June 30, 2023 • 13 mins
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He joined the guys to talk about the recent Supreme Court decisions.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What's interesting is that the witness for the majority against
the Biden administration in this opinion turned out to be
Speaker Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They quote her at length
in saying, of course, the president can't just grant a
loan forgiveness, and so she's really in the argument of
(00:23):
the majority for saying, this is not a close call.
You really overstepped and overreached as a president, and this
is now unconstitutional.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Supreme Court says, hey, Joe Biden, you can't just wipe
out kids loans or tens of thousands of dollars with
their loans. The fact that they were quoting Nancy Pelosi
because she accurately said, trying to speak truth to her
own troops, it's illegal.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
May I quote Supreme Court Justice Nelson Months.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Chris Hayes of MSNBC with this tweet right after the
decision came down. Lots of very bad things, This six
to three majority is done, Dobbs being the worst, but
them deciding you are now ten thousand dollars poorer than
you were yesterday is really a hell of a thing.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Everything's performative all the time, and it's tiring me out.
Here's a man who quests for the truth. Can you
use quest as a verb? M oh? Tim Sander for
Vice president for litigation with the Goldwater Institute. Tim the lawyer,
longtime good friend of the Armstrong and Getty show. Tim.
How are you, sir?
Speaker 4 (01:27):
I'm great, Thanks for having me back. I think quest
as a verb is okay, only in the context of
dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
There you go, mild dad, No, you were you a
D and D person when you were younger.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
I have always hated dungeons and dragon Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
I'm trying to figure why the dungeons because it smacks
in the cruel and unusual pole.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Always. It just feels so dumb to sit there and
have somebody tell you you're going down a dark hallway or
something like that. It's almost it's almost as it's like
it's as bad as sports, but without the sweating.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Yeah there's a quote.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Okay, Well, so what do you talk about? You talk
about MCing a football game. Here's a trivia question for you.
I actually want mced a basketball game. If you can
believe it.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
How did that happen? Was there literally no one else
to ask?
Speaker 4 (02:14):
So totally the worst. Possibly some idiot got the idea
that it would be really funny, since I don't know
anything about basketball, to have the MC the local game
between the teachers versus the police department.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
They were right about that, that would be funny.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
I was smart enough to realize what a bad idea.
This was a brought along a friend to do a
lot about basketball. So it worked out okay, But that
was Yeah, it was one of the weirder moments of
my life.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Wow, how odd. I almost hate to get back to
the recent Supreme Court decisions. I feel like we should.
So where would you like to start?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
What's got your hack?
Speaker 4 (02:47):
Let me let's say this about yesterday's affirmative action ruling.
Yesterday's decision was Brown versus Board of Education for Asians.
Yesterday's decision was saying, we can't keep ignoring the fact
that these race preference schemes that the colleges insist on
keeping in place are a form of discrimination that is
purposely keeping Asian Americans out of our colleges, aimed at
(03:11):
keeping out hard working kids who don't deserve to be
treated in that way. And yesterday was a great vindication
of the principle that all men are created equal and
it's really a shame that the liberal side of this
that keeps denouncing this opinion is, in the midst of
their denunciations, are proving why it was necessary by totally
ignoring the fact that Asian Americans are an important ethnic
(03:33):
group in this country that deserve to have their equal rights.
It's always being treated as black versus white, and they're Asians.
As Justice Thomas points out, Asians are totally being omitted
from the equation in all these discussions. So yesterday's decision
was brown versus Board of Education for Asians.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
So, since you're a student of this sort of thing,
are some of the opinions more pointed at fellow justices
than normal? They seem like they are.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
To me, Yeah, it certainly seems that way, Justice Thomas.
Justice Thomas's concurring opinion, which is almost sixty pages long.
He's been waiting basically his whole career to write this opinion,
is aimed at the dissent, particularly Justice Jackson, with a
it's ferocious. Now I agree with it, and so I
love the fact that it's ferocious, but it is quite
(04:19):
quite direct, and justics Jackson kind of steps back in
her response. She responds in only one footnote, where she says,
I don't know what he's talking about. I didn't say
the things he's accusing me of saying. But if you
read her opinion, she actually is.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Well and today Gorsa saying in the student loan thing too,
I think it was so my r. I can't believe
we're looking at the same case. I mean, that just
seems snarkier than usual.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
It does now. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
I think the American people deserve to have the severe
legal and constitutional differences between the justices aired in public.
That these people work for us, and we have a
right to see what they think, both about the law
and about each other. But it must mean that the
office Chris, this party is a little tense.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, I would think so for those who are not
super hip to what was in the decision and the
concurrences and that sort of thing. What was Clarence's Thomas,
what was Thomas's main point?
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Well, here's my favorite point in the opinion that I
think really boils it all down. He says, quote, today's
seventeen year olds did not live through the Jim Crow
era in act or enforced segregation laws or take any
action to oppress or enslave the victims of the past.
Whatever their skin color, Today's youth simply are not responsible
for instituting the segregation of the twentieth century, and they
(05:33):
do not shoulder the moral debts of their ancestors. Our
nations should not punish today's youth for the sins of
the past. End quote. I think that is the perfect
summation of the argument against these race counting admission schemes
that punish innocent people, particularly Asians, for crimes that even
their ancestors didn't commit a lot of these people came
to the country after Jim Crow, after slavery, and yet
(05:56):
here we have these affirmative our action programs that count
people's skin color in order to give preferences supposedly to
remedy the crimes of centuries that before the victims even around.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So is this going to have tentacles reaching out into
other parts of American life, like hiring or anything else.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Well, it's There is a notable footnote in the main
opinion that says we're not talking about military and it
basically invites the next lawsuit to be about how military
academies and military recruitment, military, how all of that stuff.
They also have their own affirmative action programs, and I
think that's the next big front that we're going to
(06:36):
see coming. And the Court in this opinion explicitly says
we're not going to talk about that now, We'll talk
about that in a future.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Well, I wish I had Katanji Brown's actual quote in
front of me, because she said something along the lines of,
so it's okay to have black people in our bunkers
fighting our wars, but not in our college classrooms.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Yeah. Well, I don't know the ideological blinders of people
who are so wedded to affirmative action. And as you
mentioned earlier, you know, seventy percent of the American people
think that these programs are wrong. And the people who
treat yesterday's opinion as being some sort of, you know,
terrible setback for the civil rights movement are very much
out of step not only with reality but with the
(07:14):
way the American people see reality. And yet they act
as if they are obviously right. And it's really a
way of insulating themselves in a way that I think
really shows up in the opinion.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
So, and we can jump back and forth as we like,
but I want to talk a little bit more about
this student loan forgiveness decision. And I'm well aware of
my own ideology, but I'm also enough of a neutral
observer in these things to feel like I have reasonably
well based opinions. And I told my three adult kids,
(07:48):
do not make any financial plans based on your student
loans being forgiven to the tune to ten thousand dollars
or whatever. It's not going to happen. It can't happen.
It's so clearly executive overreach. There's no way the courts
let it through. And that wasn't just based on the
composition of the court. What in the world were the
arguments of the dissenters saying it's fine for the executive
branch to do this.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Well, Joe, you have more confidence in the courts than well,
frankly I do, because you were right about the law.
But the law is one thing, and what the courts
are actually going to do is a totally different thing.
Sometimes this time you were right. The court did what
the law required, but that doesn't always happen. Now, the
case is about this a statute that says that the
(08:30):
secretary that is the President can modify the obligations of
these student loans. And that's the word modify. And the
question is, does modify mean that the secretary can wipe
out really an enormous amount of money. Here, here's what
the opinion says. The economic and political significance of the
Terry's action is staggering. Practically every student bar where will benefit.
(08:56):
He says, this is a third, it amounts to nearly
one third of the government. It's one point seven trillion
dollars in annual discretionary spending. So what this is saying
that the Secretary of Education does unilaterally wipe out an
enormous amount of student debt. That and with the stroke
of a pen. Now, Congress is supposed to be making
(09:16):
the laws. They're not supposed to be handing this authority
off to the president. And yet the President is claiming, oh, well,
you know, we have I have the authority to basically
make the law because Congress has given me this power.
That really is staggerant. And it's a good example of
why you and I are always talking about the dangers
of the administrative state, the dangers of regulatory bureaucracies, where
the courts just stand back and let them just make
(09:38):
the law however they want to. This is a perfect
example of that. Incidentally, it also overlaps with the affirmative
action case because the descent Justice Jackson and her descent.
She says, well, what we ought to do is trust
the experts. The experts say that affirmative action programs, in
race counting and all this is necessary to equalize society.
So we ought to trust the experts. Well, if this
(10:00):
whole attitude of well we should have this elite group
of bureaucrats who decide how we live our lives in
order to accomplish justice has that notion is really stuck
in the minds of the leftists on the court.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
You know, I've been flogging your book Freedom's Furies lately repeatedly,
partly because I found the parts of the book that
deal with the flirtation's the wrong word. It's just. A
preference for totalitarianism among the left in the early mid
twentieth century was shocking to me. It was part of
history that I wasn't really familiar with. The idea that, look,
(10:34):
we'll get experts together, they'll plan everything and will bring
you a utopia.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, and that went along with the Supreme Court creating
these doctrines about deference and not protecting property rights and
not protecting economic liberty. All those things are going on
at the same time, and we are stuck with the
legacy of that. In many ways to this day. The
Supreme Court refuses to enforce property rights, refuses to enforce
economic freedom in wide areas of life, and the reason
(11:00):
is because of the legal precedents that date back to
the nineteen thirties, when this country and in fact all
of all of the world civilizations really kind of bought
the idea that the dictatorship was a good thing. The
person who is really responsible for this largely is Benito Mussolini.
We often forget about Mussolini because we always think about
that era. We think about people like Hitler. But Mussolini
invented the idea of this of fascist dictatorship in the
(11:24):
nineteen twenties, and for almost an entire decade, everybody's like, wow,
he makes the trains run on time. He's really getting
things done over there. Sure, maybe he murders his political opponents,
but he's really getting the trains to run on time.
And that attitude still exists today in the minds of
a lot of people who think that democracy and persuasion
and argument are just time wasting, and what we ought
(11:45):
to do is just force people to do what we
think is right.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Here, I think is an important question that I've asked before.
Because we're going to hear the President called this a
rogue court yesterday. You're going to hear a lot about
that over the weekend and probably on the Sunday talk
shows and that sort of stuff about this is a
right wing outlier court, you know, unbalanced or whatever they
call it. Where does this court fit in if you
had a one to five scale, one being the most liberal,
(12:09):
five being the most conservative, Like where was the Warren
Court or where were in most of the courts in
modern history, and where's this one?
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Well, when you're so far to the left, any movement
to the right is going to look extreme. So that's
why you get reactions from people like that. The reality
is that this is a moderately conservative court that in
some ways they're doing what they think is correcting the
errors of the past, and so that keyn and seem extreme,
for example in the Dobbs case and so forth. But
(12:39):
for the most part, the court is is not picking fights.
For the most part, its decisions are not particularly radical. However,
my initial reaction when I hear the President of the
United States say that the Supreme Court is a rogue court,
My question is, what would you prefer an obedient court?
A court that takes off its hat and bows. He
would say, yes, sir, whatever you liked, sir. Well do
(12:59):
whatever you like, sir. We have a separation of powers
in this country in order to balance these three branches legislative, judicial,
and executive against each other to protect individual freedom. It's
not supposed to the courts are not supposed to just say, oh, well,
the President says that it must be okay, Oh will
of Congress does it? It must be okay. The role
of the court is to enforce the Constitution, and that
(13:20):
means striking things down that violate this nation's fundamental law.
And that's what they've been doing. So I don't understand
why we call, oh, it's a rogue court. The court
is not supposed to be obedient.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Well, it's going to be painful and expensive, but I'm
going to get that screened tattooed on my chest during
the fourth of July vacation.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
I love the idea that the Supreme Court has one
collective hat.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Add the cost of that tattoo joe to the student
loans are going to have to help you pay.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
That's a good point. Tim Sander for vice president for
the litigation that the Goldwater Institute. Tim, you brought it
solid gold. Thanks a million.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
That was awesome.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Thanks guys,
What's interesting is that the witness for the majority against
the Biden administration in this opinion turned out to be
Speaker Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They quote her at length
in saying, of course, the president can't just grant a
loan forgiveness, and so she's really in the argument of
(00:23):
the majority for saying, this is not a close call.
You really overstepped and overreached as a president, and this
is now unconstitutional.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Supreme Court says, hey, Joe Biden, you can't just wipe
out kids loans or tens of thousands of dollars with
their loans. The fact that they were quoting Nancy Pelosi
because she accurately said, trying to speak truth to her
own troops, it's illegal.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
May I quote Supreme Court Justice Nelson Months.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Chris Hayes of MSNBC with this tweet right after the
decision came down. Lots of very bad things, This six
to three majority is done, Dobbs being the worst, but
them deciding you are now ten thousand dollars poorer than
you were yesterday is really a hell of a thing.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Everything's performative all the time, and it's tiring me out.
Here's a man who quests for the truth. Can you
use quest as a verb? M oh? Tim Sander for
Vice president for litigation with the Goldwater Institute. Tim the lawyer,
longtime good friend of the Armstrong and Getty show. Tim.
How are you, sir?
Speaker 4 (01:27):
I'm great, Thanks for having me back. I think quest
as a verb is okay, only in the context of
dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
There you go, mild dad, No, you were you a
D and D person when you were younger.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
I have always hated dungeons and dragon Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
I'm trying to figure why the dungeons because it smacks
in the cruel and unusual pole.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Always. It just feels so dumb to sit there and
have somebody tell you you're going down a dark hallway or
something like that. It's almost it's almost as it's like
it's as bad as sports, but without the sweating.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Yeah there's a quote.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Okay, Well, so what do you talk about? You talk
about MCing a football game. Here's a trivia question for you.
I actually want mced a basketball game. If you can
believe it.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
How did that happen? Was there literally no one else
to ask?
Speaker 4 (02:14):
So totally the worst. Possibly some idiot got the idea
that it would be really funny, since I don't know
anything about basketball, to have the MC the local game
between the teachers versus the police department.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
They were right about that, that would be funny.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
I was smart enough to realize what a bad idea.
This was a brought along a friend to do a
lot about basketball. So it worked out okay, But that
was Yeah, it was one of the weirder moments of
my life.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Wow, how odd. I almost hate to get back to
the recent Supreme Court decisions. I feel like we should.
So where would you like to start?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
What's got your hack?
Speaker 4 (02:47):
Let me let's say this about yesterday's affirmative action ruling.
Yesterday's decision was Brown versus Board of Education for Asians.
Yesterday's decision was saying, we can't keep ignoring the fact
that these race preference schemes that the colleges insist on
keeping in place are a form of discrimination that is
purposely keeping Asian Americans out of our colleges, aimed at
(03:11):
keeping out hard working kids who don't deserve to be
treated in that way. And yesterday was a great vindication
of the principle that all men are created equal and
it's really a shame that the liberal side of this
that keeps denouncing this opinion is, in the midst of
their denunciations, are proving why it was necessary by totally
ignoring the fact that Asian Americans are an important ethnic
(03:33):
group in this country that deserve to have their equal rights.
It's always being treated as black versus white, and they're Asians.
As Justice Thomas points out, Asians are totally being omitted
from the equation in all these discussions. So yesterday's decision
was brown versus Board of Education for Asians.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
So, since you're a student of this sort of thing,
are some of the opinions more pointed at fellow justices
than normal? They seem like they are.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
To me, Yeah, it certainly seems that way, Justice Thomas.
Justice Thomas's concurring opinion, which is almost sixty pages long.
He's been waiting basically his whole career to write this opinion,
is aimed at the dissent, particularly Justice Jackson, with a
it's ferocious. Now I agree with it, and so I
love the fact that it's ferocious, but it is quite
(04:19):
quite direct, and justics Jackson kind of steps back in
her response. She responds in only one footnote, where she says,
I don't know what he's talking about. I didn't say
the things he's accusing me of saying. But if you
read her opinion, she actually is.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Well and today Gorsa saying in the student loan thing too,
I think it was so my r. I can't believe
we're looking at the same case. I mean, that just
seems snarkier than usual.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
It does now. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
I think the American people deserve to have the severe
legal and constitutional differences between the justices aired in public.
That these people work for us, and we have a
right to see what they think, both about the law
and about each other. But it must mean that the
office Chris, this party is a little tense.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, I would think so for those who are not
super hip to what was in the decision and the
concurrences and that sort of thing. What was Clarence's Thomas,
what was Thomas's main point?
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Well, here's my favorite point in the opinion that I
think really boils it all down. He says, quote, today's
seventeen year olds did not live through the Jim Crow
era in act or enforced segregation laws or take any
action to oppress or enslave the victims of the past.
Whatever their skin color, Today's youth simply are not responsible
for instituting the segregation of the twentieth century, and they
(05:33):
do not shoulder the moral debts of their ancestors. Our
nations should not punish today's youth for the sins of
the past. End quote. I think that is the perfect
summation of the argument against these race counting admission schemes
that punish innocent people, particularly Asians, for crimes that even
their ancestors didn't commit a lot of these people came
to the country after Jim Crow, after slavery, and yet
(05:56):
here we have these affirmative our action programs that count
people's skin color in order to give preferences supposedly to
remedy the crimes of centuries that before the victims even around.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So is this going to have tentacles reaching out into
other parts of American life, like hiring or anything else.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Well, it's There is a notable footnote in the main
opinion that says we're not talking about military and it
basically invites the next lawsuit to be about how military
academies and military recruitment, military, how all of that stuff.
They also have their own affirmative action programs, and I
think that's the next big front that we're going to
(06:36):
see coming. And the Court in this opinion explicitly says
we're not going to talk about that now, We'll talk
about that in a future.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Well, I wish I had Katanji Brown's actual quote in
front of me, because she said something along the lines of,
so it's okay to have black people in our bunkers
fighting our wars, but not in our college classrooms.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Yeah. Well, I don't know the ideological blinders of people
who are so wedded to affirmative action. And as you
mentioned earlier, you know, seventy percent of the American people
think that these programs are wrong. And the people who
treat yesterday's opinion as being some sort of, you know,
terrible setback for the civil rights movement are very much
out of step not only with reality but with the
(07:14):
way the American people see reality. And yet they act
as if they are obviously right. And it's really a
way of insulating themselves in a way that I think
really shows up in the opinion.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
So, and we can jump back and forth as we like,
but I want to talk a little bit more about
this student loan forgiveness decision. And I'm well aware of
my own ideology, but I'm also enough of a neutral
observer in these things to feel like I have reasonably
well based opinions. And I told my three adult kids,
(07:48):
do not make any financial plans based on your student
loans being forgiven to the tune to ten thousand dollars
or whatever. It's not going to happen. It can't happen.
It's so clearly executive overreach. There's no way the courts
let it through. And that wasn't just based on the
composition of the court. What in the world were the
arguments of the dissenters saying it's fine for the executive
branch to do this.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Well, Joe, you have more confidence in the courts than well,
frankly I do, because you were right about the law.
But the law is one thing, and what the courts
are actually going to do is a totally different thing.
Sometimes this time you were right. The court did what
the law required, but that doesn't always happen. Now, the
case is about this a statute that says that the
(08:30):
secretary that is the President can modify the obligations of
these student loans. And that's the word modify. And the
question is, does modify mean that the secretary can wipe
out really an enormous amount of money. Here, here's what
the opinion says. The economic and political significance of the
Terry's action is staggering. Practically every student bar where will benefit.
(08:56):
He says, this is a third, it amounts to nearly
one third of the government. It's one point seven trillion
dollars in annual discretionary spending. So what this is saying
that the Secretary of Education does unilaterally wipe out an
enormous amount of student debt. That and with the stroke
of a pen. Now, Congress is supposed to be making
(09:16):
the laws. They're not supposed to be handing this authority
off to the president. And yet the President is claiming, oh, well,
you know, we have I have the authority to basically
make the law because Congress has given me this power.
That really is staggerant. And it's a good example of
why you and I are always talking about the dangers
of the administrative state, the dangers of regulatory bureaucracies, where
the courts just stand back and let them just make
(09:38):
the law however they want to. This is a perfect
example of that. Incidentally, it also overlaps with the affirmative
action case because the descent Justice Jackson and her descent.
She says, well, what we ought to do is trust
the experts. The experts say that affirmative action programs, in
race counting and all this is necessary to equalize society.
So we ought to trust the experts. Well, if this
(10:00):
whole attitude of well we should have this elite group
of bureaucrats who decide how we live our lives in
order to accomplish justice has that notion is really stuck
in the minds of the leftists on the court.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
You know, I've been flogging your book Freedom's Furies lately repeatedly,
partly because I found the parts of the book that
deal with the flirtation's the wrong word. It's just. A
preference for totalitarianism among the left in the early mid
twentieth century was shocking to me. It was part of
history that I wasn't really familiar with. The idea that, look,
(10:34):
we'll get experts together, they'll plan everything and will bring
you a utopia.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, and that went along with the Supreme Court creating
these doctrines about deference and not protecting property rights and
not protecting economic liberty. All those things are going on
at the same time, and we are stuck with the
legacy of that. In many ways to this day. The
Supreme Court refuses to enforce property rights, refuses to enforce
economic freedom in wide areas of life, and the reason
(11:00):
is because of the legal precedents that date back to
the nineteen thirties, when this country and in fact all
of all of the world civilizations really kind of bought
the idea that the dictatorship was a good thing. The
person who is really responsible for this largely is Benito Mussolini.
We often forget about Mussolini because we always think about
that era. We think about people like Hitler. But Mussolini
invented the idea of this of fascist dictatorship in the
(11:24):
nineteen twenties, and for almost an entire decade, everybody's like, wow,
he makes the trains run on time. He's really getting
things done over there. Sure, maybe he murders his political opponents,
but he's really getting the trains to run on time.
And that attitude still exists today in the minds of
a lot of people who think that democracy and persuasion
and argument are just time wasting, and what we ought
(11:45):
to do is just force people to do what we
think is right.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Here, I think is an important question that I've asked before.
Because we're going to hear the President called this a
rogue court yesterday. You're going to hear a lot about
that over the weekend and probably on the Sunday talk
shows and that sort of stuff about this is a
right wing outlier court, you know, unbalanced or whatever they
call it. Where does this court fit in if you
had a one to five scale, one being the most liberal,
(12:09):
five being the most conservative, Like where was the Warren
Court or where were in most of the courts in
modern history, and where's this one?
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Well, when you're so far to the left, any movement
to the right is going to look extreme. So that's
why you get reactions from people like that. The reality
is that this is a moderately conservative court that in
some ways they're doing what they think is correcting the
errors of the past, and so that keyn and seem extreme,
for example in the Dobbs case and so forth. But
(12:39):
for the most part, the court is is not picking fights.
For the most part, its decisions are not particularly radical. However,
my initial reaction when I hear the President of the
United States say that the Supreme Court is a rogue court,
My question is, what would you prefer an obedient court?
A court that takes off its hat and bows. He
would say, yes, sir, whatever you liked, sir. Well do
(12:59):
whatever you like, sir. We have a separation of powers
in this country in order to balance these three branches legislative, judicial,
and executive against each other to protect individual freedom. It's
not supposed to the courts are not supposed to just say, oh, well,
the President says that it must be okay, Oh will
of Congress does it? It must be okay. The role
of the court is to enforce the Constitution, and that
(13:20):
means striking things down that violate this nation's fundamental law.
And that's what they've been doing. So I don't understand
why we call, oh, it's a rogue court. The court
is not supposed to be obedient.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Well, it's going to be painful and expensive, but I'm
going to get that screened tattooed on my chest during
the fourth of July vacation.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
I love the idea that the Supreme Court has one
collective hat.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Add the cost of that tattoo joe to the student
loans are going to have to help you pay.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
That's a good point. Tim Sander for vice president for
the litigation that the Goldwater Institute. Tim, you brought it
solid gold. Thanks a million.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
That was awesome.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Thanks guys,
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