Speaker 1: Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Speaker 1: Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty arm Strong
Speaker 1: and Gatty and he Armstrong and Getty. You don't know,
Speaker 1: how's it going? Glad you're here. And we mentioned a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2: October means the Supreme Court's back in session. First Monday
Speaker 2: in October they start back up again. I've already had
Speaker 2: questions about that. We welcome to the studio. Actually in
Speaker 2: the studio, Tim Sanderfer of the Goldwater And so.
Speaker 1: Now I have to admit the only reason I came
Speaker 1: down to the studio was for your life size cardboard
Speaker 1: cutout of Taylor Swift, which we do have. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: it's great to be back. It's been a long time
Speaker 1: since I've been in here. It's nice to see it.
Speaker 2: Why does the Supreme Court take a break? Why don't
Speaker 2: they work year round? And they had so many cases
Speaker 2: between June and October this year. Why don't they just
Speaker 2: stay in session year around like other people with jobs.
Speaker 1: In one sense, they do. They do sort of work
Speaker 1: all year round because they're always on call for emergency
Speaker 1: cases and things like that. But the term that begins
Speaker 1: in October and ends in late June. Right before the
Speaker 1: July fourth break is when they hear oral arguments and
Speaker 1: issue decisions, and they try to get all of the calendar,
Speaker 1: all the decisions that on the calendar issued by the
Speaker 1: end of that of that session. And most state Supreme
Speaker 1: courts do not do that. The most, like California Supreme
Speaker 1: Court is always in session. But it's just an old tradition.
Speaker 1: I think the justice is like their summer vacation time
Speaker 1: they get to go on these junkets to foreign countries,
Speaker 1: or they teach classes for some law school that hosts
Speaker 1: an event in Spain, and you know, it's kind of
Speaker 1: a just the way they've done things, and you know
Speaker 1: in the law, if they've done things for a long time,
Speaker 1: that becomes legal. Right.
Speaker 2: Interesting, So this particular Supreme Court session, what are cases
Speaker 2: that you're excited about? And as you always point out,
Speaker 2: what cases they decide to take as big as the rulings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And because they don't have to hear
Speaker 1: every case, they can choose to take a case or not,
Speaker 1: and in fact, they only take about one percent of
Speaker 1: all the cases that they are asked to decide. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and fewer every year, really, And how do they vote
Speaker 1: on that? Is that just a majority five for it's
Speaker 1: four justices, so there's nine of them. If four of
Speaker 1: them say they want to hear a case, then they
Speaker 1: go ahead and together the case on the theory that
Speaker 1: you might swing one vote one way or the other.
Speaker 1: But the one good point, the one that really stood
Speaker 1: out just this week is on Monday, the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: said that they want to hear a case, well, a
Speaker 1: few justices said they want to hear a case about
Speaker 1: parental rights, and in particular these cases that are popping
Speaker 1: up all over the country of schools deciding to transition
Speaker 1: a student from male to female or female to male
Speaker 1: and then conceal that information from a parent. And we
Speaker 1: at the Goldwater Institute, in fact, are litigating one of
Speaker 1: these cases. We file the petition the Supreme Court that
Speaker 1: we're waiting for them to decide whether to take this
Speaker 1: case or not. Out of Maine, where a school district
Speaker 1: in Maine decided to take our client's child and give
Speaker 1: this child a a device to restrain her breast so
Speaker 1: that she would look male when putting a shirt on.
Speaker 1: Was a teenager and gave this child two of these
Speaker 1: and then said to the to the child, well, we
Speaker 1: don't we won't tell your parents, and you don't have
Speaker 1: to tell your parents. And then and so this would
Speaker 1: lose my mind. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? These
Speaker 1: are these schools are supposed to be You're supposed to
Speaker 1: be entrusting these schools to take care of your kids
Speaker 1: while teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic, and history, and and
Speaker 1: that's that's what they're supposed to be doing. And instead
Speaker 1: they've taken this very I'm sure they think of it
Speaker 1: as very proactive and protective, but I would call it
Speaker 1: aggressive approach in actively trying to withhold information from parents,
Speaker 1: and the kind of information that is really central to
Speaker 1: a parent raising a child. I mean, psycho sexual development
Speaker 1: of a teenager is something a parent needs to be
Speaker 1: there to help a child through. And the schools are saying, no, no,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have a say in the matter. And well,
Speaker 1: the U. S. Supreme Court has said in the past
Speaker 1: the parents have a fundamental constitutional right to control the
Speaker 1: education and upbringing of their children. And so we say
Speaker 1: that what the school did violated that constitutional right, and
Speaker 1: we've asked the Supreme Court to take that case. Well,
Speaker 1: what happened on Monday was that Justice as Alito, Thomas,
Speaker 1: and Gorsich issued a dec issued in an order, you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a ruling, but issued an order saying we
Speaker 1: would really like to hear a case like this. There
Speaker 1: was another case similar facts to Court decided not to
Speaker 1: take the case, but they said, well, we would like
Speaker 1: to hear a case along these lines. And they're going
Speaker 1: to have to eventually. I mean, as the regulatory state
Speaker 1: expands its control, and as the teachers' unions can expand
Speaker 1: their control, and as the state increasingly things that it
Speaker 1: knows better than you do how to raise your kids,
Speaker 1: you're going to find more and more and more of
Speaker 1: these conflicts. And there has to be a limit, a
Speaker 1: line drawn to protect the rights of parents to raise
Speaker 1: their kids.
Speaker 2: And if the Supreme Court decides that now you can't
Speaker 2: do they can't keep that sort of stuff secret from
Speaker 2: the parents, Will that have tentacles beyond just try and stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, definitely it will. And in fact, they've sort
Speaker 1: of already did started doing this. So last term, the
Speaker 1: Court decided a case about schools that were teaching lessons
Speaker 1: to kids about sexuality like same sex, marriages, transsexuals, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. In and this was very young kids. I
Speaker 1: don't remember exactly, but you know, elementary and pre elementary's
Speaker 1: kids in Virginia. And the question in that case was
Speaker 1: do the parents have a constitutional right to opt their
Speaker 1: kids out to say, I just don't want my kids
Speaker 1: to go through these these lessons? And the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: said yes they do. Now, the reason that you do
Speaker 1: have that constitution right, and the reason that's important is
Speaker 1: because there's been this question among lawyers and judges over
Speaker 1: the level of how far does the parent's right to
Speaker 1: protect and direct the upbringing of a child, How far
Speaker 1: does that extend? Does it stop when you choose what
Speaker 1: school to send your kid to, Because that's what a
Speaker 1: lot of courts have said, a lot like circuit courts
Speaker 1: of appeals have said, well, yes, you have a constitution
Speaker 1: right to control the education of your child, but once
Speaker 1: you've chosen what school to send your kid to, that's
Speaker 1: the end of it. Then it's up to the school
Speaker 1: that you know that the you we can and that
Speaker 1: makes sense because you can't have parents going in there
Speaker 1: and vetoing everything that a public school wants to do
Speaker 1: you know, have a Heckler's veto over the entire curriculum
Speaker 1: of a school. I can see why they're concerned about that,
Speaker 1: but it also it can't be the case that your
Speaker 1: parents your rights as a parent end once you send
Speaker 1: your kid to the public school and then they can
Speaker 1: do whatever they want. And sure enough, in this Virginia case,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court said, no, a parent's rights do not
Speaker 1: end at the schoolhouse gate. Well, if that's true, then
Speaker 1: that the same applies to these situations where schools are
Speaker 1: concealing vital information from parents about how their kids are developing.
Speaker 2: What's that quote you always have from the early twentieth century,
Speaker 2: Progressive is about schools?
Speaker 1: And oh yeah, well, you know the progressive thought of
Speaker 1: public education as a means of shaping the minds of
Speaker 1: of kids. And Woodrow Woodrow Wilson. Am I living through
Speaker 1: that right now totally? And Woodrow Wilson, who you know,
Speaker 1: he was the only president with a PhD. He was
Speaker 1: like a college president before he became President of the
Speaker 1: United States. He was a leading progressive intellectual. He has
Speaker 1: this speech where he says that the goal of the
Speaker 1: school is to make the child as unlike the parent
Speaker 1: as possible, and that was so great. It's a very
Speaker 1: extreme way of putting it. But you s, what they
Speaker 1: were thinking is, well, they were like, the problems, all
Speaker 1: the tensions and difficulties that we have in America, those
Speaker 1: can be resolved by taking all the kids and putting
Speaker 1: them together and teaching them, you know, how to be
Speaker 1: good citizens. Which maybe that sounds good to you in
Speaker 1: the abstract, but the problem is what do you mean
Speaker 1: by good citizens? All right? Yeah?
Speaker 2: The problem the problem with that, obviously is they have determined,
Speaker 2: we have figured out what is best for all of
Speaker 2: you know, America, and that's what we're going to teach kids.
Speaker 1: And fortunately there are alternatives. There's school choice programs throughout
Speaker 1: the country that parents can take advantage of to get
Speaker 1: their kids into schools that are tailor made or a
Speaker 1: tailor designed for their kids. And especially in my home
Speaker 1: state of Arizona, we have a wonderfully successful program, the
Speaker 1: Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, where a parent can decide what
Speaker 1: schools to send their kids to and get them out
Speaker 1: of failing public schools or public schools that aren't serving
Speaker 1: their kids needs, maybe their kids have special needs or
Speaker 1: that are abusing their power in these ways, and what
Speaker 1: we need is more school choice, more power in the
Speaker 1: hands of parents, and less power in the hands of
Speaker 1: bureaucrats who again think that they know better than you
Speaker 1: do how your kids ought to be raised.
Speaker 2: You and your wife are committed to non child people,
Speaker 2: But it would be so awesome if you had kids,
Speaker 2: just because I can imagine, I mean, because you get
Speaker 2: fired up about this on behalf of other people's kids.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine if your kids. It's a scary thought.
Speaker 1: I had not thought of it till you mentioned that.
Speaker 1: But you're right, I can't imagine. You mean a school
Speaker 1: board meeting. I was, well, I just think about how
Speaker 1: I was when I was in school. I was already
Speaker 1: a kind of a nonconformist when I was forced to
Speaker 1: go to the government schools, and I made life pretty
Speaker 1: pretty hell for my parents my teachers when I was
Speaker 1: in school, So I can imagine what I would do
Speaker 1: if it was my kid.
Speaker 2: Well, I promised to get back to the Supreme Court stuff.
Speaker 2: But tim was helpful to me and my story of
Speaker 2: my son taking a public school American history class and
Speaker 2: on day one having to write a land acknowledgment about
Speaker 2: the tribe that had owned the land board the school.
Speaker 1: Was and how we should all feel so horrible about that?
Speaker 1: Who and that tribe probably stole it from some other tribe,
Speaker 1: and that tribe stole it from some other tribe. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would I just pray for the day when somebody
Speaker 1: requires somebody to do a land acknowledgment for the Commanchee,
Speaker 1: you know, the most aggressive imperial power in Native America
Speaker 1: that just slought or countless other tribes and stole their land.
Speaker 1: And yet now you know, and somebody does this land
Speaker 1: was once possessed by the commanche you know, And I
Speaker 1: would love to see that. Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2: They must not do this in Europe, right, the land acknowledgement,
Speaker 2: because it'd be impossible if you had a square foot
Speaker 2: of France, right or Germany?
Speaker 1: I mean, how in the hell would you do This
Speaker 1: land used to belong to Germany and then Russia and
Speaker 1: then Germany and then France and then Germany and then Russia.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it would be very, very complicated. What other
Speaker 2: Supreme Court cases are you excited about this?
Speaker 1: Well, the there's an important gun rights case that's going
Speaker 1: to go up there, and and this case is it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of tough as an intellectual matter, at least
Speaker 1: as I think so. And that is so, the state
Speaker 1: of Hawaii passes a law that says you're not allowed
Speaker 1: to bring a gun onto private property without the express
Speaker 1: permission of the owner. Now, on one hand, that makes
Speaker 1: sense to me, because I wouldn't bring a gun into
Speaker 1: my friend's house without saying, Hey, by the way, I
Speaker 1: have a gun, is it okay with you if I
Speaker 1: bring it into the house. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: the reason this law has passed was because most people
Speaker 1: are probably not going to put up a sign on
Speaker 1: their houses is it's okay for you to bring a
Speaker 1: gun on this property something? And so it's kind of
Speaker 1: a clever way of preventing people from carrying guns anywhere.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, right. And so the question presented in the
Speaker 1: case is to what level can the state manipulate this
Speaker 1: sort of baseline rule, this the default rule of whether
Speaker 1: you're allowed to with with as long as nobody forbids you,
Speaker 1: or whether you're not allowed to unless you get express permission.
Speaker 2: And that's a tough question. Opt in opt out stuff
Speaker 2: always drives me crazy. Who decides which which it's going
Speaker 2: to be right.
Speaker 1: And so now the court has been pretty good about
Speaker 1: protecting gun rights, but there are some contray examples. There
Speaker 1: have been some cases that where the court has not,
Speaker 1: you know, been as aggressive in protecting these rights as
Speaker 1: I would like. And so I do worry about them
Speaker 1: setting a decision here that's gonna weaken the right to
Speaker 1: possess firearms. But on the other hand, property rights, I
Speaker 1: have a right to decide whether some sure the property
Speaker 1: brings it out of my property or on.
Speaker 2: The course of course, I got questions about that and
Speaker 2: other stuff with Tim sanderf for coming up on and
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Speaker 2: look forward to that.
Speaker 1: All on the way stay here are Strong and.
Speaker 2: Tim Sander is thankfully committed to sticking around for a
Speaker 2: little while talking about these Supreme Court cases or various
Speaker 2: state cases.
Speaker 1: But we're just discussing.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons I think Tim is a fan
Speaker 2: favorite has been for many years on The Armstrong and
Speaker 2: Getty Show is your ability to explain these complicated cases
Speaker 2: in a way that's normal people like us can understand.
Speaker 1: You know. I think part of the reason for that
Speaker 1: is that I was never a very good student in school,
Speaker 1: and so the teacher would get up there and lecture
Speaker 1: about something I wouldn't get it, so I'd have to
Speaker 1: go out and learn it. Myself, so I would pull
Speaker 1: down the book and read it myself, and that's how
Speaker 1: I got it. And so I know how I learned
Speaker 1: this stuff, and so when I explained it to other people,
Speaker 1: I tell them the way that I figured it out
Speaker 1: as opposed to the way that it's normally talked about
Speaker 1: in other circles. And I think that might be part
Speaker 1: of the reason that is really interesting. Have you ever
Speaker 1: thought about teaching in the law school. I have taught
Speaker 1: a couple classes. I've taught a class at McGeorge and Sacramento.
Speaker 1: I taught a class at George Mason in Virginia. I
Speaker 1: just taught a class two years ago at Arizona State University.
Speaker 1: So I have taught a couple times and all bit
Speaker 1: the students loved it. Well, I don't know, you have
Speaker 1: to ask them, but it was a lot of work.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. I felt sorry for my law professors
Speaker 1: in retrospect because I had not realized when I was
Speaker 1: a student how much work it really is. That you
Speaker 1: have to just do it.
Speaker 2: Once and then you're written, and then you could keep
Speaker 2: doing the same spiel for the next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thirty years. Yeah, I suppose you could, you know,
Speaker 1: just update your outline as you go. That is true.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, you would think that speaking
Speaker 1: for two hours is twice as hard as speaking for
Speaker 1: one hour, and actually it's like fifty times. How I
Speaker 1: want speaking for an hour. It's keeping the students' attention
Speaker 1: and not being boring. That's the thing I just dread
Speaker 1: being boring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me about it. We call that
Speaker 2: flop sweat in radio business, when you start feeling, Okay,
Speaker 2: this is not working. So how did vaping become a
Speaker 2: court case?
Speaker 1: Look at? So? One of the things that makes the
Speaker 1: Goldwater Institute where I work, unique is that we try
Speaker 1: to focus on state constitutions, on the rights that are
Speaker 1: protected by your state constitution, which a lot of people
Speaker 1: forget about. They'll talk about the Bill of Rights and
Speaker 1: they forget about the fact that your state constitution protects
Speaker 1: more rights typically than does the federal Constitution. So we
Speaker 1: like to go to state supreme courts to defend state
Speaker 1: constitutional rights. And we have a case pending in the
Speaker 1: Oregon Supreme Court. In fact, it was just argued a
Speaker 1: couple of days ago about the freedom of speech under
Speaker 1: the state constitution, and it involves a state law that
Speaker 1: makes it illegal to package vaping products in a manner
Speaker 1: that quote might be attractive to miners end quote. And
Speaker 1: that term whatever might be attractive to miners is determined
Speaker 1: by a government bureaucracy, because you know, a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of middle aged bureaucrats and a government entity. They really
Speaker 1: have their fingers on the pulse of youthful America.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And so we say this violates freedom of speech. Our
Speaker 1: client runs a vaping shop. Kids aren't even allowed in
Speaker 1: his shop. Nevertheless, under this law, he cannot even put
Speaker 1: a picture of a cherry on a box full of
Speaker 1: cherry flavored vaping liquid. The state has said that that
Speaker 1: is illegal. Well, that obviously violates your freedom of speech.
Speaker 2: Right, and it could be you know, you could just
Speaker 2: trapolate that to so many other things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't put you can't say what, you can't
Speaker 1: say a truthful message about what's in the contents of
Speaker 1: a package. And if this isn't even I mean, if
Speaker 1: the if the constitution doesn't protect your right to speak
Speaker 1: the truth, you've got some real problems there, right. And
Speaker 1: the bureaucracy there when they when we sued they can't,
Speaker 1: they came back and said, well, you you're not allowed
Speaker 1: to sue yet because we haven't written the regulations. We
Speaker 1: haven't told you yet what is attractive to minors, which
Speaker 1: is just that's crazy. I mean, the idea that bureau
Speaker 1: bureaucrats can be empowered to decide what speech you are
Speaker 1: and aren't allowed to express, and then that you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to challenge it until they write the rules is wild.
Speaker 1: So we went up to the Oregon Supreme Court just
Speaker 1: a few days ago and one of my colleagues, John Thorpe,
Speaker 1: argued that case and it went pretty well. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I got my fingers crossed about that case. Cool.
Speaker 2: Would people like you I others who like smaller government,
Speaker 2: would we rather were living under more state constitution rules
Speaker 2: than federal constitution rules?
Speaker 1: In some ways yes, and in some ways no. So
Speaker 1: it is true that state constitutions tend to protect freedom
Speaker 1: more broadly than the federal Constitution does. But you can't
Speaker 1: just leave it to the states. We have to have
Speaker 1: that federal protection against states. So think the Fourteenth amendmentant
Speaker 1: that prevents the state from violating your federal constitutional rights
Speaker 1: is crucial in protecting that. But for the most part,
Speaker 1: of course, these decisions should mostly be made at the
Speaker 1: state level. Political decisions generally, and constitutional rights should be
Speaker 1: understood mostly at the state level because state judges, for
Speaker 1: one thing, they typically are either elected or we have
Speaker 1: retention elections, so you have more control over them, and
Speaker 1: they're more attuned to the history and culture of that state,
Speaker 1: and they know what the constitution means.
Speaker 2: I have more questions about that, and we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about more Supreme Court cases coming up with Tim Sandfer,
Speaker 2: who works with the Goldwater Institute and has been a
Speaker 2: fan favored of the Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 1: For how many years? Oh, it's been at least a decade.
Speaker 2: No longer than that. Yeah, Yeah, we've been doing this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so it's sad to think about.
Speaker 1: Really. So we got a lot on the way.
Speaker 2: I hope you can stay with us if you missed
Speaker 2: a segment or now we get the podcast Armstrong and
Speaker 2: Getty on demand.
Speaker 1: Stay with us Armstrong and Getty. We're talking with Tim
Speaker 1: Sander of the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 2: Anything nice you want to say about Goldwater Institute before
Speaker 2: I start asking you questions.
Speaker 1: We're a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting individual rights in
Speaker 1: courts and in legislatures. Across the country. We're defending your
Speaker 1: right to Our greatest achievement really is Right to Try,
Speaker 1: which is a legislation that was signed by President Trump
Speaker 1: in his previous term that protects your right if you
Speaker 1: are a terminally ill patient to access medicine that has
Speaker 1: been approved for safety but not yet fully approved for
Speaker 1: sale by the FDA. And now we're branching out into
Speaker 1: Right to Try two point zero, which is an effort
Speaker 1: to legally protect your right to access tailor made medical
Speaker 1: treatment that's designed just for you.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you guys did that. It's insane that it
Speaker 2: wasn't already the case. I mean, it's just close my mind.
Speaker 2: For years that we've been talking about this.
Speaker 1: It really is. Well. We were just talking about how
Speaker 1: bureaucrats think they know better than you do about how
Speaker 1: to raise your kids. A lot of the time, bureaucrats
Speaker 1: think they know better than you do what medicines you
Speaker 1: ought to be allowed to even choose from, even when
Speaker 1: you're a patient with a terminal illness that can't be
Speaker 1: cured anyway, and you there's an opportunity to take this
Speaker 1: investigational medicine that might improve things for you, and then
Speaker 1: some bureaucrat comes in and says, no, no, we're not.
Speaker 1: You can't do that.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite phrases from that whole thing was
Speaker 2: you might give them false.
Speaker 1: Hope, false hope. That's right. Well, no hope is false.
Speaker 2: How about I'm allowed to, in my final days alive
Speaker 2: as a human being, to have some false hope, you
Speaker 2: son of a bitch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, and some and some authority over my own decision.
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: How before we get to a specific case, how left
Speaker 2: are law schools in general across the country.
Speaker 1: They are so much worse than you could possibly imagine
Speaker 1: the entire legal is right. Well, there's a number of
Speaker 1: historical reasons, I'm sure. I mean, part of it, I
Speaker 1: think is the romanticism of the sixties, you know, the
Speaker 1: hero the heroism of Brown versus Board of Education that
Speaker 1: then spread after that into this notion that the civil
Speaker 1: rights lawyers were the champions of social justice and so forth.
Speaker 1: And that was part of it, even though even when
Speaker 1: that got sidetracked into these crazy left wing notions that
Speaker 1: have nothing to do with justice. But I think the
Speaker 1: biggest problem is the very phrase social justice. Law schools
Speaker 1: are not very good on philosophy, and they teach a
Speaker 1: corrupted notion of what justice means. They think a lot
Speaker 1: of people think justice means equality. Justice does not mean equality.
Speaker 1: Justice and equality, in fact, have very little to do
Speaker 1: with one another. Justice means ensuring that every person gets
Speaker 1: what is his or her own, and equality is about
Speaker 1: distributing to things to people according to some set formula.
Speaker 1: And so justice inequality of very different things. But nobody
Speaker 1: talks about this in law school, and so people emerge
Speaker 1: from law school thinking they're deeply educated with these perverse
Speaker 1: notions about what justice even means to begin with.
Speaker 2: So if the legal education system in this country is
Speaker 2: way left, what is the result of that.
Speaker 1: Do we turn out a whole bunch of left lawyers?
Speaker 3: We do.
Speaker 1: We have tons and tons of left lawyers and left
Speaker 1: judges who often, I think, have never seriously even considered
Speaker 1: the alternative. And so they've been kind of gobsmacked by
Speaker 1: the rise of the federalist society and the backlash against
Speaker 1: what we lawyers call the New Deal Settlement, that the
Speaker 1: way that constitutional law has been interpreted since the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties or so. There's been this effort to push back
Speaker 1: against that, and I think It really surprised a lot
Speaker 1: of legal intellectuals. Lawrence Tribe, who you know, very famous
Speaker 1: law professor, refused even to publish the second volume of
Speaker 1: his treatise on Constitutional Law because he said he no
Speaker 1: longer understood constitutional law. Well good, because the constitutional law
Speaker 1: he's been p's in practicing is kakame Ma.
Speaker 2: And then you were talking about Goldwater Institute gets involved
Speaker 2: in state constitutions a lot. What what couple of states
Speaker 2: have the wackiest constitutions?
Speaker 1: Oh? Wow, Well, Montana's is pretty bad. It's written in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and it has all sorts of sort
Speaker 1: of lefty notions in it. But I and Hawaii's my
Speaker 1: favorite thing. Hawaii. Actually the law of the splintered Paddle
Speaker 1: is part of their constitution. Nobody knows what the law
Speaker 1: of the splintered paddle means, but it's an ancient thing
Speaker 1: that dates back to Kamema, so it's in the constitution. Okay,
Speaker 1: But I think the general consensus is that Alabama has
Speaker 1: the worst state constitution. It's been amended so many times
Speaker 1: that it's several hundred pages long, and it has every
Speaker 1: little last detail of state law on embedded in it.
Speaker 1: And it's just too complicated for words. I mean, California
Speaker 1: is pretty lousy. California is a bad has a lowsy constitution,
Speaker 1: but it's not quite that bad. Wow, that is really interesting.
Speaker 2: But the laboratories of democracy, you know, at least we
Speaker 2: get to see how it works out.
Speaker 1: You have a lot of crazy experiments in some of
Speaker 1: those laboratories. I mean, you're experimenting on human beings. But
Speaker 1: that that's consent, right, true.
Speaker 2: You do have the opportunity to leave the state if
Speaker 2: you want to. What other case the Supreme Court's taking
Speaker 2: up your interest to do it? Well.
Speaker 1: Of course, the biggest case on the horizon as far
Speaker 1: as I'm concerned, is the tariff case that we're talking
Speaker 1: about Federal Constitution now and the Federal Supreme Court, and
Speaker 1: that is the constitutionality of President Trump's tariffs, which are
Speaker 1: I know, totally unconstitutional, totally illegal.
Speaker 2: I know nothing about this, but the idea that one guy,
Speaker 2: any guy Trump, or anybody else could make that sort
Speaker 2: of a decision for America in the world just doesn't
Speaker 2: seem on its face correct.
Speaker 1: You would have floored the authors of the Constitution of
Speaker 1: the United States, who had lived through the American Revolution
Speaker 1: and had experienced exactly that and wrote a constitution to
Speaker 1: prohibit exactly that thing from happening. Of a single person
Speaker 1: imposing taxes on the whole nation in the amount that
Speaker 1: he chooses, for whatever reason he wants, for as long
Speaker 1: as he decides that's that's wild. And but I don't
Speaker 1: think that the I'll get to the constitutional issue in
Speaker 1: this case. I think they'll probably decide this on statutory grounds.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is the teriffs are
Speaker 1: supposedly in accordance with a statute called AEPA, which stands
Speaker 1: for something I don't remember, and AYIPA does not actually
Speaker 1: allow for tariffs. What it says is that the president
Speaker 1: can in a case in an emergency, the president can
Speaker 1: regulate or seize products from foreign countries in commerce and
Speaker 1: things like that. It's designed to freeze assets and capture
Speaker 1: things so that people aren't sending bad stuff to the
Speaker 1: enemy in wartime and stuff. The statute is not designed
Speaker 1: to allow for these tariffs that are just designed or
Speaker 1: formulated however the president wants. So I think the court
Speaker 1: is going to say that they don't satisfy it. But
Speaker 1: shouldn't they have taken that up like last week, given.
Speaker 2: The fact that I mean we're threatening one hundred percent
Speaker 2: tariffs on everything from China starting November first.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be nice if some of these things
Speaker 1: are faster. But to know, in their defense, there's so
Speaker 1: much stuff that's been coming at them, There's so much
Speaker 1: unconstitutional stuff that's been going on that's been thrown at
Speaker 1: their heads. You know, there's only so much time that
Speaker 1: they can resolve these cases, do they.
Speaker 2: I know, sometimes you prioritize things and move them up,
Speaker 2: like you know, deciding on uh, you know, Nixon and
Speaker 2: Watergate and all kinds of things that where you just decide,
Speaker 2: we got to have an emergency session.
Speaker 1: But right in general, you just let it come down,
Speaker 1: like when it comes down the pipe. So here's the thing.
Speaker 1: So the the Feds said, because the plaintiffs in that
Speaker 1: case said, well, you need to resolve this really quickly
Speaker 1: for all the reasons you just said, and the Trump
Speaker 1: administration said, no, no, there's no hurry because we can
Speaker 1: always refund people the taxes if these things are declared
Speaker 1: to league, that wouldn't be complicated at all. And then
Speaker 1: at the same time, the administration is putting out these
Speaker 1: press releases saying, we have to keep these tariffs in
Speaker 1: place because it would be economic chaos if they get
Speaker 1: struck down, because then we'd have to refund everybody's money.
Speaker 1: They were literally saying the opposite thing simultaneously. I know
Speaker 1: that that is ordinary nowadays, but to me that's still
Speaker 1: shock us.
Speaker 2: Lay people don't fully understand that. You know, these things
Speaker 2: have to work their way through courts, through a low
Speaker 2: lower level all the way to the higher level, and
Speaker 2: it takes its time or everything like that.
Speaker 1: But there's so many.
Speaker 2: Examples, like the can a fifteen year old boy participat
Speaker 2: in girls sports in high school?
Speaker 1: It just seems like this is gonna get to the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court. Can we just do it now and decide?
Speaker 2: Or the same thing, can you be a sanctuary city
Speaker 2: and just decide we don't agree, Well, you just decide
Speaker 2: these now.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason I mentioned now the court takes
Speaker 1: only one percent of the cases and fewer every year.
Speaker 1: A part of the thing is I think some of
Speaker 1: the conservative justices have wanted the Supreme Court not to
Speaker 1: decide these questions. They sort of tend to want lower
Speaker 1: courts to resolve these questions. The problem with that is,
Speaker 1: of course, the lower courts disagree with each other sometimes,
Speaker 1: but I think that the Supreme Court sees itself as
Speaker 1: they're worried that they don't because they follow this no
Speaker 1: nonsense idea of a judicial restraint. We don't want unelected
Speaker 1: judges controlling everything, which scares everybody else but doesn't scare me,
Speaker 1: because I'm worried about judges getting things wrong, whether they
Speaker 1: get it wrong by being too active or too passive,
Speaker 1: I'm worried about them getting the wrong. I'm not worried
Speaker 1: about being activists. I'm worried about them being wrong. Those
Speaker 1: are two completely different things. I think it's a very
Speaker 1: bad thing when the Court stands back and says, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna we're not gonna interfere, We're gonna let the
Speaker 1: government violate your rights and we're not going to do
Speaker 1: anything about it, because we don't want to have activist judges.
Speaker 1: I think that's a terrible idea. Anyway. What I think
Speaker 1: we're seeing is that the Supreme Court is trying to
Speaker 1: offload some of its work to these lower courts, and
Speaker 1: so they are taking fewer of those cases and not
Speaker 1: necessarily deciding them as quickly as as otherwise. They just
Speaker 1: don't want to have their fingerprints on it. Yeah, and well,
Speaker 1: because they they buy this notion that unelected judges shouldn't
Speaker 1: have all this power. Okay, and again I of course,
Speaker 1: of course nobody should do things wrong if they're in government.
Speaker 1: But the idea that that judicial activism is a serious
Speaker 1: threat is wildly overbrown, overblown. Congress and the President violate
Speaker 1: your rights on an hourly basis in this country. I'm
Speaker 1: far more worried about them than I am about the courts.
Speaker 1: The courts are so they have very little power or
Speaker 1: all they can do is pronounce what the law is.
Speaker 1: The Congress and the president can resist them very powerfully.
Speaker 1: But when the Congress does stuff and the President does stuff,
Speaker 1: the violate your rights, and the Court folds its hands
Speaker 1: and says, we're not going to do anything about that
Speaker 1: because we don't want to be activist judges. That's a
Speaker 1: breakdown in our constitutional system that was never intended to
Speaker 1: be that way.
Speaker 2: How often, and then, obviously this is a complete opinion,
Speaker 2: a judgment opinion, But how often does the Supreme Court
Speaker 2: make mistakes?
Speaker 1: Do you think, oh, they get it wrong, Yeah, they
Speaker 1: get things wrong very frequently. But oh, nowadays I would
Speaker 1: say I think they get things wrong about Oh, I
Speaker 1: guess forty percent of the time. But I guess it
Speaker 1: depends on whether you mean get things wrong by not
Speaker 1: doing things that I wish they would do, as opposed
Speaker 1: to doing things that I wish they wouldn't do. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff where like I'm, for instance,
Speaker 1: I'm not an originalist. You know. The originalism is this
Speaker 1: big popular trend right now where these judges are like, well,
Speaker 1: what the Founding's fathers thought that the Constitution meant is
Speaker 1: what it'll meant for all time, And that sounds plausible
Speaker 1: at first, but when you get down to it, it's
Speaker 1: just not how language really works. And so you know,
Speaker 1: for that reason, I also find myself disagree with a
Speaker 1: lot of people on my own side. I love Justice Thomas,
Speaker 1: for instance, but I find that I disagree with him
Speaker 1: about a lot of things. I don't think that, you know,
Speaker 1: our constitutional rights should be interpreted in accordance with what
Speaker 1: the Puritans thought when they landed in Massachusetts, and this
Speaker 1: we do you call what you are? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I have to That's the best word that I've been
Speaker 1: able to find for what I am. Okay, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm hoping to figure this out. I have a big
Speaker 1: paper that's coming out later this year that we're all
Speaker 1: talk about this, and maybe that'll help me figure out
Speaker 1: what the title is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So on the how often do they get it wrong?
Speaker 2: It reminds me of the like when they do the
Speaker 2: right track wrong track? You know, is the country going
Speaker 2: the right direction wrong direction? And the number's really high, Well,
Speaker 2: half the people want it to be further left, and
Speaker 2: have the people want to be further right, So it
Speaker 2: doesn't really tell you anything that's right.
Speaker 1: That's why the government should have less power over our lives,
Speaker 1: because we don't want those crazy people over there, whoever
Speaker 1: they might be, to control oh what I get to
Speaker 1: do with my life. And that's the whole benefit of
Speaker 1: limited constitutional government is that you get to decide your
Speaker 1: own life in your own way, and other people don't
Speaker 1: get to come in and tell you how to live
Speaker 1: what they think is your proper life. And unfortunately neither
Speaker 1: party today believes in that. Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2: The less the government is involved, the less it matters
Speaker 2: whether they get it right or on.
Speaker 1: Because they're not deciding for me. The people sometimes say, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've had this happen to me. But Tim, yeah, you
Speaker 1: believe in freedom, but that's an optimistic view of human nature.
Speaker 1: You think people are good and that they're going to
Speaker 1: do good things with freedom. No, it's exactly the opposite.
Speaker 1: I believe in freedom because I don't trust other people
Speaker 1: to be to make the right decisions from my life.
Speaker 1: I think other people are often ignorant, they're very foolish.
Speaker 1: Sometimes sometimes they're corrupt, they're bribed, they don't know what
Speaker 1: they're doing, and they'll make mistakes. So their mistakes should
Speaker 1: be confined to their own lives. They shouldn't be allowed
Speaker 1: to inflict their mistakes on my life. That's the argument
Speaker 1: for freedom. That's a good point to end on.
Speaker 2: Another excellent point from Tim Sandffer, as he's done where
Speaker 2: we figured it out like twenty years yes on the
Speaker 2: Armstrong and Getty went a year as we all enter
Speaker 2: the winter of our lives.
Speaker 1: So thanks for your time, Tim, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Police say two suspects ambushed to Florida couple at gunpoint
Speaker 3: near Tampa. Almost two months later, please say they've now
Speaker 3: caught the attackers thanks to something very small taped under
Speaker 3: the victim's vehicle.
Speaker 1: The search of.
Speaker 3: Their vehicle, our detectives did find that Apple AirTag. The
Speaker 3: Hillsborough County Sheriff's offices records tied that hidden Apple AirTag
Speaker 3: to twenty six year old Luis Enrique Charles, who was.
Speaker 1: Arrested last week.
Speaker 3: Apple's website spells out how people can get alerts about
Speaker 3: nearby tracking devices like air tags.
Speaker 1: Typically, it's on your settings whether you can be notified,
Speaker 1: whether the AirTag pops in on your phone or not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting the Apple AirTag.
Speaker 2: I mean, when I was a kid, the idea of
Speaker 2: owning a tracking device that you could have put on
Speaker 2: somebody's car or luggage or whatever would have been so
Speaker 2: James Bond and crazy. Yeah, and scary and dangerous. And
Speaker 2: now everybody's got access to one. But I keep forgetting. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you there's a setting and I should do this on
Speaker 2: my phone. There's a setting where you can see if
Speaker 2: there are Apple tags nearby.
Speaker 1: I have it turned on. Yeah, all women should. Nobody's
Speaker 1: trying to get to me.
Speaker 2: Uh but never no, but yeah, it'd be it's good
Speaker 2: to know if somebody has decided. God, I would think, yeah,
Speaker 2: if you're a woman, you got to have it turned on, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the idea every time you leave a night nightclub, the
Speaker 2: concern that the guy that kept asking to dance and
Speaker 2: you kept saying no is slipped an Apple tag into
Speaker 2: your car or purse or whatever. H Oh my god,
Speaker 2: brave New world. We're talking about scams a little bit earlier.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just for the web route commercials that
Speaker 2: were regularly doing to try to deal with getting hacked
Speaker 2: and whatnot. It just we're all confronted with this so
Speaker 2: many times per day. Every one of us gets up
Speaker 2: and deletes like ten emails that are clearly attempts to
Speaker 2: steal from us, or texts on your phone or whatever else.
Speaker 2: Got this text id theft. There were three student loans
Speaker 2: opened in my name that I've been trying to clear
Speaker 2: for over a year. I've filled out and submitted copious
Speaker 2: amounts of paperwork, and the latest request from the lender
Speaker 2: is for a copy of my high school to diploma
Speaker 2: to prove who I am. I don't know about you,
Speaker 2: but I can't lay my hands on my high school diploma.
Speaker 1: Oh geez.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this person said, I'm sixty five years old and
Speaker 2: I'm not doing the footwork to acquire a copy of
Speaker 2: my effing.
Speaker 1: High school diploma.
Speaker 2: Since I don't need to care about my credit score,
Speaker 2: I'll die with these loans of my credit report. Oh
Speaker 2: and my credit has been supposedly frozen for years in
Speaker 2: order to avoid such an occurrence. That's what they always
Speaker 2: tell you, freeze your credit thing if you're worried about
Speaker 2: your stuff being hacked.
Speaker 1: But it's funny.
Speaker 2: We had to do this the other day for our
Speaker 2: company insurance where we had to prove all kinds of
Speaker 2: different things and I needed to come up with birth
Speaker 2: certificates and marriage certificates and various things that I didn't
Speaker 2: know where they were, but I finally laid my hands
Speaker 2: on them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm trying to find those things.
Speaker 2: It's you never think about where they are until it's
Speaker 2: like down to the wire. Well, some of y'all are
Speaker 2: very like my mom always was super organized and no
Speaker 2: always knew where everything was all the time.
Speaker 1: But I'm not that person. That's a pain in the ass.
Speaker 2: I was great talking to Tim the lawyer, always is
Speaker 2: and I always like his points when he gets to
Speaker 2: stuff like he did there At the end, that it
Speaker 2: all comes down to, we want the government involved in
Speaker 2: our lives. As little as possible because they're so susceptible
Speaker 2: to being well to being human beings, and human beings
Speaker 2: can either have poor judgment, be corrupt, become corrupt, whatever
Speaker 2: the situation is, be wacky ideologically in a way that
Speaker 2: you don't agree. So you want and you know you
Speaker 2: want them making decisions for you as little as possible.
Speaker 2: And that's what it all comes down to, if you
Speaker 2: lean right in my opinion, you want the least amount
Speaker 2: of local, state, federal government involved in making decisions for
Speaker 2: your life, other than in cases where you know it's
Speaker 2: keeping you from harming someone else. But that is not
Speaker 2: the direction that the country seems to be going as
Speaker 2: we add more and more to our tax code and
Speaker 2: more laws and federal laws and all these different sorts
Speaker 2: of things. What's that There's a saying out there and there,
Speaker 2: I think somebody even wrote a book how many federal
Speaker 2: laws the average person violates on a daily basis, Multiple
Speaker 2: federal laws that you violate on a daily basis, because
Speaker 2: there are so many. And then you get into the
Speaker 2: world of just find me the man and I'll find
Speaker 2: the crime if you want to get somebody, and law
Speaker 2: fare and that sort of thing. At all levels of government.
Speaker 2: Just fantastic.
Speaker 1: Anyway, We're going to.
Speaker 2: Talk to Katie's dad in an hour three for the
Speaker 2: oddest of reasons. It's not because he used to be
Speaker 2: a judge. It's because he used to being an embalmer.
Speaker 2: He used to embalm dead bodies and then dress them.
Speaker 2: I just have questions about that, among other things on
Speaker 2: the way if he missed the second the podcast Armstrong
Speaker 2: and Getty on demand Armstrong and Getty