Ben Wittes: Who the F*** Are You?
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Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm so excited to have back Ben Wittes. He's Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He also writes Dog Shirt Daily on Substack. What's up, Ben?
Oh, you know, it's just another day in paradise. You know, every time you think you've hit bottom, you scratch and there's a Dan Bongino underneath. I mean, you know, I got to tell you, Tim, I've been ready for a lot of things. That one I was not ready for.
I think it's cute that you think that we were at or near the bottom. We're not even, we can't even see the bottom from here, Ben.
I'm just, you know, when you're falling down a well, it always feels like, not that I've fallen down a well before, but it always feels like you're about to hit the bottom and then you realize there is no bottom. It just goes down into the center of the earth. And there is Dan Pongino waiting for you.
Hugging you on the way down. Yeah. Bringing you down with him. We're going to get to Dan Pongino. We've got so much to get to. I've been binging on the Lawfare part. I'm not alone, actually. I had a friend that sent me a screenshot of something. And if you're playing on CarPlay, it accidentally gives you a double screenshot. Have you ever done that where you send a text to someone? Anyway, they were also listening to the Lawfare pod. So many of us want to understand what's happening in the law.
You know, I appreciated, you know, you and Ezra Klein saying that things must be really bad if you were listening to the Lawfare podcast again. A lot of people took a break from us for four years. And, you know, I understand that there were happier times. But when things really, really suck, we're there to hold your hand.
All right. Well, here's the thing for me. That was so disorienting on my plane flights as I was coming in and out of dozing, listening to your dulcet tones. It's so strange to have to match the considered legal analysis that's happening on the panels with... what you're responding to, which are executive orders or decrees by unelected bureaucrats that seem to have been dictated by voice note while they were playing a first-person shooter game, like are written in marker or poop smeared. And then you guys are like, well, we have to look at the reference.
Could they at least get the apostrophes right? Like the editor in me really bristles at this stuff.
So Anna's like referencing precedent from the 1952 case. And it's like, is this I mean, that must be challenging for you to have to figure out. How do you take this stuff seriously? I guess is my opening question.
Okay, so the first point is you have to bifurcate your brain. If you are talking in politics, you do not have to take this stuff seriously, and you shouldn't take it seriously. And the right approach is mockery, derision, expressions of anger, you know, all the feels. But if you are us... and you're trying to track litigation over it. You're trying to figure out what the pressure points are in which things can actually be stopped. We're not the people who are doing town halls. We're not making political ads, and God bless you guys for doing that stuff. That's not what we do. What we do is we try to give information to legal practitioners who are working in this space. And that means actually cutting through a lot of that stuff and talking about this in the language that people are going to have to talk about it in briefs challenging it, in briefs defending it. And it means taking the defenses seriously, including the 1952 cases, which you would quite reasonably be reacting to by saying, wait a minute, Elon Musk doesn't give a crap about what happened in 1952.
And I think you just have to be able to hold multiple ideas in your head at the same time. We're trying to talk in the language that the district judges are hearing this stuff in because we're trying to provide a resource that's useful to people who are engaged in or following in detail those litigations.
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