Why the Whole Alligator Alcatraz Thing Is Somehow Worse Than It Sounds

Transcript

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

0:00:00 Clip: Thank you.

0:00:02 Jenessa: You have a sufficient supply of affordable housing, people with mental illness have a house. People meant like, is it normal when a normal president does this? Do

0:00:20 Matt: Oh, I It's been too long. No, you have a first amendment right to be ugly yeah right, Jenessa, welcome to Rapid Response Friday. What's up?

0:00:29 Jenessa: Okay. You're seems like everything at once so everything is up yeah

0:00:39 Matt: Well, that's every Friday. But we haven't had you on one of these yet, where we're going to be responding to law in the news, trying to explain what's going on for everybody. And got some stuff that touches on your expertise, both with disability rights and voting rights, unfortunately, are both once again, up for grabs. Yeah. So I want to, of course, as we try to do and try to balance things out, talk a little good news before we get going, because, you know, good things are still happening. Then we're going to talk about the big executive order on homelessness. This came out a couple of weeks ago, but it's really important and not great. I we can agree.

0:00:52 Jenessa: So fun yay yeah

0:01:12 Matt: It's just about the most fascist thing this administration has put out yet, which is saying quite a lot, I so we'll talk that out. And then in a not totally unrelated story, I want to run down the legal issues going on right now with what they're calling Alligator Alcatraz, which I'm coming to call Gator Get Mow if I have to give it a name since it doesn't have an official name.

0:01:11 Jenessa: Yeah like that one better the

0:01:29 Matt: It's a little more accurate considering what's going on legally over there. And then, of course, as always, we've got a fun footnote this week. Of our favorite perennial footnote topics has been the use and abuse of AI in court. And we have just crossed the Rubicon. We have not just one, but two judicial opinions that appear to have been written by AI.

0:01:47 Jenessa: Judge not the lawyer oh

0:01:49 Matt: Yes, federal judges, not great. And there are federal judges too, it's even worse. We got to talk about it. We got to call this out because this can't happen. Still kind of funny also so it qualifies as a footnote. Alright, let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about some good news and then a lot of bad news and dann some kind of weird news. LetS

0:01:59 Jenessa: For real oh

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0:03:31 Matt: One of my jobs I feel like here, and I think you share this view with me, is to fight back against humorism where we can. There are lots of reasons to be concerned. Obviously, real real problems in this government right now. Bad things are happening. Been coming to realize that people have a lot of ideas about what's going on with immigration right now that aren't totally correct. And they're not wrong. I mean, obviously, there not ever take what I'm saying to be saying that things are fine, or that ICE is doing good things, or that we're not in a period of unprecedented emergency situations here. Government is ignoring some court orders. ICE is running rampant. It's still working within the basic parameters that I'm used to ICE working in, but it's just doing a lot more of it. To get quotas up, get the numbers going is bad. I do not want anybody to hear me as saying that everything's fine and there's nothing to worry about. But I do want to to highlight a couple of things. Of now, and I meant to mention this a couple of weeks ago before I went on vacation, but I really want to make this point now. Mahmoud Khalil, Rameza Ozturk, and Mohsen Modali, you might remember, those were all basically political prisoners.

0:04:26 Matt: Those are all people who have a lot of rights in this country, here lawfully, who were taken in because of things they said. The worst of these, I think, being Ramezza Ozturg, who was a tough student, who wrote an editorial, co -wrote, I think she was one of three authors of an editorial. Varied They down the middle, hard to argue you at the editorial about what Israel's doing right now in Gaza. She was taken in just for that and charged with this new provision of law that we've talked about that's never really been used before, especially for political purposes, for for trying to deport people, for essentially expressing their views that we find to interfere with our foreign policy. All it requires, as we've discussed before, is a letter from Marco Rubio, and they're off to the races. So I just want to point out that these three people were taken in. They were held for way too long. They never should have been held at all under pretty terrible conditions. Mahmoud Khalil had to miss the birth of his child. I'm not saying any of this is good, But again, they are isolated cases. And again, I just can't say it enough. I'm not saying it's great. It is bad. But

0:05:16 Matt: These are test cases and they lost. The government lost because they were all released. Now, these cases remain pending and they ultimately could end up with deportation orders. They could end with Rubio's letter vindicating the government's position here. The immediate urgency of trying to have these people held and deported without being released, at least we've got them released and we have these victories. I just want to point that out. Was seeing a lot of people talking as if we have had thousands of people deported to Seacott in El Salvador, the massive maximum security prison that's run by their fascist government. The fact is, there were about 270 people that were sent to Sikhan. And it was all basically over the course of a couple of weeks in March, I think maybe a couple in April. But that has not been an ongoing thing, fortunately. I think mid -April was the last of those flights. Plenty of people have been deported to El Salvador from El Salvador.

0:06:07 Jenessa: Like normal right if you're yeah you're a citizen of el salvador that would be like not that we love this but that

0:06:13 Matt: I actually had somebody ask me, was deporting people to El Salvador? I was like, yeah, of course. We've been deporting to El Salvador for as long as they've been in El Salvador. I mean, we've been deporting everywhere as long there have been countries. So I think just a sense of proportion here that the SECONT thing is a test run. And again, it's a very bad test run, we have to talk about it, we'd have to stay on it, and we have have to watch it to see what else they want to do with it. It was kind of a test to kind of scare people and get them thinking what I think a lot of people now think, which is that a whole lot of People are going to be sent there. Point of it was to send people that we can't deport to their home countries. That's really been the Trump administration's obsession with this. That has been Venezuela, which has not been willing to take their people back. It doesn't want to business with us. Some more good news recently was that we did actually get everybody from Venezuela who was being held in SICON was actually sent back to Venezuela. Now, that's not unequivocal good news. That is good good news, but a lot of those people were trying to claim asylum from Venezuela, so it's not the best thing they were sent back. But they were released from sea cot, at least, and I don't think that made enough news.

0:07:09 Jenessa: I didn't even hear about this

0:07:10 Matt: Yeah, no, it was a prisoner exchange. So we got 10 Americans and 80 political prisoners from freed Venezuela in exchange for sending their own people back. I don'T think that's a terrible deal. I hope that safe. They're And it seems, I mean, I saw lots of stories about people being very happy to be returned. And right? Right? And they're also some of the first people ever to be released from SECOT at all. Point of it is really not to let people out. I know that one of the concerns that they had was that people would be released and tell the stories of beatings and sexual violence and denial of food and water and deprivation of medical care, you know, all kinds of terrible human rights abuses. Is Venezuela is actually opening an investigation now that they've talked to the people who are in there, and they're going to be filing some kind of claim against El Salvador for these abuses. So, you know, I just thought it was worth mentioning that this Trump administration may not take the Salvadoran government up on the deal they have. That's another thing that came out of this, actually, was that the Salvadorian government had to actually admit that it did have an agreement, and we still don't have the full text of it, but it had to admit that part of that agreement is the U .S. retains jurisdiction over everybody in SECAD, which we knew, but we just didn't have anybody say out loud.

0:07:24 Jenessa: Well I mean oh mean when When they were saying the stuff about like, oh, we all knew it was BS when they were saying they couldn't get Ábrego García back. But when they Were saying like, Oh, no, he's theirs now. That's not true. We had jurisdiction over him. Oh,

0:08:23 Matt: I mean, he's still in a, in the sense that we're paying El Salvador to basically this detention facility. Now it's a little different in the case of Gregor Garcia because he's Salvadoran, but could have held onto him potentially if they could come up with a reason, and I'm sure given the flimsy evidence that the US government had, that's more than enough for El Salvador to hold people right now in CICAD. They don't need very much to hold young men, especially. Did want to point out about 30 of the people that were sent to CICADA are still there, but they're all Salvadoran. And some of them actually were legitimate gang members. We can't discount that. Very many, but some of they actually were. What CICADE is for. I don't approve of it. It's not the way to go. It is fascist, but that is the Salvadoran government's prerogative, unfortunately, to hold them. At the point at which they're Salvadoran citizens who are wanted as gang members. Obrega -Garcia case remains kind We'll talk more about it, but there has been at least some good outcomes from Rao and Judge Zenas saying that he can't be released to ICE custody. He is supposed to be released. That's being appealed, but I do hope he's going to be release to his family sooner than later. Just want to make the point that the rule of law is not dead. It's still working as designed. And these cases are the the test cases.

0:08:32 Jenessa: Right. Oh, so. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

0:09:23 Matt: These are the ones they want to bring to push things forward because they know they can do these things to immigrants before they do them to us. And there are enough good judges in these places that the administration is being kept in check. We're not getting unrestricted agreement. They're getting very frustrated with all of this. As we've talked about before, we've got DOJ lawyers quitting left and right because they don't want to have to make these arguments. So that's worth something too. A couple of notes, just a few things I wanted to say so that people have some sense of perspective.

0:09:47 Matt: I'm I'm not trying to give you sunshine and light here. I'm just telling you that a lot of the humorism I've been seeing online is not really based in fact often. Let's at least keep the facts in the conversation. That's what we're here for. Now that we've done some good news, let's talk about the unequivocal bad news. This executive order, I saw this as I was leaving for my vacation and just stunned me reading this language. I mean, first of all, let'S start with the title of the executive order which is ending crime and disorder on America's streets, July 24th, 2025. that sounds like something that you would see like in a Chiron and like a Batman movie. Mayor promises to end crime and disorder on American streets, you Gotham. Kind of touches on some stuff that's of interest to your expertise, but it's also something we have to talk about. And unfortunately, I think it has a lot to do with immigration enforcement too, for reasons we'll talk about after we get through this. Let's just look at this thing. I've is written in, and increasingly this is the way the government writes now, but this like fascist style, and there's no other way to put it. Like this is not normal. This is not how the government usually communicates with us up to this point in my life. All, starting with the purpose and policy, vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe. Now, this is the typical fascist talking point that cities, especially, of course, blue cities, even though red cities are across the board pretty dangerous, that cities are unsafe. And of course crime across the border is down, murders are down, violent crime is down steadily throughout our lifetimes, but that doesn't help fascism, so that's not what they're going to tell you. I'm interested in this number here. They claim that the number of individuals living on the streets in the US on a single night during the last year of the previous administration, I assume they're finding a way to align with statistics here, but who knows, 274,224 people they register as being homeless. I don't know how they get that number. I think they're doing a census of homeless people, but say it's the highest ever recorded, the number people living on streets in US. Do you have any idea if if that's true, or how we would know that.

0:11:41 Jenessa: I looked it up and it's worse. Was of people who were literally sleeping on the street. If you're looking at people who had no home to go to, it was 770,000. The day we started tracking this, how many people are experiencing homelessness, the problem has just gotten worse and worse and And worse. So insofar as that's the last year of data, yes, it is the worst year. And the one before that was the second worst year and we it have a housing crisis.

0:12:14 Jenessa: It's just getting worse and it's, the number there is, as far as I can tell, correct. We have a ton of people experiencing homelessness.

0:12:23 Matt: Do you know how they get that data?

0:12:26 Jenessa: I don't know, but it seemed to be coming from actual government sources under the Biden administration. So it didn't make me think it was like completely made up um

0:12:32 Matt: I mean, it's hard enough to conduct a census of people with registered addresses, so next part, when they say say the overwhelming majority of individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. And I'm willing to believe that. I mean, obviously, drug addiction and mental health are a major contributor to homelessness, no doubt. They report that nearly two -thirds of homeless individuals have regularly used hard drugs. Doesn't necessarily mean they're addicts or living with addiction, but that they have used them. To basically, they're painting the bleakest possible picture. But I do want to say before we move on, what you said about there being a housing crisis. Obviously, housing has never been more expensive in our lifetimes. People are losing their shelter all the time for reasons relating to private equity and greedy landlords and complete failure to control the housing market. Don't mention that in this order, because why would they?

0:13:17 Jenessa: They're gonna specifically go out of their way to oppose that and say that like housing first measures don't hold people accountable so we're gonna get rid of that but like that's the evidence -based thing to do here we know that it works if anybody's not familiar housing first says, it's kind of in the name, get people in a house first, and that will help you address the other problems. Of the problem with all of these stats around like how many people have a mental illness, how many People have a drug addiction, how many people Have this and this and this. The point. Have you ever heard the musical chairs analogy for homelessness? So think of it this way. You, Thomas and Lydia, we're all going to play musical chairs. So so there's four of us, there's three chairs, and let's say I have a broken leg. Probably going to be the one who doesn't get a chair, right? If we were trying to explain why did you get a chair and I didn't, the broken leg is a really good explanation. If we want to explain why did somebody end up without a chair? My broken leg has nothing to do with it. The problem is

0:14:21 Jenessa: Is there's four people in three chairs.

0:14:21 Matt: It's the chairs. Right. Right?

0:14:23 Jenessa: Data is so clear on this. If you have a sufficient supply of affordable housing, people with mental illness have a house. People with a substance use disorder have ahouse. Because if you can put a roof over your head, like fun fact about humans, when we have a House, we go inside it at night, like we don't sleep on the sidewalk for fun. So

0:14:44 Matt: I cannot abide this kind of radical leftism on this program. You're saying that the solution to homelessness is to build more homes? It can't be what you're saying.

0:14:51 Jenessa: All it takes if you look at cities where they've done comparisons of like this city has more mental illness for god knows what reason that it's up here in the north it's freaking cold and dark all the time whatever or you look a little bit at places where there is more drug addiction you don't necessarily see more people experiencing experiencing homelessness because it's really about the housing supply, the supply and the affordability.

0:15:17 Matt: Sure. And there's all kinds of reasons in the last few years that people might have lost their homes, even apart from the expense of and all of the crises people have been going through.

0:15:26 Jenessa: We cure all the mental illness, someone else will be sleeping on the street. It might help that individual, but it's not going to solve the problem. So this drives me nuts like that's not the explanation. And so taking away housing proposing solutions and then deciding these people have a problem and that's how we're going to fix homelessness. Like double misses the point.

0:15:50 Matt: That's a really important place to start before we talk about anything else that's in this order. I appreciate that a really good context. Let's move on to the most fascist sentence I've seen in quite a while, and that's really saying something.

0:16:03 Matt: Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor any other citizens. My administration will take a new new approach focused on protecting public safety. More Batman villain stuff.

0:16:27 Jenessa: Yeah, it really does sound like a speech in a movie for a person you're not supposed to vote for. Like, God. Except we're in that movie and you weren't supposed to vote for this person. Oh, God,

0:16:33 Matt: And Surrendering to disorder and fear is neither compassionate nor homeless, as if that's a factor. I mean, you know it's not a factor because the next sentence is, my administration will take a new approach focusing on protecting public safety, which is not protecting the people that, you know, are obviously society has failed.

0:16:52 Jenessa: They're people. People. They're also people that you're supposed to protect. They count. And also, people experiencing mental illness are not, in fact, more likely to be violent. So, like, getting them away from you because they bother you is not making you physically safer.

0:17:08 Matt: I understand it, they're more likely to be the victims of violence. That's been my

0:17:11 Jenessa: Correct. If you include substance use disorder, you will see higher rates of violence because accessing drugs is a crime. And so you get wrapped up with crime, an it's not related to the mental illness. But a lot of people with mental illnesses also have a substance use disorder. So easy to kind of play with the numbers and make it look that way. But as soon as you take substance use out of it, there no connection. Action. Sometimes people with mental illness engage in violence and sometimes people without mental illness, engage in violent. And we should not attribute every violent act to it's obviously because of whatever trait I don't like about you.

0:17:53 Matt: I'm concerned not only, of course, for the population that this is supposed to be about. I'm concerned about where this goes when we build up the infrastructure that talking about here. But let's get there. So this is all just the setup. This is the preamble. And now we're getting to the actual thing that an executive order is supposedto be able to do. Because again, we'retalking about the president writing up a memo, essentially saying this it's what is what our priorities are going to be and how we're going to do it. So

0:18:16 Jenessa: I ask you quick, is it normal for executive orders to have these giant preambles where you're like telling your life it is normal? Okay.

0:18:23 Matt: They can be longer than this. And the January 20th ones, they were so wordy. They went on and on and On. Should check out the one about when they renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf America.

0:18:35 Jenessa: Meant like, is it normal when a normal president does this? Do they write executive orders with like a grand speech first?

0:18:37 Matt: Oh, I don't remember. It's been too long. No, I know. Yeah, I mean, they do. I mean they often like executive orders can be very flowery because you have to explain why you're doing it. It stuff. And a lot of these executive orders that people have been afraid of, it's essentially just saying, my administration is going to retool its resources to do a thing that we weren't doing before. Not trying to change the law. Now, obviously, something like the birthright citizenship order, they're just saying we're going to ignore the law and try doing something different and not issuing documents to babies. But here there's two things that they identify that they're going to do. And I'm interested because I don't really understand the first one because I don't know that much about this subject.

0:18:49 Jenessa: All right. So we're getting into its substance. Mm -hmm.

0:19:17 Matt: The first thing they're gonna be doing is seeking in appropriate cases the reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees that impede the US policy of encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness. So I assume what they're saying is they want to undo legal protections that have been fought for for many years by disability rights advocates to keep people out of commitment and jail. Yes?

0:19:37 Jenessa: Yep. That's pretty much it. Yep,

0:19:40 Matt: What are we talking about here? What kind of consent decrees?

0:19:42 Jenessa: So one example that I found, um advocacy center v mink uh what was happening is uh have people who are in jail they are found by a judge to not be competent to stand trial which means you are now in jail not having been found guilty of anything you're being held by the government government, you can't just stay in jail forever, right? These are the rules.

0:20:08 Matt: Or can you maybe? Where we're going.

0:20:11 Jenessa: And basically, so you're opposed opposed to say, well, this person isn't competent to stand trial, but presumably if this was related to a violent crime, maybe the judge can find, they also can't go back out there. Um, we haven't found them guilty of the crime, So it's a little testy, but they're supposed to be sent to a mental health institution to either, you know, recover, hopefully, or whatever. They would just leave them in the jail because, oh, we don't have enough beds. And it's like, okay, that's not an excuse to just keep people in prison who have not been found guilty of a crime. Like, you can't just do that. That so um brought a and they just rather than having to go through the whole thing you get the consent decree of like we're gonna stop doing this we're going to do it right we're you're found incompetent you're going To within a reasonable frame a time frame go to a mental health facility because that's like what that requires so that's the the kind of thing that because the doj facilitated it could they in theory just back out of it like the judicial precedence when they're talking about like a lawsuit that went all the way through you would have to have a new lawsuit to overturn an old case but when you have a consent decree where the do j is like overseeing making sure things are done properly as part of a a settlement, basically. Don't know the extent to which they can just bail in the middle of it.

0:21:35 Matt: It takes two parties, and usually we talk about consent decries in the context of police and reaches after a series, when you've got a police department that's well known to commit, you know, something like Baltimore, right, where it's just out of control, bad policing, abuses everywhere, they will go to federal court and enter into consent decree with that police department to have monitoring and oversight by the courts and by DOJ. And I know that one of the executive orders having to do with policing was a very similar thing where they're saying we're to try to get out of as many consent decrees as possible. And I think that is, as you said, it's a lot easier than overturning a case. But they're just sort of setting the tone here and saying, whenever we can, we're going to be going after the controlling precedent so that we can make it easier to get people locked up in civil commitment. And I'm going to suggest to you, and I think you agree, that it should be very hard to civilly commit somebody. Are times when it is necessary, but the state should not be taking your liberty potentially an indefinite scenario.

0:22:25 Jenessa: You know, I think this is what people are probably gonna miss on this sort of thing. When you hear about involuntary commitment, especially if we're thinking about, when like, people talk about the problems with this, you know, if you're a skeptical person, you're trying to think it through, you might jump to the extreme examples of like, oh, somebody who's like currently experiencing suicidal ideation and like is obviously not in a right state of mind and needs help to like not literally die right this second. Yeah, of course, it's so easy to get everybody on board with involuntary commitment when you talk about that scenario, right? But we have due process in that that scenario where they're going to to have to within a certain very short amount of time depends on your state and yada yada uh there'll be you know some minimal limit to say you have to get in front of a judge and say like why I'm allowed to take a grown adult and force them to do things and what has happened uh some states it's worse some mental health conditions it's worse we just respect some people with certain mental illnesses more than others it seems uh will find that people are just indefinitely sitting there and we would never accept that if it was a crime that you would just never have a trial or you oftentimes in these proceedings people are not entitled to a lawyer and again it depends on the state it It depends on the situation, what exactly is going to happen, what the procedures are. But a lot of disability rights organizations feel strongly, you on the circumstance and yada yada, not speaking for my organization specifically, but in some circumstances, it seems very clear that people are being held too long with too little or no representation without consideration of their rights. And, was a famous Supreme Court case. Ginsberg authored the decision that said, like, yeah, you can't just keep holding people in psychiatric facilities when the psychiatrist says they don't have to be here, for example. Should be in the least restrictive setting, presuming they want to go back out into the community. Them back out in the community if they want. Want to be there um

0:24:33 Matt: Sounds like is something that might impede the US policy of encouraging civil commitment.

0:24:37 Jenessa: That's pretty much what it says right

0:24:38 Matt: Sounds like something that they might want to be coming for. To be clear, this is an executive order saying that DOJ is going to be seeking, still requires judges, still require state and federal judges on board to, a vigorous argument from the other side, from the ACLU and other disability rights organizations, no doubt, that will protect these things. And again, I'm saying, just you know, because it's written in an executive order doesn't mean that these cases are reversed. I

0:24:57 Jenessa: That case is still going to be one of the biggest obstacles to this that case says very clearly that if it is determined this person does not need an institutional setting you have to get them into a community setting uh

0:25:15 Matt: Let's move on before we give them any ideas. Maybe they haven't thought of that one.

0:25:18 Jenessa: Let's oh god I

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0:26:58 Matt: The next one is other actual item of business is to provide assistance to state and local governments through technical guidance, grants, or other legally available means for the identification, adoption, and implementation. And here's an expression I hadn't heard before of maximally flexible civil commitment. What does that mean?

0:27:15 Jenessa: Don't know just the worst the worst it's they mean civil as opposed to criminal maximally what I don I think what they mean is the most we can get away with between the federal and state laws oh god that's how I'm reading it as,

0:27:20 Matt: Flexible sounds very bad. I don't want it. Right. That's what it sounds like. No, I like my bungee cables maximally flexibly, but not my civil commitments. Treatment and quote unquote, step down treatment standards. What is a step down treatment standard?

0:27:42 Jenessa: So this is rough. Is a general term in medicine. It comes up a lot in addiction treatment. You at the highest level of needing to be in a hospital, but then when you're getting better, we can, imagine this was just like, I don't know, you had a surgery or something. You start out in the hospital and then maybe you could go to a rehab facility and then then maybe you can go home. You could think of that with addiction too. Some people go leave your home, go stay at this place. I can't trust myself.

0:28:11 Jenessa: And then work their way back into the community. That's not the only solution for substance use disorder, but is a option that some people pursue. So they're stepping down as they go like down in level of restriction. So this is literally suggesting that you give the authority figure running that, after you've been civilly forced into this, maximum flexibility to determine whether you're ready to step down. You're a grown adult and you're not consenting to treatment and it's just like, you're nicht ready. You're going to be here now. Like,

0:28:47 Matt: Is all concern trolling about the homeless and about addiction and mental illness. They're trying to make it sound like this is going to be the real ones to fight the root causes. The root causes apparently are only addiction and mental health. And again, I understand those are major contributors to homelessness, but point isn't really to emphasize the humanity of these people. It's to get them off the street.

0:29:06 Matt: That is what I'm getting from this. So the solution is to get then into long -term institutional treatment. We move on here, I just wanted to ask you about the history of long - term institutional treatment as a solution to mental illness. Because we don't have, as far as I know, what we grew calling mental institutions. It's not really a thing the same way, right? There are certainly civil commitment facilities, but this idea of sort of long -term what they used to call asylums, right.

0:29:29 Matt: I remember growing up, I always heard that Ronald Reagan was responsible for essentially ending institutional mental health care. What is the status and what would this mean if we dumped a bunch of federal money into supporting the institutionalization of homeless most people sure

0:29:44 Jenessa: You brought this up to me and that that was kind of new to me. I'm slightly younger than you are, and I had not heard as much about that whole process that went on. But basically, we used to have this process where, yeah, were institutionalized all the time for literally anything. Often, you know, your teenage daughter gets pregnant and you don't want anybody to know, oh, she's got a mental illness, send her away um with the most mild intellectual disability you know a read into the story of rosemary kennedy one of the kennedys and she was living her life doing fine until she started you know trying to live her life as an adult and have any level of independence and she was lobotomized and institutionalized like has been used against women people of color gay gay people, anybody who was doing anything you didn't like. Was also used. You ever heard of the ugly laws?

0:30:09 Matt: They institutionalized ugly people okay

0:30:42 Jenessa: Much. It's unsightly beggar ordinances. They got called ugly laws for a reason. It was literally what this is. It is, I don't want to look at you. You shouldn't be on the sidewalk because I don t want to look at you and there was a san francisco law in 1867 it was illegal for quote any person who is diseased named mutilated or deformed in any way so as to be unsightly or disgusting object to expose himself or herself to public view you're gross and I don't want to to look at you. So get out of my face.

0:30:45 Matt: Don't know okay what all of this is yeah I've never heard of that uh don't you have a first amendment right to be ugly yeah

0:31:27 Jenessa: Okay. You're going to love this because the last time an ugly law was ever actually attempted to be enforced, it was in 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska, a cop wanted to arrest a homeless guy and was struggling to find a reason and they find one. And he's like, yeah, he's got scars on his face. He's ugly. Ugly law. Here we go. And the judge challenging it. This is my favorite quote of all time. He is asking him to define ugly. And he says, ugly and who isn't? Does the law mean that every time my neighbor's funny looking kids ask for something, I should have them arrested? So like was literally what was happening it was like oh you have any sort of visible disability that's gross and I don't want to look at you and now it's illegal it's illegal for me to look you get off the street what's funny is the san francisco law if you were found guilty of that you weren't sent to jail you were sent to the poor house which I've always heard that expression and I didn't know what it was and it turns out it's like affordable affordable housing. They sent you to, they had housing first, basically.

0:32:08 Matt: Pretty much weren't they also work camps that like they would have you doing something going to labor?

0:32:40 Jenessa: Sometimes. Yeah. I mean, it's not great. Like it wasn't, I don't want to portray it as a positive thing, but like, yeah. So we were basically just institutionalizing anyone we didn't want to look at or think about or who was annoying us. And then, you know, it's portrayed as and and did sometimes serve the function of this person has a health issue, they need assistance, let's put them in this facility and take care of them. Most of the time, early history, it was abusive. It was terrible. Hospitals now have like wings that take care of people. But there was this big movement right the like late 80s where a lot of mental health institutions did shut down. The problem is we didn't implement the community based solutions, which was like the right answer, right? It's like, oh, you shouldn't be behind a locked door. You can live in our community safely. You just need a little extra help. Like so many people um just had a lot of people just dumped out onto the street with nothing and like that's not what we were asking for actually um we were actually saying actually like this is a bad way to do it let's do a good way um it's kind of like a fight between um carter passed some laws that were like trying to help and then reagan dismantles it and And it's just a hot mess, basically. You're 30s, 40s, that's kind of the era you grew up in is like, we didn't know a world where everybody was just, oh, there you go. Grandma's going in an asylum and you'll never see him again. Like, that was not a thing we grew up with. But it was very common. It was extremely common and it was not a tool to help people. People it was a political tool to oppress people yes

0:34:23 Matt: Well, yeah, they're warehousing people, right? They're just

0:34:25 Jenessa: Yeah

0:34:25 Matt: Throwing them away. And so, I mean, I think maybe we can do a little better than the settings being you lock people up indefinitely or they live on the street. I feel like there has to be something in between there.

0:34:26 Jenessa: Obviously

0:34:36 Matt: I'm just, again, creative radical leftist here, but maybe let's do a lot more. I read this, I get that's pretty much what what I was assuming they're talking about, is bringing back the asylums, bringing back long -term institutions or people, whether or not they actually need the treatment and whether or not you're going to be reviewing if they need to stay there, you're just going to get them off the street.

0:34:34 Jenessa: Right like my god

0:34:53 Matt: And talked to Chase Abodin a couple of weeks ago, and his entire term in office was undone by property developers who didn't think that he was doing enough to warehouse the unhoused, to get the off the street, whatever it took. And he kept saying, that's not my job. I'm the DA. I mean, I can't solve these social ills that are causing homelessness, but that was enough to get exactly who was behind it. There's no question. And we have Grants Pass last year from the Supreme Court. And we reviewed Grants Pass when it came out, but that essentially cleared the way for local and state governments to criminalize homelessness, essentially, to criminalize sleeping in the street in a way that we talked about at the time could be pretty bad. And I think that's where we're heading here. Did want to provide a little political context as well, because this has been very emboldening for some of the worst people on earth. Really have to do this. Godwin's Law is out the window, of course, so we have to bring up the Nazis. I'm not bringing up the Nazi. Kyle Langford, who's now the leading Republican candidate for governor of California, brought it up. He actually posted a picture of himself at Auschwitz.

0:34:53 Jenessa: Yeah mm -hmm oh yeah yeah come

0:35:54 Matt: Lankford posted a picture of himself in front of Auschwitz and there are a lot of really funny jokes that can be made in this situation when you're talking about Auschwitz. Lankferd said that this was his 0% unemployment plan. And himself with a picture and the famous Gates of Auschwitz about the German works will set you free. Also had another post a a while back about his German ancestry when he's visiting Germany, about how basically suggesting Auschwitz was the right thing to do.

0:35:57 Jenessa: On what is wrong with people all right whatever I

0:36:20 Matt: Republican candidate for California governor. About I California politics. I didn't mean to say leading. I have no idea how well she's doing and he should drop out obviously after that. Just a recent example. Again, there's been more and more of this kind of thing where people are flirting with the idea of saying that maybe Hitler did nothing wrong and everything was fine, and maybe we can go back to those kinds of solutions. I wanted to point out that, again, I hate to do this because I have to. This is very dark, especially leading into what I'm going to talk about after this. The Third Reich started rounding up the homeless into to camps within months of taking power in 1933. It was a very important part of their plan. Started designating people as social undesirables, as social outcasts, beggars, very much like what you're saying about the ugly laws, designating people as beggars and getting them off the streets. Not going to say this right, but essentially calling them Volksschrödinger, which is some variation of social outcast. Ended up sterilizing about 400,000 people, which is something the Supreme Court said we can't do to people anymore, for now. Maybe that's one of the things they want to challenge. The reason I really wanted to mention this is because that evolved within seven years into the program known as Aktion T4, which was kind of the early test run of the Holocaust. Don't know. I think there were at least maybe 200,000 or 300,000 people were murdered, just straight up killed, people who were in institutional care. Half of them were coming from church-run asylums. And the church took a pretty strong stand against this when they realized what was going on. They would call these things transfers. They would just transfer them to an execution, basically. Can see how in seven years, this is why I want to talk about it and why I was so concerned when I saw this order. Have to keep thinking about where things go. And when we talk about ICE being the Gestapo, I'm not saying they're exactly like the Gestapos in 1938. I'm saying they were like the Gestapo in 1933, when they started to centralize state and federal and local power or under the auspices of Adolf Hitler, right? Under one guy. That's very dangerous. And when they started to broaden their mission, which is very much what ISIS is starting to do. Is why I wanted to talk about the next thing, which was Alligator Alcatraz. But we should take a break and we'll come back and talk about how these things tie together. I wish this were unrelated. I don't wish I could say that this story just is something else that was on my mind. But as soon as I saw this executive order we just talked about, I realized we have to really talk about Alligator Alcatraz, which again, as we've talked about on this program before, is the official name designated by the government in... there are two major pending challenges to the concept of alligator Alcatraz. We should explain what it is very quickly. They note in a footnote in the complaint, the facility was originally referred to as the Collier-Dade Transition and Training Detention Center, but defendants have officially renamed it Alligator Alcatrazz. Also, they note an interesting history I wasn't familiar with, that there's a racist trope in Florida of something called gator bait. They

0:36:28 Jenessa: You'd think gross what oh

0:38:55 Matt: Would talk about black people as gator bait. So that is actually, yeah, it's already a known known racist term. Of course, this is in the middle of a swamp in the Everglades. And that is actually the challenge that I think may actually quickly succeed as an environmental challenge. It turns out the alligators might have more rights than the people and the other animals, but whatever it takes, honestly. This thing, I want to be clear, this wasn't necessarily in my radar as a thing that could happen because my imagination for evil just, it turns out, has been challenged again and again. It's not as broad as it could be. Was fully prepared for the federal government to build more detention facilities, and especially for private industry, which as we've talked about is making real bank right now, building

0:38:58 Jenessa: My god god oh why would

0:39:33 Matt: Out massive private camps. We know that ICE was just authorized to build out 125,000 beds. Going to be a network of detention centers that is far beyond what we have right now within the next year or two. What I didn't reckon on was the states spending their own money to do this, to build immigration detention facilities. Because why would the states do that? That is not something states...

0:39:52 Matt: Yes. Presumably the people of Florida have $450 million could go somewhere else, but it costs $450 million. Now they are counting on, and Trump has promised that at least, I think 200 million, but I think they're hoping on more of the $450 billion that was spent to build this thing is going to be repaid by FEMA, which you might remember there was a big thing. Making a big deal about how the Biden administration has set aside money for shelters, for migrant shelters for when the people were coming over.

0:39:52 Jenessa: You want

0:40:19 Matt: About how they're going to hotels and that they're wasting all this money. They're making a big point of saying, instead of what Biden was doing where they're putting up in hotels, we're going to put them where they belong behind chain-link fences in camps we built in eight weeks. So gonna use this FEMA money. But again, this is not DHS and DHS isn't running the thing and they don't have jurisdiction over it. And here's where it gets really bad. Of the people in there, of course, tried to file bond motions to challenge their detention because Because obviously they presumably are in some sort of immigration custody, except they're not. They're in state custody. It's very confusing. Nobody knows what's going on. Here's the problem. Miami Immigration Court, which should have jurisdiction over them, wrote back and said, we don't have jurisdiction of alligator alcatraz. You're gonna have to check with the facility to find out what they're going to do. They've been deporting people from the facility, but they don't let lawyers in to talk to them. We don't know what's happening. We assume that they've been deporting who already have orders. I assume they're gonna find some way to get these people immigration court. I have no idea what's going on. The ACLU doesn't either. That's

0:40:17 Jenessa: God yeah oh

0:41:17 Matt: This complaint is pretty straightforward, and it's challenging their denial of counsel and their denial OF any kind of jurisdiction in immigration court This is scary. This is very bad. I'm not going to sugarcoat this at all. This is a state building an immigration detention facility at its own expense, hoping for some reimbursement at some point from the federal government, having it run by ICE, which is so strange. And having the immigration court say they have no authority over these people, which again, I don't know what this means. And the Florida Emergency Management Agency, Florida FEMA. Yeah.

0:41:44 Jenessa: Literally does what that that

0:41:50 Matt: This No. I mean, I do not think it is an emergency, no.

0:41:51 Jenessa: Isn't people aren't an emergency that's

0:41:57 Matt: There are certainly emergencies happening, which they detail in the facility because lack of medical care, and these are not long-term facilities. Are being turned away and told there's no way for them to come in, nobody's been able to get in. So it's virtually impossible, they're saying, to file documents, to talk to attorneys, to challenge things, to fail habeas claims. Effectively have no way to contest their detention. So this is what this is going right now. So there's this lawsuit, and in parallel, there's an environmental lawsuit saying this thing was built too quickly without the appropriate permits and is on endangered wetlands and in challenging species. So that actually, as a matter of, might be a faster way to challenge the whole thing. As I said, maybe the animals have more rights, whatever it takes, I guess.

0:42:34 Matt: But there are a lot of questions around all of this. I don't even really understand what their legal theory is. Florida doesn't care. Ron DeSantis just wants to say he's doing this. Is already planning to open a second one at Fort blending to do exactly the same thing. No alligators involved in this one. Noem has said that Alligator Alcatraz should be a model for what they're going to be doing going forward.

0:42:53 Matt: And she wants to see more of this kind of thing, of states taking the initiative to build detention facilities. So I bring this up because these two things in my mind can't be unconnected. Because the research shows that the more that we engage in mass deportation, and the more that we push forward with ICE at the new volume it's going to be operating at within the next year or two, a lot of people are going to voluntarily remove themselves from the United States before they get caught. That's just what's going happen.

0:42:53 Jenessa: Well it's my god yeah

0:43:18 Matt: You don't really need research to show you that, but there is research about that, that about a third of the population at some point is probably going to vacate. You're going to end up with this massive immigration enforcement infrastructure that might have a little less to do than it does right now within the next few years. So a really scary story recently in the Washington Post about the Trump administration saying that they want to essentially have a post -9 -11 mentality in domestic immigration enforcement, that they want to identify the enemy within. And of course, we remember those of us of a certain age, the years after 9 -11, when there were terrorists hiding around every corner, and they were going after putting FBI informants in every mosque, right? If that's what we're talking about, about trying to identify domestic enemies, it is going to get to the point that I've been warning about for a while, where they are going to start identifying anybody who opposes ICE or is making problems for ICE or ist complaining about them as enemies. They're going to start to, I think, this is my prediction, I really hope I'm wrong. I hope I'M wrong about this more than I've ever been wrong about anything, that they they will begin to broaden the ambit of ICE to just being a general sort of national security agency. They've already done this. They already reclassified it to national security agency under the first Trump administration, which actually makes it harder to get FOIA materials from them because it's national security.

0:43:17 Jenessa: God forbid we know what they're up to what

0:44:29 Matt: And are on a hiring blitz right now with massive cash bonuses. They have actually just lifted the age requirements so that anybody from 18 to whatever, including senior citizens, can join.

0:44:40 Jenessa: Was the old age the

0:44:41 Matt: It's actually up to 40. I didn't know that until recently. But But yeah, they had like a maximum 40, I think, for most of the enforcement jobs. So we can get a lot of Fox News grandpas on the street. But the of this challenge to, again, what I have to continue to call, and I want to call it gator get -mo. I think that's a much more appropriate, if you're going to give it a dumb name, because it is a Guantanamo Bay situation inside the United States. That's what we're looking at.

0:45:03 Jenessa: If nobody can get in including lawyers like a military camp now like

0:45:06 Matt: Nobody's charged with anything. Like there's no actual charges. There's nothing happening. They're just sitting there and they're deporting the ones who have deportation orders. They're transferring over to ICE custody. That's as much as I can tell us what's going on. So federal judge needs to set this straight. And I think that is going to happen. For the environmental case, we've got Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami. And then for the challenge to the facility itself, we have Judge Rodolfo Ruiz as a Trump appointee, and both demanding answers. Brees recently said that we need to get to the bottom of the interplay between the federal and state authorities on who is actually running this thing. So that's the kind of questions I do want him to be asking. Strong precedent on this, and we need to have them shut this down.

0:45:41 Matt: Because with Kristi Noem saying she wants other states to do this, she said other governors are interested in doing this kind of thing, we're going to be on a quick decline here. It's a rapid and slippery slope.

0:45:49 Jenessa: I totally agree because we're gonna run into the exact issue on the other end of, oh, we're trying to get all these people off the street and we're now institutionalizing people except, oh shoot, we shut down all those mental health asylums. What do we do if we want to institutionalize people and we don't have any institutions? We've got this perfectly good concentration camp sitting here.

0:46:14 Jenessa: It'd be a shame to let it go to waste. Like, I absolutely see a connection here where this could get really bad.

0:46:14 Matt: Pretty much, pretty much. Yeah. It's hard not to. And I, you know, again, I don't want to get dimmery. I don'T want to go to the worst possible scenario, but we have to be prepared for the idea that we're creating. I mean, first of all, we're giving ICE more money than any other federal law enforcement agency. They're about to receive so much money. And we're going to be building out the largest detention infrastructure that we've ever had for civil commitment. I mean, and immigration is civil commitment. And when you're talking about how you don't have to get a lawyer and how you can be held indefinitely, I'm thinking, of course, of the stuff I work with because it's the same stuff. You've got this policy, which we didn't even get into the rest of it about how they want to encourage state and local municipalities to use every possible tool at their disposal to get people off the street, including enforcing every criminal statute they can and urban squatting and camping and loitering and drug use and everything they can do to get People off the streets.

0:47:05 Jenessa: Gonna be bad.

0:47:06 Matt: Not good. Good. It's not good.

0:47:08 Jenessa: Fingers crossed. Maybe those challenges will stop or slow this down.

0:47:13 Matt: I hope so. Let's take a quick break and come back and we'll footnote, a little little more fun on the way out here.

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0:48:47 Matt: Right. So So just coincidentally, within the last few weeks, two different federal judges have issued decisions that are full of things that I can only call hallucinations, which of course AI is famous for. Now, in neither of these cases have the parties used the expression AI or artificial intelligence. They're being very polite about it. The media is because if you know how AI works, and I think those of us who've used chat GPT, and also if you've been watching the scourge of lawyers who've been filing with suspicious citations, you might remember we had a footnote a few months ago where we talked about a talk show host who was sort of like randomly thrown into a chat GPT answer about a lawsuit, right? You've got all of these different citations that just completely get the cases wrong or make up cases because it thinks that's what you want to hear. Oh, you want an answer about this legal question? Well, this case doesn't exist, but here's one that should exist or does answer your question, right? Talk about these judges. We'll start with Henry Wingate in Mississippi. Unfortunately, these are both Democrat appointed judges who are doing good things. I don't want to pick on them too much, but I do want to say, don't do

0:49:49 Matt: This. Please stop. This can't happen. Then. The defendants filed an unopposed motion to clarify his order. So what he did is he issued an order as a DEI case, and he was trying to protect DEI policies. The facts don't matter that much for the purposes of what we're talking about. He issues an order on the 20th of July, and then he corrects it on the 23rd of July without any explanation. And the defendents are like, hold on, what was that about? What was that other order about? You need need to explain So they file a motion to clarify, and I'll just read in relevant part. TRO order identifies incorrect plaintiffs and defendants, recites allegations that do not appear in the operative complaint and or are not supportive of record evidence, identifies, as quoted excerpts, certain terms that do not appear the language of the bill, and relies upon the purported declaration testimony of four individuals whose declarations do not appear in the record for this case." That is a lot of hallucinations. Added other parties plaintiffs and defendants. Made a testimony from people who don't exist, and so they're not asking to have the TRO dissolved. This is the AG's office. They just want clarification to correct the record.

0:50:43 Jenessa: Like not even close is even after he corrected it those errors are still there no

0:50:57 Matt: Basically, they're like, we need something on the record about what happened with this weird order. And this is an unopposed motion. Both parties wanted this. And so his answer to this, it's obviously very embarrassing because there's no question, unless he had a law clerk who was just absolutely, I don't know, on acid or something. I don' t know. It's just, no, no.

0:51:14 Jenessa: This is not a mistake a human makes it's we make all kinds of mistakes we don't do that I

0:51:19 Matt: 11, We don't completely, I mean, especially 11 of the 12 plaintiffs, the judge named in the TRO have never been named plaintiffs in the case. That's really bad. Bad. Of the state officials named as defendants. Neither official is or never has been a named defendant in this case. So on August 1st, Judge Wingate issues a response to this motion for clarification. And he says, yeah, no, we already corrected the order. I'm not explaining myself.

0:51:26 Jenessa: Mean yeah cool

0:51:45 Matt: Like, basically, the parties are conceding that they don't want to dissolve or modify the TRO. They just want an explanation of this previous thing. Motion seeks relief unrelated to any substantive dispute presently before this court. Moreover, courts are not obligated to preserve superseded orders containing clerical errors once corrected. Is such a weird situation because obviously the parties don't want to specifically tell the judge, we know that you use chat GPT or whatever for this, right? But clearly something is wrong and we need to have an explanation.

0:51:43 Jenessa: Thanks I mean well and now I'm going to be worried that everything he does in the future like now I don't trust the other order like do you know my name because you just put out a document that didn't have my name in it oh

0:52:20 Matt: Not great. Right. It really does make you wonder. And I have a theory about this I'll get to after I talked about Judge Neal's in New Jersey. So this is the next one. And this all happened, again, within the space of a few weeks, just basically at the same time, which makes me wonder. I'll get to this. But in case, on July 22nd, this is a pharmaceutical case. The details don't really matter. The defendants wrote a letter to Judge Niels, which is on the record, and they wished to bring to the court's attention a series of errors in the opinion, including three instances in which outcomes comes of cases cited in the opinion were misstated. Numerous instances in which quotes were mistakenly attributed to decisions that do not contain such quotes. So the court may consider whether amendment or any other action should be taken. Now, the original order is still on the record. He hasn't fixed it yet. They go through in painful detail with six examples, like very bad examples of things that are completely out of pocket, just don't exist. And these are cases, quotes from cases that don't exist, holdings that are completely wrong, things that no judge in their right mind who's actually writing the opinion would get wrong. Again, this is such an awkward situation as a litigant that you have to come before the judge and be like, yeah, we know what's going on here, but can you fix it? It. Let's just do this and never speak of it again, maybe.

0:53:28 Jenessa: Uh how do I politely say you screwed up in the worst way possible like well

0:53:35 Matt: And I mean, to be honest, I'm sorry, but these judges should be reported to the bar. Like this is not, well, I guess I'm not sorry. If I did it, I'd be reported at the bar and it's so much worse when you're a judge making law, issuing TROs that are based in nothing.

0:53:49 Jenessa: Because people feel less comfortable challenging you like imagine a less bad version of this where there's like one or two little errors like you might not feel comfortable calling them out on it and then it's just on the record forever yeah

0:54:04 Matt: But it's a hallucination and we We all know it, right? But this is so much worse in both of these cases, because they're just wrong, dramatically wrong, especially in that first one, we were getting the facts wrong. Sounds like this one, it was at least just the law, but I mean, not just the law, just that.

0:54:16 Jenessa: I well that's all made up now anyway right so oh god so

0:54:23 Matt: But on on July 23rd, the next day after receiving it, he puts out an order on the docket. I'm just going to read from the doocket. The court is in receipt a defendant's counsel's letter. On June 30th, the court issued an opinion and order. That opinion and ordered were entered in error. And accordingly, the court directs the clerk of courts to remove the opinion from the docket. A subsequent opinion and order will follow. And so far, I don't think they have. So yeah, like it never happened, right? And that's why the previous parties wanted some explanation. So there was some explanation for the record going forward about how this happened, right? And I do think as litigants, you're entitled to that. I think you should know. You this is judicial ego, obviously. I know who works in a government office has recently had, they've been given the opportunity in their office to use a free pilot program from Westlaw, which essentially is ChatGPT for lawyers. And she's been testing it out. This person that I know does a lot of appellate work, which is very important for the kind of stuff we're talking about here. Been kind of doing the John Henry thing where you put the man against the machine and you kind of see who wins. You know John Henry with the steam?

0:54:44 Jenessa: Normally you don't remove stuff from the docket you just file the correction right it's that's weird to just delete it from yeah right right know about this

0:55:32 Matt: Oh, yeah, no. Well, it didn't end well for John Henry, but that's the classic folk tale of the who was pitted against the locomotive to drill through a mountain and he basically beat the train, but he died of a heart attack.

0:55:43 Jenessa: This sounds vaguely familiar yeah

0:55:45 Matt: Anyway, yeah. So man against machine to try to see who can write a better brief and who can come up with these things. And I mean, all over the place, this thing is not ready for prime time. There is no way that lawyers, especially government lawyers, should be using any of this because something as simple as explain this statute to me, right? Give me a rundown of how the statute is used in practice. It did is it just did the one over in the next section in that statute.

0:56:07 Matt: It didn't do the one they asked for. Just very confidently goes ahead and briefs the wrong part of the statute when they asked a very specific part, right? The same thing, though, with hallucinating cases and getting holdings of cases wrong and making up cases and citations. There is no reason that anybody should be taking chances with AI right now. And honestly, we should not be turning our legal brains over to AI anyway. And that's an ongoing theme in these footnotes, unfortunately, is it just does not end well. I understand we're all all under time constraints. We're under pressure. Know, being a judge is hard, but you have law clerks, right? I mean, we have an endless supply of people graduated from law school that can help you put this stuff together. You don't have to do it yourself. You do not have to use ChatGPT.

0:56:45 Jenessa: There are tons of people graduating law school who are looking for a job and uh yeah the market's saturated like just get help like

0:56:54 Matt: Mean it does make you wonder if maybe that's what happened here though. Maybe there were some clerks that took the easy way out. I'm guessing it's more likely.

0:57:01 Jenessa: But all know the clerk does 90 of the work and then the judge checks it right but that Would imply the judge didn't even check it oh

0:57:09 Matt: Sure, Sure. Yeah. Didn't check their citations. Or if you're talking about major cases, the judge should know what the holdings are and they got the holdlings wrong. That's a problem too. That means there's not a lot of supervision going on. So either way, this needs to stop. This is a red alert. We cannot have, especially in the federal courts, we can't have the stuff being written by machines. I've been bringing up AI stuff in the footnotes a lot for a reason because they don't necessarily merit main stories, but they have to be watched. Watched. It's bad enough when lawyers are doing it, but we have hit this new Rubicon moment when judges are doing two within the space of a few weeks. So stop it, judges, cut it out.

0:57:45 Jenessa: Yeah when some random lawyer does it you're like well you know we can't all be great but um when it's judges I mean that is like just a whole other level

0:57:55 Matt: I mean, when I saw the one, it's like, well, we have to talk about this. And then I saw there was a second one today. A second chat GPT has hit the system. Awesome. Yeah. So here we are. We have a generation potentially, and I'm going to sound so old when I say things like this, but a generation that's been going to school and using it, right? And maybe getting through law school using it. So who knows? But this should not be the norm in lawyering. This is very bad for all of us. Let's just stop that.

0:58:21 Jenessa: Cut it out train your brain it's good for your brain to go look through information and do it yourself like you the act of doing is learning so like just do it definitely if you're a student and you're learning my god just no matter how hard it is and no matter how much time it takes it's it's how you learn the things in your if you don't do it the first time you're never gonna build those connections in your brain like please don't yeah

0:58:46 Matt: That's right. Can learn a lot just from sitting down and reading any given case all the way through, actually reading it, not asking for a summary, right? Not getting the brief, not getting the asking chat GPT to tell you what it means.

0:58:51 Jenessa: Breed take some notes mm -hmm yeah

0:58:57 Matt: Just exercise that part of your brain that reads long form. It's all I'm asking. Well, I appreciate your your ire about this because it certainly upsets me. This is great. Is a good start for Rapid Response Friday. We didn't even get to everything we were going to talk to, but that's all right. We got some important stuff here. So I it. We'll be back again on Monday with talking about Project 2025 and what is going on six months later with that.

0:59:06 Jenessa: Oops fun.

0:59:21 Matt: And then we're going to pick up our series that I'm very excited about, talking about some of the better Supreme Court cases from history that people should know about, just to kind of cheer people up and remind them that the Supreme Court can be good sometimes and can be again. But I I think that'll do it for today. So we'll see you soon. Right, later.

0:59:37 Jenessa: Bye.

0:59:41 Clip: This has been Opening Arguments, produced by Thomas and Lydia Smith, with editing help from Peter Baird. The intro is by Thomas Smith. This outro is by Matt Cameron. Support the show at patreon .com slash law. Contact us through Patreon or openarguments at gmail .com. Make sure to follow our blue sky at OpenArgs. But most of all, please share the show. Thanks for listening.

1:00:14 Jenessa: It? I can't tell if it's me or you there's something that sounds like a freaking woodpecker I don't know just gross and I don't want to to look at you. So get out of my face.

1:00:19 Matt: Does that mean? Maybe I shouldn't name her. Hold on. Scratch that.