Did a Federal Judge Really Just Shutter Alligator Alcatraz?

Transcript

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

0:00:01 Matt: And we have the president trying to clear out the executive branch and replace everybody with loyalists so he can do whatever he wants. This is how you lose the confidence of the global markets forever. Jenessa Seymour, happy Friday.

0:00:31 Jenessa: Nothing going on today. Totally chill in the news.

0:00:33 Matt: Yeah, we had to really dig to try to find things to talk about today, obviously. Just a very normal country proceeding on without us.

0:00:42 Jenessa: My god. I appreciated your, uh, Maxwell coverage. That was interesting. Oh boy. Yeah, super cool that we're just, like, letting one of our worst ever sex criminals just possibly get a pardon. Hope not. We'll see.

0:00:51 Matt: I thought it was worth taking some time, and we certainly did take some time. Three hours and 20 minutes, yeah.

0:01:04 Matt: I was just wondering as a thought experiment today, what if she, instead of sounding like Dame Judi Dench, what if she sounded like, I don't know, Fran Drescher or something? How much different would that be?

0:01:10 Jenessa: I really do do you think the way people talk like it unfortunately sways people god it's really frustrating she's a master manipulator she sounds so chill and relaxed while she lies all day every day good

0:01:20 Matt: It does. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That kind of voice we're used to hearing in golden age movies. She has that really classic aristocratic sound to her. So yeah, it goes a long way.

0:01:32 Jenessa: Lord yeah yeah mid -atlantic almost yeah

0:01:37 Matt: We did a very extended Vapid Response Wednesday to respond to the entire concept of the proffer session or so -called proffer session. It didn't really meet the definition of any kind of proffer session any more than some of the things we're going to talk about made the legal definitions of the things that the Trump administration says they are. It's kind of a theme here. You know, as always, we are challenged to report on and to try to explain the best we can law in the news. And, you know, back when this program began back in 2016 or so, talking about law in the news was, you Know, law in the news, because you're just kind of explaining things that are happening. But now we have to try To explain our best about things that are happening. And we can't pretend that any of this is normal or working the way it's supposed to. We're going to do our best here to talk about a few subjects that are completely novel, novel, I guess. Everything we're talking about today is just out of whack, just out of line, out of pocket, completely not how things are done. Very much like the so -called proper session that we spent three hours and 20 minutes talking about. So we've got today an update on the Kilmer Arburgo -Garcia case. There's been some big news on that. I want to make sure everybody understands kind of where things are actually at, what's normal, what's not. We've got some great news out of the so called alligator alcatraz, or as as I'm calling it, Gator Gitmo case in Florida. We've got some big win there that I think may actually stick. Pretty much came down the way we talked about it, how it would. And a big main story though, is that for the first time, the president in US history is trying to fire a board member of the Federal Reserve. And this sounds like the kind of thing the president might be able to do if you don't know much about the Federal Reserve or the president, but it's actually catastrophic potentially for the global economy. So we've got to talk about that. I think we've all learned a little bit before coming into this one.

0:01:45 Jenessa: It's not real no oi yep Yep.

0:03:17 Matt: And then just to kind of balance things out, we've got a fun and I think very inspiring footnote from a federal judge in Maryland who is really setting the government straight. And I think I'm going to argue this is a model judicial decision. This is very much how our judges should be standing up to executive fascism right now from the Trump administration. So we've Got a Full One today. We should take a break and come back. Well, let's just get to it.

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0:03:43 Matt: So I'm just going to start out with a reasonably brief brief update on the case of Kilmar Abrego -Garcia. My understanding is he does like to go by Abregos. I'm going to try to stick with that. Yeah, we've been talking about this case since the beginning. You can go back to one of my favorite episode titles, Kafka, Esk, from April 4th, when we introduced the Kilmar Abrego - Garcia deportation back when he was challenging his removal to the SECOD. But just a very quick reminder that this was somebody who already had a deportation order, but it came with an order of withholding of removal to El Salvador. So he's not allowed to be reported to his home country of El Salvador, but he does have a standing order. This is a thing that happens sometimes. It's short of asylum that we guarantee people protection from return to their home countries. But if the government's able to arrange it, they could send you to another country. Now, usually in past administrations, it's only the people with the most serious criminal records where ICE would take them up on the joke and actually try to send you somewhere else where you've never been before. Most of the time, most people who have orders of withholding and removal can remain here as long as they don't have criminal records. They can check in with ICE occasionally. They get work permits, they get to stay here, but they can't become residents or citizens. They're just kind of in this permanent limbo, but THEY DON'T HAVE TO GO BACK TO THEIR HOME COUNTRIES.

0:04:48 Jenessa: Similarity to asylum there is unlike an asylee, I think they call it. They are just fully here legally because they are seeking asylum under U .S. law, international law, all of that. These individuals are deportable. They're not here legally, but because of a determination nation that it would not be safe to send them home. We're not going to do that. That would also violate international law. But because they're deportable, none of us even really thought about this. They could go somewhere else.

0:05:22 Jenessa: I misunderstood that. I thought he just had a hold where he just couldn't be deported because I hadn't considered some other country. Tree.

0:05:30 Matt: Not that simple, unfortunately. Withholding or removal is actually guaranteed under UN convention the same way that asylum is. It's a higher standard. The judge has to find it's more likely than not that you'll face persecution based on one of the enumerated grounds. And there are any number of reasons you might get withholding instead of asylum. The two big ones are either that you have a serious conviction, which of course he does not, or that you applied for for asylum after one year and coming here. And I think that was the situation in this case. There've been a lot of twists in this cause, but as I think everybody listening knows by now, he was actually brought back when the Supreme Court ordered that he be brought back because the government admitted that they had deported him by accident. This is just not contested at this point, that it was a mistake. I have some arguments about maybe how mistaken this actually was, and I think they might've been pushing it and actually doing this on purpose, but he was sent down with that plane load of people. And again, I just want to emphasize there have only been, I mean, too many, but there have been only about two or three plane loads of people that were sent out of the sea cot. This has not been a regular occurrence. The maximum security prison in El Salvador that we've been talking about as sort of a test case to see if they can get away with it. It turns out that they really couldn't. Most of the people who were sent to the sea cod are now out. Most OF them went to Venezuela where they were from. Camar Obrega Garcia is the only Salvadoran to be returned. The other Salvadorans arguably from what I know, and we don't have a lot of public information about this, but many of them actually were gang members or known gang members. And we don'T know about some of the others, but there are about 30, I think, and still in there from El Salvador. But of course, because they're Salvadoran citizens, the government gets to do what they are going to do with them.

0:06:52 Matt: So cutting to this, though, he was brought back not because the Supreme Court officially, not because of Supreme Court ordered it, but because he was charged with smuggling violations. I erroneously referred to them before. I should be clear about this. I called it trafficking. There is a difference between trafficking and smuggling. Smuggling are people who want to be brought here. And they were trying to tie him in with this whole MS -13 smuggling operation. And it was, as we've discussed before, for absolute nonsense based on totally not credible sources who were clearly being pressured because they themselves were about to be facing deportation to the SECON. They're all Salvadorans with orders of deportation. So big mess. This has been called out by Judge Crenshaw and others in the Middle District of Tennessee where that case is pending, but there's also the habeas claims as to his detention that have been pending in Maryland. So he gets brought back and that case in front of Judge Zinnes is still ongoing with the habea claim in Maryland." So here's the a situation. This is where they put, the position they put him in as of last week was that if he could plead guilty to the nonsense charges of smuggling, federal smuggling which are based in nothing, they would guarantee that he could go to Costa Rica where they'd already arranged that he could take

0:07:57 Jenessa: Right.

0:07:58 Matt: Up residency in Costa Rica. If he did not, then they would immediately deport him to Uganda. Those were his options. Obviously, Camargo Garcia is Latino from El Salvador. Costa Rica would be a much more compatible place for him to live. It's going to be a lot closer to his culture and his language and his understanding of life. Uganda is a very different place. Not a lot of people who speak Spanish there. I represent a lot of people from Uganda, actually. I was just sitting down with one of them today, just before we recorded. And I love my Ugandan clients. It seems like a great country, but not where he's going to choose to live. He is asking, as is his right, for a credible fear interview to explain why he's afraid to return to, excuse me, not to return. See, I'm so used to saying this. He's afraid to go to Uganda because he's never been there and has no connections to it whatsoever. And he could be facing persecution for reasons we don't even know. And so Judge Zinnes, in this case ordered after the government's kind of attempts to stay and stay and stay and keep him in custody finally played out. He was released from custody, got to spend the weekend with his family, and then he was immediately ordered to report to ICE in Maryland for a check -in. Now, this is normal when you have a deportation order that you'd be reported and would be coming in for a cheque -in, especially when you've just been released. And they would usually put you on some kind of schedule where you're going to be continuing to return. And as long as you stay out of trouble and maintain an address and, you know, do the things you're supposed to do, then you're allowed to continue to check in. In. Under the normal course of business, if this were one of my clients, I'm pretty sure they would have allowed him to continue to check in. Because again, even though he's facing federal charges right now, he doesn't have a record.

0:09:15 Jenessa: Innocent until proven guilty, right?

0:09:17 Matt: Yeah, that could be justification to bring him in. But this is a very, very closely watched case around the world. He's not a flight risk. He has young kids. He's got every reason to stay in Maryland. But they took him in, and so he's back in custody. And this is exactly what I expected, honestly, based on the way this was all going. This is partly, I think, because he filed in his Tennessee criminal case, he filed a motion to dismiss for for vindictive and selective prosecution. He found that on the 19th. I mean, usually that kind of thing would be a joke, but this is real. I means, you can't argue. I mean, this is, yeah, for sure. You can show that they're just picking on me and that they're being extra harsh on me because they accidentally deported me and now they have to justify it and they brought me back with nonsense charges because they didn't want to comply with an order from the U .S. Supreme Court. I'm mean, that's pretty vindictve. That is certainly selective.

0:09:43 Jenessa: I mean, yeah. Those are really hard to win normally.

0:10:02 Jenessa: It seems so ego -driven to me that they just have this obsession with proving this This guy who made them look bad, who led to all these protests, we can do what we want, we can doing this to him one way or another, we're gonna do it eventually, to like, to try to put people down, that you're not gonna succeed in saving someone. I am optimistic that I see this as provable, if he can avoid getting deported until then. This seems to me, as a reflex, just super unusual that you would be told, if you plead guilty to something, you get your sweetheart deal as you get to go to a nice place. And if you don't, we're going to send you to a continent you've never been to. That can't be normal, right?

0:10:56 Matt: Negotiating immigration outcomes, or at least understandings of of what the recommendations are going to be. Now, we're past the point where it used to be the judge could actually recommend, you could include as part of your plea, that the judge would recommend immigration that you not be deported. And we're way past that, what they used to call the JRAD.

0:11:10 Matt: But you can have, I've heard of that before, as kind of built into a plea deal of the understanding with ICE is going to do the following. But, you know, he's under an order already. So it's just a matter of how they're going to execute that order. The Supreme Court has paved the way, as we've talked about before, to make third country deportations a lot easier than they were.

0:11:25 Matt: There is some built -in guaranteed due process. It is.

0:11:27 Jenessa: It still just seems so messed up to me in the same way that plea deals can be very coercive already for citizens. Like to say to somebody, confess and we will help you out to whatever extent that's legal I mean the moral justification is obviously gone from any of that

0:11:49 Matt: I'm a big fan of of Kafka. I've actually read pretty much everything that Kafka has written. And we throw the word Kafka -esque around a lot. And this is definitely a Kafka, if you're familiar with the plot of The Trial, the biggest Kafka book, probably. It's just a man who wakes up one day and he's hauled into court and he doesn't know why. He's never told the charges. He just keeps showing up and coming to court. And I've thought about that book a lot over the course of the years, working with immigration proceedings, but never quite like this. This is really something of one guy that they've just decided to pick out. Actually, from his motion to dismiss, he filed a supplement. I liked this. I'll just read this part here. He files his motion to dismiss on Tuesday. In the days afterward, the government took further coercive actions that leave little doubt that the entire federal government is engaged in a coordinated effort to punish Mr. Abrego for fighting back against its unlawful conduct. That is one of those things where you sound paranoid, but it turns out they all are out to get you. It did happen.

0:12:36 Jenessa: Normally every defendant says that but uh this time it might be real hmm

0:12:40 Matt: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've met a couple. There is actually, more on your side of things, I think there's something in the DSM, or if not in theDSM, it's at least mentioned somewhere. There's like a a disorder where you believe that the entire justice system is out to get you or the federal government is out the get you.

0:12:54 Matt: I've certainly met people that believe that there is a coordinated conspiracy against them. But unfortunately, the fact is that, as Hannah Arendt famously said, most of the people who are doing the most evil never set out to do evil. They're just following, you know, showing up for their jobs, drinking their coffee, typing up orders and sending it on to the next guy. But this is certainly a coordinated effort. There's no question about that. So we're back in a habeas docket. They have filed a motion to reopen. Now, remember, this is such a weird situation. I just never heard of anything like this before because they just they deport him by mistake. We've had people brought back when they've been deported by mistake. That stuff does happen. But they brought him back in with his order still pending. So he's filing a motion to reopen an immigration court to get his case back in front of the immigration judge because now he has a whole set of other claims that he could potentially put in front of an immigration judge.

0:13:35 Matt: So Judge Zenos is giving him time to allow that motion to re -open. The governor has agreed to that. And she's just ordered as of the day we're recording that he can't be removed before the next hearing on the 6th of October and that he has to be kept in Maryland. So that's good. So you can keep access to his family and attorneys. I say good, but he he should be with his family. I mean, it's just so tragic that he got a weekend after all this time. But he gave a really inspirational speech outside before they took him in. I mean, he seems like a really sweet guy. And he was saying that he thought for three months that nobody knew who he was or where he was. And here we were all talking about him this whole time.

0:14:08 Matt: That's part of the thing here that we're trying to do is keep the sunshine on and that we can all do is just know about these things and talk about them. So speaking of knowing about these things and talking about them, we've talked a couple of weeks ago about so-called alligator Alcatraz. I hate calling it that. But the official name, I've been looking so hard to try to find anything else to call it.

0:14:25 Jenessa: Literally the reporting on this people are going down there like it's tourism and buying t -shirts that say alligator alcatraz so like if you thought we couldn't stoop lower get ready oh

0:14:41 Matt: The Republican Party is selling beer koozies and t -shirts. And the whole point of all of this, giving a cute name like that and shoving people in the middle of a swamp, it's all dehumanizing. That's the point, is to make us see this all as just a fun thing that you can watch on TV. But The Official Name is the South Florida Soft -Sided Facility South. Soft -sided facility, e .g. tent city. It is at the Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport. And the airport thing is actually a really interesting part of this.

0:14:51 Jenessa: Of course okay yeah

0:15:07 Matt: So when we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about both of the lawsuits that were pending. The other one is still pending, I'll mention at the end here, but it's probably not going to be relevant anymore. It looks like it might be moot, we'll see. But there was an environmental challenge and there was a due process challenge. And I actually had said at the time, it seems like the environmental challenge is much more likely to work more quickly, that the alligators actually are going to have more rights than the people in the camp. I got no problem with that. I mean, we're talking about a very delicate ecosystem in the Everglades.

0:15:07 Jenessa: Yeah

0:15:31 Matt: But it It turns out this site has a lot more going on than I realized and a lot more history. It's super fascinating. So just, I'll try to run this down as quickly as I can. This site that this facility is on was originally supposed to be one of the country's largest airports. There was a proposal in the sixties, late sixties to build a massive, massive airport. And there was a study at the time that the Nixon administration did called the Leopold report that showed that it would inexorably destroy the South Florida ecosystem and the Everglades national park. If they built this airport, it would basically take out the Evergrades. This is a massive national push because epigoids are a very important part of Florida's ecosystem.

0:15:31 Jenessa: Mm -hmm mm

0:16:09 Matt: And this Big Cypress Swamp that this facility is in, this fight inspired legislation like the National Environmental Policy Act, which is actually what this suit was coming under, Clean Water Act, and an additional protection of the Endangered Species Act. This is huge push in the environmental law movement. So it's actually already a very significant site for environmental law. I didn't know that.

0:16:28 Matt: So the Big Cyprus National Preserve was created after this. It's 729 ,000 acres, and it also includes, very significantly for our conversation today, a lot of tribal land, about 100 ,000 acres of tribal land. So in 1982 and 98, the Miccosukee, and I'm sorry if I, I'm going to go with Miccoskee, I think that's correct, and Seminole people.

0:16:48 Jenessa: I looked it up and that's what many people on the internet said you never know if that's just a bunch of white people saying it, but I saw Mikusuki.

0:16:55 Matt: Okay, I'll go with that. I want to make sure we get this best we can. They have a long history with these wetlands. They actually literally saved them from the Trail of Tears because they went into hiding when Andrew Jackson was relocating everybody and managed to evade federal authorities in this giant swamp. This is a space that's sacred to them. It's not even just, you know, not an ancestral thing. It is upstream of tribal lands. And according to their filings, it would put 80 % of their homes, two schools and the government building at risk potentially. The reason the suit was bound to work is because Ron DeSantis built this in eight days, built the whole thing in eight days using an emergency executive order from 2023. I had heard heard about this executive order. I went back and found it and it is amazing. I mean, it's not just Trump who's doing things through emergency executive orders, it turns out. DeSantis used the pretext of some Cubans. And when I say some Cubians, I mean 45 Cubans, 45 people who showed up in the Keys. De Santis signed that up in executive order saying that the Biden border crisis, of course, is likely to constitute a major disaster. I therefore declare the state of emergency exists in the state of Florida. Now, of coarse, we all know states of emergency are are how authoritarians and fascists and dictators get things done.

0:18:06 Matt: We say we have to have a state of exception. We can't follow the laws as they exist. And one of the things that DeSantis said that they could do under this Executive Order 2303, which we'll link to, is that you could waive procedures and formalities otherwise required as to procurement and contracting, entering of contracts, and acquisition of facilities. So under this executive order, he basically is arguing that they can just build anywhere they want to, anytime, without, without, I guess, permits or contracts or following any of the state law.

0:18:06 Jenessa: State, federal, local, tribal sovereignty, just ignore it.

0:18:39 Matt: Right. All the laws. Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for Justice, they chose to do this on federal land, and there are still laws on federal ground. So it turns out that the National Environmental Protection Act, as I said, one of the things that actually came out of this fight over this exact spot, requires pretty extensive environmental studies, as you might imagine, before you build something like this, especially in a protected area. And you might be able to guess how many of those studies were done.

0:19:06 Jenessa: Precisely zero. They also skipped the public comment period, which was pretty important here.

0:19:13 Matt: Well, it's an emergency.

0:19:14 Jenessa: The emergency of 45 people, I can't even imagine how how impressive those 45 people must be if they're going to ruin the whole state of Florida. God.

0:19:23 Matt: Very scary. Yeah, yeah. Biden border crisis comes to Florida. And of course, Florida has been taking Cuban refugees for a very long time, twice our lifetimes.

0:19:33 Jenessa: Well, it's so wild too when you have this culture that says like communism, socialism, terrible, bleh. And like, I don't want to excuse like Cuba's got a pretty rough government. And then it's like, well, yeah, but we don't Want refugees from that country. Like, aren't they supposed to be your model of C? They want to come here to capitalist utopia. But when they're a great tool for an emergency order, yeah, sure,

0:20:02 Matt: This is what I've been saying about the Venezuelans. You have such an opportunity to stick it to Maduro and to give them protection and to show what our great democracy can do for people from... And again, the Venezuela government has a lot of problems too. It's a good opportunity to highlight that. There really is a crisis there, the way way they're running it. So it's the kind of thing that when you look at the requirements for the NEPA and you look At What They Did, there's no other way this could come down from any honest judge. And of course, they did get an honest judge. They got Kathleen Williams, Obama appointee in Florida, and she wrote up an 82 -page order. I should mention that this case was originally the Friends of the Everglades v. Nome, and the tribe intervened on the 16th. And I think the tribe's involvement is the most interesting part of this. I mean, it's obviously the Friends of the Everyglades are going to be plaintiffs here, but I just didn't have any idea about the the history and about how important this was for them. And it's, you know, it's just an extra great victory because of the tribal significance here. So Judge Williams issues this 82 -page report, and honestly, I would say it might be overkill. Obviously, she's expecting an appeal, but I feel like the analysis really could have stopped at, you did not do any environmental reviews. She notes that this is not, in italics, the usual NEPA case, which is really an understatement. She notes, there is no record of a NEPa process taking place in other districts because defendants did not engage with a single step of the environmental review process in any any district. Consequently, the court's review under NEPA necessarily focuses on where studies should have been done and where interested parties should have consulted, but were not. And she actually goes on to do her own environmental review. But before we get to the tribal impact, I just want to note that this whole thing, as I understand it, was built to withstand a hurricane, like a Category 2

0:21:34 Jenessa: Bullshit.

0:21:34 Matt: Hurricane, but it's in the middle of a swamp full of water, and it's a tent city. So if there were a hurricane I think a lot of people would die if there was a surprise flood, right? It does seem like this is a very dangerous thing for people. Of the suit, but that was a real concern as I was reading about the way this thing is constructed. I heard an interview with Representative Maxwell Frost talking about his visit there and just how shoddily constructed and how jammed in these people are with barely any climate control, basically in cages, in tents. This thing never should have been opened and should not be open now, and fortunately won't be. But let's talk very quickly about the tribal impacts. I'm really glad that she took the time on that. I'd like to hear more about that part.

0:22:09 Jenessa: The impacts here, including the tribe as a plaintiff, the Mikusuki Nation, is such a big deal. Um, I think it makes it more obvious why the case is so important. You know, I Think it would be easy for a lot of people to think, like, you know, the real problem. And of course, we don't want this kind of concentration camp happening anywhere, right? It should inherently matter. But it would be easy to then say, yeah, okay, so we're just like using the environment to get around this. Like this is a trick to close it.

0:22:47 Jenessa: It's not. As you read through this decision, and I think it's pretty plain language. I think if you skip the venue part in the beginning and get to the real meat of why the environment is so important here and the tribal rights. I think it's pretty readable. You'll see why this is not just about trying to find a way to close this dang thing. This is soo important, especially for this tribe. As you said, you know, this is land they have been on for a long time and that's really special as a way to have escaped the Trail of Tears. That's a big deal. There's always this terrible, I don't want to call it irony because it's really just continuing genocide. We have these so -called immigrants coming from Central and South America or really the Southern North America. Those are native indigenous people that colonizers pushed out. Like they're just coming home. So it's already It's already so helpful to see Native Indigenous people be able to essentially defend themselves in a lot of ways. I know, of course, they're not from the same nations. But what we're also seeing here is the ways that people from this tribe educated on this issue are able to testify. So we had Amy Castaneda has a bachelor's in natural resource conservation. She's worked in the tribe's water resources division for 19 years. And Dr. Marcel Bozas, something like that. He has a PhD in earth system science, and he's the director of the tribe fish and wildlife department. He did his dissertation on wildlife movement in the Miccosukee Water Conservation Area and the Everglades National Park. They were both able to testify on how this was going to impact the environment, the wildlife, and the tribe. This really could ruin life, the animal life and the human life there. They have ancestral lands that both areas people currently live on and areas that they visit as returning to the place that their ancestors went to survive, went to escape a genocide, and those areas could be ruined by this. There was a quote from Troy Sanders, who's a guide at a museum on the reservation, and he was very upset about people just touristing because they're excited about a concentration camp. And he wrote, the Everglades is meant for our tribes. It protects life. It shields it. It's not meant to detain life. Life. And I just thought that was so, so powerful.

0:25:52 Jenessa: I really just want to make sure we give indigenous people their flowers here for defending their own sovereign land and being at the forefront of this. It was really helpful. We see the judge repeatedly reference the harm that will be done to the tribe, the harmthat will be done their land. Technically, it's not on their sovereign But the ways that it impacts that land, they are a sovereign nation. They have a right to their land that the federal government cannot interfere with in many ways. So huge legal impact to have the tribe intervene as a plaintiff to not just have environmental groups. So yeah, huge shout out to awesome plaintiff jumping in here.

0:26:39 Matt: Really underappreciated part of the story, I think. Because it was brought as an environmental suit and that is primarily what it is. But like you said, it's so much more. And I'm sure that the right -wing narrative is going to be that there's some spotted frog that they're saving or something. But so much much more than, and even if it is a spotted frog, they should save the frog, but it shouldn't be built in concentration camps. But this is so much, I mean, I was overwhelmed by just the evidence and the logic of this decision.

0:27:08 Matt: It has, of course, been appealed, but she shut it down. The order shuts it down and says, she went on to find there's irreparable harm to the plaintiffs for any number of reasons, both the tribe and the environmental plaintiffs. They've already, of coarse, as of the time we're recording a few hours ago, they're seeking a stay from the 11th Circuit. They might get an automatic one just for a bit or whatever, but it seems like this has to be over. Somebody from the Department of Division of Emergency Management, executive director, said, we're going to have to be down to zero individuals within a few days.

0:27:32 Jenessa: Oh have to so he's just kind of admitting he's gonna go with it he's not acting like he's all right cool yeah

0:27:37 Matt: That's the message they've passed on to the chaplaincy. Yeah. So I think that it's, you didn't follow the law. I don't know how else to say it. Like you just completely failed to follow any of the prevailing law on what you're supposed to be doing on federal land when there's any kind of environmental consequence in a place that is already well well -known to have a lengthy report about how bad it would be to build industrial facilities.

0:27:56 Jenessa: Yeah I mean the tribe has sued multiple times to stop illegal land grabs there to stop they sued in 2004 to stop miami from pumping sewage into the Everglades, those researchers testified, yeah, if you had the required public comment period, here's my public comment that I would have made about this. So it's so obvious that this is just blatantly violating these laws. I don't care what emergency you have. You have to do this. Yeah.

0:28:20 Matt: Sure again, if we have, if the 11th circuit acts, honestly, and we still have plenty of honest judges following the rule of law, that's kind of a theme here, I think in this episode and something to remind everybody of this, this, I don't see how they could possibly find any other way. And it sounds like it's going to be moot when they close this place. Anyway, let's hope of course, we're going to do this. We're going be fighting this battle somewhere else with a different concentration camp somewhere else, but at least this massive harm to this very special place will be averted. So good news all all around. Let's come back and talk about a developing story now with the Federal Reserve, which is a lot more exciting than the world's Federal Reserve might suggest.

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0:30:30 Matt: So I know none of their lists are really numbers, people, math, money, people.

0:30:36 Jenessa: I'm a math person. I teach statistics, but I'm not a I'm not a economics person. I reached out to my brother today because he's an economics major and I was like what's an interest rate I know they're not setting interest rates for like if I just went to get a loan I think so like what what even is this and he was like ready to blow a gasket about how big a deal this is so it's not just lawyers who are freaking out about this it is like a real economic problem that we have the president messing with the Federal Reserve.

0:30:39 Matt: That is true. Speak for myself. Don't care about money. Right.

0:31:03 Matt: Sure. Right, and to be clear, when we say messing with, he is trying to remove. This is the first time in history that a president of the United States has tried to remove a member of the Federal Reserve, a board member. It just happens to be the first black woman appointed to the Federal Reserve. I'm sure that's a coincidence, Lisa Cook.

0:31:25 Jenessa: I wonder why.

0:31:26 Matt: He really is a pretty well -established pattern at this point of coming after people of color and power. There's no question about that. On its face, it's an interesting administrative law question. And it's the sort of question that has been raised now with all kinds of other agencies. And we've already talked about quite a number of these suits. The big one was Trump v. Wilcox involving the National Labor Relations Board.

0:31:44 Matt: But he's been trying to make the assertion that the unitary executive has the authority to remove even members of independent executive bodies. They've been making this argument for a while now that there's no such thing as an independent executive body. But the Fed, for reasons we can talk about here, is really like the ultimate independent executive body. Why is it supposed to be so? And what does it do? And why is it so independent?

0:32:03 Jenessa: Okay. So the rundown I have gotten from people who understand this better than me is that the way they are controlling these interest rates, which are interest rates on something is greatly affecting our economy particularly it's influencing inflation it's giving them the ability to control basically when inflation is running away or apparently like deflation is also like really a bad thing so they have this ability to influence certain things And there's a historical example where leading into an election, Nixon was really putting pressure on the board and they caved to it to not raise the interest rates. So obviously, if you raise interest rates, people are paying more for whoever it is is paying more für something, whatever this interest rate is on. I'm never going to understand this. What that means is, yeah, people ARE upset about that, but it controls inflation. Well, they cave to the pressure. They kept interest rates lower than they should have been. And it was supposed to help nixon in the election but it greatly hurt the economy so like there is historical evidence of why it's so important that they're going to make unpopular decisions basically everybody would love if there was like zero interest on everything right except whoever's profiting off of this but that's not life like sometimes we have to do tough austerity to like make it through these economic problems and that's really where we're at is they have to make tough decisions that the president does not like leading into their own election leading into the midterm and yeah also dr lisa cook accomplished black woman I might as well right it's I find it really interesting how everybody seems to understand this except for like trump and certain certain Federalist weirdos. We have, as you said, in Trump v. Wilcox, a lot of commentary on, okay, well, maybe you can do this in the National Labor Relations Board, but we all agree, not the Federal Reserve, right? Because they're different because they're, well because they matter and because conservatives don't care about unions and labor relations. The same thing happened in the case that was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau versus

0:34:41 Jenessa: Community Financial Services of America. It's payday loans, terrible people.

0:34:46 Matt: Remember this?

0:34:46 Jenessa: That case went the right way. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was not eliminated, but the lawyer arguing for ending it, Noel Francisco, the worst, he was arguing all these reasons why the CFPB is not not allowed because of this and this funding reasons, blah, blah. And Kagan really called him out on like, okay, you're trying to make a test. It's very vague. Give me a test, and he gives her a rule, and she's like, you understand that would make the Federal Reserve illegal, and instead of being like, yeah, screw it, he's like well, no, no no, and backs off, and it ruins the argument.

0:35:28 Jenessa: This just keeps happening where people are literally ready to lose a case rather than argue that the Federal Reserve needs to be affected or edited. Because it's just like everyone agrees it has to exist. It has to be funded. It hasと be independent. Don't mess with it. It's coming up over and over and again. Even conservatives arguing against the things you would think are amazing parts of government, they don't want to touch it either.

0:36:00 Jenessa: Kagan, in summarizing his argument for why the Federal Reserve passes the test and the CFPB fails it, was just, yeah, the CFPB is just too important and whatever.

0:36:14 Matt: It's interesting you mentioned Kagan because she had the dissent in Wilcox and she touched on a similar thing where she said, except apparently for the Federal The majority closes today's order by stating out of the blue that it has no bearing on the constitutionality of four -cause removal protections, which we'll be talking about, for the members of the Federal Open Reserve Board. I'm glad to hear it, and I don't doubt the majority's intention to avoid imperiling the Fed. But then today's Order poses a puzzle, because she's saying just what you're saying, and just what she was saying to Noel Francisco, that if you're going to say it applies to these guys, it applies the Federal Reserve too. As Janet Yellen wrote a great piece today, which I think we're going to have to link to, warning the world that if the president is allowed to start interfering with the Federal Reserve by firing people and otherwise trying to dictate their policy, we could be affecting the global market because the rest of the world depends on knowing that we have an independent Federal Reserve that controls the money supply and the kinds of interests that we were talking about. And I'm sure that any trained economist has already destroyed their podcasting devices after listening to us talk about this. So apologies to economists everywhere. Please don't write us,

0:37:11 Matt: If you're still listening. But again, we're going a little bit out of our jurisdiction here by talking about economics.

0:37:17 Jenessa: Perhaps.

0:37:17 Matt: But we, as lawyers, are very concerned about actually making sure that this remains an independent body and that they follow the law. And the problem, of course, is that as we've discussed before in Wilcox, the Supreme Court effectively overruled Humphrey's executor, which is a 90 -year -old case in which FDR tried to dismiss a member of the Federal Trade Commission. We've talked about it before, but the Supreme court told him in no uncertain terms that you cannot fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission just because he's not going to carry out the New Deal. That's why he was trying to fire him. He said it's explicitly on policy grounds. You can only fire for cause, and that's how we get to Lisa Cook. And as it should be. Now, again, as I said, no president has ever tried to fire a governor of the federal reserve. It's never been done. So for cause has never really been tested.

0:37:58 Matt: So what they did for cause is, at first, of course, Trump was talking about how he just didn't like the way that she was handling some kind of interest matter. It doesn't matter for our purposes. He just didn'T like our policies.

0:38:07 Jenessa: So it's already transparent. Yeah.

0:38:09 Matt: Right. Exactly. He's already saying he wants to fire her. Trump just doesn't believe that people of color, and especially black women, I think he's got a real thing, should have this kind of authority. They're doing something very similar to what we're talking about with Lisa Cook to Letitia James. We don't really have time to talk about that. But this allegation of mortgage fraud comes out of nowhere. Bill Pulte, who's now the head of HHS, he's a private equity baron, of course, and he's the same person who was ordered to go after Letitcia James, the attorney general of New York on a very similar thing. Now, mortgage fraud, I've heard described by federal prosecutors before as a headshot, right? It's a very easy thing to prove. And if you want to mess with people, because again, with any loan application, you're doing it under pains and penalties of perjury. The fact is that Bill Pulte posted out of nowhere on his X-account on August 20th, right around the time that Trump was talking about firing her, this long letter in which he's making a criminal referral to Pam Bondi. Now, remember that Trump said pretty directly that they were going to start trying to find ways to prosecute their political enemies. He's said this multiple times now, using the Department of Justice. This is now very much typical tinpot dictator stuff,

0:39:13 Matt: And that they were going to find ways to come after them.

0:39:12 Jenessa: Yeah. Said it before he got elected. Yeah.

0:39:18 Matt: And yeah, a lot of the point of this is not even trying to get a conviction. It's just messing with your life and potentially maybe making you lose your job, as he's trying to do here, and potentially forcing you to spend maybe millions in legal fees over the course of several years. So he writes this 44 -page letter. The whole letter is not anywhere. You can't actually see the whole thing. He cites online records.

0:39:38 Jenessa: So he posts like a page of it for us. What is this like the trailer for a movie?

0:39:44 Matt: Right. We're just going to trust him, I guess, that this all adds up. But I mean, the idea that the head of the FHFA comes out of nowhere and just decides to post that one of the members of the Federal Reserve has potential mortgage fraud, just happens to be the one that Trump was talking about recently. The basic argument, it's not worth getting into. I don't like to dignify this stuff. He's saying that the property that she listed for rent on Zillow was disclosed as her primary residence at the same time that she was applying for a mortgage and listing something else as her primarily residence, I think within two weeks or something. I I don't know, I don' care, it's clearly something they're trying to cook up to get this person off the Federal Reserve. And the fact is, she hasn't been charged with a crime. It's a recommendation, it's a referral for a federal criminal charge, but it's not an actual criminal charge yet. So starting with that, that there's no actual criminal challenge, and now Trump is trying to fire her for cause. For cause has not necessarily been defined, but the fact that she's been it certainly does include potentially illegal immoral behavior. I found a pretty great law review article I think I'll link to that goes through sort of what for cause might mean in in the context of these independent agencies from 2021.

0:40:44 Matt: But the fact is, this is a Biden appointee that he doesn't want on there. For cause generally has been understood to mean something that's very serious. And it has to be beyond sort of allegations made on X in a letter we can't read, obviously. But even if she were actually charged with mortgage fraud, presumption of innocence, I don't think that she would have to necessarily step down. Maybe if she was charged with a violent crime or something, but like something that is clearly cooked up by the administration in this way.

0:41:07 Jenessa: It also, it could depend on so many different factors. Like I know I was just researching this for New York offices for a presentation I'm working on. And like you have the kind of office that and this, you know, similar to the Fed, you have the kindof office where somebody can just be fired at any time for any reason. They serve like at the, you know, convenience of the whatever. You have the kind of person who needs to be basically impeached, where if you want to fire them, there needs to be almost like a trial in front of the legislature and you need two thirds of the Senate to vote on it. And we're, of course, all familiar with that at the federal level. Right. And that's the like high crimes and misdemeanors. And oh, my God, we got to define this. But there is this whole in -between spectrum. And in New York, we have it relatively well defined for each office that like it has to often be directly related to your office. This. We don't love it if you get a DUI, but does that mean you would be a bad mayor? Maybe, maybe not. What if it was a bunch of parking tickets that added up? That definitely doesn't mean you're going to be a Bad Comptroller. I don't know. You would obviously have to have a conversation about it, but a lot of times it has to be related to the job. People get themselves into situations sometimes. I'm using passive voice in a way that's probably not appropriate. People do bad things sometimes and they need to be held accountable, but sometimes that accountability is unrelated to the job they're doing. And part of preserving this independence means you don't just go hunting for looking for something they did to find a way to get rid of of someone that may or may not be related to their job. It may or not be relevant. It may, or may, not be true. This is undefined and it may well be defined in such a way that this is not even a good reason, even if it were true.

0:43:15 Matt: Presumably, if she single -handedly somehow convinced the entire Federal Reserve to make a horrendously bad decision that crashed the global economy. Maybe that's for cons.

0:43:23 Jenessa: Oh, for sure, yeah. Like if you were taken a bribe to change the interest rate, I think we'd all agree for cause. Like some of this is obvious.

0:43:30 Matt: Sure. Yeah. Easy stuff. This is so clearly cooked up, and he's just doing it in public. And this is one of my things here. In the last couple of weeks, the acceleration of the open corruption, the open fascism, the open authoritarianism, we have troops in the streets in American cities now, and he is talking about more. We have the Glenn Maxwell thing. The reason we spent so much time on it is because they're pretending it's a proffer session. It's not a propper session in any sense. It's just an excuse for one of the most notorious sex criminals in American history to exonerate the president from the crimes that she was involved in. That's the only reason they did it, right? And we have now the president trying to clear out the executive branch and replace everybody with loyalists so he can do whatever he wants. And Janet Yellen's making the point that this is how you lose the confidence of the global markets forever, is if they think that the executive can control your money supply and can control your Federal Reserve. And this is a guy, of course, that wanted to try to send a nuclear weapon into a hurricane

0:44:27 Matt: To solve a hurricane, right? Just to give one of many examples of bad leadership, bad ideas. Even if it were a good president, I don't want him controlling the Federal Reserve, he's not an economist. And it's supposed to be independent, supposed to be apart from all of this. So this would be, it's a 14 -year term, and whoever he would replace Cook with would be with us for quite a while. And the whole thing is designed, only one governor can going to leave the board every two years, right? So they're trying to keep it so the executive doesn't have the authority to control this Federal Reserve,

0:44:27 Jenessa: I think I saw her term is gonna end 20 like naturally in 2026 so he can replace her like a year from now but this cannot wait she's gotta go for some oh is he trying to get rid of her before the midterms

0:45:12 Matt: Very possibly. I mean, it does kind of feel like he's trying to crash the economy before the midterm. So maybe that's, but no, if it'll make a difference. Now, I mean I'm getting pretty dark here, but no I think really more than anything this is just to push the limits of Humphrey's executor. This is a case we've been talking about for months now. The one that effectively on the shadow docket the Supreme Court considers to have already been overruled, we talked a couple weeks ago about Adrian Vermeule's belief. The Harvard Law professor, in a vapid response we did a couple weeks ago, his belief that just by saying on the shadow docket that this looks like it's a good case, that they've overruled a 90 -year -old precedent, they don't actually have to go ahead and do it on the merits, apparently. This is really important. This ist something to watch. And it's one of those things, it's the Rubicon crossing moment, that if he's actually able to get away with it, and I'm going to say right now, I don't think necessarily that the courts are going to stand up to this. We'll see what the Supreme

0:45:15 Jenessa: Well hey I mean god bless go for it yeah yeah

0:46:03 Matt: Court does. The Supreme Court did say pretty directly that the for -cause thing is still constitutional. And so that will give them the right to review whether this is inappropriate for cause. But again, I think she's going to get to keep her job in the interim. I don't know. That didn't happen with Wilcox, unfortunately, and the others, but it's a little different. Yeah.

0:46:16 Jenessa: I really appreciate her approach approach of you know compared to just being like oh no I guess I gotta go no I you're not allowed to fire me so I and I still you can't lock me out of the building I'm going to work tomorrow like if it's the equivalent of if he just walked up to Sotomayor and was like you're fired and she was just like no I'm not see you tomorrow like yeah she's fighting this I think in the right way of not consenting to it, fighting it as hard as possible. I'm going to wait for someone to lock me out of this building. Yeah.

0:46:29 Matt: Not leaving. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah? Yeah. I think it was one of the inspectors general did this too, to great effect. And this is the only way to go. You know you're not supposed to be fired. You know that it's illegal and act appropriately. Really. And that's my message continuing to everybody is stop saying that Trump can do it every once because there are courts that are still willing to say that he can't. And this isn't the kind of thing that troops in the streets can fix. This is an administrative issue and it's going to be up to the courts whether or not this person remains on the Federal Reserve Board. And there are still plenty of places where the system is working and the rule of law is holding up. So let's come back and talk about a beautiful, shining example of that out of the District Court of Maryland. We'll come back to Maryland where we started right after this break in our our footnote.

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0:49:08 Matt: Today's footnote is a good news footnote, I do like to bring those up as much as we can, and this is a lawsuit out of Maryland in which the United States of America has sued the entire federal judiciary of Maryland. That's not the good news, the outcome is the good news. So it is USA versus Chief Judge George Russell III in his official capacity et al., and that et al. is doing a lot of work there, because it's every district judge in Maryland.

0:49:17 Jenessa: This is very silly. Come on, man.

0:49:34 Matt: So, yeah, this is typical of the way DOJ is just bumbling around doing this stuff, right? Because what DOJ is suing over is a standing order, two standing orders actually, that were issued by George Russell, the named defendant in this case, the chief judge of the Maryland court. These standing orders involved ICE detainees, otherwise in immigration custody, filing habeas writs. And he's making the point, and this is very true right now, that our district courts are overloaded with habeas claims Because ICE is taking in so many people and doing illegal things to them and holding them and moving them around. And the real concern, and certainly in our cases and all over the country right now, is that you're going to be taken in and then moved to some random facility 3 ,000 miles away. So these habeas claims keep you in the state. And so they're much more popular now. So this is a standing order, essentially, that every time they get a habeas claim for somebody who's detained in Maryland, because so often these come in after hours or come in on weekends, right? And he's making the point this is overburdening the court. The easiest solution here is just to give you a two -day stay until four o 'clock, two business days from the time that you file. So an automatic stay goes into place when you file a habea petition so that they have the minute to figure it out so the government can't move you around. Round. And he's acknowledging, as we all know, that the government's moving people as quickly as possible, doing illegal things, violating court orders, and generally trying to get people out of the jurisdictions they were arrested in. So it just makes sense to have standing order.

0:50:49 Jenessa: You've talked about this in the past, having like, for example, a client where you're like, I don't even know where they are, that's not normal, right?

0:50:56 Matt: It has been normal to some degree, but not like this. Usually the DTNA locator actually works within 24 hours. But yeah, I think the really not normal thing has been not knowing for days and days and days where somebody is. As I've said before, I know pretty much to the hour where a pair of shoes are if I order them on Amazon, right? But it's just not how it works with people in our system. So yeah, there's all kinds of reasons you're going to want to file a habeas claim when you're detained right now. So the point is that the standing order goes into effect and then DOJ sues every judge in Maryland. Instead of just taking up one of the cases and trying to get an injunction against the standing border, which is what you would usually try to do, just get equitable relief and say, this is ultra vires. They can't actually do like an automatic stay in every case. You have to have a case by case determination. I could see that argument and and that's a valid argument to make for the government. But instead of doing that, they just sued all of the judges. And so we get this decision, beautiful decision from Judge Thomas Cullen. He's actually a Virginia judge because, of course, I don't think I need to explain this, but every judge in Maryland is now recused from sitting on this case because they're all getting sued.

0:51:57 Jenessa: Come on.

0:51:58 Matt: Yeah, I know. Coincidentally or otherwise, Judge Russell is yet another black leader that Trump is coming after. He is the chief judge. He's a black judge in Maryland. Judge Cullen is a Trump appointee, the one who wrote this decision, but he seems like kind of a lawful neutral type. He's not a FedSoc guy. He's just a very experienced prosecutor. Prosecutor, a lot of white supremacists to his credit, put a lot of people in jail, but also put away doctors who legally prescribed opioids. It seems like he reduced violent crime in his district. I don't know. I'm not going to give federal prosecutors a lot of credit, but he's not a straight up hardcore right -wing Trump guy.

0:52:05 Jenessa: God damn it. Yeah.

0:52:29 Matt: He's a Trump appointee but he's not one of those. Also, extra points because he is a fellow Garamond enthusiast. This decision, as you might have noticed, is in Garamond. So full credit on that one. Beautiful to read. Looks very nice. Section symbols are especially beautiful. But my point is, this is also a very well -written decision on top of looking nice. And I wanted to highlight it because this is a beautiful model of how the judiciary can stand up to executive fascism. I'm going to read a bit here and we'll talk about the highlight of this, the footnote that you actually brought to my attention that got this on our docket. So he makes the point about how these arguments came before him. And he said, if these arguments are made in the proper form, they might get some traction. Under normal circumstances, it would not be surprising if the executive raised these concerns through the channels Congress prescribed, that is challenging the orders as applied to a particular case, like I'm saying, you know, through direct appeal or otherwise trying to challenge the entire standing orders through one case. But as events in the past several months have revealed, these are not normal times, at least regarding the interplay between the executive and this coordinate branch of government. It is no surprise that the executive chose a different and more confrontational path entirely. Instead of appealing any one of the affected habeas cases says, we're filing a rules challenge with the judicial council. The executive decided to sue and in a big way. And this is where we get the footnote. If you want to read the footnote number two, which I think is very good.

0:53:41 Jenessa: Indeed, over the past several months, principal officers of the executive and their spokespersons have described federal district judges across the country as, quote, left -wing, liberal, liberal, activist, radical, politically -minded, rogue, unhinged, outrageous over zealous and unconstitutional, crooked, and worse. Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.

0:54:25 Matt: Beautiful. That is a good footnote, I love it. It's not often that we do a meta footnote in which we actually do a footnote about a foot note, but every so often you got to do it. You actually brought this to my attention because it was such a beautiful footnote but I love this case all around because Judge Cullen is not having it. He is making it very clearly. You can't just go suing judges. Judges are immune from suit from this kind of thing, just to begin with, obviously. They just can't be sued over a standing order. Like he said, there's other ways to do this. He actually, in another footnote, says if they really want to do this, he says you can appeal, and he drops a footnote. He says, or pursue other alternatives permitted by the Constitution or Congress. He means impeachment. If you want to impeach Judge Russell for making the standing order, you can give that a try, buddy.

0:55:05 Jenessa: That's the way to get them out yeah

0:55:06 Matt: Yeah, but I mean, you're going to say this one standing order is... We were talking about the impeachment before, and for for federal judges, the standard is good behavior, right? So that can be anything from drinking too much to actual federal convictions. Corruption usually is the good behavior issue for most judges. But yeah, no, this case is so clear, so to the point. It's 39 pages, but he really just lays into the government for doing this. And I just really appreciated the absolute clarity of this. I just want to read the conclusion before we close here because it's so perfectly written. Much as the executive fights the characterization, a lawsuit by the executive branch of government against the judicial branch for the exercise of judicial power is not ordinary. The executive's lawsuit will be dismissed and its motion for preliminary injunction denied as moot. Whatever the merits of its grievances with the judges of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, the executive must find a proper way to raise those concerns. So yeah, there you go.

0:55:59 Matt: Judges pushing back. Got to see more of that.

0:56:01 Jenessa: There's a really good footnote about just how impossibly unworkable this is as well um it's the one on page four about uh the recusal that says the mere filing of this suit required the recusal of the entire federal bench in the the District of Maryland, and the assignment of this out -of -district judge, who, by this designation, is theoretically empowered to enjoin his fellow district judges and, by extension, hold them in contempt for violating the court orders. If the case survived a motion to dismiss, the parties, the individual judicial defendants, the principal officers of the executive, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the USAG, would potentially be required to sit for depositions and produce documents, including emails and other internal communications relevant to the issuance of the standing orders and the actual reasons for filing the suit. These discovery demands in turn would almost certainly trigger claims of privilege, executive, judicial, deliberative process, and invariably compound this constitutional standoff into epic proportions. I mean, yeah, do you want to sit for a deposition and explain yourself? I don't think so. It's the tone is is beautiful yeah

0:57:06 Matt: It's so good. Yeah. No, it really Like, it's condescending in just the right way. And there's also, there's a really good thing that, I try to do this with fascism too, when we're talking about these things of like, okay, well, that's what you want to do. Let's play this out. Let'S actually see how that works out for you. Yeah. Right. Yeah, we'll have you in here every day for depositions for the rest

0:57:28 Jenessa: Yeah it's like don't threaten me with a good time oh

0:57:34 Matt: Of your life. Yeah, you know, I know that we're in a time when the scary times right now, we have troops in the streets, there's talk of trying to force more, but there is and I want to talk about this soon. But there is a coordinated resistance amongst attorneys general all over the country right now to be prepared for the worst that the Trump administration is trying to do. Court orders do still hold some effect. I know that some of them have been ignored and violated, but we still have great judges like Judge Russell and Judge Cullen and so many others that are ready to stand up for the rule of law. And as long as we have the ruleoflaw and as long we have court orders, we need to pretend that they mean something. They have to mean something. The rule oflaw is, as I've said for quite a while, it is like Tinkerbell, right? You just have to believe in it. We have no choice.

0:58:09 Jenessa: Yeah I mean that's how it's worked the whole time that's what we've been doing a lot of people just didn't realize that but you know this feeling that they can just ignore it that they're doing everything at the barrel of a gun either literally or metaphorically if that was true then why are they filing all these lawsuits you know they clearly think it matters and are doing it for a reason so the more people can push on that the better oh boy

0:58:20 Matt: It's... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the wheels are coming off in different places. There's no question. I understand later listeners are going to be pushing back on this, but we are still in the phase right now because there's no point in saying that we're all the way there, that we are in full -blown fascism. Yeah, no, nothing is inevitable. And as long as we have lawyers and judges that are willing to follow the law, I have hope here. So this is a beautiful decision. I want to see more of it. And I'm glad you found this one, a good footnote. And honestly, you know, the other things we've been talking about today, the Obrega -Garcia case has been a slog, but it has been aslog because we have so many judges that have been insisting, including judges on the Supreme Court, for all the bad Supreme Court, they did order that his return had to be facilitated. We have the Florida detention case, which was shut down completely by a very good law that actually came out of the same piece of land that they are now saying was going to be damaged by the construction. And it seems like they're going to back down now. And we have the Federal Reserve in which we're going to have to see what for cause means, where the president's trying to push the boundaries once again. But he's pushing the boundary. He's getting more and more frustrated because he's got all of these judges standing in his way.

0:58:50 Jenessa: It's not inevitable yeah yeah yeah absolutely

0:59:40 Matt: So, you know, again, I know it's dark times. I understand people have lots of reasons to be worried. I certainly am. But I think it's important to highlight these places where they are. All right. Speaking of good decisions, we're going to be coming back on Monday with our recording on Brown v. Board. We're going to be looking at the science of Brown v Board. I had a lot of fun with this one. Really interesting stuff. We got displaced, obviously, by the urgency of the fascism and the Ghislaine Maxwell proceedings. But we'll be back on track with more great Warren court decisions coming up for you, starting, of course, with the one that I think pretty much everybody's heard of. So we'll be back with that. And then, of course, back with more Vapid Response on Wednesday. And we'll be back to talk about law in the news on Rapid Response Friday next week. So we will see you then.

0:59:57 Jenessa: See ya jackhammering oh god damn it my neighbor is unloading a whole truck bed worth of firewood that's the sound I keep hearing of firewood logs being thrown onto each other are you picking it up by the uh look of the amount of wood out there this is not going to stop in the next 10 minutes jesus