Jack Goldsmith
speaker
462 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Jack Goldsmith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I am confident that it will pick its battles and it will try to find places to have maximum impact on the clearest, most legitimate ground with the largest majority it can find. And that is an art, not a science.
In my view, very little. It has very few tools. I mean, it can sanction litigants who argue before the Supreme Court, but that's small beer in this context.
It has marshals, and the marshals are under the control of the attorney general, basically. Right. Some people have talked about the possibility of civil contempt against officials that maybe could be enforced in state courts against officials.
But if the Trump administration takes the step, the momentous step of blowing off the Supreme Court in a clear way, I just don't think those remedies are going to be the important remedies. The only remedies, in my judgment, are what the feckless Congress does and what the American people do. And I mean, ultimately, that's just the way it is.
You're asking me to speculate more than I'm comfortable with. But I'm happy to do it. I'm just telling you I'm not comfortable. It's not clear which way it cuts. I mean, if you push back against Trump too much and there's a Democratic Congress, he may go worse in the other direction. I think it takes more than one house.
I think it takes the American people through their politicians saying this has gone too far. You know, I think that might happen if he clearly defied a clearly legitimate Supreme Court decision.
What do you think? What happens?
I'm accused of being naive on this point, but I tend to agree with you. And it's hopeful, but it's also my belief. Let me just say one more thing. Trump, if, I'm not sure what the aim is, but if the ultimate aim is to consolidate forms of executive power...
that are going to persist, much better to have the Supreme Court on board saying, this is something you can do, and therefore maybe accepting his wins with his losses. It's not clear. I just don't know. It's hard to predict what the legacy looks like for what he's trying to accomplish. I assume he's trying to accomplish something beyond
his term if he's blowing up the Supreme Court and basically blowing up legal checks on the presidency altogether.
I think you've written this and reminded of the Bush administration. There's a non-trivial chance, I would say a decent chance, that they're going to end up in a worse place.
Yes, they're going to win on some issues that the court was going to move there anyway, but the Frankenstein version of the unitary executive is not going to be viewed well and that a lot of these moves they're making are ultimately could happen. He's constrained by the court in ways that weren't clarified before.
Or, yeah. So all of the spending and firing things, the lower level things, if it was clarified that you can't do that... The presidency would be weakened there. It could be that there are going to be new due process and related constraints on immigration because of what we've seen can be abused. I mean, on any of these issues, you know, they're going to be – a lot of these issues are undecided.
They're being contested for the first time. And if they result in losses, that's going to be – could be a constraint on the president. But if it goes well for them –
You have – I think the plausible scenario is that you have a much more robust unitary executive, which means that the president controls agencies to an unprecedented degree and maybe controls a good chunk of the civil service as well, either by statute if he's able to do that or better for him under Article 2 because it means it couldn't be reversed.
I think that is the most likely significant change to come about. And then most of the other things, we haven't talked about the kind of abuses, and maybe we don't have time to, and what the legacy of the abuses is. On most of the other things, on Doge and things like that, it's not clear how much this is going to stick.
I mean, it's not clear what the Democrats are going to do in response to a lot of this stuff. It's not clear if we'll have tit for tat and weaponization. It's not clear if we'll have tit for tat directing and more extreme versions of directing officials to do what the president wants.
But I guess the only thing I'm really clear on is that the unitary executive will be, you know, presidential vertical control over the executive branch will be broader and firmer in constitutional law.
Jimmy Carter ran on it, basically, after Nixon. So, this is a little outside of my expertise. My senior Democratic political friends tells me that it's almost certainly going to be retaliatory tit for tat.
And that it's going to be impossible, that the idea of constraints after what's happened now is going to be impossible, and it's going to be impossible to resist doing everything Trump is doing in reverse, whatever that looks like. And that takes us to yet a worse position. I mean, it would be great if we could have the opposite.
Showing 441–460 of 462 · page 23 of 24
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