David H. Souter

It wasn't as tactical.

Usually, when they were retiring, it was because they had a sinecure of some kind, or were Abe Fortas, or were a David Souter, who's like, "Ugh, I'm just sick of this." [both laughing] You know? Like that's just the craziest retirement, is that David Souter just got disenamored with being a Supreme Court justice.

Like it was-- It's just inconceivable.

You know, I mean, like that matters though.

And, and then the only one is, so that's why I also watch, and maybe it's just perverse or I, or it's like a train wreck you can't look away from, but I watch Amy Coney Barrett because I have a sense, and I watched it in first year, second year, third year, mid, this is their fourth or fifth year now, the r- and I call it the rise of Amy Coney Barrett because she's more willing, as we've seen with most justices over their terms, they b- as they get further away from their nomination process [laughs], um, they, they start becoming their own justices.

Now, that doesn't mean they become moderate as we, as we saw with past people like, you know, David Souter couldn't wait to sh- to become a moderate.

And, and other, and others that were picked by Republican presidents like, you know, like Blackmun and others, that became, you know, I remember, what was it, Richard Nixon famously said, you know, very angry at Harry Blackmun for having chosen him.

It was something like that.

Just getting rid of the Sixteenth Amendment, I fear, is not enough because we won that case in eighteen ninety-five, the Pollock case, but only by a five to four vote, and that was back when the Supreme Court justices probably knew there was such a thing as a Constitution.

I worry that if you have people like David Souter deciding this case today, he would say, "Oh, well, the Constitution already gives us the right to levy an income tax.

That decision back in eighteen ninety-five was a mistake." So I encourage all of us, let's not just fight to put the Sixteenth Amendment six feet under the ground in a lead-lined casket surrounded by concrete with salt over the earth.

Let's try to put something in the Constitution making it unambiguously clear, so clear that even David Souter can't rule otherwise, that an income tax can never come back to haunt America.

Let me go ahead and, uh, close, I guess, on an optimistic note.

Again, there's not a whole lot more to discuss on a sales tax 'cause it's so simple.

Gorsuch was such a golden boy of the Federalist Society that we thought he would be great.

We did not know that he would actually turn out to be another David Souter.

And then what about ACB? We didn't know that because she also wanted to go by a three-letter acronym that she would be literally kind of an acolyte of RGB.

So