Trump's Awful No Good Day At The Supreme Court

0:11Hey all, welcome back. This is Joe Patrice from above the law. I'm hello Joe Patrice. Hello. Welcome me to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I am here with some other above-the-law people. You just heard Chris Williams pop in, and Catherine Rubino's here, too. I am. I'm here in presence, if not, you know, spirit. I'm a bit exhausted, but here we are. Wow. So, yes, it seemed like you were drifting into small talk, so I had to cut that off. I do. Yeah. I like that you still want to cut me off, even though you know what we're going to talk about here. Yeah. My favorite drift from that interaction was the new word.

0:58I've never heard exhausted, but when tired and exhausted, don't do. It is more than exhausted. It's like extra. Yeah. Like bonus tired. Well, so yeah, we got an action-packed week here of stuff to go over. But, you know, we do chat a little bit beforehand so that we seem like we're people and not Notebook LM. Which, actually, that's a thing we could do. We should try to put, like, our stories into Notebook LM and see how fake-sounding it comes out. I doubt we should do that. But speaking of the small part of the small talk, or at least a more friendly version, yes, this weekend, the regular listeners know that in addition to my duties at Above the Law, I also work with the college policy debate community.

1:51And this past weekend was the Cross-Examination Debate Association's National Championship. It sure was. Yeah. So, yes, I tab that tournament, which is how the pairings happen. We decide who debates each other. So I am one of the people who is responsible for that. So it's a lot to do, but it all happened. And congratulations to Kansas that defeated Iowa in the final round after. Yeah, like a real Big Ten, Big 12 championship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was Midwest-centric, although it did not take place in the Midwest. Binghamton University hosted, I think it's the third time in the last 20 or so years that they've hosted.

2:33But it was a good time. but I am I am exhausted yeah exhausted that's a debate joke I'm sorry for those who don't listen but those who know debate that was almost funny yeah I had a good weekend I've been doing a lot of runescaping recently uh it's one of those things you just once you once you I started in middle school and now my big old my big age i'm still playing um another game i've been playing is a slave aspire to which is like a strategy deck building game so my hope is that by getting my ass beaten stay the spy or two i'm helping to fight alzheimer's you know keeping the brain activated and thinking about strategy and as i'm thinking about strategy i'm just seeing how bad it seems like america is getting their ass kicked in the war that might be a little bigger than small talk but it's just on the mind it seems like one of those things where it's not that we're losing it's that there's not there's no plan to win it that's a that's a critical distinction i think but yeah like critical distinction in theory but in effect it looks a lot like i mean well not really like but i mean when you look at casualties or anything like that like they like none of that's happening it's not like a losing ground or anything it's just you know things blow up and nothing is accomplished well not that we're allowed to know there was a point where reporters aren't even allowed to report on death tolls and that's that's of course the thing you do when you're winning a war yeah that's that's fair i mean not that you know like that sort of stuff it doesn't stay hidden for long uh there's too many people involved.

4:23But yeah, no, I mean, it just seems like it's a haphazard mess that involved. I saw the chief staff, the army, for those of us who have loyalties to a branch that our chief of staff got told to resign, which is never, never, that's never a good sign when people are preemptively being told to resign. That's, that suggests there's a problem, a breakdown in the system. And it's certainly impacting gas prices. I saw that just casually as I was driving. That's$4.50 a gallon. Yeah. I went to the gas station around my way. The gas prices walk. Just basic advice there. Yeah. Run even. All right. Well, let's get back to the topics at hand.

5:19so last week we had a bunch of stories uh we the last week was a weird week for stuff because we had bunches of stories about the same few topics the first one so the biggest news of the week was the birthright citizenship oral arguments this was supreme court was hearing this the challenge to trump has an executive order where he claims that he has rewritten the 14th amendment this prompted a bunch of quote unquote originalist academics to say, sure, yeah, we also always have thought that the original meaning of this was that birthright citizenship doesn't exist despite never having talked about it before.

5:58Yeah, I mean, Steve Ladek, I think, has a piece that really goes into sort of the sham of the legal academia on the far right that is kind of trying to paper over the trail and be like, I'm sure we always thought that. And here's how you You know, it wasn't always true. Not that long ago, James Ho, now of the Fifth Circuit, wrote, well, of course, this is what the 14th Amendment means. Well, I'll go further. Randy Barnett wrote to that piece in, I think, the Wall Street Journal backing up the, oh, you know, as an originalist, I think that maybe birthright citizenship isn't real. And I'm like, you wrote a book about the 14th Amendment and you didn't mention any of this.

6:38A sign that you never thought this was an issue until like it's just the cynicism runs all the way down. Yeah, my thing is it's easy to be like, oh, all of this begins and ends with Trump. But no, Republicans have not liked Mexicans for a very long time. So if this was a thing, they would have brought it up, you know, during the other presidencies. Yeah, no, very true. And they've in the past complained like the phrase anchor baby is a thing that they've thrown around, you know, because they knew that was the law for years. But, yeah, everybody always were like, well, obviously, this is the law and we're going to complain about it.

7:16Nobody ever thought, what if, you know, to get all, you know, Royal Tenenbaum Z? What this argument presupposes is what if it isn't the law? So. All right. So there's a few things to talk about with this case that we covered. The first of which, let's go through it chronologically. The first of which happens before the oral argument even begins, which is that Donald Trump declares he's going to show up. Wild stuff. This, I think, actually provides kind of a neat parallel to the stuff we were talking about earlier, where, you know, the sham of the far right academia papering over the reality. When he said he was going to go, there was a big storm on Twitter being like, well, of course, the president goes all the time.

7:56There's a special chair reserved especially for him. That's Harmeet Dillon, the head of the civil rights division currently at DOJ, though it sounds like maybe getting a promotion. We'll talk about that in a minute, too. But Harmeet decided to say, well, there's a special chair for the president, which no one ever sits in. And I understand Passover happened, but there is not like an Elijah chair for the president to just show up and they never do.

8:25But yeah, so the president does not have a special chair. But he did go down to the oral argument and sat there for a while. Just to just to be clear, he also didn't even sit in the special chair that was mentioned. He just sat in the front row so he could be seen and probably smelled. Well, right. There is no special chair. And he sat. Yeah, he sat in the public gallery like every other. The best part is like when people are like, look, that we ask Rock, can the president attend? And it says he can. Therefore, you are all wrong when you're making fun of Hermit. And I'm like, it says he can because the public can attend.

8:57There's ways for members of the public to attend, not that it's somehow special to the president. Yeah. And the justices have a box for observers, too. And, you know, there are there are ways in which people can attend Supreme Court hearings. This was there was no special treatment, really, in this instance. Or there's definitely not like a dedicated chair. Anyway, so he's attended for a little bit. He left before the oral argument was finished, just got up and left mid-argument, which, you know, displaying the sort of respect for the process. Well, the good news is that it's probably because he knew they were getting smoked.

9:34Yeah, it didn't go well. It did not go well for the administration. Well, it went well for someone. Yeah, that's right. It did not go well for the administration. John Roberts, John Roberts, still stinging from the past hits he's taken from this administration, decided to get a good one in by saying after the solicitor general said, well, you know, things are different now because there's airplanes and it's a modern world and it's a new world. And Roberts just was like, well, it's a new world, but it's the same constitution, right? You don't get to change that. But somebody decided, you know, at some point Sauer decides to, you know, had mentioned Indians at some point in the conversation.

10:19And Gorsuch decided to take up this topic as one might expect and asked about what this interpretation would mean for native peoples. And and Sauer was like, oh, I've never even thought about that. And it's like a shame. It's like, bro, that was always going to be Gorsuch's question. Yeah. Listen, if you're listening to the podcast, you probably know this. But if you don't, Chief Justice Roberts is the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Gorsuch is the chief justice. When it comes to anything involving native sovereignty, he's the guy. He's left of left. He's likely to—I'm sure wherever he lives, whenever he prays, he's like, I acknowledge I'm eating this on native land.

11:04That was a viral tweet that I saw that somebody wrote that was like Gorsuch. Yeah, Piscataway land. Yeah, Gorsuch on a normal thing. It is, of course, okay for employers to castrate their employees. On a native's case, I'm delivering this from Piscataway land. Yes, yes. So, Sorin not being prepared for him to ask a question on how changing criterion for meeting birthright citizenship would affect natives. His answer was like, I guess. Like, what do you mean you guessed? You should have known this twice. You know, so Trump bails knowing they're losing. It's kind of a generally embarrassing run.

11:46The after it ends, though, we get to see what we you know, what we unfortunately get to see as social media has become kind of a cesspool, especially with Elon Musk's running of one of the one of the big platforms. we saw the usual outpouring of just general random racist people who aren't even lawyers talking about how Justice Jackson doesn't know what she's talking about. Right. I've had this, this is a conversation that plays in my mind. Well, me and Joe occasionally have this where it's like, well, how does the average person interact with the law? Like how do people who don't read specialty law magazines for fun think about things that are happening in the legal world?

12:25This is one of the things that comes to mind. Justice Jackson during the case gave what was in my mind a brilliant discussion of this notion of a local allegiance like and by that means like how does the a person who's not like in some weird scenario like a sovereign citizen or something how do the laws apply to them when they are in a foreign nation now the example she gave was a hypothetical where a person commits theft in japan that they could be arrested for that and also if a person who's not a japanese citizen was robbed in japan they could rely on Japanese law to get their things taken back and, you know, punish the person that stole from them.

13:03It's a neat example of local allegiance as it relates to being subject to the jurisdiction of a government, right? Which makes sense in a case where that clause is up for debate. People whose qualification is that they drive a truck got on Alcor's internet saying that this was the stupidest thing they've ever heard, that because somebody can get robbed in Japan, that Mexicans deserve to be citizens in the United States. It was just one of those things where you could see somebody not understanding the example, but not letting them recognize and they don't understand, prevent them from talking.

13:40Because there was one guy, he was like, what does she even mean? What does this matter? And then he starts talking about Biden for some reason. Like it was just like a, it was stream of word salad, you know? But yeah, it's one of those things where, I mean, it was a great example for people that understood it. One of the things that and this has been something I've noticed about the way Jackson handles oral argument generally is Jackson is a big fan of not asking, you know, unlike, say, Gorsuch be like, what about Indians? Jackson's not a fan of asking the direct question because she sets up a story that like it seems she often sets up situations where she's asking a question that like seems a little bit outside of a direct engagement with the facts to tease out answers that then just kind of compound as it moves closer and closer to exactly where they are.

14:35Almost like she's – I don't want to say she's trapping the advocate, but almost like she's baiting the advocate in. It kind of is like a cross-examination, a real true cross-examination style where, well, what about this situation in Japan? It's like it's unsettling. I mean I don't know, but the answers as they keep coming move closer and closer to, well, then let's get to what it means to be subject to the jurisdiction of. and I think that style makes a lot of sense if you understand understand what's happening yeah that way if you understand what's gonna happen six questions down that makes sense but unfortunately she's not really she's not really built for a social media world where people are gonna take the first question and go like I don't understand and like mouth off also one one thing to be fair I agree with I agree with your assessment generally but just with this particular example i do think that the way she posed a hypothetical was framed as a long-term gotcha uh gorsuch's was too because like when he led with the question was well how this affect natives i think in his well it's him he knew in his mind that it that they wouldn't be given citizenship because native americans had their citizenship because of statute all right so he so like when he was asking the question how does this affect them he knew that it wouldn't that they wouldn't be granted citizenship right so yeah all right well let's uh take a break here and uh we'll be right back all right well so we're back the other uh big story that we had multiple installments of taking it outside of the you know big federal stories to a random texas courtroom we had a Texas judge who was caught on video berating an IT worker who had come in to help fix, seemed as though it was a phone issue, that the judge wasn't connected to a Zoom call or a teleconference or something.

16:30The IT worker, who by all accounts is beloved in the courthouse, came and pointed out that, no, you're connected. You just didn't understand what's going on. and just use your error. Yeah, right. But rather than say something like user error, which is probably more accurate, I tried to, you know, allow the judge to save a little face with like, oh, well, false alarm. That did not go over well as the judge started firing back about that. And then after he tells the guy to get out of his courtroom, he's on video mumbling to his staff about get me his supervisor and everything. Like just the, you know, Judge Karen behavior.

17:14But how this works out, because sometimes we live in a world where you start to feel like maybe karma isn't doing its job. This is one of those moments where karma managed to prove that it's still out there. Because everything that happened after this judge became famous in this viral video has compounded to get even worse for this judge. So we - Karma is in fact a cat. He instantly, okay. He instantly got a lot of notoriety because one lawyer who practices in the area wrote a letter saying like, hey, this doesn't really look good. You probably should apologize. And he responded by demanding that that lawyer appear before him for potential sanctions.

18:02And so that was met with the entire criminal defense organization of the Houston area, like saying we're going to protect him. That was a black eye. Then on top of that, we started seeing more videos coming out of this judge's behavior that weren't particularly flattering. We had a what was that? Oh, oh, yeah. His bankruptcy records come out because apparently the judge has been bankrupt. The records come out that he's been fined by for some election, failing to be filing deadlines. And it's like it's all stuff where had he not been a dick on video, nobody ever would have known any of this. I mean, and he was a I mean, a real dick.

18:48This is real problematic behavior and not at all something that is acceptable for someone in that kind of a position. And it will suck to work for the guy. I mean, one of the things that came out was he was being a dick about getting a clerk assigned to him. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The series of emails came out of him yelling at the clerk's office because every clerk that gets sent up there, he calls incompetent and fires. And surprisingly, that means there aren't a lot of clerks in the office willing to work for it. Yeah. And there was one point where he was like, oh, this better not be a political thing.

19:22And it's like, no, you're being a dick. Yeah, he also threatened the head of the Republican Party in the area. Yeah, he – there was some social media posts came out. Yeah, the other Republican Party officials in the city were – or county, I guess – were talking about how problematic he was. He apparently had complained that they did not show up to his investiture ceremony. And then when all this went down on social media, he wrote that he was considering a bench warrant over it. Just really petty, you know, not really showing the judicial temperament that you would like to see stuff. But yeah, so he won his seat last time with by 300 votes out of, I think, like a million and a half or so cast.

20:13So I have a feeling he might not get reelected. seems like this is the sort of notoriety that doesn't work. Yeah, it's obviously notoriety and also demonstrates a lot of internal squabbling within sort of the Republican Party. So also not going to get a lot of institutional support. It's not like the the wagons are going to circle in his defense either. All right. Well, cool. So, yeah. So we talked about that a lot. Let's take a break and we'll come back and unfortunately be back on the federal beat for to close out. All right. So we have been running our bracket competition, which, you know, here above law, we do a bracket.

20:53And our bracket was what lawyer most deserves to be sanctioned of the Trump administration most deserves to be sanctioned after all this is over by local bar authorities. And congratulations to Pam Bondi for winning that competition. And her parting gift was to be fired for it. She broke the glass exit door, Joe. Yes, that's true. She's the first woman attorney general to be fired. Wow. Yeah. That is how SNL characterized the moment. That's fair. I've got to be honest with you. I'm a little disappointed. As the resident soundboard guy, there had to have been a sound effect that you could have used here.

21:31Oh, yeah, yeah. That probably was. Yeah. So she flew too close to the sun. Sure. There it is. There we go. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. She I'll say it again. You ready? She broke the glass exit door. There you go. And that was the SNL line about her being unceremoniously canned. Really, really funny, hilarious stuff. Or again, more karma, but in a slightly different way. My favorite little tidbit is that minutes after it became official that Donald Trump made the announcement that she was no longer attorney general, There were pictures circulating online of her official government headshot in the trash can.

22:16Yeah, it kind of had the, you know, for those of you who are old enough, the like, follow the Berlin Wall, people pulling down statues of Lenin kind of a thing. Like pulling down the Saddam statues in a break. Like moments after this was over, all the iconography of Pam Bondi was being destroyed ritualistically throughout the. Well, I mean, it's actually really funny, though, right, that that her portrait was in the trash immediately because she quite famously demoted a career prosecutor because they had it changed out the portraiture in the main office of where they were fast enough. So they sell the prior administration's portraits up, meaning Biden, Harris and Merrick Garland, and they were demoted because of it.

23:03And so people, well, if that's the standard, we're going to work. She's no longer AG, right? Right in that trash can. Right in that trash can. Yeah. I mean, I think no one has suffered more than Pam over the way this war is going, because the Dow being a well under 50 ,000 has seemingly sealed her fate. Also, this is not I'm not reporting this. I have no insider that gave me this information. But I like to imagine that as the portrait was being thrown out, somebody was like, hey, throw on YMCA. Hey, they like the little dance. You know, obviously, she also had been pushing the yeah, the she had been very.

23:42I have the Epstein files. I'm going to release them. Obviously, that did not go well for the administration. She is now replaced, at least on an interim basis, by Todd Blanche, who had been the number two, who had been working very diligently and almost, you know, mostly to block the Epstein files from being. released, at least key matters of the Epstein files, including a couple weeks ago, we learned that he seemingly personally intervened to prevent a document that detailed some of Epstein's accomplices from being seen by the Senate. So we now have kind of a, we have that cover-up artist artistry on, you know, on high display.

24:28Will Blanche be the long-term replacement? Seemingly no. There are conversations that it could be one of any number of people, Lee Zeldin being the most - Confirmable? Confirmable, the EPA administrators, because he's already been through this sort of process and is kind of a normal legislator. Although the far right has sort of put their weight behind someone we talked about earlier, Harmeet Dillon. People are the far right is saying that that is their their far their at least the terminally online section. Yeah, I I've also heard that Trump would prefer to have Alina Habba there, which. OK, let's be very clear why Alina Habba is a particularly hilarious option.

25:12Right. She could. She was never even nominated for her role as U.S. attorney in New Jersey. Right. Because they didn't think she could get confirmed. So that's a subordinate role to attorney general. The notion that she would be put up for that position and potentially have to have a confirmation hearing is hilarious. Judge, well, I mean, she goes by Judge Janine, I suppose, and not the U.S. attorney for D.C., Janine Pirro, is also an option. This is a person who has been confirmed. That said, since being confirmed, she's run an office that gets no build like in historic ways. Yeah. And I think actually in terms of whether or not Trump will elevate hers probably will be her undoing.

25:58Right. Because she's a loser. Yeah. She's had a bunch of really public L's. And I can't imagine that's the figure he wants to to celebrate right now. Well, there was a recent Trumpism. He was like, losers, I love losers. I love having people losing around me because then I get to feel much better than them or something along those lines. So that might be in her favor. Yeah, no, the DOJ is in something of turmoil, and it doesn't seem like there's a plot to have it not be that anytime soon. Now, you know, obviously, it's not the department that's doing the most work right now. But it is, from our perspective, as a legal observers, it is, you know, fun to watch.

26:42And it is providing almost daily sarcasm. well cool thanks everybody for listening you should be subscribed to the show so you get new episodes all the time leave stars reviews all that sort of thing you should be reading above the law so you read these and other stories before we talk about them you can listen to the jabot katherine's other podcast i'm a guest on the legal tech week journalist roundtable you should be listening to the other shows on the legal talk network uh social media uh abovelaw.com i'm at Joe Patrice. She's at Catherine One, the numeral one. And Chris is at Rights for Rent, as in rights, like rights like a birthright citizenship, but rights as in typing.

27:23Rights, not rights. Yeah, rights. Rights. Rights. Right.

27:30And with that said, we will talk to you later. Peace. Peace.

27:41Thank you.