OA612: The Supreme Court – How Did We Get Here?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:01:17 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments, this is episode 612, I'm Thomas, that's Andrew, how you doing, I'm doing great, I've had such a great time here and don't want to leave, so I'm staying, I'm officially moving into this Airbnb that we've all been in, that no one will be Here.

0:01:23 Andrew: I am fantastic, Thomas. How are you?

0:01:34 Andrew: I, you know, we we can require them to evict us from this Airbnb. I mean, you know, yeah, there you go.

0:01:38 Thomas: Yeah there you go, let's, and we'll record it, it'll be a lesson in eviction law Good, episode. How are you doing?

0:01:45 Andrew: This has been great fun, I love, we do this every year and get an opportunity to spend some time with the people that we work with and also who are, who are really good friends, so

0:01:56 Thomas: Yeah, you say we, I am just, it's an oversight that I somehow end up here, but it's good. It's good clerical error that leads me here.

0:01:59 Andrew: Yeah, you're just here. I will

0:02:04 Thomas: So don't tell them if you don't mind. Just keep, continue the ruse.

0:02:06 Andrew: Not. Think I'm required of a fiduciary duty to report that. But just between you and me, we're going to keep that under our hat. Yeah.

0:02:16 Thomas: All right. And all you be quiet too about it. So Andrew, what are we doing? What are we delivering these fine folks for our show today? Day.

0:02:18 Andrew: Yeah. This is a talk I put together in about 36 consecutive hours for the Houston Oasis Freethought Organization. They called me up the Friday evening after the Dobbs decision dropped and said, "We'd like you to come talk about a retrospective on the Supreme Court's term." Term And so my first thought was, well, I, you know, we can just put like the Wilhelm scream on, you know, continuous repeat, uh, and then I thought, yeah, right, and then I thought, um, no, I, what I'm going to do is give a version of that in which I explain sort of exactly what the Supreme Court has done to really gaslight all of America in terms of the only viable justification for the Supreme Court existing, being a counter-majoritarian institution. And I think it's really, really important that we don't forget this. So I put together a big slide package.

So if you're a patron at any level, I'm going to upload those slides, you won't know exactly when to click along, but I tend to spend about, you know, 15 to 30 seconds per slide, uh, you'll, you'll figure it out enough, you'll just get to see some uh crazy, gross, like, adulterated milk products. It's it's fun bit, so

0:02:54 Thomas: Right. Wow.

0:03:42 Andrew: But, um, but at the end of of day, the lesson is

0:03:44 Thomas: Well, don't spoil it. They're about to hear it. So find out what the end of the day the lesson is listening on.

0:03:46 Andrew: Yeah. All

0:03:51 Clip: Down the law, down the law.

0:03:55 Andrew: Yes, the Supreme Court hates you. Yes. You personally. And what, but very little you can do about it. Before we get into that, the the Houston Freethought Oasis is a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization, and nothing in this speech is or is intended to advocate on behalf of or in opposition to any political campaign or any candidate for public office. And of course, nothing in the speech constitutes legal advice or creates an attorney client relationship. Don't take legal advice from this speech. Oh, the puppy's there for two reasons. Reasons First, a lot of you listen to my show, and that is indeed Lily, the Opening Arguments puppy. And second, times are really bad, so I have included an adorable picture to help ease the pain. One can't believe it's not milk. This is the Supreme Court. It looks like the Parthenon, that's on purpose.

0:04:41 Andrew: If you Google it, you will find that the single phrase that is most often used to describe the Supreme Court is that "august body." Now, "august" means dignified and impressive, noble, worthy of respect, but I am here to tell you today that there was and is only ever one reason to respect the Supreme Court. This is the Caroline Products Company, today a wholly owned subdivision of Eagle Family Foods Group, LLC, former manufacturers of, I swear to you, I'm not making this up, Mill Nut, a sludge of condensed skim milk thickened with coconut oil. Congress banned it as, quote, "an adulterated article of food injurious to the public health," end of quote.

0:05:28 Andrew: It was basically the malk of the 1920s and 30s, right? Chemically formulated with vitamin R, use it to replace milk in all of your recipes if you cannot afford milk, like, like, you know, pretty much everyone during the Great Depression. And there's something else that you need to know, which from 1897 to 1937 was what we lawyers call the Lochner era of the Supreme Court. It was 40 years of right-wing judicial activism in which the Supreme Court invented nonsensical constructions of property rights and struck down pretty much every progressive law for 40 years as being unconstitutional. Minimum wage, unconstitional. Maximum working hours, uncastitutional.

0:06:15 Andrew: You couldn't regulate workplace conditions. You could not ban child labor. And let me emphasize some math here. The Lochner era ran for 40 years, by contrast the Supreme Court has only been in full-on howler monkey mode for the past five years since Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland's Supreme Court seat and gave it to Neil Gorsuch in 2017. So if you think, oh, you know, this is one of those things where the pendulum just kind of swings back and forth and I'm sure it'll fix itself, or hey, you know, really bad outcomes now will accelerate the socialist revolution, into you there's 40 years of abject misery that would like to beg to differ, and that happened to us less than a century ago.

So now back to Caroline Products, they were indicted for selling this crap in 1936, and they argued that the law was unconstitutional, and you'd think they'd have to feel pretty good about their chances before the right-wing hacks that, you know, constituted the Lochner court, right? I mean, if you can make kids work 90 hours a week in the uranium mines, what's a little vitamin R, right? Except Caroline Products couldn't have known that it was going to have its case decided in 1938, that's the year that Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the court if it didn't change its ways. And, uh, shockingly, the Supreme Court suddenly stopped just making up the constitutional right of corporations to work 12 year olds to death. Now, that probably helped, and it probably helped that Franklin Roosevelt had just won the presidential election by an unprecedented two to one margin, 523 electoral votes to eight. Put a pin in that.

0:07:53 Andrew: So the really important thing here isn't that the Supreme Court said it was OK to pass laws against selling milky sludge. In fact, if you're feeling as depressed as I am about recent events, it probably will not surprise you to learn that the Caroline Products Company changed the name of their flagship product from Mill Nut to Mill Not, got bought out by Borden Milk, got bought out again by Eagle Foods, and right now, this very minute, you can whip out your cell phone, you can go to www.millnot.com and order up some tasty Mill Not from a participating store near you. Make sure you get the original though, it's the only oil thickened skim milk bulk product with soybeans and 100% of the recommended daily allowance of di-potassium phosphate.

0:08:40 Andrew: Because you see, this is never really about Caroline Products, the product. For all I know, Milnot is delicious, right? And its mutagens give you superpowers. I don't know. Well, we just don't care about that. What we care about is why the Supreme Court decided what it did. And actually, we don't even care about that. What we really care about is this little footnote right here. Footnote four, the most famous footnote in history. Remember this number right here. This is the only good reason at all that the Supreme Court has ever had, has, or will deserve your or anyone's support. Here's what's going on. In the the main text, the Supreme Court in 1938, finally realized something that should have been super obvious to it for the past 40 years, which is, you know, the Caroline Products Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Eagle Family Foods Group, LLC, does not need the Constitution's help.

0:09:39 Andrew: They've got money. They've Got Influence. Either they can persuade Congress to let them sell Milnut or Milnot or whatever, or maybe Congress will make them go back and change it and take out a couple of carcinogens. But look, this is precisely the kind of thing that we should leave up to the democratic process. Right. And so for economic regulations, the Supreme Court announced a rule in 1938 that is so far anyway, is still the rule today. And that is if Congress can show a rational basis for your ordinary economic regulations. The corporation has to follow the law, right? Rational basis, we don't want to work kids to death in the uranium mines. Legislation, minimum working ages, minimum wage, maximum working hours, workplace conditions, all of those were about to get approved by the same Supreme Court that had just spent 40 years striking them down.

0:10:34 Andrew: The Supreme Court was also worried about something in this case, right, and that's why they wrote this footnote. And here's what it says. It starts off with, look, we want to be super careful here with what we're saying. Congress can't do anything on a rational basis, only the stuff we think you can probably fix with the political process, like the whole mill nut, mill not, If right? You're talking about, and now we're in the second paragraph, laws that restrict your right to vote, or laws that otherwise interfere with the political process, it would be pretty stupid of us to say, use the political process to fix that, right? Instead, we might use, and this is their language, more exacting judicial scrutiny of those kinds of laws. And that makes total sense. And now we get to the third paragraph, and this is the part I've highlighted.

0:11:19 Andrew: The Supreme Court in 1938 recognized that sometimes the political process doesn't work well for people who aren't white men in corporations, For right, discrete and insular minorities, that tends to, quote, curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied on to protect minorities. Again, I get it. It's 100-year-olds legalese. Here's what that means. If you're pro-Milnut, you might find yourself in the majority like now, I guess, Or right? You might found yourself in a minority like in the 1930s. But there's no sense that you're permanently stuck in one of those groups, right? You can persuade people to join your cause and your opponents can do the same thing. So those minorities are fluid, but when a minority is discreet, that is comprised of members who are easily identifiable and insular, that is capable of being written off by everyone else who isn't a member of the group and incapable of changing that identity, we think that the democratic process can't always fix things. And that's where the Constitution comes in.

This is the legitimate role of the Supreme Court to step in on behalf of discrete and insular minorities and say, hey, we're we're gonna protect you from the stuff the majority might want to do to you because you're different. And the Supreme Court didn't just make that up in 1938. You will hear how this court claims to value history and tradition. Well, you don't get more historical than the literal founding fathers who wrote the Federalist Papers, the documents that were the arguments for ratifying the Constitution.

0:12:58 Andrew: And you may recall a Mr. James Madison who went on to become President of the United States. And here Here he is when he's asked to describe one of the reasons to ratify the Constitution. Some of the problems predating the Constitution, he says, quote, complaints are everywhere heard, end of quote, that our laws, quote. Are too often decided not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minority party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. And so the founding fathers, the ones this Supreme Court claims to revere, set aside a special institution to occasionally, every once in a while, take those rules of justice and enforce the rights of the minority against even the majority.

0:13:45 Andrew: And that brings us to part two. So when we started the show, I get a lot of emails from conservatives who wanted to argue that abortion wasn't a constitutional right, and by some completely inexplicable reason, they all started off with the same terrible argument. And when I say terrible, I mean laughably bad, on the level that other lawyers will point at you and snicker. Not me though, because I'm super, super nice. And I was very patient. And that argument was this: Where does it say abortion in the Constitution? And the response here, really simple. Constitution does not say abortion. It also does not say a word about dating, marriage, condoms, clothes, hair color, adult toys, or everyone's favorite butt stuff.

0:14:33 Andrew: And so I would say to them, suppose a state, let's say it rhymes with Schmaxis, decides to ban at one go interracial dating, interracial marriage, condoms, adult sex toys, wearing off-the-shoulder dresses, coloring your hair, purchasing vibrators, and of course, butt stuff, all at once. And by the way, these are all real things that states have either tried or have successfully banned over the years, not making any of this up. That really seem like the land of the free? Does it really seem like you have any liberty? What does it mean to be in a free country if you can have a state impose those dozen restrictions on your most personal aspect of your life? And then I would show them the text of the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments here. And I'd ask them a question. I'd say, what do you think the founding fathers meant by that word liberty?

0:15:25 Andrew: Now, I will tell you the first pushback you get, this is not a knockdown instantly. The first push back you would get is, oh, yeah, well, that just means the stuff that's written in the Constitution, like freedom of speech, things that actually said, not stuff you make up. And right, then I say, all right, let's think about that argument for a second. The government tries to censor you to take away your freedom of speech. You would sue under the First Amendment. Right? Those are those are First Amendment claims. That's that's why we call it Right, that's that. The one that says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. And they'd say yes. And I'd say and you'd never hear anyone say you need something other other than the First Amendment to protect you against being censored, right? Yeah, no. And so I would say, right. So think about that. If liberty only means the rights that are otherwise specified in the Constitution, then these amendments are literally worthless.

0:16:16 Andrew: They don't protect anything because anything already spelled out is protected in the section that spells it out, right, it doesn't need to be included in the definition of liberty. And you know what? But they would slowly come around. And then I would get to the argument that says, OK, liberty can't just be whatever a judge makes up. Right. Like, that's crazy. And of course, that's an Antonin Scalia talking point and has been one for 40 years. But now mine is from the concurrence in Griswold versus Connecticut. And those internal citations are, in some cases, almost 100 years old. And what it shows is that throughout pretty much our entire nation's history, liberty in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments means the stuff that isn't written down, that is not specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments.

0:17:02 Andrew: That doesn't mean that it's up for grabs or for a judge's personal whims. Rather, it means you ask yourself, are these rights fundamental? Are they implicit in the concept of ordered liberty? Are they intensely personal and private? Is it like the list that I just went through? And for 100 years, this worked pretty well. I wish Samuel Alito had emailed my show. Yeah, right there on page one of his majority opinion in Dobbs, issued on Friday, two days ago, is Roe is terrible because the Constitution doesn't mention abortion. Literally the dumbest argument anyone ever leveled a podcast, and it just got made by our Supreme Court. And you're probably guessing, with the box being in the upper left-hand corner and all that, Alito goes to this well more than than once, and you would be correct.

0:17:52 Andrew: In major sections of the opinion, Alito's argument is that because the word abortion is not explicitly in the Constitution, it must be viewed with extreme suspicion unless it is, quote, deeply rooted in our nation's history and traditions. And so we get to, and again, this is the only paragraph in the Dobbs decision that matters, The legal conclusion, because abortion isn't in the Constitution, isn't said by name, we need to look to see if it is deeply rooted in the nation's history and traditions. Because it was criminalized in 1868 by the vast majority of states, it can't be deeply rooted in our nation's traditions, therefore it's not a right. Each and every thing that I mentioned in that long list as also not being in the Constitution was also, by the way, the subject of criminal punishment by 1868.

0:18:46 Andrew: Contraceptives, interracial dating and marriage, and of course, simply existing as an LGBTQ person. Clarence Thomas says as much in his concurrence, although weirdly he leaves the interracial marriage part out, which I'm sure is unrelated to the fact that he is married to a white woman. I want to make two observations about this new test that the Supreme Court has forged by deliberately ignoring our nation's actual history in its zeal to overturn the right to an abortion. Point one, by requiring a right to be deeply rooted in our nation, history, and traditions in order to count as implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, it means that by definition, only those who don't need the Constitution's protection could possibly get it, right?

0:19:33 Andrew: You have to prove that the liberty you want protected by is a thing that was already being protected during the ordinary political process. This is the exact opposite of footnote four of Caroline Products. And point two, deeply rooted traditions means the the traditions that were in place at the time the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified. That's why 1868 is so important, right? This means, in no uncertain terms, that only the traditions of white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, landed property owners will ever count to the Supreme Court. This means the traditions of slave owners count in defining what liberty is, but the traditions of slaves do not.

0:20:19 Andrew: So when I said that this Supreme Court hates you personally, I was not being facetious or hyperbolic. If you're a white, male, cis, hetero, landed property owner, you're probably okay, unless you're an atheist. So oops on that one. You will not find a lot of well-established atheist traditions in 1868 either. And if you're everyone else, you never had a chance. So now what? First, some more disclaimer stuff. Know, if this was a church, I wouldn't have to do this, but we aren't. So I am cognizant that this is a speech before a 501c3 organization. This is the text of 26 U.S.C. 501C3 up here. My point is not to influence legislation or to promote any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. Instead, I'm to talk to you about candidates in the past, that's fair game, and principles for the future.

0:21:05 Andrew: That's also a fair game. Some of you are not going to like this. I was asked to give this presentation about 40 hours ago on a Friday night in between two, three-hour recording sessions. And by the way, I still run a law firm too. I said yes so that I could give this part of the speech because I intend to fight with everything I have to try and take back what we've lost. And a lot of that that work is work at the grassroots and local level, building communities, working with organizations that, for example, transport women and pregnant patients across state lines to states that protect the right to an abortion. That. But politically, there is one and only one thing that you can do, and it is not much, and I know it, but you have to do it anyway. I get that people are hurting and are desperate and angry right now.

0:21:50 Andrew: But this exchange on Twitter is literally the worst possible take. The person who wrote this, someone I consider a friend, finds out about the speech, she's probably going to be mad, but he's a fellow podcast host and I eagerly await when his show comes out. It's one of the top of the queue. This is someone who is on our side. This person was so angry on Friday that they said things that I think are about to make things much, much worse. So let's unpack this exchange.

It starts with, hey, F you, if you're telling me the solution is to vote. And by the way, spoiler alert, the solution is to vote. But then the next one, that's not from me, that's just from another person who says, um, this seems like a weird take, man. And then, uh, and then the original poster does not reply, but the follow-up is from a third person, right, who says, yeah, because we did vote and nothing happened.

And I realized there's a tremendous amount of misunderstanding going on because that that third person is right. We sounded the alarms and we shouted from the rooftops and said you need to do everything in your power in 2020 to go vote to stop a criminally insane game show host from continuing to wreck democracy. And, and not nothing happened, by the way, but that's probably not something I can get into in this whole 501c3 thing.

But it's true that nothing happened to prevent the Supreme Court's opinion in Dobbs, because those wheels were set in motion in 2017. Voting in 2020 was too late. Mitch McConnell had already stolen one Supreme Court seat, and the president would get to fill two more with judges who explicitly promised to do what the Supreme Court just did. Did To make that not happen, you would have had to have voted in 2016. And thank you, a lot of you did, not quite enough.

0:23:32 Andrew: A lot of you did a truly bad thing. Now let me be clear, I mean bad here as strategically bad given your likely preferences. So let's lay those out on a political spectrum. In 2016, the two candidates who actually won any electoral votes were Hillary Clinton and the candidate to her right, Donald Trump. There was also a con artist and professional grifter running a vanity campaign who ran to the left of Hillary Clinton, and her name was Jill Stein. So there you have it. From left to right: Stein, Clinton, Trump. And then this thing happens that always happens when you have first-past-the-post voting and winner-take-all elections. Votes for the third party, this case is actually a fourth party, and I'm not going to list all the other random stupid Stupid vanity candidates, who cares, votes for the third party candidate wind up hurting the candidate most ideologically aligned with that person and helping the candidate most ideologically opposed.

0:24:26 Andrew: So math. In Michigan, Trump defeated Clinton by less than 11,000 votes and more than 50,000 people voted for Jill Stein. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,000 votes and more than 30,000 people voted for Jill Stein. And in Pennsylvania, the crucial heart of swing states, Trump won by 44,000 and 49,000 voted for Jill Stein. Again, this is just math. I'm not telling you what you should have done in 2016. I am not saying that Jill Stein cost Hillary Clinton the election. What I saying is that if you were a Jill Stein voter, presumably the last thing you wanted was President Trump. And yet, that's what happened. Had those Jill Stein voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton instead, it is mathematically the case that that would have swung 46 electoral votes, Trump would have never been president, and three of the five justices that wrote the Dobbs opinion I just broke down for you would not have been on the Supreme Court.

0:25:24 Andrew: That was your chance to stop it, and it didn't happen. Now, let me be clear what I'm saying here. Am trying to craft a future strategy based on past history. I'm not saying it's Stein's fault. For some reason, this seems to be the first defense that Stein voters give after I give a talk like this. I am not saying Hillary's campaign didn't suck. Look, none of that matters. The question is, did you want Friday's outcome or not? And if you did not want that outcome, the correct strategy would have been to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 16. Now, I cannot explain the Pennsylvania Jill Stein voters, but I actually have some insight into those other two states. This comes from talking to a lot of Jill Stein voters, actually.

0:26:10 Andrew: They were looking at this state's electoral history, seven wins in a row for Democrats in Wisconsin, 28 years of unbroken success. Wisconsin voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988, and he was a big suck loser, right? Democrats can't lose Wisconsin. Same thing. Michigan, six years in a row. OK, they didn't vote for Dukakis, but they voted for everybody else for 24 years. They voted for John Kerry. They voted for Al Gore. Democrats can't lose Michigan. And so the thought process was, hey, Hillary Clinton's going to win my state. Nate Silver says it's a blue lock. Right. So it's not a swing state. I'm going to use my vote as a protest to send a message that you should nominate a more liberal candidate next time, uh, that didn't go great historically. People are not good at predicting whether your state's a swing state or not. Yeah, Utah, probably not, right? But, uh, past was not prologue for these states in 2016. A state is totally safe until it isn't.

0:27:03 Andrew: Second, never in the history of modern elections have political parties gone back, looked at their margins of victory and defeat with respect to third-party candidates, and swung left because of it. In fact, the opposite happens. Again, I know you don't want to hear this, but this is reality. When you think about 2000, you probably think about Florida, and I can't blame you. But, right, when I think about it, I think about New Hampshire. Al Gore, who ran probably the most progressive political campaign in modern American history, narrowly lost New Hampshire by about 7,000 votes. 22,198 people voted for Ralph Nader as the protest vanity liberal third-party candidate. So yeah, if a third of Ralph Nader voters in New Hampshire had voted for Gore instead, the shenanigans and their recounts and Bush v.

0:27:54 Andrew: Gore and hanging chads would not have mattered at all. Bush would have had 268 electoral votes with Florida and Al Gore 270. If you've forgotten, Bush is the guy who nominated Samuel Alito to the court who wrote the opinion in Dobbs that came down on Friday. Now think about each of these elections in 2000 and 2016. Did withholding votes from the Democratic candidate send a message? No. In both subsequent elections, the Democratic party swung to the right. It said, holy crap, we can't lose this race again. And with the active machinations of the DNC, they put their thumb on the scale for the most conservative Democratic candidate in the field. In 2004, that was John Kerry instead of Howard Dean.

0:28:39 Andrew: I was a Howard Dean volunteer. In 2020, that was Joe Biden instead of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. As an Elizabeth Warren volunteer. So I know a little bit about what I'm talking about here. And that gets to to the bottom line. Your vote is not a message. Your vote is the right to choose frequently between the lesser of two evils that are narrowly circumscribed. And if you don't like that, start working at the grassroots level to get rid of first-past-the-post voting for instant runoffs.

But until those rules change, don't pretend they have. So I want to leave you with another one last stern warning. I know a lot of us are watching the January 6th hearings, and we've pointed and we have laughed at grifters and frauds and liars and incompetent dolts like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who kept claiming even after Joe Biden was inaugurated that they were going to throw out the whole election and re-vote and get Trump back into office, and surely none of us could be that dumb, right? Well, that's a Daily Kos article, left-wing news site, from February 2017, three weeks after Trump had been inaugurated, breathlessly reporting on the front page about a potentially landmark writ of mandamus that would nullify the 2016 election. It sits on the SCOTUS docket, uh, it was the work of these grifters and liars who have finally taken down the website after my making fun of them for five years, Revote 2017, and for

0:30:10 Andrew: The low low sum of 25, they would have sent you a printed copy of their completely bonkers petition to revote the election, um, which I do not have to tell you did not nullify the 2016 election. Uh, it was indeed assigned to docket number 16-1464 at the Supreme Court, because anything a crazy person files in crayon at the Supreme Court gets automatically assigned a docket number until it gets dismissed, which of course this thing did. So yeah, our side is plenty guilty of wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. So here are my takeaways. Number one, the Supreme Court has abandoned its most important historical justification to protect discreet and and insular minorities for majority legislation.

0:30:56 Andrew: Number two, the Supreme Court explicitly hates you in particular. They replaced the centuries-old test with a new one they just made up that says we care only about the historical views of white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual landed property owners. Number three, the last time they did it, they kept at it for 40 years until progressives came back and mustered overwhelming electoral force. We're in year five. This is going to be a long fight. The right spent 50 years to get to this point. We are not going to undo it by the midterms. That is not how you judge being able to fight back. Number four, Or, and most importantly, that fight will be longer if you give up, if you drop out, or if you vote third party. Thank you. I am now happy to take questions.

0:31:51 Thomas: This show is brought you by the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan's show, which Apple named one of its best in 2018, covers such a wide reach of topics through weekly interviews with heavy hitting guests. I've already recommended a ton of episodes. I found some more interesting ones to recommend. There's under the category in the starter packs, financial crimes. Those are always fun. Whether it's an episode about Fyre Fest, love that absolute disaster, very interesting, or interview with Frank Frank Barasa, the world's greatest counterfeiter. And there really is something for everybody. So whether Jordan is conducting an interview or giving advice to a listener, you'll find something useful that you can apply to your own life in every single episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. And that could mean learning how to ask for advice the right way or discovering a mindset difference that changes the way you see the world.

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0:34:33 Andrew: A fantastic question. I could give another talk about how this Supreme Court is trying to narrow down the ability of presidents to issue executive orders, because that is a very real thing, and Opening Arguments listeners know that I am a huge fan of a conservative Supreme Court opinion, uh, that has given rise to a doctrine that we call Chevron deference, and this Supreme Court's about to end that as well. So the war continues. Um, the way to think about it is, is like this: there are differing levels of authority and then differing potential responses, right? So when the Supreme Court says the Constitution requires something, right, requires you to let kids work 90 hours a week in the acid mines, then that means there's nothing anybody can do about that.

0:35:23 Andrew: Because if the Constitution require it, you can't pass a law to the contrary at the state or the federal level. There's nothing you can do. And there's no higher institution to interpret the Constitution than the Supreme Court. The only thing you can do is change the composition of the Supreme Courts. Now, sometimes the Supreme Court interprets what a law means. When the Supreme Courts interprets what a law mean, there is a thing you could do about it. And that is amend that law. Now that's easier said than done, because one of the things that one of our two major political parties has done is tried to make it impossible for us to pass pass or amend laws. And then the third kind of area, and this is where the executive orders come in, modern legislation is the result of, in virtually every case, delegated authority from Congress to executive agencies of which the president is the head.

0:36:16 Andrew: Let me give you the example I always use here, which is gun control. When, right, in 1996, the Congress passed gun gun control legislation banning a whole bunch of semi-automatic weapons, they said, hey, we're going to ban the AR-15. But you didn't want to just say like we ban the Arr-15 in the text of that law, because then manufacturers would just make the arr 15 Plus Special Edition, right, and, you know, paint it pink and whatever you, right, get around it. And so you would say, we're going to ban weapons that have this criteria. And every year we're going to allow the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to supplement this list with other weapons that they have determined in their judgment are consistent with this legislation.

0:37:05 Andrew: And that's how executive agencies get power. They're delegated to it by Congress. The system that has worked for just about 100 years is the Chevron deference system, in which if it is ambiguous as to whether the agency has the authority to issue its proclamations, then you defer to what the agency has decided. And this Supreme Court is about to replace that with, no, if it's ambiguous, you defer to the courts. Why? Because the courts are run by right wing monsters. So to pull all that back together, I want to be careful because 501c3 stuff. President Biden has done an amazing amount of work via executive order. Feel free to hit me up separately with respect to that, about as much as you could possibly do in ways that would surprise you, in ways that fight for LGBTQ equality throughout the government.

0:37:54 Andrew: But there's just only so much you can do via executive order. Yeah. So the question was, as a practical matter, do Democrats have the ability to make inroads in the Texas state legislature? Uh I, believe that very strongly. I am a noted optimist. Um, the reason I gave this talk I is because I see, a two contradictory things going on at the same time. Number one, I see that those of us who identify as progressive are now a clear majority in not just the nation, but in a number of states that have yet to manifest as blue or purple at the national level.

And I see tremendous amounts of, of disaffectedness of folks who have looked at what's happened and I get it and said, all right, well, this, you know, this, this whole political thing is not for me, it doesn't work. Nothing in my speech was meant to suggest that the problem facing us is not a problem engineered and put into place by one particular political party. We know who that is. OK, I blame the racists and monsters that put that system into place. But the problem is those people did not show up here at Houston Oasis today.

They're not watching on YouTube. They don't listen to my show. I can't reach them. I can reach people who are like minded, who share our values. And all I can tell you is that the math supports what I'm saying. If you are disaffected, if you think it won't happen, then you will stay home and it won't happen.

0:39:28 Andrew: We are racing headlong into that in the 2022 midterm elections. I only have a voice and a platform to people like you. And so all I can say is, you know, that same level of urgency that you felt in 2020, that you felt in January of 2021 in the Georgia runoffs, it sucks that we have to maintain that at that level for the indefinite future. But, but I put up what our history is. So, right, I again, I hit a little bit more pessimism there. But yeah, look, the math, the demographics strongly supports Texas being a purple state and massive gains in the legislature. And and working at the grassroots is always the best place to get started, it. So the question was, what's the process for decisions getting to the Supreme Court?

0:40:14 Andrew: I love this question because I think it is implying something that I have talked about on the show, that is a way of bypassing putting legal questions before this right-wing hackery of the Supreme Court. So, other than a few edge cases for some of the lawyers out there, where the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in suits between the states and stuff that you don't care about. The Supreme Court has what we call certiorari jurisdiction, right? That is, it takes the cases that it wants. The way in which those cases get granted cert is by what we call the rule of four. That is, if four of the nine justices say we should take a look at this case, the Supreme Court will add it to its docket, will grant the writ of certiorare. And that term's left over from, I don't know, 13th century Saxony, the right?

0:41:02 Andrew: Supreme Court can only grant cert in two kinds of cases. And again, asterisk, I know lawyers love fact-checking me on this, but by and large, there are two ways to get to the Supreme Court. Number one is an appeal from a federal court of appeal, one of our 13 federal circuits that hear cases, that hear appeals as of right from federal district courts. And are cases that are properly in federal courts. So they're either about federal laws or federal constitutional decisions.

Or number two, appeals from a state Supreme Court decision that affects substantive interpretation of federal constitutional rights. So in other words, if the state of Utah, for example, rules that it is is perfectly fine to require everyone to be, you know, all voters to be a member of the Mormon church, You could appeal that to the Supreme Court and say, yeah, Utah's state Supreme Court has issued a ruling that is contrary to the First Amendment, and then get relief in that particular way. So notice what's not on that list. So stuff that states could do in a negative way, you always have the right to appeal to the Supreme Court.

But when a state says a ruling is a right under the state constitution, say if they go no further than that, then that decision is 100 percent immune from review by this or any other Supreme Court ever. And I want to give you a real life example. We talked about this three years ago in Opening Arguments. This is an issue at the ballot box, uh, in Kansas, uh, in 2022.

0:42:48 Andrew: And that is, the Kansas Supreme Court said we find that the right to an abortion is contained within the liberty clauses of our state constitution. And so if the federal constitution is ever interpreted differently, and gosh, who could see that coming, that does not matter, abortion will be protected, uh, for pregnant persons as an aspect of bodily autonomy in the state of Kansas. Now, at the state level, what you can do is amend the Constitution, and that's what they're trying to do in Kansas. But this leaves a very, very important blueprint, okay? And that is to say, state courts are free to say our state constitution says no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

0:43:34 Andrew: We have always read it consistent with what the Supreme Court has said that legal phrase is called in pari materia. But we don't have to. We can say in our state that means we're protecting the basic rights that are inherent in the concept of ordered liberty. And I have been urging state Supreme Courts to do that for as long as I've been a lawyer. So it's another way in which there is an avenue to avoid bringing legal questions before the Supreme Court, because you know what the answer is going to be if you bring something up to the Supreme Court. I told you these decisions were 6-3, and you didn't have to ask what that alignment was. You know who the six are. You know what? The three is. Wow. Great question. So that was the Obama. And I have heard this and talked about this on my show.

0:44:19 Andrew: The Obama administration had a 60-vote supermajority, didn't, right, have to worry about the filibuster in 2009. So why didn't they just codify Roe as a matter of federal law in 2009? Isn't it really still the Democrats' fault? And then what can we do about this piece of abject nonsense? So first, here's why it's nonsense. You go back and look at that, uh, filibuster proof majority, and it did not include 60 pro-choice Democratic senators. It that included Bob Casey, who was outspokenly pro-life at the time, um, he has since, uh, come around to, to modify that position to sign on to, a law that would, um, protect, protect Roe, put an asterisk by that. But he was asked at the time.

0:45:05 Andrew: So mathematically, no. Anybody who's saying that is just wrong as a matter of history, is also wrong in terms of, you, that that's not the way in which you go about using your presidential authority, right, by saying, well, I'm concerned that 13 years from now, uh, a criminally insane game show host is going to steal a Supreme Court seat and wreck this, like, that's just nonsense, it's crazy. And, um, I sometimes, sometimes get why those on our side are looking to blame those on our side, because they're the people you could do something about. But, but, but this is, it's not true as a, as a matter of fact, as to what we can do to prevent arguments like this from happening. In One on one, what I, what I try and do is sit down with people and them the facts, right?

0:45:55 Andrew: Like, they will say that, and I will say, okay, think about where you heard that from. I'm going to sit you down and show you something in about 30 seconds. And if I can do this in 30 seconds, I want you to think about why the source that you've been parroting for the past couple of months didn't tell you that, and whether they're a reliable source or not. I can't tell, I have 100% success rate doing that, but it's all I can do in.

Again, I, I want to illustrate this, these, right, people are our, our friends. They're on our side. They agree with us on 99 issues out of 100. And it's about maintaining that coalition. And all I can do is point out the other side, right? Evangelical Christians showed up to vote for a thrice-divorced, foul-mouthed philanderer who's never set foot in a church and holds a Bible like it's a vampire holding a piece of, of garlic, right, that, and they did that on the basis of one promise, that he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and they did that for 50 years. If the other side can stay that kind of lockstep, we could come together with people who aren't, and still support those who don't quite get as much of the progressive agenda as we would all like to be done. I wish I more on that, but, you know, I would say try and treat people with charity. Try and show them the facts.

We got the second question because I got carried away in the political aspect there and I forgot to answer the legal aspect. Remember the three levels of authority that I talked about. The first is interpreting the Constitution. The second is interpreting law, and the third is interpreting administrative agency decisions, delegations of congressional authority. The most Congress can do is pass a law.

0:47:38 Andrew: Now, the way in which the Women's Health Protection Act would work is to say, we as Congress have the authority to regulate abortion. We have that under, because it's a matter of interstate commerce, People right? Who who are pregnant, travel across state borders in order to obtain abortions. That's a proven fact. And we would like to preempt all state laws and occupy the field, right? That is, get rid of everything to the contrary at the state level or below and replace that with whatever you set to be the standard, there should be no prohibitions on abortion pre-viability of the fetus, for example, which is how I believe the act is written. That could still be challenged in the Supreme Court in one of two ways.

0:48:25 Andrew: Number one, they could argue that it is not within Congress's power to pass such a law. And if you're thinking, well, they have the whole interstate thing, how could that possibly work? I would refer you to NFIB versus Sebelius, in which this Supreme Court in 2012, in so a more liberal version of this Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by John Roberts, said that Obamacare, Affordable Care Act was not authorized as a form of interstate commerce. Now, I can't think of anything that's more interstate commercie than medical care. People travel. You get drugs from across the the borders, people go into and out of states and seek doctors all the time. This court said, nope, that's not interstate commerce enough.

0:49:10 Andrew: So could this activist Supreme Court overturn that by saying, yeah, no, this that this is just an unconstitutional law. Congress doesn't have the power to supersede the state's will on this issue because this is not really about commerce.

0:49:28 Andrew: This as the Dobbs decision says, they certainly could. Don't And think you have be to where I am now to think this court would likely come out on that. So yeah, great question. I love the question. So let me telescope that out a little bit. It's not really that hard to fix the current SCOTUS in conceptual terms, right? All we need to do is double the current size of the federal judiciary while a Democrat is in office and then gets to appoint all of those members of the judiciary, right. By the way, this is not just a power grab kind of thing. Our judiciary is idiotically overworked. Every judge I know, left, right, and center, would tell you that their dockets are about 100% too crowded. So perfectly defensible, and you would get nine Supreme Court nominees, and all you need is a 50-vote majority to do that.

0:50:16 Andrew: You'd have to break the filibuster in order to pass voting rights reform and Supreme Court reform, and then you'd have to pass that bill. We don't have that because we have Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, But we're not that far for that. That's two. Right. We're not that far from being able to to make that broad and sweeping a chain. And that's all it takes. One act of Congress, the Judiciary Act of 2023. Now, is rank order voting rank choice voting at the local level? Is that a good idea? It's a fantastically good idea. Right? And we have the technology right now. And we're the party that thinks that, you know, Dominion voting machines send your ballots to the ghost of Hugo Chavez to adult. No, no, no. Like, yeah, I would love that. I would welcome that. People think that I am anti third or fourth party. Nothing could be further from the truth, right?

0:51:02 Andrew: For somebody whose political views are to the left of the mainstream Democratic we don't have that right now. And the way in which you get that is by agitating and organizing for that change at the local level. But yeah, Yeah. At that point, if if on Election Day you tabulate it up and it is, you 48 for the Democrat and 47 for the Republican and five for the Green Party candidate and then, OK, well, no one's over 50 percent. Let's add the Green party candidate to the Democratic candidate. There you go. Congratulations. You win. Then vote. Send as many message votes as you want. Right. That's how you can transform your vote by by changing the way the rules are kept. But right now, that's not the law in virtually every jurisdiction. And that has to be built from the ground up.

0:51:49 Andrew: That's so abolish is thinking about it from the top down. Is there a law you could pass that would do X? And the answer to that is no. And the way to think about that is entirety of our nation's history.

We've had a couple of inflection points, you know, where the Whigs die out or where, you know, Republicans go from being sort of the progressive but pro-business party to the party of racists and monsters, um, but but but by and large, right, every institution we have, uh, since 1800, uh, has, uh, assumed, uh, that that there are going to be two and only two parties.

You dismantle that piecemeal from the bottom up, right, by things like RCV, uh, by by making it possible, and and this and is an area where, you know, our our friends, uh, on the the the fourth party left are correct, and that is at that point the institutions will fight back, and both Democrats and Republicans will be aligned in not wanting to threaten that that system. They're right about that. But you can make that not matter by appealing to their self-interest, right? So how do we appeal to to self-interest? 99% right? Of congressional seats are gerrymandered right now into safe districts, be they safe Democrat districts or safe Republican districts. The people who favor that are incumbents. The people who oppose that are everybody else. And so that needs to inform you in terms of how you're working at the state level. An overcomable problem, a big issue. I would certainly love to see, I think parliamentary democracies have much more to commend them than certainly our broken system over the past 20 years.

0:53:24 Andrew: And we're going to need to think as outside the box as we can to try and fix what's going on. I would say two things I keep saying. Thing. Number one, got to be built from the ground up. And number two, until those rules are changed, you got to play by the rules we got. So

0:53:39 Clip: Thank you for being a friend, yeah, travel down the road with me, say we started from the bottom now we're here girl,

0:53:48 Thomas: And now it's time to thank our top patrons, our Hall of Famers, our all-time greats on patreon.com/law. We're on the quartile system this month, and it's the first one, despite being, you know, quite a bit of the month. That's how dates work. So I'll start us off. Thank you to El Chorizo. Hey, Kinsley. That's all one name. Trojan Horse News, a funny meme to share with the big news of the day. Banned on Facebook for shining a light on the basket of, and well, we'll never find out what yeah.

0:54:17 Andrew: I assume deplorables, right?

0:54:19 Thomas: Ah, just a nice scalding hot bath. LC Voodoo Magic Swamp Lawyer, you can't literally, literally just drunk dial senators. That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you. I became a patron to give a shout out to Kelly. Hi, Kelly.

0:54:38 Andrew: Kelly.

0:54:38 Thomas: Alex Boyer, Len Bogan, Exhibit C might be crazy, but Exhibits D is nuts.

0:54:46 Thomas: That is awesome. Well, Clownhorn, everything important. You got to fight for your right to ex parte. The CDC says take legal advice from a podcast. Jeremy Ashinghurst, I'm not fast at sex but I admire their audacity. Heather Peek, I upped my pledge for two votes for a New Orleans live show, Mardi Gras 2023. Well, I don't know about during Mardi Gras, but we could, you know, New Orleans Live Show may happen. Michael Grosnicklaus, Loudermilk and Cheese Bro, curdled by corrupt coup claims.

0:55:17 Thomas: Is Louder Milks one of them? I I already forgot that. Oh, wow.

0:55:17 Andrew: That's amazing. Congressman Barry Loudermilk. Yeah, he was the one that gave the tours of this, you know, where the people stopped to photograph the exits.

0:55:20 Thomas: Oh, okay. Burblecouch.com. Going through a divorce. Listen to assembled experts to shift your mindset from failed marriage to fresh start. And a loaf of orange. Your turn, Andrew.

0:55:37 Andrew: Marion the Corgi. Come visit Trans Vin Diesel at his new lair, the Trans Guild Promenade. Jamie. Me, comedian Aaron Trahan at comedian aet, come to Madhouse Comedy Club in San Diego. Well, I, I have never been to San Diego, so I'm gonna put that on the list, uh, We should go. Oh, a live show, Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Yeah, there's our second vote. Politics from a different but enlightening angle. The novel Vortexes is being considered for an option and screenplay. Yay. Due to the use of split pins, courthouses often have the blood of filing clerks on files. Republicanicus hostess humani generis, I, I think that's a like coyote and roadrunner joke, but one. One of our all-time favorites, a Streetcar Named Deez Nuts. Our holding action can't repel firepower of that magnitude. The Supreme Court is just playing Calvinball. Salty Seattle Driver asks that you and your friends help me get to 1,000 subscribers on YouTube so that I can make a few bucks. Sure.

0:55:54 Thomas: Me neither.

0:56:39 Andrew: SaltySeattleDriver on YouTube. I wish to wish the wish you wish toish, but if you wish the which wishes, I won't wish the you wish. Wish to wish, let's just say some people in Washington, DC need a swift kick to the scrotus. No ducks given this month. At Atomic Penguin Seven on Twitter, you keep it going. Atomic Penguin, James Heath, Dr. Scoop, Little Doug and Heather, Mr. and Mrs. Pusher, and listeners like you, thank you. Hand woven sustainable textiles for your home and body at Kellywoveit.com. Yeah, I told you, I've I've been over to Kelly Wovet.com.

0:57:07 Thomas: Yeah. I either need textiles or I have too many textiles, whatever. I never remember specifically what a textile is. It's like anything.

0:57:19 Andrew: Nobody has the perfect amount of textiles. It's good business to be in. I've decided that I should be on the patron list if that's still in the works.

0:57:22 Thomas: Yeah. Still good.

0:57:28 Andrew: So good. For a fun fantasy story, read The King's Own by W. Marshall, now on Amazon. This is not our all-time great Conrad Michaels. No, this is just a tribute. And liberals own guns, too. Support root cause mitigation, not ineffective gun control. Role, or, you know, both. Uh, thank you all so much, we really appreciate it. These fine folks support us over patreon.com/law at the five dollars per episode and up level, and uh, you are the the beating heart of the engine that is this show, and we really do appreciate it.

0:57:39 Thomas: And

0:58:00 Clip: Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar will eat you.

0:58:06 Thomas: And now it's time for T3BE answer time. I feel like this was a straightforward one, but maybe there was a trick and I fell for it. I don't know. Let's find find out a

0:58:15 Andrew: Right. Yeah, this is another real property question. A seller entered into a contract to convey Black Acre to a buyer. The contract stated that the closing was to occur on May 1st. The the buyer was preparing to perform, but the seller was not. On June 1st, this seller was ready to close. Close? The buyer does not want to follow through with the closing and claim that the seller breached the contract by, you know, not being ready on the date that was in the contract. Must the buyer follow through mit the closing? Um, and uh, Thomas, you went between A and a C, which was your final answer, no, because the closing date is an express term of the contract that must be complied with exactly. Exactly. And Thomas, I got to tell you, not only answer wrong, but your backup answer, yes, unless the buyer can show the delay of closing, cause the buyer to suffer undue harm, also incorrect. The answer is, in fact, B, yes.

0:59:12 Thomas: Right.

0:59:13 Andrew: Unless the contract or the circumstances indicate that time is of the essence. There's really a couple important points here. The first is not all breaches of a contract are material breaches of that contract, right? This is something, to be honest, I've had fellow lawyers screw this up, right,

0:59:27 Thomas: Well, This totally is, I mean, it's a month. Like, that, is a material breach.

0:59:34 Andrew: Yeah, well, we're about to get there, and for example, imagine that you were, and again, don't take legal advice from a podcast. This is not about your particular lease with your landlord, Lord. But, you know, I had a situation in which a tenant, it was specified, you know, would move out of the premises at 5 p.m. and return the keys. And, you she moved out at about 7.15 p.n. because it took longer to get her stuff out of The Premises than initially thought. And this was a commercial lease, not a residential lease, but you can imagine the similar circumstances. And And, you know, the lawyer on the other side at first was threatening and blustering and was like, you didn't schedule this on the proper time and therefore I'm going to. You know, and I just wrote back and I said, there isn't a court in this state that you will find that will hold that that's a material breach of the contract. Give us back our money. And two days later, he gave us back her money.

0:59:34 Thomas: Right Sure.

1:00:30 Andrew: But, so that's sort of the first principle. Just because you have failed to comply with a contract in every little jot and tittle, that doesn't mean you get to get out of it. Then the question is, well, what about a month in the sale of real estate? And the reality is this kind of dovetails with our discussion of Elon Musk buying Twitter. Winter, land deals are also complicated. And there's plenty of case law, a lot of it 13th century Saxony, that says, you know, a month is in fact a reasonable time for closing on a piece of land to run late.

1:00:39 Thomas: Wow. Jeez. Yeah.

1:01:04 Andrew: So now then the question is, what's the law, right? The law is, this is why A is wrong. The standard is, is time of the essence in delivering a particular piece of real estate? You can prove that in one of two ways. You can proof that by writing it into the contract, time is of the the essence, and if you do that, then you do have to close in, you know, within your, within the time period. Or you can prove via extrinsic evidence, right, like if there is a ton of back and forth between the parties that are like, hey man, you know, I'm gonna be homeless if I don't move it right like you know right

1:01:40 Thomas: Like surveillance footage of me checking my watch a bunch during the transaction, see, times of the essence, walking fast, quickly. Quickly. Yeah, it's such an old timey, like I have the pocket watch that's in my vest or whatever that, yeah.

1:01:45 Andrew: Yep. Uh and Yeah. Yep. Time, so it, not, you do not have to show that it would suffer undue harm. I think that would be a higher standard. You just have to shows, no, the parties agreed or knew that it was really, really important to deliver this on time. So there you go, tough question, uh it

1:02:10 Thomas: Wow. Is that particular to real estate? Like if I have a contract to sell you stuff I just don't deliver.

1:02:20 Andrew: Is particular to real estate, yeah, yeah. No, yeah, right, imagine that if you had a delivery contract for apples, you show up you show up with a truck full of, yeah, apple juice, right, yeah, but

1:02:22 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. It just, it just a pile of mush. Yeah, there it is. It's month later. That's fine, right? Yeah. Apparently because that bar exam question that Thomas got wrong. Totally. It's a bit completely fine. Nothing I can do. Enjoy your mush.

1:02:40 Andrew: But you're in, you're in good company. For example, would-be prospective public servant Maggie District 1, working to prevent Fultons County from a Republican state takeover, also went with C. Reason it the same way, you do real property, is just one of those that if that's not the area in which you practice, uh, sometimes the intuitive answer uh is just wrong, yeah.

1:03:06 Thomas: Yeah. What was the office she was running from? It's not like of real property questions or yeah.

1:03:09 Andrew: No, it, yeah. She's not going to be register of wills, or, yeah, so uh, everybody can in good conscience still vote for Maggie Goldman down in Fulton County, uh thanks for playing along, uh, know, a couple of people got it right, a of non-lawyers got it right, which I thought was really, really impressive. I'm going to go with Maristor for our winner, who says, long time, first time. Gotta be B. I'm not a law student or a lawyer, can't play one anywhere. But time is of the essence means exactly that. Failure to perform on time is a breach. The one about harmful impact would apply if time is, of the instance, not agreed, I think. Well, no, no, wrong, we just went through that. But you were correct that time is of the essence is something that you either have to specify or prove, and that was not the case here. So congratulations, Maristor, on being this week's winner, and everyone, let's give them a follow. That is at M-E-R-I-S-T-O-R on Twitter. And congratulations for being this year's winner, and being this

1:03:19 Thomas: Absolutely.

1:04:08 Thomas: Well, that's crazy talk. If that question is right, then I want to be wrong. No, I don't know. No, that's fine. Okay, fine. That's our show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you for Rapid Response Friday and tune tune into the Hearing on Tuesday. That's like probably tomorrow as you're listening to this. Oh, I can't wait. I'm sure Andrew will be tweeting, as always, has been a necessary companion on these hearings. So OpenArgs on Twitter for Andrew's live tweets, I'm sure.

1:04:28 Andrew: Yep. Yeah. We have already gotten advanced reporting, Thomas and I were pouring over some of the CNN news articles last night that uh Bye.

1:04:41 Thomas: They seem good. Can't wait. We'll see you next time.