Don't Let John Roberts Fool You (with Mike Sacks)

It does feel like a fundamentally regal conception of the presidency, right? The president isn't just a civil servant.

They're not a servant of the people, but they're like imbued with these awesome powers, right? They can't be touched by the law, blah, blah, blah.

Stuff that I think is kind of ridiculous.

Well, this is, I mean, where the no kings rally, like the term comes from, really.

I mean, the Supreme Court pretty much crowned a king in this case.

And they did so by both massive chicanery around its own docket and the timing of its docket to even get there by pushing it later and later and later.

So that by the time they did what they did, it was almost election time and there was no time for Jack Smith to prove the private acts in trial that Trump could be nailed to the wall for.

I know I'm going on and on, but I want to know one more thing because this relates to your introduction about how Congress is just doing nothing.

A lot of the things, the criming while in office stuff, I mean, these are impeachable offenses.

The stuff that Trump was being prosecuted for trying to overturn the election as federal crimes.

This is what he was impeached for in the second time as well.

And the utter failure of Congress to do its job in Trump 1.0 and maybe we'll see it again in the second half of Trump 2.0. to pursue its constitutional duty, not just to impeach as it did, but to convict someone so clearly unfit for office and so clearly committing high crimes and misdemeanors now like 18 times a day, shows that sometimes prosecutions, while they are necessary to vindicate the criminal law in this country, they're backups when it comes to a uniquely corrupt or criminal an impeachable official for Congress's failure to do his job because of cults of personality or high partisanship.

so there's there's a lot going on here i'm sure we'll come back to these questions of impeachment um i want to ask you more about the corruption but i also kind of want to highlight or ask maybe ask you a question something that i kind of had the suspicion about with this trump versus the united states ruling um and you highlighted the ambiguity of official acts right like is this an official act of the president or is emac acting merely in his private capacity and like you It seems like one of these rulings that on the surface gives enormous power to the executive, but in practice, it's the Supreme Court that has retained it to itself.

Well, we get to decide when it's official and when it's not official, right? And if Joe Biden is committing crimes in office, then that's clearly merely the acts of a private citizen.

But if Donald Trump is raking in billions from whatever loony crypto deal he's doing, well, that's just a presidential initiative.

Right.

That like by retaining their power to interpret these kind of ambiguous terms, they are always getting to decide what the actual limits of power are here.

Yeah.

And that's a broader theme with the Roberts Court.

A heads I win tells you lose thing.

Broader theme altogether.

Not just arrogating power to itself, but then picking and choosing when to deign to give that power back on a provisional measure to the other branches.

uh we can look at that with their work on administrative law with the um

with the major questions doctrine which it used to spike biden's student

loans um student loans program or student loan relief program and the uh the clean power plan biden's clean power plan where they said that issues of major economic social political import even if they fall squarely within statutory authorization as the Student Loan Relief came under the HEROES Act, as the Clean Power Plan came under the Clean Air Act.