Quinta Jurecic
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Quinta Jurecic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And Roberts, at least in his majority opinion, seemed kind of like offended by the fact that prosecutors were going after these actions to begin with. That that wasn't gentlemanly in some way, let's say. And I do think that if... This is essentially like saying, you know, if the moon were made of cheese.
But if Trump had come in with a number of very well-designed sort of surgical test cases to really push the limits of presidential power in a way that I think a court that is disposed to a very particular vision of executive authority would have been really sympathetic to, that you could absolutely see the court ruling in his favor on those issues.
And it may still on some of these, you know, like the ability to remove the FEC commissioner, for example. But coming in and just kind of wrecking everything and then saying to John Roberts, like, hey, you're going to back me, right? I think is not very appealing to Roberts who wants to see himself as the custodian of this kind of wise apolitical institution.
And I know that people are going to listen to me and think, But of course, the court is just a political institution these days, you know. I think that certain justices on the court, certainly Roberts, I think Amy Coney Barrett, want to be seen as more than politicians in robes and that that is going to guide their behavior more.
And so for that reason, I am very skeptical that things like, you know, trying to assert a really aggressive presidential impoundment authority or assert this sensible reinterpretation of birthright citizenship are going to make it through designed as they have been designed.
You know, there are a lot of ways, like I said, where there are particular authorities the executive could have used to say, we're going to tweak this funding, you know, we have this authority, etc. Or they could have said, actually, Congress puts this condition on this funding stream, and we think that condition is unconstitutional because, you know...
There are national security concerns, and we're going to make an extremely targeted court case to argue that the legislative constraints that Congress has placed on the executive's ability to impound funds are unconstitutional and convince the courts and the Supreme Court on that basis. That would be sort of the clever way to do it, and I think a way that would have given you a lot more luck.
in the Supreme Court, the way that they have actually done it, just kind of coming in with a sledgehammer and just smashing everything, is not likely to get the courts on their side. And so if this is a kind of evil master plan to destroy constitutional government, They're not doing it very well. That doesn't mean that it's not extremely dangerous. It is.
But I think it's important to be careful about the extent to which we portray this as part of a very well thought through plan.
That seems right to me, and I'll point to another example as well. So one of, I think, the most terrifying things that's happened in the last week, and it's difficult to rank them, is the news of Elon Musk's kind of wrecking crew of young men
who have kind of reportedly been dispatched to a variety of federal agencies to supposedly look for efficiencies, but it seems from the reporting like what they're actually doing is kind of barging their way in demanding access to data and then wrecking as much as they possibly can. And... There are a lot of ways in which that's concerning.
The most concerning has been the reporting about what's going on inside the Treasury, where I believe two Musk kind of acolytes had access to very, very sensitive Treasury data, and particularly the corner of the Treasury Department that is kind of the nerve system that actually sends out the payments that the United States government is sending around the world.
And that is concerning because it could cause a global financial crisis. I think that, you know, imagine the worst possible case scenario, right? The U.S. government says, actually, we're not going to pay, you know, any of this money that we owe anyone.
Even if they, you know, target that at a very particular sector, you can see how the ripple effects would extend because— Or even imagine they just accidentally break it. Exactly.
Exactly. And so, reportedly, there are two people who had been mucking around in these systems. There was a lawsuit filed trying to block this. The court stated that those two Musk aides should be barred from being able to change anything, that they should only have read access
Now, to be clear, their having read access is very concerning, but the fact that it was downgraded, or at least that it was downgraded after this court order, is a very, very good thing. And then the other thing that happened is not too long after that court order was issued, the Wall Street Journal reported that one of those aides,
whose name is Marco Alez, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly, resigned because the journal had confronted him with a number of extremely racist tweets that he had posted. And by racist, I mean that he posted things like, I was racist before it was cool. So I'm using his own self-descriptor there. Now, that sequence is... is reassuring in the sense that they backed down. They blinked.
But I was very concerned that we were going to end up in a situation where a court said, you know, Doge folks, you need to get out of there. Elon Musk said no, and then you have a standoff. because the agency that actually carries out court orders in these kinds of situations, the US Marshals, is actually under control of the Justice Department.
So what happens if Trump then tells the Justice Department not to comply, right? That didn't happen.
Like many people in D.C., and by that I don't only mean, you know, official D.C. I mean D.C., the city where people live. I have spent the last couple weeks having a lot of conversations and hearing about a lot of conversations with people who work in the federal government, who wanted to work in the federal government, who are connected in some way to the federal government, and who are...
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