Chapter 1: What recent changes are impacting the Republican Party's unity?
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Chapter 2: How is the Supreme Court influencing presidential powers?
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Hello and welcome to The Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back one of our favorites. He's an opinion columnist for The New York Times. He's also co-host of the legal podcast, Advisory Opinions. It's David French. How are you doing, David? Tim, great to see you. Good to see you as well.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Trump versus Slaughter case?
A bunch to get into. I want to start with what is happening at the Supreme Court. We are going to get at the end to some real weird stuff happening in MAGA world.
I promise you that. Tim, that's so uncharacteristic. You're saying there's some weird stuff going on with MAGA? No, no. Okay, I'm skeptical.
We'll see. Sometimes everybody has, what is it, the strange cousin? It's just for MAGA, it's all the cousins.
Yeah.
I haven't had a chance to talk about it this week, but on Monday, we had arguments in the Trump versus Slaughter case, which is about giving Trump and giving any president more powers to fire civil servants. So actually, why don't you just explain the case and what you think is happening?
Yeah, yeah.
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Chapter 4: How are free speech protections evolving in today's political climate?
So on Monday, the court heard arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, which is this case about the firing of an FTC commissioner. Now, this is one of those really interesting areas where old school conservatism meets Trumpism. Well, I wouldn't say meets Trumpism. There's some overlap with Trumpism. And that is that the FTC is one of these multi-member commissions created years ago.
There's a number of these. where they're located in the executive branch, but they're kind of hybrid agencies. They're supposed to be in the executive branch, but also immune from some degree of executive branch oversight. You can only fire the commissioners for cause, for example. And this has been something that conservatives for a long time, legal conservatives,
have really bristled at because they look at these multi-member commissions as almost creating a kind of a new branch of government. They're not really under the control of the legislature. They're not really totally control of the president. They result in, in the conservative argument, one that I happen to share, they result in kind of an entrenched bureaucracy that isn't really accountable
purely accountable to the president, not purely accountable to Congress, not really accountable to the people because it's so far removed from the people.
Chapter 5: What role do conspiracy theories play in MAGA politics?
And this is kind of a legacy and hangover of the progressive era, sort of this idea that, you know, look, administrative states need a lot of technocratic expertise and we need to insulate technocratic expertise from political accountability. And, you know, there are problems attached to that.
The way I've described what's going on here with the court is we're very much, Tim, at what I would say a fork in the road. Think of it as we've got one of two destinations, the good place or the bad place.
There's no purgatory in this world? No.
Nope, nope, nope. It's one or the other, Tim. It's one or the other. Sorry, it's to use the old, old phrase, turn or burn. Like those are your two options, right? So here's the bad place. And then I'll tell you the good place.
The bad place would be if the Supreme Court does what I think has been kind of consistent with originalist philosophy forever and ever and said, wait, these hybrid agencies are structurally not in conformance with the Constitution. If it's an executive agency, it's got to be under the president.
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Chapter 6: How is the FBI's focus affecting progressive groups?
If you wanted something under with Congress having a lot of control, you create a legislative agency like the Congressional Budget Office created at the tail end of the Nixon era. But the bad outcome would be, OK, you give the president greater authority over the executive branch. But then you also give the executive branch greater authority.
That would be if you upheld, say, the birthright citizenship order.
Well, that's where I was going next. And there's been some interesting kind of analysis of what we're hearing from the judges of that. What did you think? The justices, rather.
I think they've taken the case to uphold birthright citizenship. It's very difficult for me to imagine an executive order sort of overturning More than a century of American law that is also, by the way, promulgated by statute. So you have the constitutional provision, you have a statutory citizenship provision, and then you have this Trump executive order.
And I don't think that Trump executive order is going to trump the statute. I don't think he's got a proper understanding of the Constitution here. There's exactly on point Supreme Court authority from right close to the generation that actually passed the 14th Amendment.
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Chapter 7: What impact does the manosphere have on young men today?
So I think you've got a lot of things against the Trump administration. Very similar with the Tariff case. So the bad place, though, is let's say the court gives Trump more power over the executive branch and then allows the executive branch to do what Trump wants to do and grab more power. But I don't think that's what's happening. Yeah. I think what's happening is this.
They're going to give Trump more power over the executive branch or give all presidents, let's put it this way, all presidents more power over the executive branch, but also make the executive branch less powerful by extending the Biden era precedents around vaccine mandates and student loans into tariffs, into birthright citizenship, so that presidents who want to be lawmakers are
are just going to be shut out. A president is a law executor, which is very different from a lawmaker. And so I think that's where they're headed. And I think that's the better place or the good place is greater political accountability for a diminished executive branch. The bad place would be greater executive authority over a more powerful executive branch.
Yeah, I'm instinctively with you on that. I do think that there are some risks associated with giving, you know, him this kind of firing power.
Oh, sure.
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Chapter 8: How are recent election results reflecting Republican discontent?
And with politicizing all these offices. I mean, you see that potentially, obviously, does this extend to the Fed? And does that then, you know, raise questions about the Fed independence? You know, obviously, we're seeing some of this at HHS with, you know, now we're going to get rid of scientists and put in quacks at some of these commissions.
We're quarantining people in South Carolina right now over measles. That's where we are as a country. So what would be your pushback to that, which is like we do need some of these commissions to be independent?
Yeah. The problem you have here is you have three branches of government, judiciary, executive, and legislative. If you want to create an additional branch of independent sort of technocrats, how do you do that? I mean, I think that that might be constitutional amendment territory where you sort of delegate –
You delegate some political functions over to independent, non-accountable technocratic bureaucracies or that have very, very, very limited democratic accountability. The problem here, though, Tim, we are often conflating things. This case was about one of the heads of the agency.
You know, part of electing a president is you're electing a person with hiring and firing power of cabinet agencies, of the top people in the executive branch. The top people in the executive branch serve at the pleasure of the president. But what Trump is doing is something different that wasn't at issue in this case. So this case was about the top person, one of the top people.
But he's also firing people up and down the bureaucracy, including lots of people who have civil service protections. And that's where you're getting into some of your scientists, for example. But the problem is, even if you keep all those scientists, if the top person is Robert F. Kennedy and then his boss is Donald Trump, you've got a load of problems.
There's still some good stuff happening though. I don't want to out that. I saw somebody at the airport recently who's at one of these like small commissions tucked into one of the departments. I'm not going to out them. And they're like, I'm listening to your podcast every day. And I'm like, and they told me what they did. And I was like, how have you not been fired? Yes.
I don't know.
I don't know. They don't know that we're here. There's only five of us in this corner office. And so, you know, sometimes there are civil servants that can do good work that don't have the oversight of those, you know, whatever, the political leadership.
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