Pod Insights 5-4 Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition About this episode Feels like we should be able to collectively wrestle with the problems of a system by which 14 million people will die in the next five years because one man can decide to withhold a bunch of money that Congress said needed to be spent, but unfortunately, because of the law, and what the law says, no one can sue about it. Good luck with figuring this one out.
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5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Transcriptions of each episode are available at fivefourpod.com http://fivefourpod.com/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Speaker 00 Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prolog Projects. In this episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about the Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. This is a recent case about the Trump administration's efforts to block foreign aid that has already been funded by Congress. At the beginning of his term, Trump signed an executive order to halt all foreign aid that did not align with the administration's goals. In response, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, along with other nonprofits, sued the government and said that the president cannot unilaterally block foreign aid funding. The Trump administration is announcing more steep cuts, this time for an AIDS relief program.
0:45 Speaker 01 This South African lab may be close to a breakthrough in the fight against HIV, but its researchers have had to stop work after US President Donald Trump hit pause on foreign aid.
0:57 Speaker 00 The Supreme Court, in yet another shadow docket decision, ruled in favor of President Trump, stating that, at least for now, the nonprofits do not appear to have standing to sue. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
1:14 Peter Shamshiri? Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have revised our nation's trajectory downwards, like the latest jobs numbers. I'm Peter.
1:24 Michael Liroff? Yes.
1:25 Peter Shamshiri? I'm here with Rhiannon.
1:26 Speaker 04 Hey.
1:27 Peter Shamshiri? And Michael.
1:28 Michael Liroff? So are we in a recession yet, or are we pre-recession?
1:30 Peter Shamshiri? No.
1:31 Speaker 04 I don't know. We need to revise the numbers, Michael, okay?
1:34 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
1:35 Speaker 04 There's no conclusions yet. We're revising.
1:37 Peter Shamshiri? What continuously happens now, usually, like, there are jobs reports, and then they will occasionally be revised upwards or downwards, once we have a little more information, and we've just seen a series of downward revisions.
1:50 Speaker 04 That's what's going on.
1:52 Michael Liroff? But to negative numbers, sometimes. I think it's, like, revised from adding 55,000 jobs to revised to adding negative 3,000 jobs. It's like, okay.
2:03 Speaker 04 Awesome.
2:04 Peter Shamshiri? As a whole, the nation needs to work harder. I think it's obvious.
2:08 Michael Liroff? Yeah, that's right. Nobody wants to work anymore.
2:12 Peter Shamshiri? Three years ago, I had one job, okay? Now I have three.
2:16 Speaker 04 Uh-huh.
2:17 Peter Shamshiri? Two podcasts, newsletter.
2:18 Speaker 04 Eating avocado toast.
2:20 Peter Shamshiri? Hmm, that's four jobs.
2:26 Peter Shamshiri? Keep up, keep up, folks. Ooh, I was laid off. Start a podcast.
2:32 Michael Liroff? Going well, start another. Not going well?
2:35 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. You take your podcast, you roll it into more podcasts.
2:41 Michael Liroff? Maybe get a job at Syracuse, teaching about how to make a podcast.
2:45 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. Michael is referring to a new department.
2:49 Michael Liroff? That's right.
2:50 Speaker 04 Whole department that Syracuse University is opening about podcasting and influencing.
2:55 Michael Liroff? That's right. Getting a degree in influencing.
2:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:58 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. You want a professor who's got two podcasts in the Patreon top 15 right now?
3:05 Peter Shamshiri? Whoever they're hiring, I bet he doesn't.
3:12 Peter Shamshiri? All right, folks, as you can hear, Michael's still in the process of moving and recording from a tin can, but we are marching onward.
3:21 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
3:21 Peter Shamshiri? This week's case, Department of State, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. This is a case about the Trump administration's efforts to block foreign assistance, USAID, et cetera. One possible point of confusion here, we'll be talking about the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the plaintiffs here, and also foreign aid. AIDS, aid. Everyone was yelling at me, saying that this is confusing. I don't personally think it is, but I'm just going to clarify. Those are different things.
3:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:55 Peter Shamshiri? Now, early in his term, Donald Trump issued an executive order stating, quote, "No further United States foreign assistance shall be dispersed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States." Now, this is interesting, because foreign aid, generally speaking, determined by Congress, right? Nonetheless, Secretary of State Marco Rubio froze all foreign aid funding through the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, while the government carried out a review of the foreign aid to make sure that it was fully aligned with the policy of the President of the United States.
4:41 Peter Shamshiri? This is all what's called impoundment. Impoundment is the process whereby the president does not spend money that has been appropriated by Congress, historically considered a no-no, as are many things that Donald Trump does. So, the AIDS vaccine advocacy coalition and some other nonprofits sued. They said, hey, this is illegal. The president cannot unilaterally halt foreign aid funding. But the Supreme Court, in a six to three decision, said that they don't think those nonprofits have standing to challenge the claim. This should sound relatively familiar.
5:23 Peter Shamshiri? Donald Trump does something that is patently illegal. It's so obvious that it's illegal that there shouldn't be any discussion of it. It's challenged in court. The Supreme Court takes it on the shadow docket and they find some-
5:38 Speaker 04 Yay, yay, yay!
5:40 Peter Shamshiri? I mean, you have to admit, it's good for us that they do it. We haven't had to come up with a new case to do from like 20 years ago all year because the Supreme Court keeps doing this.
5:55 Speaker 04 Because they are firing off three paragraph little memos to us.
5:59 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. And yeah, and they're all so short.
6:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:04 Peter Shamshiri? It's kind of sick. Then the Supreme Court finds some technicality to allow Trump to keep doing what he's doing, at least for now, right? This has been the court's MO all year, and here they are doing it once again. Ree, I'll hand that off to you for background.
6:22 Speaker 04 Okay, lots of shenanigans going on. I think it makes sense, actually, to reverse a little bit. Let's back up, let's go back in time to the 1970s, to another crank crony.
6:37 Speaker 04 Corrupt fucking loser president, Richard Nixon. Because, right now, 2025, this isn't the first time that impoundment has been an issue, where the president withholds the disbursement of funds that have been allocated by statute by Congress, right? So, after getting re-elected in 1972, President Nixon declared, "He's gonna reduce government spending. He's gonna reel in big government." Sound familiar? And, how's he going to do that? In part, he's going to impound funds. Now, over the course of history, various presidents have used impoundment to varying degrees, but Nixon really put the impoundment thing on steroids.
7:18 Speaker 04 And, what this puts a magnifying glass on, what the tension is here, if we're backing up a little bit, is the relationship between Congress and the executive. Congress passes laws that create federal agencies, directs them to use public monies, and then, what is the power of the executive when the executive branch is over those federal agencies, is over that amount of money that has been appropriated by Congress? So, I'll give an example. Congress passed amendments to the Clean Water Act in the early 1970s, directing the Nixon administration, through the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, to disburse funds to states to help them address water pollution. This is cleaning up sewage systems, you name it, right?
8:02 Speaker 04 And President Nixon refused to disburse those funds, as well as tons of other categories of funds, like subsidized housing, federal transportation stuff, roads, construction, disaster relief. Nixon's just saying, like, "I oppose these programs. I'm in control of the budget here. I'm not dispersing those funds." So, the city of New York and other cities across the US sued the Nixon administration, and they're saying, like, "We're due these funds under federal law, and Nixon can't just withhold like this. Congress passed these laws allocating for us to get these funds." And so, there's a Supreme Court case. The Supreme Court ruled in a case called City of New York v. Train, that under those Clean Water Act amendments, the president could not impound those funds. The statute, the-
8:46 Speaker 04 Clean Water Act says sums of money need to go to XYZ grantees. So the president needs to make sure those sums of money go where they need to go. So you literally have a Supreme Court case addressing this controversy of impoundment. Now, that was just narrowly decided like just under what the Clean Water Act says. But you see where the court at least was leaning in terms of this balance between congressional and executive power. Then, right after the Supreme Court case comes down, Congress itself responds to President Nixon and his fuck shit by passing a law literally about impoundment. The next year in 1973, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act.
9:25 Speaker 04 And it basically says that the president can't just withhold funds completely up to the administration's discretion. The power of the purse lies with Congress, the statute says. And if the president doesn't want to disperse funds that are mandated by federal law, well, there's a process for requesting that basically he be allowed not to. So let's fast forward to 2024. Congress appropriates more than $30 billion for foreign assistance. And on Trump's first day in office in January 2025, he froze all of that funding. Like, we all remember, right? The firing and closing down of USAID offices all around the world, all of that.
10:07 Speaker 04 And also, there are organizations in foreign countries that are recipients of this aid and in fact rely on this aid quite heavily. And so some grants and disbursements have happened out of this $30 billion. But at issue in this case that we have here, decided on the shadow docket, is a remaining $4 billion of foreign aid appropriations. Trump recently requested that Congress rescind. Trump making the request to Congress that he be allowed to impound.
10:40 Speaker 04 That he doesn't have to allocate this $4 billion, but Congress hasn't acted on that request. So the appropriation of those funds by statute is still active, right? This is still live. And many, many of these intended recipients, including the named plaintiff, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, are, we're going to talk about the impact of this later, literally at risk of like, not just having to close down, but you have to think about the impact of all of the services that they provide all over the world, not being able to do any of that. So some of these organizations sued, and that's how we get to the Supreme Court.
11:22 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. So the big picture legal issue here is that Congress passed legislation appropriating these foreign assistance funds. The president cannot unilaterally nullify an act of Congress, right? At least under, shall we say, more traditional understandings of our Constitution. That would violate the basic separation of constitutional powers. It would probably violate the Empowerment and Control Act, right?
11:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:49 Peter Shamshiri? But as usual, as we've seen a lot this year, the Trump administration does not argue before this court that what they're doing is legal. They argue instead that the plaintiffs here, these nonprofits, do not have standing to sue. Their argument is a little bit technical. It's based on what's called a preclusion. Sometimes Congress will pass a law about something or other, and in the law, it will say, here are the people who can sue about this. Sometimes it will also say, no one else can sue about this, right? But sometimes it just says, here are the people who can sue about this, and then courts infer that no one else can sue.
12:29 Peter Shamshiri? So basically, what happens is that Congress is identifying an area of concern, and they're saying, here is the vessel for addressing that concern. There's this one law, and only certain people can sue. Everyone else is precluded.
12:44 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
12:44 Peter Shamshiri? So
12:45 Speaker 04 Right.
12:45 Peter Shamshiri? That's what's happening here. There's the Empowerment and Control Act, like we mentioned, passed after Nixon, and it says that the comptroller general, I'm hitting the comp, don't yell at me, but I want people to hear it.
13:00 Speaker 04 CPAs leave us alone.
13:02 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, the Controller General can sue when the executive branch illegally impounds congressionally appropriated funds. So the court doesn't provide much reasoning, but the argument is basically, look, Congress passed a law about impoundment that allows the Controller General to sue over this, and that implicitly precludes anyone else from suing about it. Basically arguing that when Congress created the Impoundment Control Act, they meant for that to be the exclusive method for challenging illegal impoundments. Now, the obvious counterargument is that if Congress wanted to make the Impoundment
13:44 Peter Shamshiri? Control Act the exclusive method for challenging illegal impoundments, they could have just said so in the law, right? But they did not. The even better counterargument is that in the law itself, the Impoundment Control Act says that it is not the exclusive method for challenging impoundments. The law says, quote, "Nothing contained in this act shall be construed as affecting in any way the claims or defenses of any party to litigation concerning any impoundment." That's just a clear statement that other people, besides the Controller General, can sue.
14:21 Michael Liroff? Right.
14:22 Speaker 04 It's just a sentence that says other people can sue.
14:24 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
14:24 Michael Liroff? Right. It's a sentence that says this does not preclude anything for anyone.
14:30 Peter Shamshiri? It's basically what you would describe as a non-proclusion provision, right? And yet, the justices are saying that preclusion applies. Six justices of the Supreme Court are arguing that this law precludes the lawsuit when the law itself expressly says that it does not.
14:47 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
14:47 Peter Shamshiri? A level of shamelessness that you rarely see, except now all the time you see it, actually. But before, recently, I wasn't that used to it. Let's, I'll put it that way. This is very, this is another situation where it's interesting that the court Doesn't provide a full opinion. And they expressly say, this is a preliminary finding. This is shadow docket. It's procedural. It is technically not a final decision about this law. All they're doing is ruling on whether or not like a lower court ruling will stay in place and keep the funds flowing or halt the funds for now and technical procedural shit, right? So they're like, look, this is just a preliminary finding. We're kind of guessing here.
15:31 Peter Shamshiri? So it's sort of like they're making room for themselves to change their mind later and be like, hmm, maybe you're right. Or maybe not. Maybe they're, they're just doing the same thing that they've been doing all year, which is you say you won't reach the merits, but you make a preliminary finding that benefits Donald Trump. A preliminary finding that allows him to continue doing whatever he's doing. And I don't know, I guess in this case, it's just sort of extra obscene because they are sort of interpreting the statute a little bit. In other cases, they have basically been like, we're not even going to touch the law. We're not going to talk about what we think the law says. We're just making this like procedural finding or whatever.
16:15 Peter Shamshiri? But here they seem to be at least implicitly interpreting the statute. And that's just an extra layer of absurdity because one, the statute is very clear that preclusion does not apply. And then also two, it's just like, well, if we're going to go this far, then like-
16:33 Michael Liroff? You're looking at the statute, just rule on the merits.
16:36 Peter Shamshiri? Right. Can't we talk about the fact that like, this is obviously illegal? Like, like can that at least be mentioned in the opinion?
16:43 Michael Liroff? Right.
16:43 Peter Shamshiri? It's just one of those things where you're reading it, just being like, you fucking kidding me, dude? Like, how long are we going to have to keep doing this? How many times do I have to read a shadow docket opinion where Donald Trump has like, just like out and out, cut and dry, violated the law, shot a dog in the middle of the street and then the Supreme Court is like, hmm, I don't know. We've sort of, we need to hold off on this for another six months.
17:08 Speaker 04 Yeah. We need to hold off on this for another six months, but I will say that I don't think shooting a dog in the street is illegal.
17:14 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
17:15 Speaker 04 That's the bullshit dance.
17:16 Peter Shamshiri? We can't say for sure what happened here, but I've heard that was a piece of shit dog.
17:23 Michael Liroff? I mean, to Peter's point about shamelessness, I feel like they've pulled this move so many times, they can't really think people are buying this, right? Like, they can't be that delusional. Who's that stupid? Who's that gullible? Who's like, yeah, on the 70th time they do this, being like, yeah, I guess it's just procedural. It's so weird how every time, the procedure gets in the way of ruling on the merits and Trump gets to do whatever he wants.
17:53 Peter Shamshiri? Right. Like, there's only so many times you can pretend to be flipping a coin and land on Donald Trump. You know what I mean?
17:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:58 Peter Shamshiri? And like, we're working on like 25 times in a row, and it's sort of like, okay, come on. Can you, can you please just stop this?
18:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's like, it's so frustrating, it's so shameless. And to your point, Michael, it's like, they can't think everybody is this stupid, like, really believing what they're doing. But I think it's like the delusion of victory and power. This is just a wild victory lap that they're taking on top of all of our heads, you know? Like, I don't think they care if, like, anybody is like, quote unquote, falling for it.
18:34 Peter Shamshiri? Well, they're very close to a political orgasm, right? And their head's fuzzy. They're politically coming. And they're very close, and they've lost their ability to reason. That's the, I think, the most accurate metaphor for what's going on here. And then maybe after the political orgasm, they'll be like, oh.
18:52 Speaker 04 They regret it a little bit. Yeah.
18:54 Peter Shamshiri? That, that was very shameful. But for now, they are furiously jacking.
18:59 Michael Liroff? Right now, they're just pumping wildly.
19:01 Speaker 04 They're not having intercourse, let's be real, because they don't, the justices don't fuck. But, yeah.
19:08 Peter Shamshiri? Is right wing legal ideas, right wing legal theory. And let's, let's make this metaphor robust.
19:19 Michael Liroff? Really dig into it. Okay. Well, I think that's a good time to change topics, actually.
19:26 Peter Shamshiri? I would say, I would say, yeah.
19:28 Michael Liroff? Yeah, there is a dissent. It's by Kagan. It's joined by the other two liberals. It's, it's good. It is, I would say, appropriately condescending, which I quite liked. I don't find Kagan to be particularly prone to things like italics for emphasis, but she does use them here in a way that makes you think.
19:50 Peter Shamshiri? She's mad.
19:50 Michael Liroff? She thinks she's talking to like a three-year-old.
19:53 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
19:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to say this very slowly, like that.
19:58 Michael Liroff? Right.
19:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:59 Michael Liroff? So that, so that sentence that Peter read, uh, nothing contained in this act shall be construed as affecting in any way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She rewrites it with emphasis, you know, in italics, nothing in the ICA.
20:16 Michael Liroff? And then parentheses, neither its processes for considering proposed rescissions nor its creation of a comptroller general suit affects, in italics, in any way the claims of any party to litigation about any impoundment.
20:32 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
20:33 Michael Liroff? It's like, okay, you know, like assholes.
20:40 Peter Shamshiri? It's one of those things where it's like, I don't know what you're supposed to argue when there's like a single sentence in the law that's just like very clear you're wrong.
20:49 Michael Liroff? Right.
20:49 Peter Shamshiri? What are you supposed to do beyond just like throwing it in their face with italics?
20:54 Michael Liroff? Right. It's just like, this is it. And so a good portion of her opinion is just dedicated to this and how that, that answers everything, you know, it's like the long and short of it. But she does talk about like, why the president is not likely to win on the merits, since that's part of the stay considerations. She talks about some of Trump's arguments. She makes the point that, like, essentially his complaint that, well, I'll be harmed by having to negotiate with countries and give foreign aid that I don't want to give and engage in negotiations I don't want to engage in. She's like, well, yeah, tough shit. That's part
21:36 Michael Liroff? of being in a divided government. Like, Congress did it, said it. Like, that's it. That's, it's over. Like, that's just, that's just the division of power.
21:45 Peter Shamshiri? The majority has set a precedent this year where if the Trump administration claims that something will make their lives more difficult in any way. Then like, they win. Then they're just like, oh, I don't want to negotiate. I don't want to have to like, do the job of president. That would be a lot. And the court's like, you're right. That's right. Anything that gets between you and manifesting your will in its perfect formulation, that is an undue burden on the president.
22:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, nothing should be hard for you, King, you know?
22:16 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
22:16 Speaker 04 King, literally.
22:17 Peter Shamshiri? Little kisses.
22:17 Michael Liroff? Unless it's firing someone at the Fed, which might affect our 401Ks.
22:24 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, yeah, except for, except for our beautiful children.
22:30 Michael Liroff? So that's pretty much it for Kagan's dissent. That's, I mean, it's short, much like the opinion itself. It's just a few pages.
22:38 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. Typical Kagan, very sharp on the law. And I would have liked a couple paragraphs just like, we all see what you're doing, you little piggies. You're a bunch of little disgusting rats. And one day we will smoke you out of your holes.
22:52 Michael Liroff? And there'll be a big mallet waiting for you when you do pop your head out of that hole.
22:59 Peter Shamshiri? You're gonna get bonked. If a Kagan clerk is listening, if you could send her the politically jerking metaphor, I think that that would be really helpful for her understanding. And then maybe she could drop in a footnote.
23:13 Michael Liroff? Much like 5-4.
23:16 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. Some, some observers have called this.
23:38 Peter Shamshiri? Let's pivot from this to talking about the material consequences of cutting foreign aid.
23:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:44 Peter Shamshiri? Because we have talked about a lot of these cases, right? The shadow docket cases that have come up under the Trump administration where like, Trump is flagrantly violating the law and the court aids and abets. That is true here, too. This is like, an egregious violation of the constitutional order, where Trump is just unilaterally halting foreign assistance. And, you know, doubly so where the court is just ignoring the words of the controlling statute. But
24:17 Peter Shamshiri? We should pause for a second here because this isn't like about some abstract notion of constitutionality, right? This isn't about like the firing of a department head where Trump ignored procedure like he was supposed to give notice and wait 90 days or whatever, right? The human cost of the cuts to foreign aid are like unbelievably vast.
24:43 Speaker 04 Massive.
24:44 Peter Shamshiri? There was a peer reviewed paper published this summer finding that if USAID were to be defunded, the result would be 14 million deaths globally, including 4.5 million children through 2030. So just five years. Think about, think about the scale of that, right? I mean, the sheer volume of human suffering being perpetuated by these Ivy League nerds talking about a preliminary finding of the Empowerment Control Act, like, you know, of their analysis of the Empowerment Control Act. It's just, it's hard to like speak about this stuff appropriately because like, how do
25:24 Peter Shamshiri? you talk about someone who facilitates in suffering that vast, right? What's the appropriate like response to someone who kills 14 million people? Yeah. What do you, how do you even, how do you even conceive of that from like a moral perspective? What's the appropriate punishment for someone who does this? Those are questions I genuinely don't know the answer to because it's like, it's human suffering on a scale that the mind cannot comprehend.
25:54 Michael Liroff? Like the Hague exists for crimes like this, essentially.
25:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is really hard to conceive of the scale, really, really kind of like incalculable. And it's so disgusting, the way the Supreme Court here like is completely ignoring that and ignoring that, I think on purpose to just, you know, on the shadow docket whitewash this as some procedural decision. You know, it's so vast that the problem, the injustice is so vast that I do think it's worth mentioning then.
26:25 Speaker 04 One example of an organization that now is defunded because of this decision. And we can talk about the plaintiff here, AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. The executive director of AVAC said about this shadow docket ruling, quote, "With this ruling, the Supreme Court has given the administration a free pass to run out the clock on the dispersment of foreign aid that Congress appropriated. Since foreign aid was frozen on the first day of this administration, we have seen," we, he's talking about at AVAC, "we have seen thousands of clinics close, hundreds of thousands of communities lose access to essential services and medications, and thousands of lives lost."
27:06 Speaker 04 This is Mitchell Warren over at AVAC talking about, obviously, all over the globe, what this organization does for AIDS prevention, AIDS research, birth control, testing, the provision of, you know, actually, literally giving services to people who have AIDS and HIV. These are life-saving services. This is how many organizations all over the world are funded. This is how they carry out the services that they provide. And they are now defunded by the Trump administration's actions. And that has been, you know, rubber stamped here by the Supreme Court. I think this question of, like, what you're hitting on, Peter,
27:50 Speaker 04 of like, the scale of this is important. And, and because it's related to a frustration that I have a lot of the times with Supreme Court cases across the board. But especially, I have this reaction when it's a Supreme Court case around a foreign policy issue, which is that the Supreme Court, in these decisions...
28:16 Speaker 04 It's so narrow, it's so specific, it's so like granular in its scope that you miss constantly the massive impact of of actually what they're deciding and and what they're allowing here, the Trump administration to do. You know, actually, like, if we're backing up totally, and I'm not recording a podcast right now about the Supreme Court and this decision, you actually are not going to catch me like politically defending the system that is created by USAID. This is actually a system and a structure, I would argue,
28:58 Speaker 04 and many people do, of American imperialism, of American control and hegemony around the world. This is part of America's role right now on the globe that USAID in so many countries creates economic and social dependency on US foreign aid. And who has the power to control that US foreign aid? Well, it's officials in the United States, right? And those control levers and mechanisms are exercised in the way that serves US interests.
29:32 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, it's used, it's frequently used as as leverage in foreign policy.
29:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, the countries in the global south that receive the most US foreign aid are the countries that have to say how high when Trump says jump, right? And so like, we can get into the details of this. However, however, you have a Supreme Court case like this, and what it has everybody focused on, which is so enraging to me, is little tiny procedures, little tiny procedures. And, well, Congress said this, not this. And who can sue anyway, right? And it's so narrowing, I think, to all of us politically, just in terms of like conceptualizing what actually we are talking
30:18 Speaker 04 about on these big, big, big issues of federal law, federal policy, and the power
30:25 Speaker 04 Or literally the power of the United States, not just domestically, around the world. And you don't get an understanding or like any nuance or any complication here. You get a fucking ridiculous, harmful, I like, this is harmful, right? I don't agree with it. A fucking ridiculous, harmful, stupid case in three paragraphs that Justice Alito, I'm sure shit out, right, in five minutes.
30:54 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, the foreign aid stuff is very interesting because there are all these really nuanced arguments about what our foreign aid regime should look like.
31:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:04 Peter Shamshiri? There are a lot of liberals who basically say, and I'm actually relatively compelled by this argument, like, it's true that foreign aid is used as leverage in American foreign policy, but that trade off is worth it because of the good that is done. And like, trying to undo that is so difficult that, like, this regime is sort of like the, a reasonable compromise, right? Where we, you pay out foreign aid, but the State Department is using it to manipulate other countries. That like, you know, it's not the ideal situation, but it's a workable one. There's like an argument between that and people that think that we should be sort of working towards a different style of regime in foreign aid, right?
31:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:44 Peter Shamshiri? None of that argument is taking place here. Instead, it's like, this is like, just like a baby at the control panel. You know what I mean? Just like pressing buttons, like, these absolute morons tinkering with this shit on, like, these really weird, narrow legal grounds. And you get the worst of every world and you have, the aid that has the fewest strings attached is what's getting yanked first. You know what I mean? When we talk about the cutting of foreign assistance, aid to Israel is still going out, right? That's not what we're talking about.
32:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:17 Peter Shamshiri? We're still funding warlords across the globe, but like, I assure you, that stuff is untouched, you know?
32:22 Speaker 04 Exactly.
32:23 Peter Shamshiri? It's so frustrating to have to. Engage with these issues through these lenses.
32:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. No conception at all of like, why is there a system in which, you know, the appropriation and the withholding of billions of dollars leads to 14 million people dying? We're not even thinking on the scale of the injustice here, you know? We can't, not with a fucking decision like this, not with the level of the debate being where it's at. Like, this is a problem of American politics, you know? And it's a problem that is, that is greatly, greatly contributed to by the Supreme Court.
33:03 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. We're talking about the big picture stuff. To return to some of the narrower questions, slightly narrower questions. Whenever the court was like disciplining the Biden administration, it'd be like, you know, the court has weighed in on this, Congress has weighed in on this. The Biden administration needs to operate within those confines, right? And then you have Trump and suddenly like the constitutional order is like this very fluid thing to them. Where it's like, hmm, yeah, I don't know. Maybe Congress doesn't appropriate funds, right? Maybe, maybe all these like really fundamental principles of our constitutional order don't really exist, right? Like.
33:43 Speaker 04 Maybe we just have a king.
33:45 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, they're all legal realists now, right? They're like, you know, isn't, isn't power sort of what we will it to be?
33:54 Peter Shamshiri? Aren't we sitting on all the guns right now? You know, you have a situation where Nixon tried to do something. Both Congress and the Supreme Court stepped in to restrain him. And then 50 years later, Trump comes along and like, you know, in many ways, Trump is just sort of like the omega to Nixon's alpha, right?
34:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, a real grotesque.
34:21 Peter Shamshiri? We always talk about the modern conservative political movement as something that didn't start with Nixon exactly, but like Nixon was their ascendance, right? Into, into power and Trump represents this just sort of preposterous end result of it. And. The conservative legal project was always like the rejection of the resistance to that political movement, right? The rejection of the anti-Nixon political order. A lot of the things that they temporarily conceded after Nixon, right? The idea that Nixon committed a crime, that he should have been punished for that crime. Those were concessions that
35:06 Peter Shamshiri? that were politically convenient for them at the time and are no longer politically convenient for them. And so they have they have rescinded all of those concessions. They have rescinded their apologies for Richard Nixon and all that he wrought. Now you have Trump, the like, the avatar of like, unapologetic Nixonian politics.
35:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. An AI creation, if you put it into ChatGPT, you know?
35:35 Peter Shamshiri? Right, right. And it's just like, more asshole.
35:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. More disgusting, more asshole, more loser.
35:42 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, weirder looking.
35:44 Speaker 04 Even weirder looking.
35:46 Peter Shamshiri? Less natural.
35:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, even weirder voice.
35:50 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, make the make the skin unusual.
36:00 Peter Shamshiri? Next week, INS v. Lopez Mendoza, a case from the 80s that basically said that in deportation proceedings, there are fewer constitutional rights. A little bit, a little bit less constitution in the deportation context, helping pave the way for the modern ICE hellscape. Yeah, we're going to be returning to our roots, talking about how cases from 40 years ago have set the table for the disgusting tyrants of the modern day.
36:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:34 Peter Shamshiri? Classic stuff.
36:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:36 Peter Shamshiri? Follow us on social media at 54pod. Subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com/54pod, all spelled out for access to premium and ad-free episodes, special events, our Slack, all sorts of shit. Our merch on sale now, 54pod.com/merch.
36:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:59 Peter Shamshiri? It rules.
37:00 Speaker 04 Check it out.
37:01 Peter Shamshiri? It's highbrow shit. You won't believe it. You won't believe that a bunch of weirdos like us came up with merch this beautiful about the Supreme Court.
37:08 Speaker 04 Shut up.
37:11 Peter Shamshiri? This is how you sell shit, Ree.
37:12 Speaker 04 You're so stupid.
37:14 Peter Shamshiri? You don't understand that I'm always hustling.
37:19 Speaker 04 His fifth job is saying, "Go to the website and buy merch."
37:22 Peter Shamshiri? I feel like the, what you want me to say is, "We have merch on our website. Peter signing off. No one's gonna go." You have to entice them.
37:35 Peter Shamshiri? All right, we'll see you next week.
37:37 Speaker 04 Bye, y'all.
37:38 Michael Liroff? Bye, everybody.
37:43 Speaker 05 Five to Four is presented by Prolog Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neefok provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY. And our theme song is by Spatial Relations. If you're not a Patreon member, you're not hearing every episode. To get exclusive Patreon-only episodes, discounts on merch, access to our Slack community, and more, join at patreon.com/54pod.
38:17 Peter Shamshiri? I'm gonna go write down my thoughts on that politically jerking metaphor before I forget it.
38:24 Speaker 04 Dear diary, I'm thinking about six conservative justices jacking off right now.
38:28 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
38:29 Michael Liroff? Gotta journal that one.
38:31 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
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