Dispatches From The Collapse Of The Rule Of Law

0:28Once again, we have returned. I don't know. I haven't been to Catholic Church in a minute. Fair enough. I believe it's now. And peace also with you. No, it said also with your spirit. With your spirit. Welcome to our thinking like a Catholic segment, which has now replaced small talk. Where we don't necessarily go over our sins or anything, but we do a series of squats. Hair shirts. All right, let me hit the Gregorian chant sound effect here. Bum, bum, bum, bum. Oh, no. No, we will stick with small talk. How's everybody doing? I don't want to brag, you guys. Yes, you do. That's what you say before you want to brag.

1:06Let's be frank here. I know. I know. I killed Trunk or Treat this weekend. Oh. My daughter's preschool had a Trunk or Treat, and I signed up to be one of the cars that hands out treats and is decorated to the nines. And I did a Sesame Street theme. The car looked like Cookie Monster, obviously. Hell yeah. It had fur. It had big googly eyes. I mean, I don't want to say I was the best decorated car there. You do. I mean, I felt like I really killed it. I felt very proud of myself. All the late nights trying to construct said Cookie Monster felt very worth it. I will also say that like the costumes that my daughter and family also wore were Sesame Street related.

1:57So we had a bunch of Sesame characters. My daughter carried her little Elmo doll around. Like it was, you know, maximum theme moment. And I felt pretty good about that. That is beautiful. I will say I just immediately got sad from hearing that because I'm like, these fuckers really cut funding to PBS. Yeah, that is sad. I think the way the thought chain went was you were like, obviously, Cookie Monster. And I was like, well, doesn't he not even eat cookies anymore? Maybe it could have been. So he does eat cookies. I've watched a lot of Sesame Street recently, as you might have guessed. He does, but he also does healthy snacks as well.

2:37He and Gonger, who is a newish character that you may not be familiar with, but Gonger is a chef. And he and Cookie Monster create healthy treats. I have a whole problem with this entire segment in Sesame Street that I really won't bore you with. but it is a little bit problematic in my mind. But Cookie does eat healthy treats as well, and cookies are sometimes a treat, but it's still part of his personality that he really loves cookies. So he's like a recovering Pillsbury addict? There's no recovery talk. It is low on the AA vibes, but he always, when they're trying to make their healthy snacks, he will eat all the raisins, and then they have to like go to a raisin farm to get more.

3:20And they drive to the raisin farm, which, because they're in a food truck, which, okay, they drive there. But then they use an iPad to communicate with the farmers. Joe is loving this, by the way, for everyone who can't see this. Even though they've driven there. They've already driven there. But instead of like talking to the farmers, like in person, they're using their iPad. But they've driven there. So what I heard there was, she has a lot of problems with this that she's not going to bore us with. and then immediately began to bore us. No, I did not. There was followable questions and I felt like it was appropriate.

3:53Well, actually what it was, was it was an interruption of Chris because I was explaining how I got to the funding being cut because you were like, obviously Cookie Monster, like no, it could have been the grouch. And I was like, well, crap, the grouch is homeless. You know who else is homeless? Sesame Street. So that was the thought ring. But yeah. I also sign that Sesame Street was not nearly as woke as everybody made it out to be if it was really that woke he would have been cookie person yeah like there would have been a there would have been a critique on monsterness and all that or like cookie them you know but that's beside the point monsters are are not a binary gender necessarily right like it is there's female monsters too yeah no but it is it is a it is a stigmatizing title though i think they own it i think they've reclaimed the word yeah i think i think monsters seem to enjoy pretty much all the same rights in the sesame street ecosphere as their human cousins i don't know that that r was a little hard i think it's monster or you know you really have to be a member of the community to get that off.

5:02I'm just saying. Yeah, no, they seem I don't think that there's that distinction. It does not seem like there's a legacy of discrimination against the against the community. Yeah, no. Within the Sesame Street world. Within that alternate universe. The only one who seems stigmatized at all is Oscar who actively wants to be. Correct. He makes him happy to be stigmatized. But here's the thing that always confuses me. I mean, there is still class war. You can't un-woke that. Like, you gotta have a little - See, but I don't think Oscar is - Oscar's not homeless or anything. Oscar has a home. It's just a messy one.

5:41And there are apparently tunnels underneath that garbage. Oh, yeah, because he can pop up into any garbage can because it's almost like the Super Mario Brothers pipes. He just pops up everywhere. That is the lore, yeah. Oh, so maybe he's actually overhomed. Maybe he's hoarding. He's a hoarder. Okay. He's a garbage lord. Yes. I think that is absolutely accurate. That is absolutely what the character is. I think that's what they're trying to tell us. Damn it. Damn it, Grouch. I just have never understood. I, you know, the PBS cuts at all are very troubling and sad. And the relationship with HBO was awful and all.

6:16But I hold out hope because I just, I've got to think the merchandising rights are worth something. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Like they should be able to finance themselves by selling a few more of those Elmo dolls. You know, let me tell you. It needs to be everywhere. If they make it, we will buy it. That is very clear in my household, for sure. I would buy a vial of Elmo-themed balsamic vinegar just for the memes of it. What? Oh, no, there was a big thing. There was a... Oh, y 'all might not know this since we're giving lore. Apparently, Elmo also has a New York accent. So he was listing off things and he was like, you know, balsamic vinegar.

6:57That's a hard word for Elmo. And he just sounded like he was from Brooklyn. It's a thing. I can. Well, I mean, Sesame Street definitely takes place in New York. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. They're all New Yorkers, I would say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, now whenever I hear Elmo's voice, the Tims are implied. But, yeah. Yeah. So, it's Sesame Street. All right. So, we have now gone very, very deep into this. Let us move on to actual topics. Good news. I did not go to a legal tech conference last week. I did not travel for the first time in weeks. I did not travel to a tech conference.

7:39So, of course, I went to a different conference. This one, though, was the Society for the Rule of Law, which is an organization that George Conway is famously involved with. It's a group of – I don't think they would love the characterization, but it's a possibly fair characterization. It's kind of an anti-federalist society. It is a group of conservative lawyers who have looked out at the world and gone, no, no. This is wrong. This is not what we meant at all. Except low key. Yeah. I mean, query whether or not that they have been betrayed or that they are the Dr. Frankensteins of the situation and the thing that they advocated for for years has come to pass and they are horrified to stare into the abyss of it.

8:25But one way or the other, there are a bunch of conservative and libertarian lawyers who are not pleased with the way the Trump administration operates. And they had their annual conference, and it was really interesting. Bunches of panels, too many almost. Just scheduling-wise, it was back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Well, in their defense, there's a lot to say about the state of the rule of law in 2025. There is. I will say from where I was sitting and chatting with the people around me who were largely some non-lawyers, but largely former government lawyers and stuff. Everybody's one criticism was, can we get a five minute break to stand?

9:07Because it was just back to back panels, but very interesting stuff. Any panels on that whole Second Amendment fighting tyranny thing or no? No, nobody got into that. We did have a talk about the unitary executive theory and whether or not that was a— Are they forward? Were we the baddies question? Was I the problem? Yeah, but also we talked about district judges and the role they've been playing, largely holding the line and preventing some of the worst abuses with very little help from the Supreme Court. I think it's really interesting. I think ALM did a story not too long ago about how some of the most vocal district court judges have been Reagan appointees.

9:56Sort of the older but sort of conservative. I think the exact sort of people that were probably at this conference are the ones that are sounding the alarm the loudest. Yeah, you defined the – in a lot of ways, you defined the audience that this group spoke to. Lots of Reagan era, either literally or spiritually lawyers who are not pleased with where things are going. There was obviously a lot of animosity towards the tariffs moves, which speaks to this Reagan thing, which obviously that's the other thing that's going on right now. we just added more tariffs to Canada because Canada ran an ad pointing out that Ronald Reagan was opposed to tariffs and that has angered Donald Trump, who's kind of pretending it's like a deep fake rather than literally Ronald Reagan's entire purpose to be a free trade.

10:45It was pretty free trade. Yeah, pretty clear. It's really inopportune when reality gets in the way of theory. Yeah. And yeah. And we are kind of in this post-truth universe where we're doing that. But yeah, so we're going after Canada again because they actually played Reagan quotes verbatim. But also, you know, as far as things Trump is mad at, we also saw, I don't know if anybody noticed, he just messaged out in all caps that he's investigating Major League Baseball because the Democrats and the mafia fix the World Series. Don't really know what that was all about. especially because to the extent the mafia is doing anything it sounds like the nba that is what the would appear yeah well we've gotten we've gotten into multiple legal stories of the week and gotten a field of the one we were actually talking about which was this conference uh very interesting conference though i think that you're right there there is this old school principled conservative group who are not pleased with the way things are going uh i don't think Like, you know, it was something they grapple with because, you know, as nonprofit rules go and all, it's not that they're actually partisan against Trump or anything.

11:59It's just reality is that's the person doing these things right now. I think they would be opposed and still be a conservative group if a Democrat started doing some of the same stuff. But here they are. And well, I was just going to get to this, what I kind of called the cognitive dissonance part of the conference, because there were a lot of folks who were very committed to, hey, we got to fight back against the excesses of this administration, especially on the tariffs and so on. But there were definitely people there who, from my perspective, had not quite come to grips with the role they played.

12:39I mean, in my article about it, I made the connection to the hot dog costume, and we're all looking for the guys who did this. There were some people who just couldn't let go of the ghost that, well, Trump's doing this, but it's really because some Democrat backbencher said something in 2000 that I didn't like. or it really is because Al Gore's fault or Joe Biden's fault or something like that. And, you know, you just the blame the victim kind of style. And there were also hangups over things that were just entirely false, complaining about student loan. You know, this is just like when Biden tried to overturn this to forgive student loans and put aside that those statutory postures were completely different.

13:20when biden lost that case he dropped that argument and then he did continue trying to relieve student loans but that's not the same as he ignored it he found a different statute that allowed him to do slightly different things he tried a different tactic yeah and there was those are not the same people complaining about oh when the irs investigated the tea party which is a incorrect assessment of what happened there uh even the fbi looked into it and found there was no evidence of that but like these kind of conservative notably the president did not say i expect these people my enemies to have charges against them and why haven't they be done faster right yeah exactly it was there was this trump says i want more charges against my enemies and somehow comparing this to this irs story that isn't really accurately described and yes the fbi looked at that under james comey who you know is still a republican uh and he found there was no real evidence for those claims, but they persist as kind of this conservative shibboleth that some of the folks there haven't quite gotten over.

14:25And I felt like that's the thing holding back this group as a movement is that they're struggling that the party that they identify, that is so much of their identity, right? They probably feel very much that that defines who they are to a certain extent. And it is no, those words no longer mean what they think they mean. Yeah. And Republican no longer is identified as the same type of person that they thought. Yeah. Well, if I can transition a little bit within this, one of the panels, one of the more powerful panels was the judges, some former judges talking about what's going on. And I'll tell you, Mike Ludig right now, that guy, run through a wall for that guy right now.

15:05And I want to be clear, when I started this job at Above Law like 13 years ago, I would have said that he was probably in a handful of maybe two or three judges that I would have said were the craziest judges. The wildest, craziest right-wing judges. And the way in which the world has changed and he's stuck to his guns in a principled way, like, yeah. And he delivered kind of the moral grounding. So what was the moral grounding? What was his sort of thesis? Just like the Supreme Court's out of hand. They are acting illegitimately. And like there was a lot of dancing around like, oh, you know, things aren't going well.

15:48He would cut to the chase like, no, they are illegitimate. Everything they're doing is wrong and undermining democracy. They need to be stopped. There were a lot of people kind of talking. And I think this was a theme that was being grappled with at the conference of are we here to push back against these excesses and kind of be an opposition that like brings us back from the brink versus we're over the brink. It is now time to build the civil society that, you know, in a very Velvet Revolution sort of way exists after the fall. And are we now at that point of building? And, you know, Norm Eisen was there who was the ambassador to the Czech Republic at one point.

16:27And so that even though he didn't talk about this, it did. It did. Those ties did come like the whole concept of civil society, which is the basis of the Czech post Cold War transition. It really came through. Like, is this really about building how we, a group that will not really push back against this totalitarianism because there's no way to do it. It's here. Are we what transitions after the fact? And that is the fight that I think is still racking them. Where are they? Are they the one or the other? Ludic clearly seems to feel like they're the latter. Really interesting, rough stuff, talking about some of the threats that the judges are receiving, which is out of hand, and the Supreme Court is doing nothing to help them, if not actively exacerbating the conditions that lead to these violent threats.

17:24One judge, they talked about how one judge has had to move out of their home because the Marshal Service said there was no way to secure their home where they were, so they had to move. That's pretty horrifying stuff. Yeah. Judges are, as an institution, the judiciary, especially because of the way the Supreme Court currently is, are not doing a ton of stuff to really stop the Trump agenda. And even still, the sort of speed bumps that some judges are able to put in the way are being met with such vile hatred and violence that it's truly noteworthy. until the judge is not stopping the trump agenda one point i mean obviously we all know this but i do think it is worth saying now trump's appointing record is out of this world so like part of the part of the reason why some of that pushback isn't happening is because they were put there by him and yeah frankly at the district court level and this is a point that was made at this panel at the district court level even trump judges are pushing back against this like everybody seems to be universally doing this.

18:26It's the higher courts where you start seeing some of this more partisan stuff, which in part is due to the fact that district judges tend to be closer to the issues and more professional and not the political hacks that tend to operate at the appellate level. And also where these things are happening. You know, the administration is not abusing people, is actively talking about how they're going after big blue cities and stuff like that. So the abuses are happening, you know, not in Amarillo or Palm Beach, for instance. So that has changed a bit of the dynamic, too. Yeah, I think that that's certainly true.

19:01And the other part of that, I think, is also that the district courts are more involved in the fact finding, right? So like the specifics matter a lot. And what we're seeing increasingly, especially on the Supreme Court level, is that they are making their own findings of fact. And the actual what's really happening is getting papered over in favor of these broad policy statements that just kind of give a thumbs up to whatever the Trump Trumpian policy is. I mean, they kind of talked about, and, you know, obviously the biggest version of this is Judge Sukhman's thing a few weeks ago, but like there are district judges who with only a couple of clerks are working at 2 a.m.

19:40to issue 80 page opinions to stop administrative action that is wildly illegal and the supreme court is tossing out two paragraphs two vague paragraphs to basically freeze as ludic put it 5 000 pages of opinions that actually are reasoned by lower court judges it's a real problem uh the threats are real uh unfortunately the marshal service is you know run by the department of justice not by the courts which is another aspect uh you know risk factor because one of the things that was kind of unsaid but implied throughout this conversation was what happens when this administration just decides they don't care about protecting judges they don't like, which is something theoretically within their power.

20:27Real worrying. Yeah. Anyway, I guess we've been on this for quite some time, so we should take a break and talk about at least something else, right? Yeah.

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21:35Well, let's talk about the fixes in for baseball. Oh, okay. That was something we touched on in the last segment. And it was one of our top stories of the week, something that happened during game two of the National League Championship. It was the Dodgers versus the Brewers. Shannon Kobolarski was the former associate general counsel at a staffing agency, has learned the hard way that when you act wildly inappropriately at a ball game, it'll bite you in the ass. Ooh, OK. Yeah, there was a viral video where this attorney can be seen responding. So, you know, there was a home run. The Dodgers take a 3-1 league.

22:17Kowalarsk is a Brewers fan, kind of annoyed by that, you know, which to me is very typical, right? You know, there are wins, there are losses, there are good plays, there are bad plays. But she responded by telling a vocal, admittedly vocal Dodgers fan, you know what? Let's call ice. and the Dodgers fan in question was a U.S. citizen war veteran, as he made very clear in the video. And the video ends with the attorney seemingly taking a swing at the camera. All right. You know, not the kind of stuff you necessarily want your staffing agency to be associated with. But took a swing and hit the camera?

22:57It kind of cuts off there. It doesn't seem like she actually made contact, but sort of lunged her hand out in a way that seemed like she was trying to get the camera away or something like that. Well, because if they swung and missed, that kind of sums up the problem for the Brewers in that whole series. Okay, fair. True and fair. But as I kind of said, she was fired from her job. They're no longer associated with her. But it's more than that. She was also on the board of some charities that Make-A-Wish Foundation for Wisconsin that no longer wants to be associated with her. She's no longer on that board.

23:30She voluntarily resigned that position. And also she's been banned for life from the stadium. Nice. Wow. The interesting thing is that based on things that were not part of this incident, the Dodgers fan was also banned from the stadium for drunken disorderly conduct unrelated to this incident. But just kind of give you a vibe of what the stands were like that day. Wow. Yeah. Well, OK. just uh don't be a bad cold as ice karen yeah something like that's gotta you gotta gotta say these things i think that this is going to be an ongoing thing like you know that feeling you get whenever you're near october you're like oh somebody's gonna do blackface or oh somebody's gonna be uh or now they're a little more savvy now they're just dressed up as an um ss members but hey i saw that face does not go out of style we we could still be getting that i would be surprised, I would put money on it, that there's going to be some attorney that decides to wear an ICE costume.

24:30You know, like, I think that as, as white Christian supremacy ramps up even more, we're going to start seeing people push what's the edge of edgy. And we're going to start seeing more things like this. Cause she had to be very comfortable to be like, Hey, I'm gonna get the, I'm gonna get the secret police on you because of me not being happy with you at how you're acting at a sports game. And this isn't that new. I remember I was just looking up times where people threatened ICE. And I saw videos from like 2018. So like this isn't something that is a new phenomenon, but I do think that people are getting a lot more comfortable with calling in the, you know, the secret army to enforce their will.

25:06Yeah, but I also think that the threat is different. In 2018, the threat certainly existed, but it was not quite as nasty, not quite as vile, considering like I think that the way that ICE has been ramping up its behavior. I think that it makes it a much uglier thing to say. Oh, no question. While it was still happening at that point, it's not like ICE had permission to racially profile from the Supreme Court. Right. But what I'm saying is like, as we're seeing the slide towards white being righter, well, not that that's never not been the case in American history, but we're seeing the brightness go up and we're going to see more things like this.

25:48Like, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people that came to her defense and was like, well, was the person illegal, you know, and just bypassing the racial profile that had to be there for her to think that that was an appropriate response to what was effectively her being salty over a leisure activity. And I think you're right, though, that this is the Supreme Court's fault in a really fundamental way because. Calling for a Kavanaugh stop. Yeah. Yeah. Why? You know, there's she's an attorney who's calling for a Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh stop, maybe, you know, but I think that seeing the ugliness through it, I think, is really a good thing that we're still able to do.

26:25And these companies and organizations that no longer want to be associated with her. I think that's that's a good thing. So let's let's take an aside here. I don't know if anybody's been really tracking the social media universe, but the meltdown that that the non rule of law Republicans, like the ones we were talking about earlier, are having over Kavanaugh stop is the fascists. The fascists, you mean. Non-rule of law Republican is too kind. They are in absolute temper tantrum over the idea that these are called Kavanaugh stops. They're like, how dare you call them this? Well, first of all, that means it's the only thing we're about to call them.

27:03Well, that was my transition. Yeah. Well, they'd rather call it justice or the work of God. But, you know, that's neither here nor there. Well, it is here. Did you see there was some pastor that was basically saying that it was a, you can do the work of God with a pistol by joining ICE and deporting illegals. We are in a point of like, I think we are at the point of crusade speak to where I'd personally rather not, I think the way you used it last podcast, sane wash. I think to say the anti-rule of all Republicans is a sane washing of it. The fascists are doing this. Yes. The people who openly refer to themselves as Nazis are doing this.

27:49Yeah. Now, finally, Cadwallader, the oldest law firm in the country, has had a rough go of it lately, has seen a few defections. More than a few, for sure. Yeah, for a lot of reasons. Don't want to necessarily speculate that it's all due to capitulating, but that's certainly some of that. I think they were already seeing, I think, a few notable departures from the firm before they were one of the nine firms that inked a deal with the Trump administration. But doing that certainly accelerated. Certainly some folks leaving a couple of high profile white collar litigators have left. Some other folks have left.

28:31And now looks like they're looking for a merger partner. Yeah. Yeah. It seemed like this was going to happen when they announced a new leadership change, which they blew off as, no, you know, this is just kind of routine that we're bringing in another managing partner. But a lot of us speculated this might be to begin the process of finding a merger partner. And now seems like they are willing to admit that they are having conversations with folks. We'll see what it what makes sense as a merger partner for a cadwallader. I mean, I have some thoughts. I don't know if anyone else does. I don't know.