Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’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 Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right. And so one of the challenges there is people feel like I would never get away with that at my job. Yes. If you were just a normal federal government employee, let's say you just work in a Social Security office helping people get Social Security cards. There are very strict ethics rules that do not allow you to accept gifts greater than $20.
I cannot send you a copy of my book because it costs more than $20. Right. And so there are very strict codes of ethics for federal employees. It's meant to make sure that things are transparent and above board and you can't just send gifts to grease the wheels and make things happen.
happen and that it's treating citizens fairly and so when you see that some supreme court members are taking trips with billionaires on private yachts and going to their private hunting fishing retreats and the private jet trips and it seems like the rules are for thee but not for me yeah It makes people feel salty about it. Like I would get fired if I let you take me out to lunch.
It's easy for Chipotle to even cost more than $20. Yeah, exactly. If you just add on enough queso. Some Supreme Court justices have even talked openly about that, that when they go out to lunch with friends, they insist on paying for themselves. They do not even allow themselves to be treated by a friend to lunch to keep things above board.
But that has not been the case with a couple of justices on the court. So all that to say that there is a perceived imbalance in terms of how political they have become to where they're supposed to be. The number of cases they hear that are unanimous. If you look at the number of cases they hear where at least one of the liberal justices is in the majority with the conservative justices.
If you look at the number of cases where one of the conservative justices finds with the liberals, you would find a different pattern, however. you would find a pattern in which their behavior overall is not as politicized as the news would have us believe.
It's the big name cases. It's the heavy hitters. But it's the political cases. Yes. It is the ones that get the attention. Exactly. And this is the other thing that's true about the court is that they take the cases they want to hear. They get to choose which cases they want to hear.
Four people have to want to hear the case.
Out of nine.
Wow, that was nice of you.
Got my first F. Four people out of nine have to want to hear it. But here's the other thing is that that's not a law. There's no law that says four people have to want to hear it. They just decided that for themselves. They could change that at any point. They make all of their own rules. So yes, the tradition of four out of nine have to want to hear the case is just a tradition.
There's no external governing body that dictates these things to them. So four people have to want to hear it. And the fact that they have a six-person ideological consensus means that they are more likely to take up political cases.
And so even though the majority of the cases are not highly political, the majority of the cases are kind of boring, they're administrative, they're pertaining to one specific criminal, doesn't extrapolate to the country at large necessarily. Even though that is true, the willingness of the court
to take on these highly politicized cases like affirmative action, like abortion, like transgender medical care, because they now have a crucial majority who wants to hear a certain type of case.
Yes, that's right. To varying degrees. Even within the six, there's a spectrum.
They feel empowered to take up cases that they maybe would not have felt empowered to take up before because they have a level of consensus amongst themselves that the case is going to be decided in a way that they feel is favorable.
When it was 5-4 or when it was a more liberal swing to the court, the conservative members would not have advocated for taking up these cases because they know they're not going to be decided in their favor. And so now the opposite is true. The pendulum has swung to the right on the court.
I think that's absolutely true. The role of the court has evolved over time significantly. Members of the Supreme Court used to literally ride around on horseback to hear cases. They didn't even have a building.
They were in the basement of the Capitol. They didn't even have a building until the 1930s. And so if you think about the visibility of or the optics of we meet in the basement of the legislative branch. Yeah. The optics are very different than the building they have now, which is like on the top of the steps with the big marble pillars. It seems very grandiose and official. Yeah.
The way the court views its role is on a pendulum spectrum. If you think back to the 1950s, during the time when we were making rulings about things like Brown v. Board of Education, school integration, the person who was in charge of the Supreme Court at the time was a chief justice named Earl Warren, who was actually formerly the governor of California. Yeah.
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