about nine dimensional chess on enforcement.
- [12:24]
Jamelle Bouie
I think that's absolutely right. The Brumby board example is really important because what you see in the reaction to massive resistance is you begin to get the federal government involved. Right? And that's obviously not going to be possible here. But also other civil society institutions begin getting involved. Courts obviously are taking their lead from the Supreme Court, right? Like the court ruling against the administration. Even if the administration's like, we don't have to follow that, other actors in this society are going to take that seriously. In part, right? Because, you know, as of now, the presumption is that, like, the administration isn't going to be here forever, but the court will be here four years from now. Right? Like the law will still be here. And so the court's decisions help orient how the rest of the political system and civil society respond to particular disputes. And that is as important, if not more than how the administration is going to respond if the court is smacking down in a really decisive way these efforts to gut habeas corpus protections, destroy due process. Other actors are going to first, maybe be more aggressive in their pushback against the administration. And second, right, like immigration lawyers, other, other practicing attorneys will take their cue, say, oh, we can file suit, we can push back, and we'll likely get a pretty good hearing from whoever we come before, in part because the has established this is what the law is here.
- [13:54]
Michelle Cottle
So what the court says just in and of itself matters, even if the court can't strictly enforce it. And it has to go through this years long process like we saw with the civil rights movement. And you've written a lot about the historical parallels that you see in this Jamel, what lessons from the past feel most relevant either in a optimistic or pessimistic way for you right now?
- [14:23]
Jamelle Bouie
I mean, this is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It's just sort of an observation about how rights work. And I wrote about this this week in my column. But you know, in the pre Civil War America, there was a fairly large population of free black Americans, not like, not like million strong, but like in states like Ohio, Illinois, sizable populations. But the thing about being free, a free black American in this period is that your status, not unlike that of an undocumented person or something, someone with just sort of a temporary protected status, your legal status was incredibly provisional in part because the states you lived under likely had like these anti black laws that really put tight restrictions on what you could do, what legal rights you had. But more importantly, the existence of slavery, the existence of a, of a non protected class of people to which you have this racial connection rendered you insecure as well. So the thing I know in the piece is that free black Americans were in regular danger of being kidnapped and sent down south with no real recourse. But even after the Fugitive Slave act is passed in 1850 or the second Fugitive Slave act, there wasn't really due process. If a slave catcher showed up in your town and were like you're, you're a runaway, right? Like you can't, how are you supposed to prove that you're not? And I brought that up just to know that like the existence of slavery of this class of people who are outside the law necessarily degraded the rights and citizenship of the people who were nominally inside the law. And that this extended not just to black Americans, but to white Americans too. Part of what precipitates the armed conflict over slavery in the 1850s is precisely the fear among many whites that what is happening to blacks is gonna happen to them eventually. And in our case today, if we're going to accept the existence of a class of people who can be renditioned abroad with no legal protections, that necessarily means that the rest of our rights are highly provisional. Once you grant the power to place one group of people outside the law, you've effectively granted the power to place all people outside of the law.
- [16:32]
Michelle Cottle
Well, which brings us back to the point that Trump has made, that he'd be perfectly open to deporting homegrown criminals. How feasible is this? And, you know, basically how terrified should.
- [16:45]
David French
Should we be as a practical matter? It's extremely feasible. As a practical matter, it's the easiest thing to do in the world that he could just put him on a plane. Now, I think what you are seeing here is a process of testing and prodding. And so he's sort of hammering away at various American institutions and traditions. And I think each wall, that ca barrier that collapses, he just will keep hammering. And, you know, I asked the people who've come to me and say, david, he's not going to do this to citizens. No, come on, this is bluster. And I've asked, where is your evidence that he has a line? Because at this point, if you're in the camp of take Trump seriously, but not literally, you know that phrase from 2016? Well, all of us as Southerners are familiar with, bless your heart on that take. You know, bless your heart on the idea that this man has self restraint. And so you have to ask about that immediate next step. And that immediate next step is citizens, watch out. And then you might think, well, that's only criminal citizens. Those are only the citizens who have already done terrible things and have lost many of their liberties. But look at the power he's exerting over civil institutions here in the US in blatant violation of their First Amendment rights. I mean, again, where is the line? Show me the line that he's not willing to cross.
- [18:10]
Jamelle Bouie
I couldn't say it better than that. There simply isn't any reason to give this administration the benefit of the doubt. The thing we know about Donald Trump is that he is a habitual line stepper, right? Like, wherever you place the line, he's gonna step over it. And when you draw a new line, he'll step over that. And so they can say, oh, this is only gonna be incarcerated people. And then the line will be redrawn again. They'll step over it and they'll choose some new category of people. Of course, the Trump criminal isn't something you do that is proven in a court of law. It's a quality of a person. So who knows who's going to be a criminal in his estimation?
- [18:52]
Michelle Cottle
Oh, I think all three of us would qualify, Jamel.
- [18:55]
Jamelle Bouie
Oh, yeah, we would definitely qualify as criminals. So you can go no further than this point. This is the place for everyone, I think, in civil society to take a stand. I keep thinking of because of the way my brain works. I'm thinking of two movies right now. The first is one David, I'm sure you'll be familiar with Star First Contact.
- [19:16]
David French
Oh, yeah.
- [19:17]
Jamelle Bouie
When Picard is talking about the Borg and how that at every turn, the Federation retreats from the Borg and that this has to be the place where they take a stand. The line must be drawn here. The other is Paul Schofield in the 1966 adaptation of a Man for All Seasons, where he's playing Sir Thomas More when he's being pressed to arrest someone who hasn't broken the law, just sort of like, violated whatever norm his character says. I'd give the devil the benefit of the law for my own safety. And that's, that's due process. That's constitutionalism. We have to give even the people in our society that we find the most reprehensible and despicable the benefit of the law, because if they do not have it, then who does?
- [20:07]
Michelle Cottle
So you guys have brought up that he's testing, he's poking, he's crossing lines, he's sledgehammering. And in part, I think what they wait to see is if there's some kind of just, like, response that's overwhelming so that they know they've gone too far or some kind of huge public outcry or, you know, maybe someday Republican lawmakers would stand up and say enough. But compounding the problem here in terms of public opinion seems to be that this administration just makes stuff up and says whatever it wants to. And for people who aren't following it extremely closely, it can. Sounds different, right? So, like on Tuesday, Stephen Miller, one of the president's top advisors, said emphatically that Abrego Garcia is a gang member. Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt called him an MS.13 El Salvadorian illegal alien criminal who was hiding in Maryland. I mean, with this kind of just bs, I'm sure many of Trump's supporters believe that he is a proven dangerous criminal gang member. And by him, I mean Abrego Garcia, not Trump. On the whole, do you guys think any of the facts of this case are cutting through to people who are inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt?
- [21:28]
David French
You know, one of the tells about how MAGA is thinking is if you see them start to sort of like, celebrate in real time that we are talking about this issue. And so I think a lot of MAGA thinks they're winning this issue, that if we are talking about Garcia, then we are not talking about the economic instability that they see as the real threat to their power, because they know something. And, Michelle, you hit the nail on the head in people's minds right now. This is a terrorist gang member of Ms. 13 that Trump is trying to keep outside of America, while the far left is trying to bring this terrorist gang member back into America, into, you know, a town near you. And I think that they think this works for them, actually. And now this is the hardcore MAGA folks. I'm not sure that they're right about this. I think a lot of people understand sort of the very basics that the court said, don't send him to El Salvador, and you sent him to El Salvador. Just bring him back. And if he's deportable somewhere else, fine. But you violated a court order here. This was not supposed to happen. A lot of people just understand that, and they understand lawlessness. You know, there was the town hall kind of viral clip where the guy says, if I get this $1200 fine from a court, can I just say no?
- [22:49]
Jamelle Bouie
Does that stand up? Because he's got an order from the Supreme Court and he's just said no.
- [22:55]
David French
Is that how this works now? So I do think this is cutting through, but no one should be under any illusion here. MAGA believes that the more we talk about immigration, the better it is for Trump, and they may not be entirely wrong about that politically.
- [23:12]
Michelle Cottle
Jamel, I mean, do you see an opportunity here for Democrats, or is this all just downside?
- [23:17]
Jamelle Bouie
Yeah, so I see an opportunity here. The way public opinion tends to respond to Trump with immigration is the broad public likes the idea of, like, an immigration crackdown, Right? So they like the idea of, yeah, people shouldn't be able to come here illegally. And kind of, you know, along the lines of David's point that people understand lawlessness, they see that as being a kind of lawlessness they don't like. They don't like it, so they don't want it. They don't like the idea of, like, a flood of people coming in, which is not really what's happened, but they don't like that idea. And so when Trump talks about, you know, deporting illegal immigrants or whatnot, like, the public likes that. They are on board with that. But when it comes to actually specific, discrete policies, right, like, we are going to separate children from family, people are like, why? I don't. I don't like that. Like, I want you to do that. That seems. That seems lawless. That seems unreasonable. We're going to just start deporting people without giving them their due in court. I don't like that very much. Right. Like that. That doesn't seem okay. And so the opportunity here for Democrats is don't talk about immigration as, like, an abstraction. Talk about Abrego Garcia. Talk about the specific people and what's being done to them. And ask voters, ask the public, do you want this to happen to you? Do you want this to happen to your neighbor? Do you want this to happen to the people who you work with on the job? Hey, you're a contractor. You hire a lot of dudes who are just like, Abrego Garcia. Do you wanna see ICE agents come and, like, send them away for them to be gone for the rest of their lives? Like, the opportunity is in, like, this is a dramatic story. There's drama here. And so the opportunity in sort of like, is enhancing the drama. And I get the sense that Democrats are beginning to understand this. Chris Van Hollen, the senator from Maryland, the state, of course, Roberto Garcia resides, going down to El Salvador, for example.
- [25:08]
David French
I told his wife and his family I would do everything possible to bring him home.
- [25:15]
Jamelle Bouie
It's dramatizing this in the way that attracts attention. The break. Garcia belonged to a sheet metal workers union. And the union leader on CNN was like, we got to get this guy back. Our union is founded on due process. We want our brother Kilmar to come.
- [25:33]
David French
Back and get his due process.
- [25:35]
Jamelle Bouie
People see that and it sort of signals, oh, this is something to take seriously and be important. So I think there are opportunities here. I actually think the fact that the administration is, like, has gone beyond, oh, this guy shouldn't have been here, to screaming that he's a terrorist and he's like the top guy in MS.13. That's a sign of weakness, in my view. Right? Like, you don't start turning up the volume like that if you're confident that the public is on your side. You start turning up the volume like that when you're afraid that they very much are not. And you have to find some way to short circuit people's I think, quite natural. Sympathy. You learn that this guy has three kids. He's just a guy living his life, trying to work, and now his wife and his children cannot see him. That we don't know. We don't really know what's happened to him. We don't know if he's alive or dead. That scares people and engenders sympathy. And sympathy is a powerful emotion. And you know, it's a powerful emotion precisely because they are trying as hard as possible to short circuit sympathy.
- [26:40]
Michelle Cottle
That at least gives me a little bit of optimism that this could go in a, you know, result in some backlash.
- [26:48]
David French
Can I crush your optimism just for a moment?
- [26:50]
Michelle Cottle
Damn it, David.
- [26:51]
David French
Maybe, maybe not. Crush it. Just like, you know. Okay, fine, Cast a little doubt on it. So here is. There is this very strange thing happening on the right that is very explicitly designed to turn off that sympathy slash empathy receptor in people's minds and brains and hearts. And there's a series of books that have been out taking on the very concept of empathy. You've seen Elon Musk in some of the sort of the tech bro world taking on the concept of empathy. That empathy is inherently toxic. That empathy warps your decision making so that anytime there is an appeal to sort of a person's decency and humanity, which, by the way, that's what, for example, our fundamental rights are based on. But anytime you appeal to this sort of inherent dignity of human beings and this idea that human beings should not be treated like this, then that's toxic empathy. Then you're trying to manipulate me. So there is an actually ongoing project to actively try to close the hearts of people on the right to appeals to the humanity and dignity of other people. And it's just breathtaking to see.
- [28:07]
Michelle Cottle
So on a scale of 1 to 10, then how worried are you guys about the showdown that we're looking at between the administration and the courts?
- [28:17]
Jamelle Bouie
I think there will be a showdown between the administration and the courts. But I'm not to allude to what I said earlier, to go back to what I said earlier, I don't necessarily think that that's gonna be the most important thing. The most important thing is gonna be how the rest of society responds to it, right? Like, if there's a showdown between the administration and the courts, and everyone's sort of like, well, I guess we just, you know, the courts were defeated. There's not much we can do, then you should be worried, right? But if the rest of civil society is like, no, this is not okay, then you're in a better place.
- [28:50]
David French
I do think what we have been watching generally is a collision between an out of control executive and a responsible judiciary. Now the question that I have is how will the judiciary respond if that conflict escalates? And history here, I feel like the Court should be looking at history now and understand that there are moments when the Court has been a giant part of the problem. Dred Scott, Plessy versus Ferguson, Korematsu versus United States. And there have been times when the Supreme Court has been indispensable towards justice. And I'm thinking about, for example, Brown v. Board that we've already talked about. West Virginia v. Barnett, established, you know, strongly establishing core elemental free speech rights. I mean, you can go on and on where the Court has, in the face of intense public pressure, done the right thing. And so this is one of those moments of national choosing. I feel like, you know, we've rested for, on our laurels for a while as sort of comforting ourselves in some mystical notions of American exceptionalism, as if this is a inherently better country with an inherently sort of better class of people. Turns out we're human beings just like everybody else and we're subject to the same passions and temptations and including the temptation to follow authoritarians and demagogues and the temptation to disregard the rights of others. And so this is a time of choosing. And it's not just the Court, it's, as Jamel said, it's all levels of society.
- [30:13]
Jamelle Bouie
We're coming up on the 250th anniversary of 1776 of the Declaration of Independence and the revolution. And let me say that this was one of the core points of the revolutionary generation, that we're not different, we're not special, and that it's incumbent on us to like, actively try to be better, to actively try and work to build a different kind of society. And obviously their efforts were chock full of all kinds of hypocrisies. You don't need to tell me about them. I live like down the street from Thomas Jefferson. I get it. And yet that insight and intuition, which seems basic, but it's true that we are not different, that we are subject to the same temptations. And that part of the work of being a citizen in a representative government, whether you want to call that a democracy or a republic, who cares? Part of our obligations are to be mindful of our temptations and our weaknesses and do everything we can to mitigate them, both in the building of our institutions and in how we interact and live. Together as just people in this world.
- [31:21]
Michelle Cottle
All right? And I'm gonna wrap this up by sending out my eternal plea that I'm always saying before every election, after democracy must be constantly defended. And when I talk to people, to voters on the campaign trail who are upset because this or that Congress member didn't save us in this or that way, or they're not doing more, all I can think of is just, it's not the courts that are gonna save us. It's not Congress that's gonna save us. It's everybody has to take a role in standing up for what's right. Otherwise, yes, we are just as susceptible to crashing and burning as any other country.
- [32:01]
David French
So.
- [32:02]
Michelle Cottle
All right. And with that, guys, I'm going to wish you all a fond farewell and please come back and let's do this again very soon.
- [32:08]
David French
I'd love to, anytime. Thanks.
- [32:10]
Jamelle Bouie
Hopefully we'll have a more cheerful topic, right?
- [32:12]
Michelle Cottle
We're not going to let David be such a downer next time.
- [32:15]
David French
I could be a downer whenever I want to, Michelle. Fine.
- [32:18]
Michelle Cottle
Fine.
- [32:39]
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