the classics yeah okay that's a good one that's scary yeah like stuff like that

i've kind of seen i watched it when i was oh that's hella scary the original one the original one okay yeah i was that literally terrified me for real for the longest time i'm like this is the scariest i think i watched it when i was in like high school or something I tried to watch the one with Bill Skarsgård.

Is that who it is? Yeah.

And those out here are really scary.

I

reviews were for horror movies i've never even like thought about

that i didn't think she was gonna make it she's like mom i cannot say in here like i am terrified and i was like no at the time I think there was like a Colleen Hoover book adaption and there's I was like do you want me to go ask them if they'll let us switch theaters it's not a big deal if you can't handle it and she's like no I just need to get to the scream I wish I could remember the ones that was talking I

Why the ethics reform, Kate? You may have serious philosophical differences with people like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, but do you think they're making right-wing decisions because they're being bribed?

Absolutely not.

I think that in many ways, it's concerning for reasons independent of whether these enormous gifts from billionaire friends and benefactors influence their votes in any particular case.

I mean, I should say, I don't know.

But I actually don't think that's the crux of the case for ethics reform, that somehow there is one or more justices whose decisions have been tainted by particular gifts or particular relationships.

I think it's a larger problem, which is that the justices right now comport themselves and seem to believe that they stand outside of, again, normal mechanisms of accountability and regulation.

Every other government official is subject to binding ethics rules.

Remind people what the shadow docket is and why you and many other people find its use troubling.

Why the ethics reform, Kate? You may have serious philosophical differences with people like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, but do you think they're making right-wing decisions because they're being bribed?

Absolutely not.

And I think that in many ways, it's concerning for reasons independent of whether these enormous gifts from billionaire friends and benefactors influence their votes in any particular case.

I mean, I should say, I don't know.

But I actually don't think that's the crux of the case for ethics reform, that somehow there is one or more justice whose decisions have been tainted by particular gifts or particular relationships.

I think it's a larger problem, which is that the justices right now comport themselves and seem to believe that they stand outside of, again, normal mechanisms of accountability and regulation.

Every other government official is subject to binding ethics rules.

Remind people what the shadow docket is and why you and many other people find its use troubling.

So it's

certainly something that they could do or even, yeah, smaller groups, things like three.

But yeah, you raise a good question.

Is there concern that this could somehow shift some even further action onto the shadow docket, which as we were just discussing, is enormously problematic in just how little meaningful process is afforded on the shadow docket.

So I actually think as part of this reform package, you definitely need some kind of shadow docket reform.

So you could, right now, the justices, when it comes to the shadow docket, as when it comes to so much of their work, are the kind of deciders not only of the cases, but of the rules governing their disposition of the cases.

And they are skeptical about the authority of any other entity to impose regulations on them.

of

Mm-hmm

... birthright citizenship, but those are really the outliers.

For the most part, they have totally backed him.

Um, so it feels like there is a very real chance that this, the kind of reform proposal that I'm talking about, would change things for the better.

Um, so one, I think that kind of regularizing appointments so that presidents do know that they're going to have some appointments to the court will mean the temperature is taken down on the kind of selections and the confirmation process in that it is not maybe the only shot a particular president has of changing the balance of the court.

Each seat becomes so valuable when they become open only every decade or so, and a president doesn't know if they're gonna have only one or, you know, maybe two shots at actually changing the composition of the court, so they all have four, so maybe that, that sort of lowers the temperature.

Um, it also, I think, at the front end, if the next president is able to appoint two or maybe even better, four justices, that does sort of jumpstart the kind of change to the Supreme Court, which is maybe more short-term than long-term, but at this moment, I think this Supreme Court, as presently constituted, is going to be an enormous obstacle to any kind of reform agenda that a kind of democracy candidate for office, office of the president and in Congress, wants to pursue.

H- how do we change that? How do we reduce the importance of the Court?

To your point, is the idea of judicial neutrality just gone? Are we done?

I mean, they say, obviously, that they stand outside of politics, and I just think that you can't with a straight face credit that at all anymore.

I mean, it was always overstated, right? They have always, there's always been, like, constitutional politics, justices forever have always had strong views about what the Constitution means, maybe how much power government should have, all those things.

But I do think that, at least for most of our history, they did stand outside of rank partisanship.

That I think is a genuinely new and incredibly troubling development.

And in some ways because, like when, during the kind of crucible of the Reagan Justice Department and Reagan administration, which you write about in your book, when all of this is kind of forged, they're tr- they're fig- they're, they're planning and then they sort of execute a takeover of the judicial branch in some ways as a hedge against what they think is the likely loss of power in the other branches, right? So they have the presidency at this point, but they're worried that Congress is gonna end up in Democratic control.

Don't you dare tell Clarence Thomas what to do, Kate.

Y- yeah.

What are the legal issues on appeal now? So the

administration kind of avoided defending this executive order on the merits the first time it was before SCOTUS.

As you said, it was really a question of standing and ripeness.

Are the states coming too early, right, to challenge this order? And are they actually being injured in any appreciable way? Because there isn't yet an order out.

Okay, it turns out actually that second part was wrong.

The Supreme Court... essentially wrote this emergency order on the premise that the Postal Service hadn't yet issued the order that the executive order, the rule, say, that the executive order directed the Postal Service to issue.

It turns out it actually had already done that a couple of days earlier.

What's your assessment of her reasoning? Is it legally sound and maybe more important? Is it the kind of reasoning that appeals to this court? I

And listening to Rhaena whine and cry and bitch and moan in a cave for the whole season was so annoying.

And, like, I get where Daemon's coming from when he's, like, not wanting to tell her because Rhaenyra was so upset, but on Rhaenyra's side, she's like, "Who do you think that I am? You don't think that you could just come to me and tell me that?" Th- this show is a lot of miscommunication.

"At least I'm on the throne."

Yeah.

[laughs] I'm guessing that, that's kinda, like, where I, I was at.

It's like she's just gonna accept her role and, again, setting us up for how she is to rule going forward.

And this is why it suck, it really sucks, 'cause I really want to do a rewatch of Game of Thrones, but I'm so afraid to hear stuff that I don't wanna hear, even though, like, I don't know.

Like, I'm not 100% sure.

Yeah

... that this suit was novel.

Um, and so she essentially asked, so this lawsuit gets filed, and before there's, you know, even a response from the Department of Justice, you know, Trump's DOJ to, to Trump's lawsuit, she basically says, "It seems like we might have a problem with, you know, Trump being on both sides of the V, so why don't you guys file briefs explaining why there's a case or controversy so this can proceed?" And before the filing deadline arrives, lo and behold, they announce this big settlement and the withdrawing or the dismissal with prejudice of the lawsuit.

So I think she was initially skeptical, and then once this announcement was made, she essentially thought, "Well, the party who filed the lawsuit is asking me to dismiss it.

It's kind of up to them, and so I can't hang onto it just because I am troubled by what I'm seeing," so she granted the dismissal.

But the reason we then got to this order was because following that dismissal, a group of friends of the court, like amici, tried to essentially intervene.

They filed a lawsuit, and there is a mechanism for outside parties to essentially seek to intervene in a case, [lips smack] and for a few different reasons.

... how would you think about u- you know, using this as a point of inquiry for Blanche if you were a senator on the Judiciary Committee?

Yes.

They could have answered the question about the constitutionality of the order there.

They decided instead to resolve this technical, really important, but technical question of the power of district courts to issue nationwide injunctions and not to say one word about the constitutionality of the underlying order, leaving it hanging out there.

Now, it was never in effect because there was a delayed period for implementation, lawsuits were filed immediately.

It was stayed immediately after that last suit.

New suits were filed.

So it's never gone into effect, thank God.

Like, that also needs to be addressed.

What was the justices' reasoning on why these cases were ultimately different?

So y- you're, you're right that, you know, sort of the invocation of kind of Calvinball, like Trump does win in one and, and, and lose in the other, as a technical matter.

Um, but I think that presidential power and the idea of the unitary executive, and obviously right now it is Trump who's the beneficiary of that vision of the presidency, won huge in today's decisions.

And Slaughter, which is the case that overruled this nearly century-old precedent, Humphrey's Executor, and said the president has to be able to fire at will, whenever he wants, for any reason or no reason, the heads of even traditionally independent agencies, um, that is a decision that I think will fundamentally change the kind of nature of presidential power and the face of a lot of the federal government.

Um, Trump has already been acting like he has the power that the Supreme Court declared today that he has.

Um, but I do think that this declaration by the Supreme Court will further embolden him, if it's possible even to imagine a further emboldened Donald Trump.

And yet it was a mixed day because Trump did lose in the case in which he was trying to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and the court tried to draw a distinction between presidential power over most independent agencies, complete, and presidential power over the Fed, or at least the, you know, governors on the Fed, you know, limited.

I'm curious, in your mind, because I keep saying Calvinball, is there any pattern to where the justices are standing up to President Trump's administration and where they're handing him wins? 'Cause it seems like as long as it doesn't impact the economy, he can do whatever he wants, except in these other moments when he can't.

Looking at it, is, is there any real distinction between what, uh, the, the Court said about these independent commissions, the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve? I mean, is it just that these justices don't wanna touch the Federal Reserve because it has all this power over setting interest rates and, and, uh, monetary policy?

I think it's mostly about the latter, the, the kind of concern on the part of the Court that the work of the Fed is so important that the Supreme Court doesn't want to mess with it.

I mean, the statutes creating and empowering all these agencies, ones that regulate, you know, the environment and consumer protection and, you know, labor relations, you know, there's independent agencies that have significant authority over, you know, wide swaths of the kind of American life and law, and they're all a little bit different.

Um, but the Court basically paints with a broad brush in saying the president, because Article 2 of the Constitution makes him sort of the sole repository of executive power, it, it gives him complete control over everyone who serves atop these agencies, again, even ones that by congressional design are meant to be insulated to a degree from politics and from the presidency.

But regardless of those statutes and those congressional preferences, the president has to have complete control.

And so it's not that, you know, there's a salient distinction, I don't think, in the Fed statute that distinguishes it from these other agencies, uh, but I think these practical concerns that we've already alluded to.

And then the Court does gesture toward history.

Do we get a sense from these rulings if the Supreme Court justices, or the conservative ones, also seem to be leaning in that direction of more power for the president?

What did the court say today?

Right.

So both of these groups are recipients of this TPS status, which is this humanitarian relief for individuals who are already in the United States.

And the government determines they cannot be safely returned to their home countries because of things like armed conflict or natural disaster.

So as you just said, both Haiti and Syria were under these designations.

The Trump administration tried to end both, as it has for most TPS designations.

And lower courts found both that the right steps were not followed in making those terminations, but also in the case of Haiti, that unconstitutional racial bias or animus infected that decision.

Why is this case important?

Mm-hmm

... is no longer the law of the land, and anybody born 30 days after the issuance of this order, you know, if your parents aren't, if you don't have a citizen or lawful permanent resident parent, even if your parents are here on a student visa or other temporary status, you're out of luck.

Um, and obviously immediately challenged, and lower court after lower court says, "This is a blatantly unconstitutional executive order." Um, and the administration takes the case up to the Supreme Court.

So it actually came up to the Court once last year on this kind of procedural question of whether lower courts can issue something called nationwide injunctions.

The Court said, no, they can't.

This has to be a class action.

So it's back before the Court as a class action.

... and how is it now under attack?

So is this a coalition of justices who wanna support people's rights who use cannabis, and justices who wanna support people's right to own guns at almost any cost?

[laughs] And this is the sort of unusual convergence of those.

Potentially.

I mean, I think this is actually, given how expansively the court has read the Second Amendment and its right to keep and bear arms in recent cases, really for the last two decades, um, it's hard to see this case coming out any other way.

If you have this very central constitutional right, i- it's hard to see the government being able to infringe it on the basis that it did here.

So basically, this is a federal law that has lots of ...

You know, it, it prohibits people from possessing guns in a bunch of different categories.

Can you explain what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was getting at?

What is the, your evidence or your text for your concern?

Yeah.

I mean, I think the Voting Rights Act dismantling is a big part of it.

So the court has now three times taken these enormous bites out of the Voting Rights Act, this kind of crown jewel of the civil rights movement enacted and reauthorized again and again with enormous bipartisan support over, you know, over a half-century.

So first in Shelby County in twenty thirteen, and then in an intervening case called Brnovich, and then just last month in Louisiana v. Cala.

It has basically rendered the Voting Rights Act a dead letter.

Um, so that's I think a very big part of it.

W- what, what is important not to change?

Right

...

so there is a controversy for the judge to resolve.

And she basically said, "I'm not sure that that basic prerequisite to be in federal court is satisfied here, because you are the president [laughs] and you're at the top of the administration.

And by the way, you issued all these executive orders that said that your legal views, you, Donald Trump's legal views, are conclusive inside the executive branch.

Nobody can disagree with your view of the law.

Um, and so I- I'm just...

But, you know, once you pervert a system that is already opaque to a lot of Americans, right, and already has felt, I mean, has felt rigged on any number of levels for decades, if not lifetimes, how do you restore that trust? Can you? I mean, how bad is it? How bad do you think he's broken an already, you know, uh, a system that had a lot of work to do?

... how I'm misremembering?

I think that's totally right.

So I think that's, that's an, a, a good sort of additional explanation.

And I think that in, um, the Students for Fair Admissions case that essentially dealt the death blow to affirmative action in higher education, um, which built on, you know, the University of Michigan case, um, from the early 2000s.

In both of those cases, it sort of, in the 2003 Michigan affirmative action cases, the court basically makes a version of this point, which is, you know, essentially describes affirmative action as something like a necessary evil, but not something that we're gonna tolerate forever.

And so Justice O'Connor writes this opinion that basically says, in a, a very kind of non-judicial way, opinions don't usually do this.

She says, "We think this kind of thing is no longer g- gonna be necessary in 25 years." It's like, where did that come from? [chuckles] It's completely aspirational.

So I'm sure I've oversimplified this, um, but can you explain what the court ordered this week and why?

Can you make it plain for our audience what's at stake here?

here?Sure.

So the 1965 Voting Rights Act is one of the single most important legislative achievements, um, Congress has ever made.

Um, it fundamentally reshaped aspects of American democracy, making real the promise of the, both the Fourteenth and, in particular, the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of race.

So until the Voting Rights Act, we actually didn't meaningfully have a multiracial democracy in many respects.

After the VRA, we did for a time, and the Supreme Court has essentially dismantled one of the key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

That's back in twenty-thirteen when the court struck down the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with particularly egregious histories of racial discrimination in voting to get federal approval before changing anything with respect to voting and elections.

Am I seeing that right? And if not, what is the other way to actually interpret that?

What do you think the chances are that a Democrat president takes over in 2029, or indeed decades after that, if it takes them a bit of time to sort themselves out, and says, you know what, I'm going to appoint as many justices as it takes to overturn all the stuff we've just had done.

Well, once again, the president can't do it alone.

So you're right.

The Supreme Court, the size of the court is not set in the Constitution.

That's a product of statute.

So it's been nine for over a century, but there's nothing required about nine.

But Congress would have to pass a law changing the size of the Supreme Court.

When the dust settles and we'll get decisions over the next few months and and all of them by the end of June, when the dust settles on this term, do you think that that is going to be what we're talking about, that we're talking about how the court finally said, OK, you've gone this far, but you can't go any farther? Or do you think we're going to be looking at this like we did a couple of years ago where the justices ended up coming down on the side of Donald Trump and saying you have much greater power, you have presidential immunity for your actions than we even comprehended at the time?

What are the two or three, um, opinions or even arguments, 'cause as you mentioned, at least one big case hasn't been argued, that you're, m- excuse me, most focused on?

Well, from the...

You know, they're all, these are all presidential power cases.

I- there, there's one I'll mention that isn't, but, um, that, I think, is the kind of most important term of the theme in terms of argued cases and also the theme in terms of the shadow docket.

That is the kind of defining question of this moment is: Are there real constraints on the president? And, um, there...

You know, many of the constraints that have traditionally functioned are not functioning well or at all one year in.

Um, so we'll see how much of a constraint the Court is.

Mm.

How did the attorneys representing the trans athletes argue that these rights apply to their clients?

Interestingly, these were, I think in particular in the first case, these were actually fairly narrow arguments in certain respects.

No one was challenging that schools can maintain sex-segregated sports teams, so girls' teams and boys' teams.

And there was even a question about whether someone who says that they identify as transgender but hasn't taken... steps to sort of actually live and pursue any of the kind of transition-related care, whether that person would have to have their asserted gender identity respected by a school and a team.

And actually, one of the lawyers for one of the athletes said, no, I mean, we should respect that person's self-identity, but they're not required to be allowed to play if they haven't taken steps to essentially conform their life to the gender identity that they deserve.

kind of have presented.

But in Hecox's case and in BPJ's case, these are both individuals who have transitioned, who are living as a middle school girl and a college woman in the two respective cases.

How relevant is this concern when it comes to these two young women who've brought their cases to the Supreme Court?

N- now, what about precedent, Kate Shaw? Has the Court ruled on questions like this before? Have they ruled on exactly this, and they're gonna revisit and maybe overturn some precedent? What have they said in the past?

There has just never been a president who's relied on this particular statutory authority to impose tariffs, so this is a pretty open question.

You know, there are definitely precedents that say courts give deep deference to presidents when presidents are acting in a foreign affairs or national security sphere, and the president, as actually the clip from President Trump you played at the top I think makes clear, he is framing this case as about national security and foreign affairs, and that's domain that the president wants to have this fight on because it is domain where courts are hesitant to second-guess the president.

Um, there's also, though, uh, a relatively recent doctrine that, sorry, it sounds kind of technical, but what's called the major questions doctrine that the Supreme Court has deployed in recent years, including to invalidate some pretty major actions by the Biden administration.

The idea here is that there are certain things that, powers that the executive branch might want to exercise that are so vast, have such political and economic significance, that Congress has to be really, really clear if it wants to empower the executive branch to take those kinds of major actions.

And on the basis of that doctrine, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden loan forgiveness program, a major EPA greenhouse gas emission regulation, some COVID measures like a vaccine mandate and an eviction moratorium, and so there is a question, well, will the Court be consistent and require that kind of statutory clarity when it's evaluating the conduct or, uh, you know, the actions of this president in the same way it was when Biden was the president?

So th- part of the question is whether, whether they will do the same thing here?

Eh, absolutely.

Right.

... about the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

So, I just wanna underscore, these cases are about presidential power but they're also about, and your intro I think alluded to this, issues that really do touch basically all of us, right? The safety of the products that, the cribs we put our children in.

That's the Consumer Product Safety Commission, it is by design a bipartisan expert body.

Trump says, "No, I wanna be able to install my people at the head of that agency." And so far the court seems to be poised to completely grant him the unfettered authority to do that.

That's true about the National Labor Relations Board, which, you know, both protects unionization but also protects workers more broadly, not just union activities.

Um, and the list is very long.

Uh, how do you see this playing out?

What else have we heard from the court so far? Is there anything about this term looking different than a typical term? I mean, just in terms of, like, caseload?

I mean, it's a light term so far in terms of the number of cases the court has decided to hear on the merits, like with briefs and oral arguments and then decisions.

But I think you can't look at the Supreme Court right now in the context of just the cases on what we think of as the merits dockets because so much of the court's most important work right now happens on the shadow dockets.

So these emergency applications from the administration after losing either in a district court or the Court of Appeals or both, sometimes skipping the Court of Appeals and going directly to the Supreme Court.And, you know, there has been a challenge that the president has taken some action that is precluded by statute or inconsistent with the Constitution, and usually a lower court has agreed with the challengers, and the Supreme Court, it has not accepted and decided to hear those cases, it has simply issued a preliminary ruling, almost invariably over the last four months, resulting in a big win for the Trump Administration and for the, uh, ability of the president to just proceed even in the face of statutes and Constitutional provisions that seem to prohibit what it is the president is trying to do.

So, that's sort of the, the shadow docket.

In terms of the merits docket cases, the court is going to hear this challenge to the president's sweeping tariffs.

They are hearing not just the Chiles case about conversion therapy, but two separate cases involving state bans to trans athletes' participation in school sports.

Can you explain how the Trump Administration has been using the shadow docket and kind of really what it is? Because it, I have said this phrase, "The Supreme Court allowed the Trump Administration to do X, at least for now," so many times, but the for now seems pretty important when the actual ruling on any of these incidents would seem to be coming months in the future.