Emily Bazelon

And yet the timing of it means that the person who they are giving much more power to, the actual president in office, is Donald Trump.

Maybe for some of them that's like kind of inconvenient.

You could imagine that Chief Justice Roberts would prefer that a more honorable president was actually in office while he was doing this.

But when people who've been eyeing a goal for a long time, whether it's, you know, jurisprudence or legislation, get a chance to enact it, it's hard for them to resist.

And so I feel like that is part of the dynamic here.

I wonder, David, how you think about that part of how our legal landscape is changing.

Well, one way to think about both of those questions is, can courts save American democracy?

What is their actual role here?

And I think what we're seeing is they can't do it on their own, right?

So, I mean, I would argue that the lower courts have been really pretty stalwart at

since Trump took office in standing up for the rule of law and pushing back in calling the president's bluff on a number of fronts.

I think the Supreme Court has been far less effective.

Whatever its frustration with the emergency docket, until the decision about the National Guard in Chicago, Trump, the administration had an almost unbroken string of victories on the emergency docket.

So we've seen the Supreme Court exceed in a number of domains.

And yes, they probably are going to push back on in some of the most extreme cases.

But I agree with you, Aaron, that we're still going to end up with expanded presidential power for this particular president.

And I think the other insight of the questions that you asked is that when the political system is not operating in a way that there are obvious consequences for someone who is abusing power, then it's really hard for the legal system to fix the whole thing.

Yeah.

To me, the most important question is what happens in the upcoming elections.

Are they free and fair?