Trump Is the End of a 100-Year Experiment

23:21Ross Douthat:But that is sort of a great example of an area where a different Republican president coming into a landscape where the prior administration had used a more liberal interpretation of this law to allow the largest wave of migration in recent American history. A different Republican administration would have come in and said, OK, we have this asylum law that, you know, Joe Biden used in this ridiculous way. Let's change the law. And Trump has done nothing like that. There's no revision of the asylum laws pending in Congress, anything like that. He's just assuming that you can buy an executive power with a friendly Supreme Court.

24:00Ross Douthat:But in this case, maybe it will work and he will get the policy outcome that he wants. Maybe. But again, if you actually care about this issue and you agree with the Trump administration, the next Democratic president to come in can snap their fingers and change it immediately. So you haven't really won anything and you also haven't lost anything. And that's the problem that we seem to have right now. What makes Trump kind of unique is that Joe Biden actually did try to move legislation about student loan debt forgiveness. Right. It failed. It failed. Obama tried to move legislation on immigration.

24:32It failed. Trump hasn't even tried. And remember, before the election, in fact, he told Republicans not to vote for immigration legislation changes because one gets the sense he wanted to do government by executive order. because this is more fun.

24:50Ross Douthat:Yes. So most likely, there'll be some victories for Trump, but there'll be two really large defeats, birthright citizenship and tariffs, both very big issues. Birthright citizenship is more important to the Republican base or the conservative base. Tariffs are obviously close to Trump's own heart. A year ago, there was a lot of conversation, including on this show, about what it would take for Trump to defy the court. In practice, you know, you've had a sequence of setbacks for the president that have been met by, you know, angry tirades on social media, some attempts to do end arounds, but basically Trump has accepted the power of the court to block it.

25:32Ross Douthat:Does that continue? Is there any scenario where Trump acts Andrew Jackson style in defiance of the Supremes? Not in any of the cases we have yet, really, because, first of all. Well, he hasn't done it yet, but on birthright citizenship. But I'm saying for the cases that we have pending to talk about, there's not really an option to defy the court. The court has really been defined over the course of our entire American experiment by being at odds with powerful presidents. My argument would be this has built its legitimacy as an independent branch. You know, there's only been 17 chief justices and there's been like 50 presidents.

26:10These guys look around and are like, we will outlast you and the next guy and the next guy, like no problem. Like on birthright citizenship, for instance, if the Supreme Court, as I predict, says, no, Donald Trump cannot do that through executive order. That's sort of the end of it for Donald Trump.

26:27Ross Douthat:Well, just to walk through the maximally sort of paranoid scenario, because I think there's a lot of people who read The New York Times who entertain these scenarios, right? The one thing we haven't talked about is the court's ruling about broad executive immunity from prosecution and legal action. This was a big ruling before Trump came into power. I think there's an argument that the court saw it as much as protecting Biden from Trump prosecuting him as protecting Trump. But regardless of that, I think with that in the background, the sort of the fears of what a president can do have just gotten stronger.

27:03Ross Douthat:There's just this sense that like, well, the court gave the president all this immunity. And so can't he use that to issue crazy pardons and do all kinds of things, knowing that in the end, even if it doesn't work, he won't be prosecuted? What do you make of that argument? Because certainly Trump has not been shy about issuing corrupt pardons. Nope. Right. So just how would you reassure someone if you would reassure them that that is unlikely? If one were giving a president good legal advice, they would say that that immunity decision should have no bearing on how you act. You should act as if it never happened because we do not know what immunity this actually gives you.

27:47So whatever immunity Donald Trump or any president may enjoy, and I really think of the immunity decision as like a preface to a future immunity decision, you just don't know a lot based on that. There's so many unanswered questions. So I wouldn't rely on that at all if I were giving legal counsel to a president, especially if the president was like, hey, I'll pardon you for a future crime you commit on my order to ignore the Supreme Court decision and affirmatively do this thing. You know, those people are going to go to jail and then they can argue about it. And I just don't think there's going to be a lot of executive branch officials that are going to enjoy playing roll the dice with President Trump.

28:31Thank you.

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30:27Ross Douthat:Okay, let's talk then about the court itself for a moment, since we've been talking about its powers and how it shapes the country. But obviously, it does not exist. Nine people exist, right? And this is, you know, part of what your book does is try and tease out the actual power dynamics inside this incredibly powerful institution. So just briefly, how do you see the court divided right now beyond the broad conservative majority liberal minority split? So I love comparing Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh because they're so similar. I mean, they're both the sons of powerful D.C. mothers. They go to the same high school.

31:08They work in the W administration. Oh, I forgot to mention, they clerk at the Supreme Court the same term for the same justice. They go on the circuit court at the same time. They go on the Supreme Court nominated by the same president within 18 months of each other. They are Federalist society lab creations that are given the imprimatur of perfect conservative justice. Kavanaugh was more likely to agree with every other justice, including Sotomayor and Kagan. Jackson is the one exception than Gorsuch. So you've got to come up with some other way other than ideology to explain why these guys repel each other in opinions.

31:50They are the only two justices to switch spots between the federalizing the National Guard case that Trump lost and the tariff case that Trump lost.

32:00Ross Douthat:But allowing for that kind of uniqueness, it still seems to be the case that you do have a kind of 3-3-3 division on the court. Three justices who seem to the casual observer, at least further to the right. Three who are conservative but center-right and move back and forth, function as swing votes, and three who are more liberal. Is that how you would define the three groupings? Not quite. I think, you know, what you just described is a horizontal ideological spectrum. But I think there's a vertical one as well that, you know, I've said is institutionalism. You can think of it as respect for precedent, thinking of the court as a single voice, thinking of, you know, its legitimacy and credibility over time and through the other branches.

32:52But that's a spectrum as well. And it's temperamental, it seems, more than anything. And yet we see presidents spend so much time thinking about that horizontal axis and making sure they have someone who is going to rule the right way on these, whatever the specific culture war issue of the day is, when in fact, that vertical axis is responsible for which cases the Supreme Court decides to take, how narrowly or broadly they decide them, Whether, you know, it's 6-3 or 7-2 or 8-1 or 5-4, that has a lot more to do with that axis. And it's interesting that presidents haven't seemed to notice that yet.

33:34Ross Douthat:Give me just two contrasts, one conservative and one liberal, of people who are high versus low on institutionalism. Yeah, you bet. So Kagan and Kavanaugh are both high institutionalists. They are going to moderate their own positions to get larger majorities on the court. They're far less likely to write separate concurrences with their own sort of idiosyncratic views of the law. Justice Kagan has called concurrences a, hey, I've got a thought and I want to share it. You know, she poo-poos the very idea of having these concurrences. Low institutionalists, my non-institutionalists, Gorsuch and Jackson, certainly.

34:15I've referred to Justice Gorsuch in the book as the great concurrer after, of course, the great dissenter John Marshall Harlan. They're going to write separately about their own views of the law. They're not going to care very much about precedent. What those guys decided isn't my problem. This is what I think of this case right now. And they're not going to think very much about the court as an institution over time. Again, that leads you to make bad decisions that take into account all sorts of things that aren't your job. Your job is just to read the Constitution, says what the Constitution says, the end.

34:49Those are my low institutionalists. But there's still also just a pretty clear sort of 3-3-3.

34:57Ross Douthat:Or maybe, I mean, yeah, Gorsuch, I agree, is maybe he's unclassifiable. The first three are the most conservative in any sort of casual. Let's just be let's be simplistic. Be casual. Well, no, I mean, I because I just think it's it's important to to insist upon the evidence of our eyes and ears. Yes, the justices cross lines all the time and have all kinds of eccentricities. But in the end, on the big cases, you would say there's three justices who are the furthest to the right. There's three who are center right. And there's three who are liberal. Right. Right. I'm not sure that Thomas Alito and Gorsuch are more conservative than the chief Kavanaugh and Barrett.

35:40OK. I do think that they are more idiosyncratic. In the book, I call them conservative honey badgers. Like they are each soloist, you know. But depending on the issue, they can move all around about the conservativeness. And it goes to this definition of what conservative is. And they don't even agree on that. And I think it's going to be really hard for anyone to predict the outcome of cases if all they think about is ideology and which justices are more conservative than the other.

36:11Ross Douthat:Which of the middle ground justices do you think is the most influential? Because, again, I grew up in a world where for a long time the only thing you needed to know to figure out how the court was going to rule was to psychoanalyze Sandra Day O 'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. And then O 'Connor retired and for a little while it was just like Anthony Kennedy is in charge of the Supreme Court. He is our philosopher king and so on. There's no philosopher king out of Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett. But is there a justice that you think is the defining justice of the court right now? I love the question of who is the most influential justice because it gets to this very interesting question over what it means to have influence over time.

36:52So, yes, Justice Kennedy was very influential over how cases turned out. If we're just doing that metric, it's Kavanaugh. He is in the majority more than any justice in the modern era, more than Justice Kennedy even was.

37:05Ross Douthat:So check that as an answer. On the other hand, when we look at that era of the court, we don't think of Justice Kennedy as being influential on the legal project. We think of Justice Scalia as being the most influential. And so in that sense, I think you can come closer to understanding the project that Justice Jackson thinks she is doing or Justice Thomas, for instance, with text history and tradition. He's in the majority less than any justice, some terms. And yet, we do think of him as being quite influential because it's not always about being the fifth vote and being in the majority. Right.

37:43Ross Douthat:But Kennedy wasn't influential long term in part because he did play the philosopher king. And each decision seemed to be emanating from his kind of very idiosyncratic and personal reading of the state of the American soul. Someone like Barrett, though, is in the same kind of position as Kavanaugh or Kennedy before her, but is a, you know, sort of Scalia and hardcore theorist. So when she's in the majority, she's trying to ground the decision in theory, I think, to a greater degree than Kavanaugh or Roberts. So does that mean that you would bet on her as the influencer just out of that group? Yeah, she is certainly, you know, like the Dos Equis guy, the most interesting justice in the world because she is on this formalism project.

38:34Ross Douthat:All Interesting Times guests are, you know, the most interesting people in the world. So I'm glad to hear that she qualifies. Go on. For sure. She's on this formalism project, right? She is doing something different than Justice Scalia was. She's doing something different than the other justices are. And what makes it interesting is while being very conservative, if you were to plot that spectrum on kind of any definition of federalist society conservative, she has ruled against the Trump administration more than the other conservative justices. Gorsuch, by the way, has the distinction of ruling against the government more than any justice because he's our libertarian.

39:12He's consistent.

39:12Ross Douthat:Biden, he's against Biden, he's against Trump, he's against them all. Yeah, I love he's the solo dissenter in this IRS tax case that's like, who cares? Except he was like, no, screw the IRS. They're always the bad guys. So what Barrett is up to is what everyone is watching, even though she's not the most likely to be the fifth vote, but because there's this sense that she is moving the court more than just as the deciding vote. So then what about the liberals? So you already mentioned, right, that Justice Jackson is clearly playing for the long term in the sense of writing dissents that there's no chance she's going to get any of the conservative justices to ever sign on to.

40:01Ross Douthat:But the theory is you are basically trying to establish a view of all of these decisions that will be available to a future liberal majority when it comes time to unwind the decisions of the conservative court. Talk about her, but then talk about how that's different from what certainly than what Justice Kagan is doing. And I'm curious where you think Justice Sotomayor fits in that, because, you know, what what you do in dissent is very interesting generally, I think. Well, let's just make sure we level set on their seniority. So if you're in the majority, it's the senior most justice in the majority who gets to assign the opinion.

40:38And if you're in dissent, the senior most justice in dissent gets to assign the dissent. Justice Sotomayor is the senior most of the liberal justices. And so in that sense, she is the great dissenter of this court. She's going to write the dissents in those big cases, the principal dissent. Justice Jackson, though, is writing a whole lot more in sort of a like, hey, but also, you know, voice where there might be a principal dissent from Justice Sotomayor, and then you get another dissent from Justice Jackson. Again, she's anti-institutionalist. She sees her job as fundamentally different. Every justice signs their name into the fly leaf of John Marshall Harlan's Bible before they take office.

41:21His portrait sits in the conference as they vote. He is the justice that they will all tell you is their North Star. He is the sole dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson upholding Louisiana's separate railroad car. Posterity now says that he was obviously right. And it's this idea that in the moment, you shouldn't be caught up in the culture and what the majority tells you and how you were raised or anything else. Your job is only to say what the Constitution demands. And that is when the court is at its best. And so every justice wants to be John Marshall Harlan. Every justice wants to avoid being Roger Taney, the chief justice who decides Dred Scott.

42:01And the question is how they all are trying to navigate to do that.

42:06Ross Douthat:But many of them don't want to be John Marshall Harlan all the time. And so this is the balance where if you look at Justice Kagan, it seems very clear that she is trying to envision a liberal jurisprudence that could take over the court if you just flipped a seat or two. Right. Whereas Justice Jackson is envisioning a liberal jurisprudence that would require five seats to flip. And that's very different, right? Yeah. Last term, we saw several 7-2 decisions where Kagan separates from Sotomayor and Jackson. Even the Childs case, this term on conversion therapy and the First Amendment was 8-1. Jackson is still by herself.

42:51Jackson's not crazy, though. After FDR left office, there were nine Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court. As recently as 1992, there were eight Republican appointees on the Supreme Court. These swings happen faster than I think we think. And so justice, you know, the liberal jurisprudential set has really been struggling to find what's going to replace living constitutionalism. They are all doing versions of textualism and originalism, especially now that those methodologies are against what Donald Trump is doing. Right. So as the liberals search for what that jurisprudential methodology is going to be, Jackson is trying to define one and Kagan is trying to define a different one.

43:38She is the strategic justice.

43:41Ross Douthat:Right. Right. She's constantly trying to remind the other justices, don't forget, you want to be consistent. Remember this other thing that you did. Find consistencies in that or look at this originalist argument. Ah, aren't you an originalist? You know, what if we take this out and just narrow this decision? What if we don't take this case? So she is winning all sorts of things behind the scenes. And Jackson is like, no, I'm not doing strategy. We're not doing behind the scenes. I'm not narrowing apertures. who cares about apertures. I'm going to write in nearly every case. Do you think that's mostly an intellectual or a temperamental difference?

44:16Ross Douthat:Like what temperamental? Yes. So it's just like the kind of person you are coming into the court matters as much or more than your sort of formal. Yes. Jurisprudential commitment. And presidents have been caring so much about these ideological commitments. They haven't paid attention to the temperament at all. And the temperament is defining which cases the court is taking and how narrowly or broadly they're deciding them far more than the ideological stuff.

45:13We'll see you next time.

45:33I feel like I'm accomplishing something. I like the do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. When you finish it. My family does Wordle and we have a huge group chat. Like my grandma does Wordle. Your grandma does Wordle. Oh, every day. Yeah. Do you have a Wordle hot take?

45:48Ross Douthat:You should start with the word that's strategically bad to make it more fun. All of these games are so fun because it's like a little five to ten minute break. I love these games. Yeah. New York Times game subscribers get full access to all our games and features. Subscribe now at nytimes.com slash games for a special offer.

46:17Ross Douthat:Temperament also connects to one of the biggest decisions justices make, which is when to leave, right? A decision that famously reshaped the court in a profound way when Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided to hang on for one more term. There's a lot of talk actually about both Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, but it's mostly about Alito potentially retiring now with a situation where, you know, a Republican president can appoint his replacement and a Republican Senate can confirm one, which may not obtain for two years, four years, much beyond that. Do you think he's going to retire? It is such a close call.

47:01There's just no indications that Justice Thomas wants to leave. That's why we're all ignoring that possibility. Justice Alito, there's just evidence on both sides. On the one hand, he has twin grandbabies, and he's never seemed like much of a people person. On the other hand—

47:18Ross Douthat:But maybe that means he doesn't like the twin grandbabies. You never know, right? No, everybody likes their twin grandbabies. I apologize to the Justice for the imputation. Go on. You know, he has this book coming out and that set tongues wagging because the book's release is for that first week of oral argument. And on the one hand, a book is going to sell. In the next term. Yes, in October. On the one hand, this is his first book. A book is going to sell much better if you're an active Supreme Court justice. Right. On the other hand, you know, you're not doing a book tour because it's during that week that you're sitting for oral argument.

47:54But of course, this is Justice Alito. Not doing a book tour is a feature, not a bug. So hard to know. That being said, like, we're certainly all making our short lister lists and taking bets at all the same.

48:09Ross Douthat:Well, then let's talk about those bets about potential replacements, right? Because the dynamic on the right, we've just been talking about the dynamic among liberals, but the dynamic on the right is itself incredibly complicated because on the one hand, you have sort of the normal range of ideological possibilities. Do you want, you know, another lab-grown Federalist Society justice? Do you want someone who sort of represents the kind of common good constitutionalism that some conservative theorists have embraced? But then you have Trump himself, who is really angry about the justices he picked, who Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society handed to him, and they've all betrayed him in various ways.

48:55Ross Douthat:And he, you know, I don't think it's would be it's not it's not false at all to assume that he wants a yes man hack and a crony on the Supreme Court. So what what do you get out of that combination? What kind of nominee? When we look at the circuit nominations that Donald Trump has made, they all look remarkably similar and they are all of a first term ilk. They all have the same resumes that, you know, Federalist Society judges have always had. By the way, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that that is a bad thing. We are so narrowing the resumes that one may have. So by that measure, it sure looks like his Supreme Court nomination would come from the circuits.

49:42And, you know, Judge Andy Oldham on the Fifth Circuit clerked for Justice Alito. And currently, three of the nine justices replaced the justice that they clerked for. The chief replaced the former chief. Justice Kavanaugh replaced Justice Kennedy. Justice Jackson replaced Justice Breyer. So that's why he is probably at the top of everyone's shortlist right now. But that's not necessarily a great thing.

50:07Ross Douthat:Right. But still, it does seem like Alito has been the justice most likely to side with the Trump administration in a lot of key cases. He's also a serious respected jurist and not seen as, you know, a crony or yes man. So it seems like the Alito mold is the place where Trump's desire for court support meets who can actually get confirmed, right? Like, give me a name. Who does Trump nominate where it's perceived as just a Trump pick and Senate confirmation is in doubt? So I think the just a Trump pick is probably Solicitor General John Sauer. But what's interesting about him is that he would get confirmed quite easily.

50:52He has the shininess of the resume while having the, you know, shown loyalty to Trump. So Elena Kagan was, of course, solicitor general and had not been a circuit judge before she went on the court. So John Sauer would easily be following in that model. You know, I think that the if we want to keep moving along that spectrum, you probably get to Todd Blanche next.

51:14Ross Douthat:Who is the acting attorney general in the wake of Pam Bondi's firing. Right. You know, there's Eileen Cannon, the district judge who ruled in favor of Trump in some questionable motions and areas involving the classified documents case. I hear her name mentioned a lot, but most of the time people sort of giggle afterwards like it would be a troll. But Trump's not opposed to trolling. Your book is an endorsement of the court as an institution in the sense that you argue that in a difficult situation, to put it mildly, it's serving the country well. I agree that I think the court is doing a decent job under difficult circumstances, but I did come of age with a common conservative view that said that it's a bad thing for American democracy to have so many crucial questions, culture war questions maybe especially, but not only them, settled in the final analysis by five to four votes from a bunch of increasingly Ivy League lawyers.

52:18Ross Douthat:And I'm still sympathetic to that view, even though now that final say aligns more often, much more often than it did 20 years ago with my own political preferences. What about you? Were you a court skeptic 15 years ago in that sense? Oh, I think everything you're saying is still true and completely consistent with the idea of this institution being the last branch standing. This is the problem we face, which is you need Congress to get back in the game for this whole thing to work. The court cannot stand as an institution by itself. And by the way, I defend the institution. That doesn't mean you can't criticize decisions of the court or think decisions were wrong.

52:58It's more about like abolish the Supreme Court stuff doesn't make sense when the Supreme Court is the only counter majoritarian branch we have, which is to your point, it has to use that counter majoritarianness sparingly. It is not meant to stand athwart being nine platonic guardians saying, you know, here's what we think is the better answer. President Lyndon Johnson famously said, why amend the Constitution when Justice Douglas can do it in an afternoon? We don't want that. And that's the imperial court you're talking about. So I don't think we have an imperial court by necessity. I think we have an imperial court by choice because we are not voting.

53:43We are not creating the incentives to bring in congressmen who legislate.

53:47Ross Douthat:But to the extent that choice is being made under conditions where, you know, the Constitution, at least as interpreted through Marbury versus Madison, and there are other interpretations, but as interpreted through judicial review, you know, it does. U.S. Supreme Court has sweeping power relative to lots of other modern democracies. It's an unusually powerful court. And some people would say, well, the problems of presidential power, the atrophying of congressional power, they're what you'd expect when the system by its nature pools certain kinds of power in the judiciary in this way. Like you get abdication from Congress for a reason.

54:28Ross Douthat:And those people, again, they used to be on the right. Now they're on the left more might say, maybe if we weaken the court to some degree or weaken the power of the justices, right? And, you know, you have term limits, for instance, or you change the way in which, you know, the way in which the court is constructed. Maybe that drains some power from it. And then that power flows back to Congress. What do you make of that argument? I suggest several reforms at the end of the book. We could end forum shopping tomorrow. I think that's incredibly dangerous for the judiciary as a branch. This idea that you can pick which judge.

55:06Here's your case. I don't care how fair that judge is. If everyone knows one side picked you, you're not going to look very fair. And we could easily fix that. Having a binding ethics code. I suggest amendments to the Constitution, the first one of which should be make amending the Constitution easier. By the way, also make the impeachment conviction level lower. So, again, creating more accountability and a little more churn like what I think you want. What I would caution people about is, you know, look at Chesterton's nice fence over there. Before you start tearing it down, make sure you know what's on the other side of the fence.

55:42So with term limits, for instance, it sounds nice. Every president would get two picks on the court. Those justices would serve for 18 years. It would create a lot more consistency.

55:53Ross Douthat:Right. You wouldn't be relying on quite literally the workings of divine providence to decide. No, seriously, to decide when justices die and are replaced. There are lots of conservatives and liberals who are term limit curious. I would like to disabuse them of that notion based on what the second and third order effects will be. First of all, if every president automatically gets two picks, those two people will eventually be named ahead of time. And eventually they will end up being part of a ticket campaigning with the president. You will have the president, the vice president and, you know, two Supreme Court justices.

56:30That will change who becomes a Supreme Court justice like it's changed who becomes a president. We no longer pick the best president. We pick the best person at running for president. Second, when those people are ready to leave office after 18 years, they are going to want another job. What if they want to be attorney general? Would you trust their decisions in advance of them leaving the court if they're angling for a cabinet spot? What if they want to go join a corporation for a lot of money? What if the other justices know, you know, this president has been elected, he's about to get his second pick on the court on.

57:05So let's hold these cases until that justice is on because we think they'll decide it better. It will make the court less independent. It will make trust in the court, I think, deteriorate quite a bit. And remember, the court isn't meant to be democratically accountable. It's meant to be counter-majoritarian to protect the First Amendment or the Fourth Amendment. We want it to stand against these bare and fleeting majorities in our pluralistic society. And if you get a big enough majority, you amend the Constitution. If you get a long enough majority and the culture has changed, you get new justices on the Supreme Court that reflect that as well.

57:45But beware of changing the incentives of these justices because its independence is the superpower.

57:53Ross Douthat:So I buy that argument to some degree. I can certainly imagine all kinds of unintended consequences that flow from turning the Supreme Court into a term-limited enterprise. I guess I just wonder, you know, when you describe a better world that involves big changes to the amendment process or things like that, that seems fairly unrealistic to me. And when I look ahead from where we are to where we're going, it seems like Donald Trump probably is not going to pick a constitutionally existential fight with the Supreme Court, in part just because he's really unpopular right now and he doesn't have the oomph to pull it off.

58:33Ross Douthat:But it just seems to me like over a longer time horizon, you have an imperial presidency, and we won't call it an imperial court, but you have a very powerful court and a weakened Congress. It just, I just sort of foresee some kind of constitutional crisis in our future driven by this sort of court versus president collision. And I like the court right now, and I don't like the president. But the president is elected, and the court is not. And so I'm just not I'm not sure how all of that turns out. So that's less a question than a than a, you know, a sort of a sort of gloomy, a sort of gloomy prophecy.

59:12Ross Douthat:And I'm curious if you have to carry us out a more optimistic take on the next 15 years of judicial history. I think our politics is turning and politics, of course, is downstream from culture. You know, reality. It's more like a whirlpool, surely. Everything's downstream of everything else. But now go on. Reality TV viewership is dropping off a cliff. And perhaps we are done with our reality TV era of candidates as well. And it will take a little while. But when people realize over, over, over that these executive orders aren't actually working, we're not solving any of the problems. I look at the primary race in Texas between Tallarico and Crockett in the Democratic primary for Senate.

59:57And Crockett ran a very traditional, you know, what I'm calling this reality TV-based candidacy, looks a lot like Donald Trump with, you know, some different policy priorities. Tallarico ran a very Ted Lasso campaign, optimistic. He had campaign mechanics, you know, on the ground type organizing. And Tallarico won in the end. And if that's a harbinger of things to come, we could actually have a functional Congress and the court can recede back into just being part of the conversation instead of the last word in the conversation. And the other thing I'll just add is historically, this is not the biggest threat the court has faced in history.

1:00:35That absolutely goes to Thomas Jefferson when he impeaches Samuel Chase for being a partisan hack, basically, with the goal of eventually impeaching Chief Justice John Marshall and ending the Supreme Court before it began. It was not the organization or the institution we think of it as today at all. You know, Marbury versus Madison, the ink was still wet on. So this idea of what it was, what it would be, what its value was in our system was all up for grabs. And Jefferson wanted it to be a reflection of politics and of these elections. That's the biggest threat. So the court has faced off with greater presidents than this, Lincoln, FDR.

1:01:20I think the institution will survive just fine if we understand it better.

1:01:27Ross Douthat:All right. Sarah Isker, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me.

1:01:55Ross Douthat:Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holsneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Afim Shapiro Audience Strategy and Operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelbeck Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusik, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz And our Director of Opinion Shows is Annie Rose Strasser

1:02:42Thank you.