Lev Menand
speaker
1,295 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 17 Jul
Lev Menand’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Absolutely.
I mean, before the debt ceiling was in place, Congress used to specifically authorize all of the debt issuances.
When Congress would do a spending program, they would join it with a funding.
It's illegal to fire everybody at the IRS.
They're civil servants.
Yeah, right.
There's a really deep issue here that you guys are
you know, um, raising, which has to do with the rule of law.
And you may know a case Marbury versus Madison, very famous case, 1803, which has to do with president Thomas Jefferson's, um, decision not to deliver a commission to a man named Marbury to serve as a justice of the peace in the district of Columbia.
And it went all the way up to Supreme court and chief justice Marshall said, uh,
The president can't not do what he's legally required to do under the law.
And the courts can mandamus, is the word, the president to do what he is required.
And it was that decision up until Myers that was understood to underwrite Congress's ability to limit removal power because Marbury, the president was not authorized to remove him.
He had a five-year term.
And to tell the executive branch, the courts can tell the executive branch to follow the law.
Part of the problem with this unitary theory is it's really troubling Marbury and this foundation that suggests the president is under the law, has to follow the law, and the court's job is to make the president and the president's officers do that.
And as we get away from that, you can have these hypotheticals where you're thinking, oh, they're just having the IRS not follow the law.
That is unthinkable to the 19th century.
In the 19th century, under Marbury, that's a plain case for mandamus, as Chief Justice Marshall said, having the IRS officers do nothing.
But now, we actually think that maybe that's... What are we going to do?
Showing 261–280 of 1,295 · page 14 of 65
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