3-24-25 - 8am - Chief Justice Roberts and Pausing Funding

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, Michelle W. D.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Brown, you're still going with back surgery for why you
were out a couple of years ago.

Speaker 3 (00:09):
Okay, I guess we'll buy that. But I didn't know
that crack surgery was something else that had to go along.

Speaker 4 (00:17):
You have the top done, now the bottom done. Okay,
I get it.

Speaker 5 (00:23):
And I didn't realize that dentists did crack surgery. It's fascinating,
I thought, I mean.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Wherever you can get the best price.

Speaker 4 (00:33):
Right exactly, you know, and.

Speaker 5 (00:36):
Since iHeart, you know, because my age won't let me
be on their medical policy, but I still can't get
their dental policy. I'm still getting iHeart, you know, to
indirectly pay for my tram surgery to get my crack widen.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
The first time.

Speaker 5 (00:55):
I forgure whether it's a dinner or my kids, my
grandkids or my grandson. Somebody asked me, so, what they
do your tooth? And I said, well, they had to
widen my crack. And the minute I said it, I
was like.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
What how else do you just? How else would you
describe it?

Speaker 5 (01:11):
They opened my crack, they widened the crack, they expanded
the crack. I mean, what verb would you use?

Speaker 4 (01:20):
No? No, no, don't answer that question. Yeah, you probably don't.
Don't answer that question.

Speaker 5 (01:25):
Two thousand and five, there's a rough two thousand and
five was a rough year for me. Let's go back
to two thousand and five for a minute, because that
was the year that Chief Justice John Roberts was confirmed
to be the.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
To be the Chief Justice. I didn't say that quite right.

Speaker 5 (01:46):
During those confirmation hearings, he infamously invoked America's national pastime
by describing his view of the role the judiciary plays
in our constant. He said, and I quote, judges are
like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules, they apply them.

(02:10):
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical.
They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it
is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame
to see the umpire. Huh, then why did you step
out and say something that wasn't exactly calling a ball

(02:32):
or a strike and drew all the attention to yourself
when he told uh, by the way, there is no
This is when he made the statement about an impeachment
is not the proper role or the proper procedure by
which to challenge a judicial decision, that is through the

(02:53):
appellate process that is not on the Supreme Court website,
and you can ask, you can go to all sorts
of sorts. I've tried this numerous times. What do you
use chat, GB chat GPT, you use GROT, you use Perplexity,

(03:17):
you use any of the AI apps, And you ask
who did he make that statement to? Or you ask
where is the original of that statement? You'll get all
basically the same answer from all the AI sources. Different
sources have quoted the Chief Justice, and then they'll try

(03:41):
to explain to you these are reliable sources. It's the
Associated Press, it's Reuters, it's you know, the major networks,
it's all the cable channels. So the very fact that
everybody's reporting it still doesn't tell me who he said
it to. They still can't point me to a press release.

(04:04):
They can't even they can't even point me to a
statement issued by the Chief Justice through the Supreme Court's
Public Affairs Office, And no such statement exists on the
website even as of last night. Haven't checked this morning,
and you can go look, but I doubt it's there.

(04:27):
So if only he would just call balls and strikes.
But the more I kind of dug around and was
looking for info about the statement. The more I got
to thinking about what's Chief Justice John Roberts been doing
on the Court.

Speaker 4 (04:48):
He's actually been.

Speaker 5 (04:51):
Repudiating his umpire proclamation when he was confirmed, and exalting
above all of the can concerns his personal conception of
the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court and by extension,
the entire judiciary, protecting it from people who disagree with it,

(05:14):
who would, in his opinion, be attacking the legitimacy of
the Court. Now, I, for one, don't believe that we
should ever attack the legitimacy of the Court.

Speaker 4 (05:26):
But I do.

Speaker 5 (05:27):
Believe, I unabashedly believe that we have a right, if
not an absolute duty, if the Court pulls down or
publishes an opinion or rights an order, and I'm not
a party to the proceedings, I think I have a
right to express on this program, or in private or

(05:49):
anywhere else my opinion about that order or that decision.
I'm one, I'm trained as a lawyer. Two, I'm protected
by the First Amendment. I'm guaranteed the writer free speech.
And I think, as I've said many times, I think
it's in our DNA to challenge our government. And if

(06:10):
we don't challenge our government, if we don't challenge the
Supreme Court, if we don't challenge Congress or the President
or anybody else, then I think we're failing to be
citizens of this republic. We're advocating, just like we've advocated
our compassion to the government, we're abdicating our opinions to
the government. We're letting the government make all the decisions

(06:32):
without any sort of feedback from us. Hell's bills, they
work for us. You go back to the very first
time that I think Roberts made a horrible decision that
showed that he was willing to play politics. I know

(06:56):
you know the case. It's from twenty twelve. The case
is called National Federation of Independent Business versus Sibylius. Who
is you know who the NFIB is, Well, who is Sibylius?
Kathleen Sibilius. She was the Secretary of Health and Human
Services under Barack Obama. It was initially reported by CBS

(07:22):
News in the immediate aftermath of that decision, and then
in other reports in later years by other court watchers,
including CNN. What was that case? That's the Obamacare case.
Now the Chief Justice initially intended. We now know this

(07:46):
from the dissents. We now know this from interviews and speeches.
We now know this to be a fact that the
Chief Justice initially intended to rule against the constitutional of
Obamacare's individual mandate requiring us this is this is how

(08:11):
I believe it operated. Obamacare was the first time that
the government said that I must go by a product
in the private sector, and I will face a tax
penalty if I failed to do so. That was the

(08:32):
individual mandate that required all of us to carry health insurance,
whether we wanted to or not. Now, I happen to
think that carrying health insurance is a good idea. But
at some point during the Court's deliberations, the Chief Justice
changed his mind. He decided that he could do a

(08:54):
couple of things. He decided first that he could throw
a bone to the court's conservative blocked by against the
mandate on the grounds of the commerce clause, which the
law's drafters and the Obama administration alike had cited as
the constitutional basis for the individual mandate. But Roberts threw

(09:15):
an even larger bone to the liberal wing of the court.
He opted to actually rewrite the statute, so that you
could and would have to construe the mandate as a tax.
Let's stop. Let's stop and relive that moment for a moment.

(09:36):
If the court, if the law says that I must
go purchase a product in the private sector, and if
I don't, then I get taxed, then how is the
mandate itself attax Because by the very operation of the mandate,

(09:58):
I don't get taxed if I actually go by health insurance.
It's only when I don't that I get taxed. So
by the operation of the mandate itself, there is no tax.
But he decided that the entire package was a tax.
And of course, the Court has long ruled that the

(10:21):
courts can, under the sixteenth Amendment and under their power
of the Purse, pretty much tax anything they want to.
Even Obama had repeatedly told the public that I'm not
imposing a tax.

Speaker 4 (10:37):
But what happened.

Speaker 5 (10:40):
Even though I think Roberts believed that the mandate was unconstitutional,
he put himself in the twist of a pretzel in
order to conclude that it was really a tax so
that he could be the swing vote to vote in
favor and uphold Obamacare. Now, is that calling balls and strikes?

(11:00):
Is that what an umpire does?

Speaker 2 (11:02):
No?

Speaker 5 (11:04):
Even worse, the timing of the Chief Justice's flip, his
turning himself into a pretzel, coincided exactly with a Rose
Garden speech given by Obama in which the President ludicrously
described the possibility that the Supreme Court could nullify his

(11:25):
health care law as unprecedented or extraordinary. So there's a
pretty basic question here. Did Roberts switch his vote in
a historically important case so as to mistakenly attempt to
maintain the High Court's institutional integrity in the face of

(11:46):
an imperious.

Speaker 4 (11:46):
President kind of seems like it, doesn't it?

Speaker 5 (11:51):
Well, since then that's the first There were probably others,
But for me, that was the first major time that
Roberts appears not to have followed what he told the
Senate Judiciary Committee that he saw his job as an
umpire not to make the law, but to call balls
and strikes. Well, what did you do in the civilious

(12:12):
case he made the law? He actually said, Oh, I'm
going to rewrite this to mean what I think it
should mean so that I can uphold its constitutionality. Does
an umpire do that? Does an umpire change the rules
of the game so that he can make sure a

(12:33):
team wins or that a team loses. We haven't seen
that kind of corruption since I can't remember the commissioner's name.
But that's what it is, is corruption. And there was
an abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson that's just three years ago,

(12:55):
which overturned Roe v.

Speaker 4 (12:56):
Wade. Roberts refused to join.

Speaker 5 (13:02):
The majority opinion written by Justice Alito, instead writing separately
merely concurring in the judgment. Now that's a classic move.
Why because he argued the Court could uphold Mississippi's underlying
fifteen week abortion band statute without somehow overturning Row. He

(13:24):
was trying to rewrite Mississippi law. Now that stunt was
legally incoherent to the point of outright intellectual dishonesty. But
why did he do it? Because for Roberts it was
politically convenient for his really bizarre conception of the role

(13:46):
of the Supreme Court. Justice What does he think his
role is. I think he thinks his role is to
somehow attempt to rise above the fray and steer the
ship of the Court in a way that preserves the
Court's public image and therefore if as long as they
have a good public image, as long as many Americans

(14:08):
look at the court and go, oh yeah, they're doing
the right thing that somehow protects their integrity. That is
not an umpire, That is not balls and strikes. Do
you ever boot an umpire's call at a baseball game?
I certainly have. Have you ever looked at, you know,
the strike zone that some umpire has compared to another

(14:29):
umpire and go, how do you need glasses? How do
you call that strike zone? So all of this criticism
of Trump's call for the impeachment of Judge Bosberg Baseberg, Baseberg,
how you pronounce his name? Who ruled that mid air

(14:49):
flights deporting trenda rodwe thugs had to be turned around.
I think it's absolutely in line with Robert's history of
prioritizing what he believes to be the judiciary's integrity. But
on that score, he's again absolutely wrong. And judicial impeachment,

(15:13):
as far as that goes, is a well established remedy.
It's in the constitution. You don't have to make it up.
It's there. And using it as a remedy for judicial
behavior that we believe.

Speaker 4 (15:31):
Is rogue is beyond the norm.

Speaker 5 (15:34):
Because all the way back to the Jefferson presidency in
the eighteen hundreds, so it's in the constitution, it's been
historically used. And Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Number
sixty five that where there has been abuse or violation
of the public trust is when impeachment is appropriate. Now

(15:58):
that's not exactly a legal justisiable standard, but it is
the Bailey book of politicians, who themselves must exercise prudent
and discernment if they're going to use impeachment. But Roberts
kind of just blasting this out. Seems that Roberts and
Bosburgh both need a remedial legal lesson. Now there is

(16:24):
something that Roberts could do to actually help the judiciary
regain credibility in the eyes of the public.

Speaker 4 (16:32):
What should he do?

Speaker 5 (16:35):
He should absolutely forthwith, in an expeditious, speedy manner, take
up these outrageous lower court decisions that are based less
in law than they are in just the frothing of
this hatred of Trump, all these temporary restraining orders where

(16:56):
one judge sitting in one district court with jurisdiction over
just that area applies a restraining order across the entire country.
I don't think it's a constitutional crisis, but I do
think it's a legal crisis, and it's not coming just
from the direction of those claiming as much as they
think that it is. The true crisis is coming from

(17:19):
these unhinged lower court judicial insurrections that are basically doing
everything they can, and I think extra judicially outside the rule,
outside their jurisdiction. Declaring that I'm sitting in this court
with one defendant in front of me, this defendants being affected,
I could enjoin them from affecting that defendant that I'm

(17:41):
going to apply it across the entire country. If there
are only one person could heal in those judges, Oh yeah,
there is John Roberts Michael.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
I've been paying two dollars twenty cents per month since
twenty fourteen because I chose to not get on Obamacare
immediately because I didn't need it at that point and
I couldn't afford it, and they penalized me to this day,
even though I am seventy six years old. It is

(18:17):
a crime and it should not be allowed, and DOGE
needs to check it.

Speaker 5 (18:24):
So you don't have health insurance and you get a
like it comes out to two dollars and twenty cents
a month the tax you pay for not having Obamacare.
I'd like to know, let me know, send me a
text message, tell me, tell me what you mean, and

(18:46):
why are you going without healthcare?

Speaker 4 (18:48):
You're seventy six years old. That concerns me. But that's
none of my business. I'll think you what is my business?

Speaker 5 (18:56):
I think it was last week that I was on
a tirade about DOGE cutting. I wasn't on tire I
was a tirade because it was reporting about Doge and
the Department of Bag cutting some half a billion dollars
out of money. It was going to food banks. And

(19:20):
my argument was, and still is, regardless about what I'm
about to say, that that's something you should be funded
by the private sector. Food banks are not the job
of the federal government. That's something that could easily be
done by private charitable organizations to go raise money, because

(19:45):
I don't think any of us want people in the
country to go hungry. And if people are struggling, then
I mean, churches have food banks, private charities have food banks.
And I know, in fact, I got a lot of
text messages to this effect. I am reluctant people say
to give additional money to nonprofits and to charities because

(20:10):
so much of my tax money already goes to what
I believe are welfare programs. I fully understand that when
you look at the breakdown of taxes, you look at
the federal budget, it's basically redistribution of wealth and for
social welfare programs. Well, let's go back to the story

(20:31):
in Politico that caused me to go through that tirade.
The headline was USDA halts millions of dollars worth of
deliveries to food banks. Now, I have often talked about
how we have to be discerning consumers of news because oftentimes,
like Dragon will do a headline, and we did the
headline story about the park in downtown Denver off Spear Boulevard.

(20:55):
Turns out that Denver, rather than you know, saying hey,
why don't you donate this to US, paid five point
two million dollars for it. So, yeah, Denver paid for
a park. There was a park according to the headline,
But there was more to the story than that, And
there's more to the political story than just that the
Department of Vague has halted millions of dollars in food

(21:17):
deliveries to food banks through the Emergency Food Assistance Program,
and the article specifically cites a five hundred million dollar
cut that was allocated for f y twenty five that
that was canceled, and then the article went on to
talk about how it was going a that there was
a separate one million dollar cut to programs that support

(21:38):
schools and food banks that purchase food from farms, all
of which was to give you the impression that Trump
was going to redirect these funds from the Commodity Credit
Corporation to other priorities, and that food banks and school

(21:59):
lunch programs we're going to, you know, leave everybody in
a lurch, and kids were going to go hungry, and
people that were having a difficult time buying groceries were
not going to be able to buy groceries. And so
the narrative was established, Trump is evil. Trump's cutting food
bank programs. People are going to starve. Okay, let's break

(22:20):
it down. The first claim that USDA halted five hundred
million dollars in these deliveries for FY twenty twenty five.
The article specifically says that five hundred million dollars was
intended for the uh the Emergency Food Assistance Program for

(22:44):
deliveries in FY twenty twenty five. Now, that program was
historically funded through a mix of farm bill appropriations and
then actual purchases of commodities from or buy the USDA
for these food banks. It notes in the article that

(23:07):
last yeah, still last month. Last month, in February, the
USDA canceled solicitations from suppliers. There was an email from
Feeding America that was cited in the article, and then
a USDA employee speaking anonymously, alleged that the Trump administration

(23:27):
was going to claw back the funds previously allocated by
the Bideny administration. So the entire claim hinges on secondary sources.
Only those secondary sources one anonymous employee at USDA and
Feed America, which is Feeding America, which is one of

(23:50):
the organizations that gets government grants to supply food banks.
I happen to know a couple of people that work
at feeding Feeding America. There were no USDA press releases,
no bought budget documents, no named government officials on March twentieth,

(24:11):
an entire month since the email to cut funding. You
would think that there would be some sort of official
statement if such significant cut occurred, especially.

Speaker 4 (24:23):
That there was backlash.

Speaker 5 (24:25):
Well, the Commodity Credit Corporation is a real entity with
a flexible budget. Usually around thirty billion dollars annually is
what they get, but adjusted by administrations since it was
created based on different priorities, and redirecting funds is absolutely
within the executive branch's discretionary authority over these kinds of

(24:50):
programs because Congress has not explicitly locked the funds for
any particular purpose. But the article, when you go back
and reread it, does not provide any concrete evidence beyond
the Feeding America email and one anonymous source. So without those,

(25:11):
the exact amount of five hundred million dollars and the
full cancelation is unverified. In other words, it's an allegation,
it's not a declaration. So there is a second claim,
one billion dollars to school food bank programs to school

(25:32):
and food bank programs. To be more precise, if you
do a Google search, there's you'll get a two pages
of Democrats expressing dismay over USDA stopping one billion dollars
for those food programs, but specifics like which program those

(25:58):
are all vague. The Rawleigh news and observer. When you
do the Google search pops up it details thirty million
dollars in cuts to North Carolina programs, suggesting that the
one billion dollar figure might aggregate multiple regional cuts. But
still there's no breakdown, there's no official confirmation, and without

(26:22):
a clear breakdown, with no official confirmation, it could either
be an exaggeration or again a conflation of proposed versus
finalized cuts. So what's the purpose to push a narrative?
But then there was a third plane that the cuts
reflect the Trump administration priorities, and that is tax cuts

(26:44):
for the wealthy. The article states the supplier cancelation notice
came in February twenty twenty five, Yet the halt is
framed as a recent development by March nineteen, just last week,

(27:06):
So it's been known about for a month, So why
do you bring it up now? And that raises the
question about whether the decision was finalized or whether it
was still under view. The article also went on to
claim that one hundred and forty eight million of the
five hundred million dollars was for dairy eggs and blueberries,
but how much of the total five million dollars was

(27:27):
cut versus just delayed because if you notice, one thing
that does is doing is saying, pause, pause these expenditures,
Pause these appropriations while we review them to see if
it's the best use of our money, how much of
it's being abused. Are there any ig reports on these

(27:48):
funds that might cause us to say, oh, this is
actually being abused. And the other thing is the entire
halt in these programs could reflect your credit adjustments. Do
you know what happens? I mean, it happens. All happened
all the time when I was in government. So there'll
be an appropriation for five hundred million dollars for something,

(28:11):
and that might be divided up against three or four
five contracts, and each of those contracts would need to
be renegotiated, or some contracts would be completely void because
they hadn't been used, and you have to go in
and not just renegotiate, but renew or redo a contract
completely from scratch, all of which takes time because there's

(28:35):
no time limit on when or how the money is
supposed to be spent. There's money sitting I can guarantemn
to you that there is money sitting in the sitting
on the books of FEMA right now. That are for
disasters that are probably at least five years old or older.

(28:57):
And so what needs to be done is for those contracts. Yeah,
so let's just say it's one hundred million dollars and
it's for a contract for a disaster that occurred five
years ago. People need to go into the field, sit
down with someone in the governor's budget office or in
the city council's office, wherever the appropriation might be headed to,

(29:21):
and find out do you still need it, have you
abandoned the project, are you still doing a project? How
much of it have you paid? How much is left?
Because you might not need one hundred million dollars, you
might need only twenty million dollars. The point is political
left all of that out simply to drive the narrative.

(29:45):
And why do I bring this up today, Because once again,
when I'm out and about and I see friends, relatives,
my son, my grandson, Tamer's friends, my friends, I get
blasted with this stuff. Uh is it true that Trump's
cutting five hundred million dollars from food banks? Well, nobody

(30:08):
really knows. Uh. And if if all you've done is
read the headline, and if all you've done is looked
at the story or you've heard something on MSNBC, or
for that matter, even Fox News. Because Fox News is
guilty of this as anybody else, then you're not being
discerning consumer of the news. And even if they are

(30:29):
cutting five hundred million dollars, I go back to my
very first point, why should we be spending five hundred
million dollars? And if we are and we're going to
cut five hundred million dollars out, then why isn't let's
just use Feeding America for an example. Why isn't Feeding
America going out? You would think they would have a

(30:51):
fundraising team that would say, oh my gosh, we're facing
a five hundred million dollar cut, We've got to raise
five hundred million dollars. This is a great time, a
great purpose, a great reason for us to go out
and do so. We've got all of the staff, we
got all these consultants and everybody else. This will raise
five hundred million dollars, and I bet they could do it.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Good morning, Michael and Dragon. I'm working on my tax
return and I would certainly like to know how much
of the taxes I paid last year can I also
claim as charitable contributions. I'm sure it's a decent percent
given what Jose has found.

Speaker 5 (31:31):
Fifty Dragon, We've made a list. Colorado has the sixth
highest risk of fatal drunk driving crashes caused by gen Z,
coming at number one Alaska, number two, New Mexico. I'm

(31:52):
not surprised by New Mexico with all drunk driving. New
Mexico was terrible. Number three Hawaii for Connecticut, tied with Oregon,
number five, Montana, and coming in at number six Colorado.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Is this what happens when you get the video game generation?
You need to put up those billboards and say, you know,
new high score, eighty six people dead this year, and
you're like, oh, wait, I could do I can do that.
So I hate those signs. They just they feel like
they would encourage you because eighty seven people died this
year on the roadways.

Speaker 5 (32:22):
Well, what fascinates me too about this is how many
of gen Z drivers aged sixteen to twenty four actually
have a driver's license.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
I thought that I thought.

Speaker 4 (32:31):
That generation wasn't driving. So here are the stats.

Speaker 5 (32:36):
Drivers age fifty five and over are responsible for fourteen
point one percent of yearly fatal crashes caused by intoxicated drivers.
Gen Z drivers ages sixteen to twenty four calls more
than one fifth, more than twenty percent of annual drunk
and drug driving death at twenty point eight percent. Colorado

(32:59):
is the state We're intoxicated. Young drivers pose the sixth
highest risk, accounting for one fourth of fatalities.

Speaker 4 (33:10):
Let's see anything else you know about.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
I thought there were some other stats out there that
say gen Z really doesn't drink either.

Speaker 4 (33:15):
So that's a little which means.

Speaker 5 (33:18):
That a smaller portion of that larger group of people
are causing most of the accident.

Speaker 4 (33:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (33:25):
Yeah, then there's this story that I'm truly discouraged and
fascinated by this same time.

Speaker 4 (33:34):
Klarna, it's one.

Speaker 5 (33:35):
Of those by now pay ladies is like the old
layaway systems, except now you get it early.

Speaker 4 (33:40):
Sure. Yeah, yeah, uh.

Speaker 5 (33:42):
They've made a deal with Door Dash Door Dash customers
will soon be able to buy with Klarna via full
payments or interest free installments or deferred options aligned with
payday schedules. Now, if if you've reached I just I'm

(34:06):
not Dave Ramsey at all by any means. I've made
horrible financial decisions in my lifetime, horrible ones. So I
know a little bit about bad decision making. But if
you're ordering door Dash and you're putting it on Clarina,
and you're taking the deferred option to pay for your

(34:29):
pizza or your Mexican food or whatever the hell you're
ordering to have delivered, and you're paying out over time
on interests, I'd say there's something wrong. U Laren is
getting ready to do an initial public offering, said last
week that its signed on door Dash as a partner,

(34:51):
another sign of momentum for public market investors.

Speaker 4 (34:56):
I'm not sure. I'm not sure that's a good idea.
I would suggest that you would not do that