Where does it stem from? Do you see that? What triggered him to take this on?

Oh, gosh.

Well, certainly on some level, only he can answer that question.

But what we do know is that Roberts was a young, very conservative lawyer in the Reagan administration.

And at that time, in the early 1980s, the Supreme Court had actually dealt a blow at that time to the Voting Rights Act, making it harder to enforce Section 2 by saying you have to show that there was a racist motivation behind a law, not just a effect that that disadvantages one racial group and so Congress in reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act in 1982 set to correct that to say no you don't have to show intentional you don't have to prove intentional you know racism in order to overturn a law that has racist effects and Roberts from within the Reagan administration from within the Justice Department, pushed very hard to stop that update from Congress, to stop in the reauthorization, to not fix that intent problem that the Supreme Court had inserted into the Voting Rights Act.

And he lost that battle at the time.

And Congress not only reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, but they corrected the Supreme Court and said, no, no, no.

Is there a space left in the Voting Rights Act for any application at all?

So Pema, first, what is the basis of this case, Trump v. Barbara?

So on Trump's first day in office, January 20th, 2025, he issued an executive order purporting to say that he is going to return our, uh, practice of birthright citizens- citizenship to the way that he says the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended it, and he says it was never intended to apply to the children of people who are here who are undocumented, and it was never meant to apply to the children of people who are here on a temporary basis, say a student visa or a work visa or traveling.

And so all of those people, he's gonna start denying them citizenship.

So immediately-- And he said that he would do this within thirty days.

So essentially immediately, you would start to have thousands of babies born in this country, possibly stateless, um, without a country of their own, subject to deportation, not able to get food assistance, not able to get healthcare potentially.

Uh, so it was an immediate crisis.

And so immediately, um, people who were about to have babies who would fall into this category and civil rights groups sued, um, and now for the first time, the question of whether or not that order was legal and constitutional has reached the Supreme Court.

If the judges decide the administration has made an argument that they can, they can stand behind, who might that ruling affect?

This is the one where the justices will have to consider the president's attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, even though her position is protected from firing except for cause.

For a little context, Trump has put in place a political lackey named Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and he pulls mortgage records for people that Trump doesn't like or wants to fire, and he finds some discrepancies in their paperwork that could possibly point to mortgage fraud, but are also pretty flimsy and certainly unproven.

One of the people targeted through these allegations of mortgage fraud is Lisa Cook on the Federal Reserve, appointed by President Biden.

So, Trump takes this allegation of mortgage fraud and he says, "I'm firing Lisa Cook." Lisa Cook sues and says, "No, you need a real cause.

(laughs) That's a pretext.

You just wanna lower interest rates, and so you're trying to get rid of me, and this is unproven, and I haven't even had a chance to dispute it, and so you can't remove me." The question before the Supreme Court, they're gonna hear oral arguments in January, is whether or not Trump can remove Cook while her case challenging her removal moves forward in court.

But this underlying issue is really so similar to what we've been talking about in the tariff case and the Alien Enemies Act case.

Now, wouldn't this bump up against Frankel's observation that the Nazis, for as long as they could, did try to protect stability in the economy?