Are You There, God? It’s Me, the Constitution.

SCOTUS may be between argument sessions, but the legal news isn’t slowing down. Kate, Melissa, and Leah cover the latest out of Minnesota before touching on the Department of Homeland Security’s troubling use https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/02/03/homeland-security-administrative-subpoena/ of administrative subpoenas and Jodi Kantor’s reporting https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/supreme-court-nondisclosure-agreements.html on the introduction of non-disclosure agreements to the Supreme Court. Then, some election news: the Tulsi Gabbard-supervised FBI raid on an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, Trump’s desire to “take over” elections, and an update on the challenge against California’s Proposition 50, Gavin Newsom’s counter to racial gerrymandering in Texas. Finally, Kristi Noem’s attempt to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haitians gets shot down by the District Court for the District of Columbia, and a smörgåsbord of other legal bits and pieces. Leah: What a “Melania” Cinematographer Hoped to Accomplish https://www.newyorker.com/culture/q-and-a/what-a-melania-cinematographer-hoped-to-accomplish, Isaac Chotiner (New Yorker); Bad Bunny’s Grammys speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhvdOTvdpjs; Melissa’s upcoming book (link below); Margaritaville Resort Times Square https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/justice-samuel-a-alito-jr/so-ordered/9781541608252/ Kate: The Secrets of the Whales https://www.disneyplus.com/browse/entity-214a64b8-2468-4d71-a712-172b53e41e90 (Disney Plus); Liam Ramos Was Just One of Hundreds of Children at This Detention Center. Release Them All. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/opinion/liam-ramos-ice-detention.html, Elora Mukherjee (NYT); Ian McKellen on Colbert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l2RqzVG4ag Melissa: Should You Buy a Newspaper or a Yacht? https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/02/bezos-washington-post-layoffs-yacht/685902/ By Alexandra Petri, How Autocrats Meddle With Elections https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/02/how-autocrats-meddle-with-elections/685383/, Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic); This Guy Sucked https://www.thisguysucked.com/; Nuremberg https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/nuremberg-0; Mona Lisa Smile https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=mona%20lisa%20smile; Mrs. America https://www.hulu.com/series/mrs-america-96f330fe-878d-412e-949f-fd8b69b3adf2; Fleece Puppy Bag https://www.zara.com/us/en/fleece-puppy-bag-p11143730.html (Zara) Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2026! 3/6/26 – San Francisco 3/7/26 – Los Angeles Learn more:http://crooked.com/eventsPreorder Melissa’s book, The U. S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-constitution-annotated-for-the-contemporary-reader-melissa-murray/8e7f0dfa472fc3ca?ean=9781668221938&next=t&Buy Leah's book,Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lawless/Leah-Litman/9781668054628Follow us onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/strictscrutinypodcast/?hl=en,Threads https://www.threads.net/@strictscrutinypodcast, andBluesky https://bsky.app/profile/strictscrutiny.bsky.social

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Melissa Murray?

  Strict scrutiny is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. We are all legal nerds here, and we know that precedent set in any area of the law ripples out across our lives in so many ways. Our right to religious freedom is one of the most sacred areas of the law, protects almost every aspect of our daily lives, rights that we all hold dear, like LGBTQ+ rights, freedom to choose the type of healthcare that you need, and ensuring a well-funded and inclusive public school system. Protecting the separation of church and state is, in fact, protecting the very foundation of our democracy. If you're looking for ways to more deeply understand the connection of and from religion to so many of the civil justice issues we see today, you should check out the Summit

• 0:42Melissa Murray?

  for Religious Freedom, or SURF, an annual conference held in DC and virtually, April 25th through 27th of this year. At SURF, advocates, organizers, faith leaders, atheists, and everyone in between will come together to take on the growing threats of Christian nationalism and the efforts to impose one narrow religious belief on us all. This is a movement for big change and collaboration across the entire spectrum of religious belief and non-belief. It strengthens our democracy, protects our public schools, and our reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more. So be a part of the movement that's pushing back and standing up for freedom.

• 1:20Melissa Murray?

  You can register to attend today at thesurf.org, T-H-E-S-R-F dot org.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Crooked Con is coming up right after the election, and we have just added a bunch more great names to the lineup. We got Governor JB Pritzker coming, Senator Chris Murphy, and then over from the House side, Ilhan Omar, Robert Garcia, Sarah Jacobs, Jamie Raskin, Sarah McBride. We also have Carlos Eduardo Espina, Simone Sanders Townsend, Eugene Daniels, David Pakman, Jessica Tarlov, Heather McGee, and then all the other people that we've announced on the website, plus more to come. Great list. Check out the full lineup and get tickets right now at crookedcon.com. We'd love to see you there. That's crookedcon.com.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Mr. Chief Justice, may I please report? It's an old joke, but when a hargoned man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, "I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."

• 2:43Melissa Murray?

  Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We're your hosts. I'm Melissa Murray. I'm Leah Litman.

• 2:52Kate Shaw?

  And I'm Kate Shaw. And with SCOTUS still in between argument sessions, we are going to take today to really stay focused on legal news. And oh, boy, there is a lot of it. Some of it is from SCOTUS, some from Article II, and then there is just a little bit of everything else. We will start with the news out of Minnesota and then cover some goings on in the executive branch, Congress, and the lower federal courts.

• 3:12Melissa Murray?

  But first up, some dispatches from Minnesota. So, in a major tone shift and change of course, I'm joking, that's a huge joke, Borders Arena Tom Holman announced that DHS has reduced the number of federal officers deployed to Minnesota from 3,000 to, wait for it, 2,300, which I guess is a start. But it would still be the largest deployment ever, and it still means that quotidian life in Minnesota is, in the words of the immortal Bruce Springsteen, underneath, quote, "an occupier's boot."

• 3:47Kate Shaw?

  Yeah. So, last episode, we talked about how the surge of federal immigration officers and just the casual brazen lawlessness on the ground was creating enormous problems in the federal courts in Minnesota, given the hordes of people the federal government was arresting and detaining and trying to deport, some with pending claims for asylum or protection from removal. This created an enormous uptick in the number of cases that the federal courts were required to hear. The administration also adopted the brazen and baseless view that federal law required them to detain basically every person who had never been lawfully admitted to the country when they initially entered the country, although that has not been the practice previously.

• 4:27Leah Litman?

  And almost every single court who have considered that argument has rejected it. Specifically, more than 300 judges have ruled against the government on that issue. But the government is sticking to it, and it's partially what is generating this backlog of habeas petitions from people who are challenging their detention. And after we recorded, the Fifth Circuit, it's always the Fifth Circuit, released a decision in which it said, "F those 300 judges, the practice in every executive branch for decades, law and common sense. We agree with the Trump administration that the law, apparently, though no one ever realized or thought this before, requires them to detain EVERYONE who originally entered the border without being lawfully admitted, no matter how long ago. That the Fifth Circuit is allowing the administration to carry out this mandatory detention policy

• 5:11Leah Litman?

  is going to do a few things. It gives the government an incentive to try to transfer people to the Fifth Circuit, as they did with Liam Ramos and his father, where the government will be allowed to detain them as it tries to deport them. And it's going to create pressure on plaintiffs and courts outside the Fifth Circuit to file habeas petitions and review them before someone is shuttled off to the Fifth Circuit, where they won't be allowed to get even a bond hearing to ask for their release. Oh, and if you didn't already think the Fifth Circuit was a joke, well, let me tell you, they issued this decision, which again disagreed with more than 300 judges, on Friday, when oral argument in the case was Wednesday. Yep, took them only two days. Now, back to everything in the state of the world that existed when we recorded to explain

• 5:55Leah Litman?

  the immigration backlog. Add to this the fact that DHS is telling officers that you don't need a warrant to arrest someone or to enter their home, and all of that unconstitutionality and lawlessness unsurprisingly generates additional legal claims challenging these additional detentions.

• 6:10Melissa Murray?

  And because there are some lawyers who are reluctant to work for a justice department that seems bent on injustice and lawlessness, there have been staffing shortages that allegedly have caused the executive branch to delay with compliance with court orders to release detainees and to otherwise adopt what has been a chaotic slapdash approach to legal filings and legal challenges.

• 6:34Kate Shaw?

  Okay, so let's break it down with some stats. Chris Geidner, who writes the newsletter Law Dork, said he has identified 253 federal habeas petitions filed just in the month of January 2026 in the District of Minnesota, whereas only six had been filed in that same court in January of 2025, just one year ago. So this is the context for that Chief Judge Schilt's scathing order that we discussed on the last episode. That was the order in which the Chief Judge suggested that ICE had violated almost 100 court orders in a single month and likely more. He was referring there to orders to release detainees who were being held unlawfully, which DHS was just not complying. Okay, so fast forward to last week, when things really seemed to reach a boiling point.

• 7:19Kate Shaw?

  At a hearing focused on the executive's possible noncompliance with court orders, Minnesota reporter Paul Bloom shared a highly unusual exchange between the judge and Julie Lee, a DHS lawyer who had been detailed as a Special Assistant United States Attorney to the US Attorney's Office in Minnesota to help with the backlog of detainee cases. As Bloom relayed, during this court appearance, Lee was refreshingly candid about the state of things in the office to which she had been detailed.

• 7:45Leah Litman?

  According to the transcript of the proceeding, Lee said, quote, "I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep. The system sucks. This job sucks. I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need," end quote. She's definitely posting that on Glass Door. So having said that, I think that that short excerpt might miss some of the broader context for the entire hearing. There has been, you know, some response of sympathy for the lawyer, which I'm not sure is the like right or complete take that reflects all of what is happening here. So the government lawyers in this hearing generally described a chaotic system where

• 8:27Leah Litman?

  they don't really know who's responsible for what, or what to respond to, or how to litigate these cases that she was thrown into. At one point, after hearing a bit about what is going on, the judge said, quote, "So is then each attorney within your office making up his or her own process?"

• 8:44Melissa Murray?

  Yeah. And the judge also had a pretty sharp take on the whole unitary executive notion, given the chaotic lack of coordination that Ms. Lee and the other government lawyers described. The judge said, quote, "I wholeheartedly embrace the notion of a unitary executive, as in DHS, ICE, the DOJ, all a part of the executive branch. And if there's a problem in the restaurant, I don't intend to go in the kitchen to try to figure out who makes the bread. And all of it is part of the executive branch. And so it is not an excuse to tell me you contacted ICE because ICE is also part of the unitary executive for accountability purposes." Correct, sir?

• 9:22Leah Litman?

  Love this energy.

• 9:23Melissa Murray?

  All of that seems exactly right. That is the correct take of the unitary executive theory.

• 9:28Leah Litman?

  Right. It doesn't allow them to get out of complying with some laws and be above the law in other respects. Like, you cannot have it both ways. Anyways, as I kind of suggested, I didn't really feel that bad for the attorney. I think at best, she went into this willfully blind to what the government was doing or would be doing. And that really hit me after reading the entire hearing transcript, which is just nuts. If you have ever litigated or been near a courtroom, I have never seen or read a transcript remotely like this. And part of the reason why I don't think this can just be collapsed or flattened into sympathy for the government lawyers, who were in these offices before Operation Metro Surge and elected to stay during it, is because that obscures the stakes and consequences for

• 10:12Leah Litman?

  the people being harmed by this conduct. And anyway, so here is how one of the plaintiff lawyers, really petitioner's lawyers, describe things, quote, "Detained first, find authority later." This is exactly their strategy. And we've seen this from all of our cases, where there's no warrant, there's no probable cause. Most of my clients, they report that respondents upon detaining them, have no idea who they are. They are pulled over for how they look, or for where they are, or for any number of things that...

• 10:37Melissa Murray?

  Don't amount to probable cause under the US Constitution.

• 10:41Kate Shaw?

  And this petitioner attorney went on to describe a declaration filed by one of her clients, which describes how, quote, "He was without food. He was without clean clothes. He was subject to physical danger, both through reckless driving of ICE agents transporting him from one location to another, watching people screaming in pain with medical neglect, being exposed to COVID. Just the conditions of his confinement, eating food that he conflated with dog food. People are just being treated like less than human." And all this was happening while he had a court order for his release. And while all of this is happening, ICE agents are telling him to self-deport because he's got no chance to get out of there other than to self-deport. Myself and his immigration attorney, who is here in the courtroom today, were not able to talk to him. So just pause for a second. This is someone with a court order

• 11:24Melissa Murray?

  Yes.

• 11:24Kate Shaw?

  directing release, and officials are nevertheless telling him he has no chance of getting out except for through self-deportation. Like, it is stunning.

• 11:33Melissa Murray?

  Here are some other snippets from the judge, and there are some pretty choice words for what was happening. So the judge says, quote, "What can the court expect going forward? Because this is obviously not workable, and it's certainly not an example of complying with the court's order unless you feel it is." And then, I just gotta say, when a judge says, "This is X unless you feel it's not X," it's not a good place to be as a litigator, as the lawyer for the government. Like, you just don't want to be there. Here's another snippet from the lawyer, Ms. Lee, who requested being held in contempt of court so she could sleep. She said, quote unquote, "I share the same concern with you, Your Honor. I am not

• 12:15Melissa Murray?

  white, as you can see, and my family's at risk, as any other people that might get picked up too. So I share the same concern, and I took that concern to heart. But again, fixing a system, a broken system, I don't have a magic button to do it. I don't have the power or the voice to do it. I can only do it within the ability and the capacity that I have." That lawyer, Julie Lee, her detail as a special assistant US attorney to the US Attorney's Office in Minnesota has ended. And I don't know if she is also going to be relieved of her duties with DHS. I think that's an open question.

• 12:48Leah Litman?

  Yeah. So that's not the only chaos that the government has been affecting as part of this massive lawless immigration enforcement. So the government announced a policy change that if allowed to go into effect would make things even worse as far as denying people opportunities for review of their detention or removal and backlogging courts with those claims. Specifically, the administration announced that it plans to largely eliminate the Board of Immigration Appeals process and is mandating the dismissal of all appeals, which cost $1,000, filed 30 days after this announced policy change unless a majority of the Board of Immigration Appeals or BIA votes to hear the case. So the BIA, for those

• 13:32Leah Litman?

  not familiar with the structure of federal immigration law, that's the appellate tribunal within the agency, within the executive branch that reviews decisions of an immigration judge about whether someone is removable or has a defense to removal or a reason why they shouldn't be removed, even if they are removable.

• 13:49Kate Shaw?

  And eliminating this process or narrowly restricting it is another way of making it harder and harder to challenge individual immigration decisions, all while people are being detained in these horrifying conditions that we were alluding to a minute ago and being told that they have no chance of getting out, all part of the administration's push for mass deportations. The policy change also stated that in most cases, rather than having 30 days to file a notice of appeal to the BIA, people will now have only 10 days. So very, very clear that they are getting increasingly desperate to increase their numbers of detained and deported individuals. And this is just kind of the latest tactic. The White House Press Secretary gave some comments that we think really capture what the administration is up to here in service of that goal. Let's roll that clip.

• 14:34Kate Shaw?

  To be clear, he does believe the state should oversee.

• 14:38Leah Litman?

  The president believes

• 14:39Melissa Murray?

  In the United States Constitution. However, he believes there- Let's be very precise about it. He believes in the Constitution. He just wishes it were shorter, like just Article Two, Section One.

• 14:50Leah Litman?

  I loved it. It was just perfect. Sure, there's a Constitution. However, yes, due process is a thing. However, very, you know, but-actuallying and, you know, that, the whole due process thing, doesn't exhaust the constitutional provisions the administration is trampling on again in the course of its unhinged approach to immigration enforcement. We also learned this week about the government's escalating practice of administrative subpoenas. So before Jeff Bezos put the latest dagger in the paper's heart, more on this in a second, The Washington Post ran an article that describes how the administration is making use of a little-known mechanism that actually relates to a pending Supreme Court case to further limit pushback against it. So the story describes the federal government's use of what are called administrative subpoenas.

• 15:34Leah Litman?

  And those are a kind of subpoena that an agency can issue without the involvement or approval of a grand jury or a judge.

• 15:41Kate Shaw?

  The story in The Post focuses on how this 67-year-old retiree sent an email to a public DHS address of a DHS attorney, expressing this individual's concern and disagreement with government policies and asking the administration to be merciful, only to have the administration turn around and issue an administrative subpoena to Google for a bunch of this person's information. This man is a naturalized citizen. He was understandably terrified. But here's the thing, he wasn't even provided the subpoena, and Google gave him a week to file to quash the subpoena, one he did not have access to. Okay, the story recounts how the Department of Homeland Security has issued subpoenas to Columbia University as part of its crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and advocacy, to

• 16:26Kate Shaw?

  Harvard for employment records, to Instagram about users who posted about ICE raids, and seeking personal information for workers in the Minnesota health system when staff protested ICE doing enforcement activity in their hospitals. So a terrifying tool that the administration is apparently wantonly now using.

• 16:42Melissa Murray?

  And people seem to be complying with it. These big organizations seem to be going along with it. The article also notes that Google and Meta received a record number of administrative subpoenas last year, in the first year of the Trump administration. And we should connect this to a case that we have talked about on this show, a case that's pending before the court. That's First Choice Women's Resource Centers versus Platten. That's the case about a crisis pregnancy center that is trying to challenge an administrative subpoena, one that isn't self-executing, in federal court. During the oral argument in that case, it appeared that the Democratic appointees were concerned about the potential abuses of administrative subpoenas and that they might

• 17:23Melissa Murray?

  vote with the Republican appointees to allow the administrative subpoena that was at issue in that case to be challenged. We were a little wary of this because, as we discussed in our preview and recap, allowing every administrative subpoena to be challenged would effectively clog up the federal courts. Perhaps the Democratic appointees suspected where all of this was going and what the federal government might do with a tool like the administrative subpoena at its disposal.

• 17:51Leah Litman?

  I think the unfortunate reality is, even if that ended up being the resolution of Platten, that is, they said that administrative subpoena was challengeable, the reality is that many administrative subpoenas, like the ones issued by the federal government that are described in that Post article, are so difficult to find information on, it's still going to be hard to challenge them. So a ruling for the crisis pregnancy center in Platten wouldn't necessarily fix the problem. It would just allow some litigants to challenge administrative subpoenas that are issued by entities that, unlike the federal government, aren't trying to do them surreptitiously. It's also not clear that everyone targeted with an administrative subpoena could get a lawyer, much less be able to file a challenge in federal court. And the man who's profiled in the Post story had DHS officers show up at his house a few

• 18:33Leah Litman?

  weeks after the subpoena was issued, and they asked him about this email he had sent, which was, just for the record, this is the email he sent, quote, "Don't play Russian roulette with H's life. Err on the side of caution. There's a reason the US government, along with many other governments, don't recognize the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency and..." You know, in H's case, there was a risk that he was going to be removed to Afghanistan. And that email launched administrative subpoena that sought information about, you know, this man's online sessions going back months, every IP and physical address, alternate usernames, and more.

• 19:06Kate Shaw?

  It is just as perfect a distillation of the Trump administration as I could imagine, that asking for the application of principles of common sense and decency gets your ass subpoenaed for all of your records.

• 19:17Leah Litman?

  Well, just like telling officers to comply with the law gets you investigated for violating the law. It's just, yeah.

• 19:23Kate Shaw?

  Absolutely.

• 19:28Melissa Murray?

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• 20:55Melissa Murray?

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• 21:37Melissa Murray?

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• 22:23Kate Shaw?

  Speaking of attacks on basic constitutional principles here, the freedom of speech. Now let's return to the topic of democracy literally dying in darkness. So this week, as our listeners probably already know, it was widely reported that the Washington Post, the venerable newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal and has been a national media institution, will undertake massive layoffs, something like 30% of its workforce. The cuts will especially impact both the foreign desks and the Metro Desk, which was the source for coverage of local news, which kind of both reinforced the paper's shift toward national news.

• 23:00Melissa Murray?

  This is a big deal on many fronts, and I want to come back to the local news piece of it. We talked about this a bit on the podcast before, but local news has suffered a lot over the last decade with many local papers going under and many national papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, limiting their metro coverage. The void in local news coverage can obviously be filled by other outlets like radio and TV, but there has been a lot of consolidation in the local broadcasting markets with many local TV and radio stations being acquired by large corporations like Sinclair, for example, which has a very conservative bent and which means that a lot of the news then sort of skews to the right or even further to the right, further

• 23:44Melissa Murray?

  exacerbating the kind of media siloing that we are all living with. And so this new move on the part of the Post to limit their foreign desk coverage obviously has real repercussions for how we think about global issues and the local news retraction, I think, has real consequences for what it's going to look like in our individual communities and how we digest and receive the news.

• 24:06Leah Litman?

  And just on the importance of local news, I think part of the reason why we have been getting such high quality information about what is happening in Minnesota is Minnesota has a very robust, independent, local media scene. You know, there's a Star Tribune as well as other outlets, and that is what this, you know, slashing of the Washington Post takes away from the District of Columbia. But even beyond, you know, the impact on the local news, it's still a big deal. The Post has been one of the papers that have tried to hold government institutions accountable, at least in a bygone era. When the Post was purchased by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, many wondered whether it could still maintain that legacy. And it seems like we have an answer now, and the answer is no. I do wonder

• 24:48Leah Litman?

  if all of the money spent promoting the Melania documentary might have been redirected toward the Post operations, or at least some of them.

• 24:57Melissa Murray?

  Hmm. Can I tell you something petty I did over the weekend?

• 25:00Leah Litman?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Kate Shaw?

  You did not go see the documentary.

• 25:02Melissa Murray?

  I didn't go and see the Melania documentary. Instead, I watched Becoming, the Netflix documentary about Michelle Obama, 25 times.

• 25:13Leah Litman?

  I love it.

• 25:14Kate Shaw?

  Excellent.

• 25:15Melissa Murray?

  Like, first I watched it with sound on, and then I just kept hitting play over and over and over again. Now it's number eight on Netflix.

• 25:23Leah Litman?

  Tiny little acts of resistance, they add up.

• 25:25Melissa Murray?

  Exactly.

• 25:26Leah Litman?

  They do.

• 25:26Kate Shaw?

  I love that.

• 25:28Leah Litman?

  Anyway, in happier news about organizations that are holding Truth Social to power, but still also some really bad news about what Article 2 is up to, The Wall Street Journal broke the absolutely bonkers, batshit surreal story that four days before the second Trump inauguration, the quote unquote "spy sheik," a United Arab Emirates royal and government official who serves as the country's national security adviser, secretly purchased a 49% stake in the Trump family's World Liberty Financial crypto company.

• 26:03Kate Shaw?

  Very American hustle, wasn't it, that story? Okay, so this like $500 million purchase resulted in $187 million going to Trump family entities. So just to take stock, we have a foreign government official taking a major stake in the United States president's personal family company on the eve of his retaking power. In addition, Steve Witkoff, who was subsequently named Trump's envoy to the Middle East, is a co-founder of World Liberty Financial, and the Journal reports that almost $31 million went to Witkoff family entities.

• 26:41Leah Litman?

  This is just a staggering grift, but that's not all. It seems like there was a pretty quick payoff from this investment. Guess what happened after the spy sheik affected that huge cash transfer to the Trumps? Months later, the United States agreed to give the UAE access to 500,000 of America's most advanced AI chips each year. Those are hugely guarded, a highly sought-after scarce resource, and we know the grift and corruption have been nonstop, but this really seems like it is just on another level, both in scope and just obviousness. You know, a business deal with the leader of a foreign country who also happens to

• 27:24Leah Litman?

  be involved in national security, the amount of money what's, you know, being given in return, it makes the entire Qatari jet, you know, Amaliu jet situation look like chump change.

• 27:35Kate Shaw?

  Because it is.

• 27:36Leah Litman?

  Right, it is at this point. And despite this reporting, it just seems like there is zero chance that anyone in the administration will be investigated over this because the alleged beneficiaries were Trump-affiliated or bore the last name Trump. And that, one year in, is the state of the law in the second Trump administration, namely that it doesn't apply to people named Trump.

• 27:56Kate Shaw?

  They're not even making noises about an investigation.

• 27:58Leah Litman?

  No.

• 27:58Kate Shaw?

  It is just like, no, you know, or what are you gonna do?

• 28:01Leah Litman?

  They're like, this is business as usual.

• 28:03Kate Shaw?

  Completely, it is. But it's really important not to get inured to this because it is so wildly inappropriate and illegal. And we have to keep calling it out as such.

• 28:15Melissa Murray?

  Speaking of calling it out and staying on the media beat for a few more beats, as we have previously noted, in the last year, The Gray Lady, The New York Times, has expanded its coverage of one of our favorite institutions, the Supreme Court. We think this is a great development. And what's even better about this great development is not that there are more eyes on the court, but that these eyes have actually found the tea and now they are spilling it. So last week, Jodi Kantor for The New York Times reported on some efforts to impose some laws and rules on the Supreme Court, specifically rules that impede public knowledge about the court and accessibility for the court and to the court.

• 28:58Leah Litman?

  That does seem like, again, what law means in the second Trump administration.

• 29:03Melissa Murray?

  I mean.

• 29:03Leah Litman?

  But the story is that apparently in November 2024, so right after Donald Trump was reelected, the chief justice, quote, "summoned employees of the United States Supreme Court and requested they each sign a nondisclosure agreement promising to keep the court's inner workings secret," end quote. Although The New York Times didn't review the agreements, quote, "People familiar with them said they appeared to be more forceful and understood them to threaten legal action if an employee revealed confidential information," end quote. Clerks and employees have been asked to sign, unclear whether any justices or their spouses might have been asked to do the same.

• 29:41Kate Shaw?

  Hmm.

• 29:42Leah Litman?

  Is the chief justice saying, "Do not take notes on a motherfucking criminal conspiracy"?

• 29:49Melissa Murray?

  It does seem a little stringer-bellish.

• 29:51Leah Litman?

  Right.

• 29:52Kate Shaw?

  Mm-hmm. This whole thing is just so sus. I mean, so NDAs in public service in general seem like something of a problem. You know, to be clear, the chief justice has lectured law clerks since time immemorial, at least Roberts has, and I think Rehnquist before him. I think it's pretty customary for the chief and sometimes individual justices to try to impress on law clerks and staff the importance of confidentiality, at least during the term of your clerkship. And that's about protecting deliberations and votes in real time and before decisions. It is very different after the fact, sometimes many, many years after the fact. It's also very Trumpian, right?

• 30:26Melissa Murray?

  Yes.

• 30:27Kate Shaw?

  This move to use NDAs. And the notion that you, one, John G. Roberts, would take a look at the court and the country and the executive branch in the year of our Lord 2024 and say, what this institution needs by way of reform is NDAs for its staff. So a ridiculous misread of the situation and also highly unsuccessful because nondisclosure agreements-

• 30:50Melissa Murray?

  This is the best part.

• 30:51Kate Shaw?

  Intended to control leaks promptly leaked. Less than two years after this implementation, The Times learned about this development through no less than five separate sources. You just love to see it.

• 31:06Melissa Murray?

  Love to see it. It's, again, this inability to understand and actually diagnose the problem, right? Like, when he looked at the immunity case, the problem is the prospect of criminal accountability for former presidents. He looks at these leaks describing a court that is just broken and dysfunctional, and he says, the problem is the leaks, not the dysfunctional, broken institution.

• 31:28Kate Shaw?

  Completely. And also, like, the idea that you would enforce one of these NDAs again. Like, I mean, I would love nothing more than John Roberts to try to take one of these former clerks to court to actually, like, open up the possibility of some actual public scrutiny on the institution.

• 31:44Melissa Murray?

  Well, this is the part of the article that I thought was really interesting, Kate, because I don't think that is what he is going to do.

• 31:51Kate Shaw?

  Of course not, yeah.

• 31:52Melissa Murray?

  I mean, like, so they talked about how Justice Scalia, when he was on the court, would tell clerks, you know, if you- I will ruin your life. I will hunt you down. I will ruin your life. I will hunt you down and ruin your life. And they quoted, or they paraphrased Justice Barrett, saying a similar kind of thing, you know, probably softer in some way, not quite as, like, you know, I'm gonna kill you with my hands. But I think that's really what this is. Like, the NDA is not meant to be toothy as a legal mechanism. It's like, no, we're really gonna ruin your life.

• 32:22Kate Shaw?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Leah Litman?

  It's meant to be a threat.

• 32:24Melissa Murray?

  Yeah, I mean, it's Trumpian in every sense of the word.

• 32:28Kate Shaw?

  Absolutely. The fact of an NDA and the fact that like, right, many of the lawsuits that Trump has filed or threatened are not about plausible winning legal claims. They're about coercing, inducing behavior. Yep, capitulation.

• 32:41Melissa Murray?

  As we discuss in a forthcoming article.

• 32:43Leah Litman?

  In our very first co-written big Law Review article.

• 32:47Melissa Murray?

  Full-length article, exactly.

• 32:48Kate Shaw?

  That's true. We did a book review.

• 32:49Melissa Murray?

  We did a book review about Josh Hawley's manhood.

• 32:52Kate Shaw?

  And this is better. So, keep an eye out for it.

• 32:55Melissa Murray?

  I mean, it's true. Very true.

• 33:03Melissa Murray?

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  same, so get seafood that you can trust and that you'll use. Go to wildalaskan.com/strick for $35 off your first box of premium, wild-caught seafood. That's wildalaskan.com/strick for $35 off your first order. Many thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. Aura Frames is the answer for every gifting moment. Ask me how I know. Well, I'll tell you. Just a few weeks ago, my mother-in-law turned 80 and I had to get her a gift. What do you get the woman who literally has everything? What do you get the woman whose favorite son you married and took to New York, even though she lives millions of miles away? Well, not millions, but 1,500, and she counts every single one of them.

• 35:18Melissa Murray?

  I decided there's no point hunting for the perfect gift because I already know what the perfect gift is. A gift that's personal, but not over the top. A gift that says, "I get you. I see you. And now you can see your favorite son in all of these pictures that I've loaded into this beautiful digital frame that you can display in your home and just look at all day long." Aura Frames is the perfect gift. It allows you to preload photos before it ships. So before I sent this to my mother-in-law, I had it loaded with about 300 pictures of nothing but my husband, so she could see his beautiful face in real time, whenever she wants. And I can continue to update her Aura Frame with photos of my husband walking the dog, doing chores.

• 36:02Melissa Murray?

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• 36:52Melissa Murray?

  Shifting gears to Article 2. Listeners, as you likely know, about two weeks ago, the FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized voting records and data from the 2020 election. The Brennan Center has called this, quote, "an extraordinary escalation in the administration's campaign to discredit the 2020 election results and lay the groundwork for interference in future elections." To be very clear, the seized materials included ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that are used to tally the votes, electronic ballot images that were created when the ballots were counted and then subsequently recounted, and all of the voter rolls. So hello, this is the alarm bell sounding.

• 37:37Melissa Murray?

  This is a big effing deal.

• 37:39Kate Shaw?

  It is a huge deal. So Fulton County, as people probably know, is the Georgia county that includes much of metro Atlanta, where there are a lot of Democratic voters. That's a county that went for Biden in 2020. Donald Trump has not gotten over that fact.

• 37:53Melissa Murray?

  No.

• 37:53Kate Shaw?

  He, from the time of the election and continuously since, has insisted that something was awry in the county of Fulton. You might remember that Rudy Giuliani, remember him, how could we forget, falsely claimed that election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss, had engaged in election fraud. They later sued Giuliani for defamation, winning $150 million almost in damages. He later reached a settlement with those two women in order to avoid further proceedings to settle the debt. But that is the backdrop.

• 38:21Melissa Murray?

  So Fulton County was a site of some insane election denying, which may be why this FBI raid occurred. And you know, the whole raid was literally cooked up in a meth lab of election denialism. And it seems that the president dispatched Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to Fulton County to oversee things.

• 38:40Leah Litman?

  This was not an intelligence effort, obviously. It was billed as a law enforcement initiative. Not sure why Director Gabbard was there, although in a letter to top Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Gabbard said Trump asked her to be there, quote, "under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate and analyze intelligence related to election security," end quote. Also want to note, there is this whistleblower report about something going on with our intelligence community and Tulsi Gabbard that Senator Ron Wyden is raising alarm bells over. It hasn't been processed or maybe even adequately disclosed to Congress, but there are signs

• 39:22Leah Litman?

  that there could be this impending looming disaster, severe breach of national security protocols, and we just don't know what's going on. It's just wild.

• 39:34Kate Shaw?

  And can I just say, so we know from the kind of subtext of that letter that something very, very serious was alleged by this whistleblower, but it's been radio silence from the public's perspective since then. And like, I understand this is sensitive, it's highly classified information presumably at issue. Like, the Democratic senators who are on to this need to find a way to communicate with the public about it without revealing classified information. If they're like, well, this is, we have to go through a process and it'll be slow and we have to tread carefully because it's classified information. Like, that is customary inside the Beltway thinking, and I'm obviously not suggesting revealing classified information, but they have to find a way to talk around it to the public about what is going on and to keep the pressure on the administration, because I am very worried about this story.

• 40:19Leah Litman?

  FYI, if this had happened under Joe Biden, whoever was the Director of National Intelligence who did this would already have been forced, they would have called for that person's head already. Like, the fact that that person is now doing election enforcement in Fulton County is bonkers.

• 40:38Kate Shaw?

  It's, yeah. So, all right. So that's the kind of gabbard piece of this, which is just like, so atypical, so suspicious, so concerning. Let's zoom out for a minute and just try to contextualize things broadly, sort of Fulton County and the election landscape writ large. So there are a lot of election-related shenanigans going down. There is the president's interest in getting red states to engage in mid-cycle redistricting, to redraw congressional maps in advance of the midterm elections, to give him a better chance of retaining control of the House of Representatives. More on that in a minute. As we've mentioned before, DOJ is also targeting blue states, seeking detailed voter data that includes dates of birth, partial social security numbers, and some observers speculate that this information will be used to target left-leaning voters, voters of color, using

• 41:20Kate Shaw?

  voter suppression tactics. There are secretaries of state raising concerns that the impact of this effort will go beyond the upcoming midterm elections, and that the administration might be in the process of building a database it could use to disenfranchise voters in future elections.

• 41:34Melissa Murray?

  And the cherry on top of all of this is the president's announcement last week that he would like the federal government to take over elections. Let me put this differently. He would like the federal government, rather than the states, to control elections.

• 41:53Melissa Murray?

  Hello? Who is this? The Constitution? You would like a word?

• 41:58Kate Shaw?

  Well, Melissa, we have a Constitution, however.

• 42:01Melissa Murray?

  Well, however. Well, listeners, I'd just like to point out that the Constitution vests in the states the authority to administer elections. Now, Congress can add rules for federal races, but Donald Trump apparently doesn't read the Constitution, which is nuts, because everyone knows you read the Constitution for the articles.

• 42:20Kate Shaw?

  Well, specifically, you should now read Melissa Murray's U.S. Constitution Guide for the Contemporary Reader for the annotations, where Melissa explains the many different provisions that the Constitution gives you background and whatnot, so that any time this guy says anything, you can butt actually them.

• 42:41Melissa Murray?

  But actually, and but actually, we should note that one of Trump's earliest second term actions was an executive order that tried to rewrite the voting rules nationwide. And unsurprisingly, federal judges have largely blocked it because, wait for it, it violates the Constitution.

• 42:58Kate Shaw?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:59Melissa Murray?

  Thank you for calling.

• 43:00Kate Shaw?

  However, anyways, last week, White House spokesperson Carolyn Levitt tried to save the commander in chief from himself by clarifying that the president's takeover remarks were apparently a reference to the SAVE Act, pending legislation that would tighten proof of citizenship requirements. Part of the act would require individuals to present a birth certificate or passport that matches their current name in order to establish their eligibility to vote. Some observers note that the new requirements would likely disenfranchise millions of married women who might not have a passport and who have taken their husbands' names, which would not be reflected on their original birth certificates. But despite Ms. Levitt's very earnest spin efforts, the president, in later remarks, did not reference the SAVE Act.

• 43:45Kate Shaw?

  Instead, he doubled down on election denialism, claiming that democratically controlled places like Fulton County have, quote, "horrible corruption on elections," and the federal government should not allow that. Does that sound like he's talking about something a little bit more than the SAVE Act? Though, to be clear, the SAVE Act is odious legislation.

• 44:03Melissa Murray?

  It's fucking crazy.

• 44:03Kate Shaw?

  It would be a nightmare.

• 44:05Melissa Murray?

  Hello, trad wives, they're coming for you. They're coming for you.

• 44:09Kate Shaw?

  I tried to tell them, the patriarchy is never going to be cool with women. It doesn't matter what you do.

• 44:18Melissa Murray?

  I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace finally figured that out with regard to Mike Johnson. Like, come on, ladies.

• 44:25Kate Shaw?

  There's more election-related news, this time about California redistricting. Okay, so on the topic of imminent elections, we have a new development in the mid-cycle redistricting showdown. So, listeners, you probably remember, in response to the Texas effort to redistrict the Lone Star State to secure additional seats for the president, which lower courts initially actually blocked, but the Supreme Court then facilitated, so that's happening in Texas. In response to all of that, California took action.

• 44:50Melissa Murray?

  And the Golden State decided to put before the voters in last November's election, a single ballot initiative, Prop 50, which would allow California to conduct a single round of mid-cycle redistricting. And surprise, surprise, the measure passed because nobody likes people just deciding mid-cycle to redistrict their state to give the president an advantage. So Californians stepped in and that was their response. Obviously, that response was immediately challenged by California Republicans on the ground that it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Right. And so California responded by saying, no, it is not an unconstitutional

• 45:32Melissa Murray?

  racial gerrymander. It is a totally permissible partisan gerrymander. So no big deal. And listeners, if all of that sounds familiar to you, it should because there are no new ideas and these are basically the same arguments that were put forth against and in defense of the Texas redistricting plan. So again, I learned it from watching you, Dad. Yes, the it's not racial gerrymandering, it's partisan gerrymandering argument, which is only possible because of the Supreme Court's decisions declaring partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable was also trotted out in the California redistricting litigation as well as the Texas redistricting litigation. Now, in Texas, a Trump-appointed district court

• 46:14Melissa Murray?

  judge wrote a lengthy opinion concluding that despite the Republican Party's claims, it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. That is Texas's mid-cycle redistricting in large part because of DOJ documents. Yep, our girl, Hermie Dillon, taking notes on a motherfucking criminal and civil conspiracy directing the Texas legislature to target majority-minority districts. Again, Stringer Bell would like a word.

• 46:38Kate Shaw?

  Or the Supreme Court just swooping in and saving them from themselves because the Supreme Court did weigh in. It granted Texas's request to stay the lower court's ruling. It credited the view that the states were just doing partisan gerrymandering. No big deal if not an actual constitutional right on the part of state legislatures. Okay, so because of that background, in Texas, the Supreme Court acting lawlessly in a way that benefits-

• 47:00Leah Litman?

  benefited the electoral prospects of the Republican Party, people were actually quite nervous about how the court would respond to the California case. I don't think it was beyond the realm of the possible that the court would allow the gerrymander in Texas, but strike it down in California. But surprise, surprise here, what sauce for the Texas goose is sauce for the California gander. You get a partisan gerrymander and you get a partisan gerrymander and everybody gets a partisan gerrymander. So at least in this case, both of the maps will stand. Republicans benefit in Texas and Democrats in California.

• 47:27Melissa Murray?

  All right. So this all went down via a shadow document order that was issued last week. The court rejected the GOP's request to stay the lower court decision, upholding Proposition 50 and blessing, again, some more partisan gerrymandering. And importantly, there are no noted dissents. And all of that is obviously welcome news, but it also tells us something sobering. So I don't mean to be a fly in the punchbowl, listeners, but this means that the second wave of Trump appointees to the lower courts may be even more extreme than friend of the pod Sam Alito. Judge Kenneth Lee of the Ninth Circuit actually dissented from the lower court decision upholding the new California maps when Justice

• 48:12Melissa Murray?

  Alito stayed silent. So I'm just going to leave that. Let it sit for a while.

• 48:17Leah Litman?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Melissa Murray?

  Let it sit.

• 48:18Leah Litman?

  And even with respect to the Supreme Court itself, it is emphatically not an indication that the court is moderating or standing up to Trump despite a rush of stories attempting to pitch that narrative. Some asks are going to be a bridge too far even for this court. And as Kim Lane Shepley reminded us when she was our first guest this year, even captured courts in autocratic regimes sometimes rule against the autocrat, which helps shore up the court's own credibility and the credibility of the autocrat. So don't be fooled by this and steel yourself against the Supreme Court is standing up to Trump storylines when they rule against him in one or more of the upcoming or recently argued cases and rant.

• 49:00Kate Shaw?

  Yeah, but we're gonna like-

• 49:01Leah Litman?

  That's where you should be using your butt actually energy.

• 49:03Kate Shaw?

  Exactly, exactly. Use it there. Yes, the record against Trump. Yes. However. However. Ever.

• 49:09Leah Litman?

  It literally enabled him for the last year.

• 49:12Kate Shaw?

  Yeah, and are going to continue to do that. Exactly. To pull that out whenever you can. But this is actually a rare week because in addition to that surprisingly good news on the shadow docket out of California, we also have other good news coming out of the federal courts. So mark your calendars. Remember this week, the district court for the District of Columbia invalidated the revocation of temporary protected status for Haiti. Probably not the last word on this, but very, very good and important news from the district court. So temporary protected status, or TPS, is a designation that allows individuals to remain in the United States and to work here legally based on findings about conditions in their home country. This decision to block the revocation of TPS for Haiti is very significant for many reasons.

• 49:57Kate Shaw?

  For one, it was pretty clear that the administration was planning on doing major immigration surges targeted Haitian nationals once TPS ended. You might recall that Haitians are the group of people that Trump and Vance defamed and smeared during the campaign, ginning up disgusting and false claims about Haitian immigrants eating the dogs, eating the cats in Springfield, Ohio. Right? Sorry to remind you of that odious episode, but that was among other reasons why people were so worried about TPS ending, leading to immediate surges focused on the Haitian community in particular in Springfield.

• 50:30Leah Litman?

  And the judge in this case absolutely let the administration have it. The opinion begins by contrasting George Washington with Kristi Noem. As the judge noted, George Washington had this to say about immigration to the United States, quote, "America is open to receive not only the opulent and respected stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions." In stark contrast, the district court noted, Crispy, no, Kristi, no, I'm sorry, had, quote, "a different take." The judge then included a screenshot of a Noem tweet that ended with, quote, "We don't want them, not one," in all caps. The district court's opinion then concluded that the plaintiffs had established that it was substantially likely, quote, "that Secretary Noem preordained her termination

• 51:13Leah Litman?

  decision and did so because of hostility to non-white immigrants," end quote. And it used a bunch of her statements to substantiate that this was a predetermined conclusion driven by racism and xenophobia.

• 51:25Melissa Murray?

  The opinion also had some really nice twist the knife moments where it just dragged the unitary executive for filth. So, for example, in rebutting the government's argument that, quote, "harms to Haitian TPS holders are speculative if TPS had been revoked," the court screenshotted the Department of State's travel warning for Haiti, which it noted was, quote, "at level four, do not travel in part because of kidnapping crime, terrorist activity, and civil unrest." Again, remember, as Kate said, you get TPS if the conditions in your home country are such that you cannot be there. So, you can't have it both ways, people. The State Department can't say Haiti is a level four threat and then you don't have

• 52:10Melissa Murray?

  TPS. The judge continued-

• 52:11Leah Litman?

  I love that the lower courts are like, if the Supreme Court is going to insist on the unitary executive, we're just going to do some things with it. So-

• 52:22Melissa Murray?

  There were some other choice passages. So, the court says, quote, "Secretary Noem complains of the strains unlawful immigrants place on our immigration enforcement system. Her answer? Turn 352,959 lawful immigrants into unlawful immigrants overnight. She complains of strains to our economy. Her answer? Turn employed lawful immigrants who contribute billions in taxes into the legally unemployable. She complains of strains to our healthcare system. Her answer? Turn the insured into the uninsured. This approach is many things, and the public interest is not one of them." End quote. Shorter, Judge. Girl, cray.

• 53:06Kate Shaw?

  That passage was amazing, and it ends-

• 53:08Melissa Murray?

  She cray.

• 53:09Kate Shaw?

  -with a banger, which is, quote, "There's an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table." Secretary Noem, the record to date shows, does not have the facts on her side, or at least has ignored them, does not have the law on her side, or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X formerly known as Twitter.

• 53:35Melissa Murray?

  Pew, pew, pew. Like, wow, that was crazy.

• 53:38Leah Litman?

  It was, and there-

• 53:40Melissa Murray?

  But refreshing.

• 53:41Leah Litman?

  Crazy but refreshing. And there were even more developments in Article 2. So we need to do an update on the ex-USA dick watch. So for longtime listeners, I guess you might remember friend of the pod, Ed Martin, the former USA dick, that is the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, who was so cray, not even Republican senators would confirm him to that position. Ed Martin, you know, was removed from that position and shuffled to different positions in DOJ, like serving as the pardon attorney, where he recommended pardons for January 6 rioters. His motto, it is reported, was "No MAGA Left Behind." He also headed the DOJ's Weaponization Working Group, you know,

• 54:25Leah Litman?

  the group that is frantically and feverishly weaponizing the DOJ against Trump critics. Well, CNN reported that a DOJ review, quote, "Found that Ed Martin improperly handled grand jury materials that were part of an investigation targeting Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James." Oh, really? So it seems that our friend, Ed Martin, shared secret grand jury material in the Schiff case. He initially denied it, but as always, it turned out that he had taken notes on a motherfucking criminal conspiracy, and emails surfaced suggesting that he had, in fact, shared the material. And that is why he was replaced by a box of wine.

• 55:02Kate Shaw?

  AKA, the actual US Attorney in DC.

• 55:05Leah Litman?

  Say no names!

• 55:06Kate Shaw?

  Former Fox News host. Okay, you just figure it out.

• 55:09Leah Litman?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Kate Shaw?

  Franzia. General Franzia, is all we'll say.

• 55:17Leah Litman?

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• 56:26Melissa Murray?

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• 57:17Speaker 06

  Long Play, our docu-series exploring the people and forces shaping the South, is back. Newsflash, the South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South, too.

• 57:31Speaker 07

  We're in the final stretch of the midterms and the political map has only gotten more competitive with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. So we thought it was time to get back out on the road and take a closer look at what's actually happening on the ground.

• 57:44Speaker 06

  I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics.

• 57:48Speaker 07

  And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director.

• 57:51Speaker 06

  Tune in on Mondays to Long Play Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 58:03Kate Shaw?

  So, moving on, next segment we're calling, "Are You There, God? It's Me, Congress." As you know, some of us have asked, "What is a Congress and where can we get one?" Well, it seems we got some signs of life in the last week, right? House and actually Senate Democrats both have come forward with some ideas. So this week, the minority party in both Houses of Congress held together a shadow hearing on ICE enforcement that featured some of the people who have been the most impacted by ICE. And when we say impacted, we mean brutalized and abused. I guess not only by ICE, but also CBPE, right? Two separate DHS components. Witnesses include Aliya Rahman, a disabled US citizen who was on her way to a Minneapolis doctor's appointment when she was dragged out of her car and brutalized by ICE.

• 58:48Kate Shaw?

  Also included, Marmar Martinez, who is a Chicago teacher who was shot five times in Chicago by ICE. They initially claimed because she had rammed their car with hers until evidence emerged making clear that that was entirely invented, like literally never happened. And there was also testimony from Luke Goode, who is the brother of Renee Goode, who was, of course, killed in Minneapolis by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross.

• 59:13Melissa Murray?

  Members of Congress have also called for DHS to rescind the leaked May 2025 memo authorizing ICE agents to liberally use administrative warrants to detain people. So that is a great development. And they have also indicated that they may be ready to shut the government down over funding this insane murderous immigration enforcement regime, which would actually be a really massive step towards stepping up and standing up to this administration. And so, all to say, Congress, we hardly knew ye. More of this, please. Keep calling attention to the human impact of these excesses because although it is harrowing

• 59:56Melissa Murray?

  and awful to witness and recount, it is super important for people to know what is going on and the human toll it is taking.

• 1:00:04Kate Shaw?

  And I don't know, I only watched like parts of it, but it was incredibly powerful testimony from the witnesses. And this is something that even when you don't have the gavel in Congress, you don't like control either chamber, you can hold these shadow hearings and do kind of public education about what is happening on the ground, how outrageous it is. So I really hope we see more of that. All right. Next up, speaking of finding a spine, we have a legal academy update. So a few weeks ago, we discussed a very concerning turn in the University of Arkansas Law School's dean search. So the school had offered the position to Emily Suskey, who is a professor at the University of South Carolina. And then the offer was rescinded, apparently because some people in Arkansas objected to the fact that Suskey had signed on to an amicus brief supporting

• 1:00:46Kate Shaw?

  the rights of trans students in the trans athlete cases that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Well, the academy is not taking that latest incursion on academic freedom quietly. So dozens of law professors have come to the support of Emily Suskey, whose offer to become dean was revoked in what seems pretty clearly to have been an exclusively political decision.

• 1:01:07Leah Litman?

  And while the faculty who signed the letter, quote, disagree about many specific matters of law and policy, including in relation to this specific issue, we are united in our view that the selection of a law school dean should be guided by academic values and appropriate institutional processes, all of which appear to have been subverted here, is what the letter says.

• 1:01:26Melissa Murray?

  So because there's never too much Article Two, Article Too Much, if you will, we have to go back to some other developments. I just want to make sure that you all are aware of the cursed timeline that we presently occupy. So the President of the United States was apparently on one a couple of nights ago. As we have noted before, former President Barack Obama lives rent free in Donald Trump's head, which apparently led the sitting president to post on Truth Social, a pretty vulgar meme video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. But you know what the real problem is here? It's wokeness. It's D E I. Yes, all

• 1:02:11Melissa Murray?

  of this. And by the by, this seems as good An opportunity is any to note that the Wall Street Journal reports that the EEOC is investigating allegations that Nike's DEI objectives resulted in, quote, "a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white employees." This all comes just weeks after the president mused that civil rights resulted in white people being, quote, "very badly treated." Who's going to tell them about slavery? Anyway, it seems like as good a time as any to alert our listeners to another development. This is a trial that is going on right now in federal court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where prisoners' rights groups are challenging the Angola Prison Farm Line.

• 1:02:53Melissa Murray?

  So this is a practice which requires prisoners to do backbreaking, manual farm labor in absolutely oppressive weather conditions, all while white prison officials supervise them on horseback. And yes, if that sounds a lot like slavery to you, like, I think that is the point. That is certainly the point the advocacy groups are making as they maintain that the farm line practices violate the Eighth Amendment as well as several federal statutes. So that trial started last week and it continues this week.

• 1:03:25Leah Litman?

  But going back to rent-free occupants of the president's head, Hillary Clinton has agreed, along with her husband Bill, to appear before a congressional committee to testify pursuant to a congressional subpoena related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. The Clintons had earlier refused to appear before the House Oversight Committee on the view that they had already shared what they knew. They also offered to provide information through other avenues, but the Republicans in Congress really wanted them to come in, take an oath, and get their testimony on the record.

• 1:03:53Kate Shaw?

  And so the Clintons actually did agree, but with conditions. And the big condition was that they wanted a public and televised hearing. And Representative Comer, who chairs the Oversight Committee, seems unwilling to hold an open hearing. Hmm. Why?

• 1:04:06Leah Litman?

  I mean, who knows? But it seems that Secretary Clinton also had questions about the refusal to schedule a public hearing. Last Thursday, she posted on social media, quote, "Let's stop the games. You love to talk about transparency. There's nothing more transparent than a public hearing. Cameras on," end quote. Oh, shit, it's on like Donkey Kong.

• 1:04:26Melissa Murray?

  There was also a separate email blast from Bill Clinton's press office that asked the recipients of the email to call Comer's office to demand answers as to why the interviews the committee is conducting as part of its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein are not happening in public settings. All of these are excellent questions and I don't know, I still remember the Benghazi testimony of Hillary Clinton and I'm ready for some really excellent new memes.

• 1:04:53Kate Shaw?

  She really has sort of stamina and presence in those hearings, so.

• 1:04:59Melissa Murray?

  Her face has no chill for these things. And I'm here for it. Love it.

• 1:05:03Kate Shaw?

  Agreed. So let's move on to some housekeeping. This spring, as you probably know, if you listen to our show, we are expecting some huge decisions from SCOTUS, decisions about birthright citizenship, Trump's effort to undermine the 14th Amendment, questions about the meaning of the Second Amendment, including whether it applies to individuals who use drugs and whether they can own guns, whether asylum seekers have to enter the United States to apply for asylum under the Immigration and Nationality Act, or they can apply from elsewhere, whether under federal law ballots have to be received by Election Day rather than just mailed on Election Day, as well as other cases we've talked about regarding whether the president can fire officials like the head of the Fed or a governor of the Fed, the future of the Voting Rights Act, the future of Trump's tariffs. So big, big cases coming down the pike.

• 1:05:48Melissa Murray?

  And as always, on Struck Certainty, we will be waiting in the wings with our constitutional law professor hats on to break them down, put the cases in context and explain what these decisions will mean for the people they will affect the most. We'll laugh, we will almost certainly cry, and we're even taking our show on the road to California to laugh slash cry live in front of some of you. It's going to be amazing. So this being an election year, the stakes for these rulings are going to be higher than ever, which is why we thought it was so important for us to come and see you on tour. So if you are in the Golden State, come out and hang with us at the LA show on March 7th at the Pelus Theater. You can grab your tickets at cricket.com/events. And most importantly, that is the way to

• 1:06:32Melissa Murray?

  inaugurate what we know as bad decisions. Season. So let's make some bad decisions together while the court makes some bad decisions without us.

• 1:06:41Leah Litman?

  Theirs will be even worse.

• 1:06:44Melissa Murray?

  For sure.

• 1:06:44Leah Litman?

  Speaking of good decisions, our favorite things. So I love Isaac Jotner interviews. The one with Dante Spinotti, the Melania cinematographer, was truly in another stratosphere. I'm not going to spoil it. I will just tell you, you have to read it. It just stunning, just stunning. Another favorite thing, Bad Bunny's Grammy speech was moving and powerful.

• 1:07:13Kate Shaw?

  Speaking of we'll laugh, we'll cry. Did anybody else actually shed tears when he started talking? I was just like, I started heave crying and my kids were like, are you okay?

• 1:07:21Leah Litman?

  As I've said.

• 1:07:22Kate Shaw?

  So moving.

• 1:07:23Leah Litman?

  On previous episodes, I'm just a raw nerve edge. And so it is very.

• 1:07:27Kate Shaw?

  Easy to set me off.

• 1:07:28Leah Litman?

  Exactly. Exactly. Another favorite thing, I got to read a galley of Melissa's forthcoming book, The U.S. Constitution, A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader.

• 1:07:40Kate Shaw?

  Melissa, you need to send me a copy. Sorry, sorry. Finish it. Finish, finish the spiel.

• 1:07:43Leah Litman?

  No, yeah. So it was a wonderful, quick, informative read. Highly, highly recommend it. So that was a lot of fun. Another favorite thing, my stay at the Margaritaville Resort Times Square. Melissa told me I had to include this in favorite things because no one could.

• 1:08:02Melissa Murray?

  It's so bonkers.

• 1:08:04Leah Litman?

  I was out for a conference slash lecture at NYU. And when people asked where I would stay, I told them the Margaritaville Resort Times Square, and no one could believe that the law school would put me up there. But that was on the list of approved hotels they gave me, and so I picked it.

• 1:08:21Kate Shaw?

  Wait, is there a rooftop?

• 1:08:21Leah Litman?

  No one has ever picked the Margaritaville Resort Hotel.

• 1:08:24Kate Shaw?

  I think there's a rooftop bar in that hotel that I heard is surprisingly good.

• 1:08:28Leah Litman?

  There, there is a rooftop.

• 1:08:28Kate Shaw?

  During COVID, Chris, my husband, went there a handful of times. It was like, this is like weirdly a low key kind of great bar.

• 1:08:34Leah Litman?

  See, there you go.

• 1:08:35Kate Shaw?

  If you didn't try it out, Leah, try it next time.

• 1:08:36Leah Litman?

  Well, I mean, you know why it's the Margaritaville Resort? Because there used to be a Jimmy Buffett jukebox musical that played in that hotel's theater for years, which I did see.

• 1:08:49Leah Litman?

  I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm no, nothing more needs to be said. Two thumbs up, two thumbs up for the Margaritaville Resort Times Square. I'm glad the hotel is doing more than the musical did.

• 1:08:59Kate Shaw?

  Get them on as a sponsor. My gosh.

• 1:09:01Leah Litman?

  Yeah, that's fabulous. I'm in New York. On the way out to New York, I got to meet a stricte who was sitting in the row ahead of me, but because I fail and I'm not as good as Melissa, I completely forgot to write down your name. I'm very sorry. One other favorite thing. So last week, we got the announcement of the much anticipated forthcoming book of one Samuel A. Alito. It will be out this fall. It is entitled So Ordered: An Originalist View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country. This actually isn't my favorite thing. Don't go preorder the book. But of note is that it's scheduled for release the week of the court's first sitting of the new term

• 1:09:44Leah Litman?

  in 2026, which makes me really wonder if he's retiring because he plans to not be on the bench during that first week and instead promoting the book.

• 1:09:56Kate Shaw?

  Wow.

• 1:09:56Leah Litman?

  Curious. Interesting. And curiouser. Curiouser. Also, maybe he's retiring before the midterms so they can get someone in there super duper fast. Yes. In case they lose. And give the president a win. Yeah. Already have some notes on it, specifically the subtitle. Since when is Sam Alito an originalist? The guy literally mocked originalism during an oral argument, asking in the Brown versus Entertainment Merchants case, whether Justice Scalia would want to know what James Madison thought of video games. And additionally, why would an originalist have a view about our country aside from the Constitution? I just, it's a very confused and confusing subtitle. I don't know why people aren't wearing shoes with buckles. I would like a shoe

• 1:10:41Leah Litman?

  with a buckle. I mean, maybe that's it. We don't know.

• 1:10:46Kate Shaw?

  These are good notes and questions.

• 1:10:50Kate Shaw?

  Wow, that's interesting on the timing. I had not caught the pub date. That is intriguing.

• 1:10:55Speaker 07

  Stricklys, you have the chance to do the funniest thing ever.

• 1:10:59Leah Litman?

  Not by the book.

• 1:11:00Speaker 07

  Coming out.

• 1:11:01Leah Litman?

  Yeah. Not by that one, by Melissa's.

• 1:11:04Kate Shaw?

  Do you think bookstores might package them? Like a little bundle?

• 1:11:07Leah Litman?

  Yours is gonna be on a shelf with this.

• 1:11:08Speaker 07

  Point, counterpoint.

• 1:11:10Kate Shaw?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:13Speaker 07

  It would be awesome if we actually had to do like something together.

• 1:11:16Kate Shaw?

  Booked on some television program.

• 1:11:19Speaker 07

  Like firing line.

• 1:11:20Kate Shaw?

  Oh, my God. Wow, the mind reels. All right. Well, we maybe have that to hope for slash dread. Let me move on to my recommendations, which are very, very different. One, for some reason, my youngest child and I have just watched this four-part Secrets of the Whales documentary on Disney+ Plus, which I thought was brand new, but it's actually like five years old. It's James Cameron directed, Sigourney Weaver narrates it. These whales are the most fascinating thing. There's like an orcas episode. There's humpback whales. There's sperm whales. There's belugas. They're so smart. They're so sophisticated. Their language is incredible. It was just like

• 1:11:51Speaker 07

  Put one of them on the court. Come on, let's do it.

• 1:11:54Kate Shaw?

  Maybe it's gonna be a vacancy. Okay, so that's one recommendation. Alora Mukherjee, who we've had on the show before, had a wonderful, I mean, extremely just like enraging and I thought very powerful op ed in The Times, the title of which was Liam Ramos was just one of hundreds of children at this detention center, released them all. She's talking about the Dilly Detention Facility in Texas, where Liam was held until released, and many, many other of her children, clients, are currently being detained. And it sounds like a literal hellhole where people are being detained in our country, in our names, and it's just an outrage. And anyway, definitely recommend it if people haven't read it. And last, there was a very short clip that I saw. I didn't actually see the whole interview, but Sir Ian McKellen was on Colbert this week

• 1:12:40Kate Shaw?

  doing a monologue from the play Sir Thomas More, which then he ends by saying William Shakespeare, but it's not actually a Shakespeare play, but Shakespeare probably had some role in the revisions of the play. In any event, it is an unbelievably

• 1:12:56Kate Shaw?

  relevant meditation on immigration and xenophobia and exclusion and small-minded leaders and it is, and you know, just a beautiful piece of writing and performance. Watch it if you haven't.

• 1:13:12Melissa Murray?

  Listeners, if you don't know, Sir Thomas More served Henry VIII, who literally beheaded women, was unbelievably excessive in literally every aspect of life. So draw your own conclusions about how this is relevant to our current moment. In my favorite things this week, I want to recommend Alexandra Petry, former guest on this podcast and a former writer at The Washington Post. She has a great piece in The Atlantic called, "Should You Buy a Newspaper or a Yacht? Advice for Jeff Bezos." And it's definitely a must read. It makes you really think, if you've got a lot of cash hanging around, do you want to buy a newspaper or maybe just buy a boat? Like, think about it.

• 1:13:57Melissa Murray?

  Also in The Atlantic this week was Anne Applebaum's, "How Autocrats Meddle with Elections." And I thought that was not only relevant to what we talked about in today's show, but just incredibly sobering for everything that is going on and how close and urgent the threat really is. In a lighter mode, I want to recommend the This Guy Sucked podcast with historian and certified hater Claire O'Bein. She basically goes through history, finds like literally the most despicable people you could ever imagine, then has other people come on to talk about them. They basically talk about why these guys sucked so much. So there is an amazing episode on King George IV,

• 1:14:41Melissa Murray?

  that is, the son of George III, the mad king. Hilarious episode. He definitely sucked. There's also an episode on Phyllis Schlafly, who mentored Ed Martin when they were both at the Eagle Forum and, you know, raised up Salakwatar. Spoiler, I will later this season appear on an episode about Roger Taney, who walked so John Roberts could run. And my husband's away this week, so I am doing a John Slattery Film Festival in my home. So I have seen Nuremberg. Exactly. Nuremberg, which is amazing. I talked about this on Blue Sky. Fantastic new movie with John Slattery, Rami Malek and Russell Crowe. I also saw Mona Lisa Smile.

• 1:15:24Melissa Murray?

  I forgot that he was in that, but he's very good in that, too. And he was also, I'm bringing it all together now, Mr. Phyllis Schlafly in Mrs. America.

• 1:15:36Kate Shaw?

  With Kate Blanchett as the Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly. But that was a great series.

• 1:15:41Melissa Murray?

  And then finally, I made a purchase this week. But I don't think I'm going to keep this purchase for myself because the purchase is so good. And when you find something that's this great, you actually want to give it to someone who's going to love it more than you will. And so when I found this purse that looks like Stevie Nicks, I knew I had to buy it for Leah.

• 1:16:03Leah Litman?

  Stevie Nicks the dog.

• 1:16:04Melissa Murray?

  You're not watching on YouTube. Stevie Nicks, this is why you have to watch on YouTube. This looks just like Leah's mini.

• 1:16:12Kate Shaw?

  Adorable dog.

• 1:16:13Melissa Murray?

  Yeah. And so I can't keep this for myself. One, I can't keep it because Cole is very upset and is trying to defile it in many ways. So I'm keeping it out of reach and I'm going to give it to Leah when next I see her. I mean, obviously in miniature and in real life.

• 1:16:30Leah Litman?

  Another reason to watch us on YouTube is I, well, both Melissa and I are wearing T-shirts that I will be making and bringing to our California live shows for our VIP. So if you want to sneak peek of some of the fun stuff at those California live shows, go ahead and take a look at YouTube.

• 1:16:49Melissa Murray?

  Finally, before we go, we have to shout out one of the unsung heroes on our team. For as long as we've been cutting social clips for YouTube and Instagram and the various talks, Joseph Dutra has been the mastermind behind our social media presence. And we just want to say thank you to him as he moves on to his next big opportunity and to welcome Eric, who is now going to be watching us, clipping us and posting us to all of your favorite social media platforms.

• 1:17:28Melissa Murray?

  Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked Media production, hosted and executive produced by me, Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shaw. Our senior producer and editor is Melody Rauel. Michael Goldsmith is our producer. Jordan Thomas is our intern. Our music is by Eddie Cooper. We get production support from Katie Long and Adrian Hill. Matt DeGroot is our head of production. And thanks to our video team, Ben Heathcote and Johanna Case. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Strict Scrutiny in your favorite podcast app and on YouTube, at Strict Scrutiny Podcast, so you never miss an episode. And if you want to help other people find the show, please rate and review us. It really helps.

• 1:18:23Speaker 06

  Long Play, our docu-series exploring the people and forces shaping the South, is back. Newsflash: The South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South, too. We're in the final stretch of the midterms, and the political map has only gotten more competitive with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. So we thought it was time to get back out on the road and take a closer look at what's actually happening on the ground. I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Long Play Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:19:04Melissa Murray?

  Relax and get ready for bed with Dr. Teal's magnesium spray. Made from a proprietary blend of topical minerals powered by pure Epsom salt and natural Dead Sea salt. Dr. Teal's magnesium spray is designed to help you unwind and get in a nighttime state of mind. Dr. Teal's magnesium spray is wellness you can feel, and you can find it in your local bath aisle. Dr. Teal's. Yep, you needed that.

• 1:19:33Leah Litman?

  Monday Night brings one more big matchup to settle into. And when every play matters, the last thing you want to do is step away to figure out dinner. That's where DiGiorno comes in. Get a DiGiorno pizza ready before kickoff, then enjoy restaurant-quality taste fresh from your own oven while you stay locked into every play. Stock up on DiGiorno over the weekend, so when Monday night rolls around, the only thing you sweat is the game. Shop now at the link in the episode description. It's not delivery. It's DiGiorno.