Your Trump 2.0 Questions, Answered [UNLOCKED]

This episode was available early to Premium members. If you'd like that kind of perk, consider joining at fivefourpod.com/support. What do you do if ICE comes to your door? How will Trump enforce his anti-trans orders? Are there risks to podcasting in the age of Trump? You asked some really dark questions, and we have answers. To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support. 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support. Our researcher is Jonathan DeBruin, and our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey y'all, it's Rhiannon. Surprise! Also, you're welcome. We are releasing a premium episode that was previously for subscribers only. We're releasing it down the free feed today, so everybody can enjoy it. Now, this is a mailbag episode that was released a couple of weeks ago, in which we took questions from subscribers and did our best to answer them. Remember, though, this was recorded a few weeks ago, so if anything about like Trump's executive orders or whatever sounds a tiny bit outdated, that's why. So, we wanted to share this episode with everyone to give listeners a little bonus content in this hell era that we are in currently. But also, just to say, you know, if you're not subscribed,

• 0:44Speaker 00

  then these are the kinds of episodes you are missing out on. So, remember, as a subscriber, you're a part of that Patreon or the Slack community, where you can get questions to us and interact. And we are releasing content just like this, and lots of other good stuff for 2025. You know, our five-year anniversary of Five to Four: Five Years is coming up, so Arch Enemy subscribers can look forward to a special event around that. We're thinking about different kinds of premium content for subscribers, like book talks, interviews, stuff like that. And upcoming premium episodes that we already have planned include episodes on the Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell and his infamous Powell memo, which has been

• 1:26Speaker 00

  called "The Project 2025 of the Nixon Era." We're also planning an episode, which will be a review of the movie about that high school football coach who wouldn't stop preying on the field after every game. And we're gonna be rolling out a new series, Weird Freaks of the Conservative Legal Movement, where we'll just be roasting some of those wormy little losers who are behind the dumbest and like, most racist, violent, destructive ideas in the law right now. Eek! So, uh, yeah, let's go, girlies. 2025 is underway, and you can join the club at patreon.com/54pod, all spelled out. Again, patreon.com/54pod.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  And enjoy this episode.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this subscriber-only episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are taking your questions. As the second Trump administration continues to wreak havoc, the White House and its allies are testing the limits of their power by ignoring existing laws and pretending the Constitution is just a set of suggestions. Peter, Rhi, and Michael can't save you, but they can tell you what would happen if the Supreme Court overturned same-sex marriage, and what to do if ICE agents show up at your workplace, and how to protect yourself against the paralyzing effects of panic and despair. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and everything else sucks.

• 3:04Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have frozen our civil liberties, like Donald Trump freezing the federal budget.

• 3:12Michael Liroff?

  Mmm.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Eek!

• 3:14Peter Shamshiri?

  I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael.

• 3:16Michael Liroff?

  Hey, everybody.

• 3:17Peter Shamshiri?

  And Rhiannon.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Imagine, hi, everybody. Imagine if Michael was the one that just said, "Eek!" It's that scary, folks.

• 3:27Michael Liroff?

  It is that scary.

• 3:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, things are not good.

• 3:29Michael Liroff?

  No.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  No, we should get into it.

• 3:32Peter Shamshiri?

  We should. First of all, I would like to complain. I've been woken up at the crack of dawn by my co-host to record a podcast at 10 a.m.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was about to say, tell him what the crack of dawn is, Peter. Say it.

• 3:45Michael Liroff?

  It's 8 a.m. over here.

• 3:47Peter Shamshiri?

  When you record at 10, you have to get up at 9. It's...

• 3:52Peter Shamshiri?

  It's insane. All right, so we're doing a mailbag episode, and we got a couple of questions about this. And because it's so pressing, we do want to give a quick overview of the situation. It's very much in flux. We're recording several days in advance, so things will have changed. But Donald Trump has taken several steps to sort of secure his grip over the federal bureaucracy. And many of those steps are questionable in their constitutionality, by which I mean, anyone who's not a psychopath would recognize these steps as unconstitutional.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Because they extend beyond the president's powers over the federal budget. So, Michael, I'll let you take the lead here because you're the politics guy.

• 4:40Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  You're the literate guy even on the podcast.

• 4:43Peter Shamshiri?

  Michael will have read the NBC News articles that have come out about this, whereas Rhiannon and I will have not.

• 4:49Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, so this, I mean, I don't even know where to start.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:53Michael Liroff?

  I do think like, it's worth saying explicitly, like, in fourth grade, you learn that, you know, Congress has the power of the purse. And what the president is saying here, what Donald Trump is saying here is, no, they don't. I do, I get to decide what we spend money on, which turns Congress, you know, almost to like, an advisory function. It is, like, goes to the heart of the separation of powers. So it's pretty wild. It's a pretty wild power grab. It's also one that I think goes to show how disconnected the MAGA movement is

• 5:36Michael Liroff?

  and the conservative legal movement is, that they all hate the government, you know, capital T, capital G, the government, and think everybody else hates the government. And a lot of people do, in part because they don't know what the government does. They don't, they don't understand the way it intersects with their lives. And when you freeze federal spending like this, it hits every corner of society. Like, it's meals on wheels, it's legal aid, it's Medicaid. You know, my wife's a mental health professional and works at a clinic for, you know, low income people. All her patients, many of whom are in crisis, can't

• 6:21Michael Liroff?

  pay all the sort of Medicaid portals down. And on and on, professors whose positions are funded by grants from the government, not getting salaries. It's just.

• 6:33Michael Liroff?

  The sheer breadth of social impact is staggering. The government guarantees loans, a lot of different types of loans, but especially mortgages. And they were saying they weren't going to guarantee loans. And that meant the housing market would collapse. Like, most mortgages are done in a certain form and certain numbers so that they will get essentially automatically guaranteed by the government and insured. And if they're not getting insured, it's going to, it would be much harder. The interest rates would be much higher. You'd be much less likely to get a loan and on and on and on.

• 7:14Michael Liroff?

  There is no corner of society that wouldn't be touched by this and might be touched by this because it's frozen until February 3rd. This episode should be coming out on February 4th. So we'll see. And to be clear, when I say it's frozen, a judge issued a temporary administrative stay, putting this on hold and saying the government has to disperse funds until February 3rd, while the judge Biden appointee Ali Khan, you know, takes time to consider the legal issues and see whether they will do something more permanent.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  And just to the point that so much is in flux, stuff feels really unstable and really scary. And it is, but you know, another note about like how this stuff will be working through the legal system, the court system, you know, also, everybody I'm sure has heard about, you know, the executive order around birthright citizenship that also is frozen while it makes its way through the court system. And so all of these like massive changes that the Trump administration is trying to implement, like, yes, some go into effect, but on the other hand, many, many, many, now this is all about legal battles about all of this stuff.

• 8:31Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, and I think, big picture, we're seeing a couple of things. One is Trump and his people immediately testing every boundary.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:39Peter Shamshiri?

  In a way that makes me feel like this is sort of, big picture, it's worst-case scenario. Right? This is not Trump 1.0, where he comes in, trips over his own dick repeatedly. Maybe gets a few things done, and that's that. This is a much more organized effort to seize the federal government for the right wing.

• 9:00Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Peter Shamshiri?

  So what we're talking about sort of encompasses two big right-wing initiatives right off the bat. One is this unitary executive idea. The idea that the president has full authority over the executive branch, unfettered. This even goes a little bit beyond that, but essentially, the idea is that the president should be a little bit more king-like, a little bit less restrained. This is something that conservatives have, in many circles, long believed. The other thing going on here is something we saw at OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, where they sent out an email that looked like it was designed to push resignations.

• 9:44Peter Shamshiri?

  Right? Basically being like, if you want to resign, it would be great. Here are some benefits for resigning. Like, this is something many companies do to get people to quit. They say, hey, if you resign.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Here are some benefits. Make it a little bit tasty. Makes sense that it's something that companies do, because it does appear that Elon Musk is behind it.

• 10:05Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, I heard somebody say it was literally the same email, copy-pasted, that he had sent out when he took over Twitter.

• 10:13Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. And what's the point of that? The point of that is that that goes out to all of these government civil servants. Civil servants within the government tend to exist across administrations. They're not political appointees. They are lifelong civil servants. It's the whole point. Right. They're doing public service. What the right wants to do is push those people out and replace them with loyalists so that the entire federal government, top to bottom, is full of lunatics. So that's what's happening there. I don't think that we can say that much more about it at this point. We'll move on to your other questions and hope that when this episode comes out, America is still here.

• 10:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Or do we hope that? Let's all vote.

• 11:01Michael Liroff?

  I want to add one more, one more note. If you don't quite yet have that sense of dread and that knot in your stomach about what's going on, which is that Trump did another thing that is not currently under review in the courts and not on hold and is ongoing, which is he instructed a review of the border and whether they should institute a state of emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act so that the military can be used preventing border crossings and in domestic law enforcement. So that's coming down the pipe and that is a future big crisis.

• 11:40Peter Shamshiri?

  All right. So let's tackle the first question here. This is something we've gotten a lot from listeners and also from people in my life. Are you personally scared going into the second Trump administration? Seems insane to think of members of the press being rounded up and punished for their speech, but when former President Biden preemptively pardoned his entire family, it feels like maybe that fear is warranted. Do you think that there are inherent risks to being a public facing opponent of Trump? So I'm going to say a couple of things. We, you know, we can go around the room here. Are there inherent risks? Absolutely. I do think that people are sort of getting those risks wrong. The risk isn't that like the Trump administration comes knocking on your door exactly.

• 12:23Peter Shamshiri?

  That might be some risk, but like, you remember the poem, first they came for the socialists. By the time they get to podcasters.

• 12:33Peter Shamshiri?

  The country's toast. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not worried about it in that sense. I think the real concern for the media is a right wing emboldened to just sue everyone, right? That everyone just gets like bogged down with like defamation lawsuits and shit like that. Is it a very discreet risk for us? I'd say no, because I'm pretty careful. I like to dance around the edge of defamation. But you never know, right? I think that what the real risk is for most media outlets, and I'm not really specifically referring to us, I think this doesn't apply to us that much. But I think the risk for most lefty outlets is some right wing billionaire somewhere

• 13:18Peter Shamshiri?

  saying, I don't like them and deciding to attack and use litigation to bring them to the ground. I think that's a real risk for a lot of like larger outlets.

• 13:28Michael Liroff?

  Suing them in the northern district of Texas.

• 13:30Peter Shamshiri?

  Right, right.

• 13:32Michael Liroff?

  I will say, and Peter knows this, he's joked about it, but I'm less sanguine about the government knocking on our doors than he is. I know we're not that big, we're not that important, where we are on anybody's list. But, uh, I don't know, it worries me. We're not free of risk, I don't think. And like Mike Davis, who's very sort of plugged into the Trump legal world, once quote tweeted me on Twitter and added the FBI being like, you should investigate this guy.

• 14:10Peter Shamshiri?

  And I retweeted him.

• 14:15Michael Liroff?

  I, I don't know where this is gonna go in the next four years, but I do think there are real risks, real dangers to being critical media right now. I've been frightened about it and I've been trying to diffuse that fear with humor for several months, but it hasn't worked.

• 14:34Peter Shamshiri?

  And now to the person who's actually gonna get fired for her views.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, you know, Peter talked about like what the risks are to corporate media outlets or like, you know, media organizations. And I think that's true, like some billionaire, somebody in the federal government decides, eh, we don't like these people. And, you know, they use the tools that they have, lawfare, whatever the ways are that they can go at these organizations or corporations or outlets that they don't like. Yeah, I think that's the risk for them. This is something that like even individuals, different kinds of organizations, like not just media folks or commentary folks like us or podcasters, everybody has to do their own risk assessment. And when we talk about like, security culture and how we keep us safe, like this thing, we keep us safe, we keep us safe, like what does that mean?

• 15:23Speaker 00

  That means that like, you look at what the risks are and you decide what amount of risk you're willing to take on based on what the consequences are. I think adding the FBI, adding federal agencies, all of that stuff, that's stuff that happens to me on Twitter all of the time. That's stuff that happens all of the time to lots of folks. And I imagine the FBI obviously might care about some of those, but obviously knows that's just a weird fucking online ecosystem where that happens a lot. The risk to individuals like us is that crazy individuals find us and the consequence of

• 16:02Speaker 00

  usually that are things like doxing, which I have been through, are things like people calling your boss and saying, this person said this on a podcast or said this online.

• 16:14Peter Shamshiri?

  Do not call Leon, whoever's listening.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Right. Leon doesn't care, you know? Leon listens to our episode every single week before it's released.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  So, you know, we're insulated a little bit from those risks by the nature of the structure of our podcasts and what we do. We're insulated a little bit in that term. Will we be criticized? Like, absolutely. And you expect that. And like, this is something that, you know, like, I just gotta like, put it out there, like, you know, like. Politicians, individuals, like, people are doing this now already to people, and people are already living through this and navigating this. And, yeah, so it's not to say it's not a risk. It's not to say it's not uncomfortable or even scary, like, when this happens. But also, like, we're just structured in a way that we either, like, aren't gonna be,

• 17:05Speaker 00

  like, main targets, or the targeting of us, we're sort of cushioned from the typical consequences that come from, you know, being doxxed, being exposed, being vulnerable in certain ways from saying certain things publicly. So, yeah, like, I'm scared. I don't want it to happen, but also, you know, fuck them, and it's gonna happen, so whatever.

• 17:29Peter Shamshiri?

  Also, Rannan has been identified by name by senators before.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:34Peter Shamshiri?

  So, how much worse can it get? If we're talking about...

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:38Michael Liroff?

  Well, dude, knock on wood. Knock on wood, knock on wood.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:43Peter Shamshiri?

  You'll be, they'll be playing that clip in a year.

• 17:47Peter Shamshiri?

  How much worse can it get? All right, another question, and we got this in different colors. "I'm in a same-sex marriage that was performed in a state that does not have any state law on the books allowing state marriage or banning it. If Obergefell is overturned, what would realistically happen to my marriage and those of others in similar positions?" Interesting question, something people are obviously thinking about. I think the answer here is a nice and polite "it depends."

• 18:15Peter Shamshiri?

  If you want to be optimistic, and I think there probably is room for some optimism in this front, even if Obergefell is overturned, and I would say that the likelihood of that is not unlikely, but if Obergefell is overturned, your marriage is likely to remain valid if it existed at the time. Now, could a state pass a law saying any gay marriages performed in this state over the past decade are void?

• 18:48Peter Shamshiri?

  Theoretically, yes. I would say that that's not particularly likely, but it could happen. However, if you got married in a blue state that's not going to change the law, for example, your marriage is likely to remain valid across the 50 states due to the full faith and credit clause in the Constitution. We might see challenges down the line related to that, but that's sort of how it worked before. That said, red states will work to make your life difficult because they can. That's sort of inevitable. We just don't know exactly what shape it'll take. So I would say likelihood that your marriage would be invalid, very low.

• 19:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Likelihood that it causes you some problems if you live in a red state, very high.

• 19:36Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, like just one example of this, and this is from, there's like old case law on this from like back before Loving v. Virginia, when there were still like race mixing laws and like anti-miscegenation laws and whatever. And people would go to neighboring states to get married. And what would happen is it'd make you more vulnerable in things like when couples split up, right? Because the state would say, well, your marriage was never actually real to begin with, and so you have no legal rights on divorce, on joint assets and things like that. So if you're in a red state, there are a lot of ways you will be made more vulnerable by this.

• 20:21Michael Liroff?

  But the immediate impact, no, your marriage will not go poof.

• 20:26Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. A good place to start to like explore this is to look, if you are in a red state, look at the state of same-sex marriage laws in the state before Obergefell, right? Like where they're actively like, no, and if you're in a gay marriage from another state, this is how this state treats it. Like, look at what was on the books before Obergefell.

• 20:48Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. And this is also a question that people asked us. The laws that pre-exist Obergefell are most likely still on the books. And if Obergefell is overturned, those will be the laws again. And so you can go and just check what's on the books and have a good sense of what will happen. They could pass new laws, of course, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do. But that would give you a good sense of what will happen immediately.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Okay, kind of a related but slightly different question. Lots of questions like this on lots of people's minds. This person wrote in and said, my question is, I currently live in a blue state. I am trans and I've had all of my legal documents like birth certificate, social security card, passport and ID changed to my correct gender. There's a lot of worry that any changed federal ID is going to be out of compliance now. If they're saying that gender is sex assigned at birth and my California birth certificate now says male, how are they gonna know? How are they gonna enforce this? Is it just gonna be a massive shit show?

• 21:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Yes.

• 21:52Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 21:53Peter Shamshiri?

  Now, the answer to that is yes. We're seeing these executive orders drop. They are deeply disconcerting. They are clearly aimed at rooting trans people out of public life back into the closet. But the reality of their enforcement is very complex because like this listener is sort of noting, the paper trail for your sex assigned at birth, which is, you know, their North Star in this case.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:25Peter Shamshiri?

  Is a little bit finicky, right? You might have your birth certificate changed. In this person's specific case, I don't want to tell anyone like, don't worry.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:33Peter Shamshiri?

  I hate to do that in this environment. You never know. You never know what can be chased down. You know, you can imagine a situation where someone comes under suspicion of being trans and what evidence could they hunt down? People in your life might know. But realistically, if you have had your birth certificate changed, I'm not sure how likely it is that the federal government gets to you on this. But, you know, again, we don't know exactly what the contours of these laws and rules are going to be. If you are in the military and you are trans and an executive order has been passed about this, right, that basically aiming to root trans people out of the military.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:16Peter Shamshiri?

  You will likely at some point have to attest that you are not trans, at which point you are lying. It can get complicated, but I think there is sort of a silver lining here in that if you're in a state that has provided trans people with these sort of avenues for changing their documentation, it does make the Trump administration's life harder when it comes to trying to enforce their bullshit, for sure.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Just on the point of like being investigated for lying to the federal government, there is a related question that was included with this question, which is about exactly that, right? Like if a federal form is asking your sex assigned at birth or your sex assigned at conception, you have your documents changed to reflect your lived identity and your lived gender and you put that on this form, is it possible that you could be prosecuted for lying on a federal form? Yes, that is in fact the way that the federal government prosecutes a lot of people in the immigration context, for example, that's already a thing. If you were, you're, you're an immigrant, you get arrested for something completely

• 24:27Speaker 00

  unrelated, a state charge for DWI. And if in those records at any time, you identified yourself as anything other the immigration status that you actually were at that time, the federal government can use that against you and say that you lied on official documents or you lied in official court proceedings and you can't get the immigration status you're looking for. And so, yes, where these things get complicated, yes, like insulate yourself as much as you can if you're in a blue state, but these things do get complicated when you're talking about sort of the stuff that's in the exclusively federal category. And yes, things like getting prosecuted for lying to the federal government are, you know, one of the ways that they can make your life harder.

• 25:12Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Peter Shamshiri?

  And maybe this is a good time to pause and say, we got a lot of questions.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:21Peter Shamshiri?

  That reflect a generalized anxiety. We're answering some of them now because some of them reflect very real tangible concerns. Some of them are just sort of general expressions of concern, nervousness, despair. My sort of reaction to a lot of this stuff is stay frosty. You know what I mean? Don't let your anxiety overwhelm your ability to respond intelligently when shit happens.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Every now and then I will say, you know, I'm not super concerned about X, Y, and Z. And someone will respond basically accusing me of downplaying it, right? Maybe in certain cases I am wrong. Maybe Michael's right that I should be worried about the feds knocking on my door or something along those lines, right? But if you are sort of a doomer about everything, if you're just like, this is as bad as it's going to be. Everything's going to continue to be bad and everything is going to be as bad as it could possibly be. You won't actually prepare yourself for what's coming. You will not do an effective job of preparing yourself and the people around you. You will misallocate your resources and it's important not to during a time like this.

• 26:38Peter Shamshiri?

  So don't let yourself get bogged down by your anxieties, breathe and like think, you know?

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, we got the variation, dozens and dozens of questions that, you know, almost worded exactly the same thing. I am gay or trans, or I'm an employee of this federal or government agency, or this organization that does this kind of work, or I am an immigrant or a loved one is an immigrant. And then the question, basically, how scared should I be right now? And you know, the answer to that is we're all scared. It's scary. This was really an overwhelming amount of anxiety and fear that we could feel in these questions. That's obviously like really bubbling over in people's lives. It's very real and it's very. Uncertain the time that we live in, we should all recognize that.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  And then, but also it's like, hear us recognize it. Everybody is recognizing it right now. There's power in that. You have got to be able to think. Your question right now cannot begin and end at, how scared should I be? Like, think about what information you get from that answer. That's not actually good information that addresses any of your fears. If I tell you, you should be really fucking scared. Like, okay, then what, right? So you have got to come into community with people and decide and be doing those risk assessments. These are reasoned and rational. You can be doing them in community with your loved ones and the people that you live with and the people that you work around. What is the highest possible risk?

• 28:13Speaker 00

  What is the highest possible consequence? What is everything in between? Nothing happens to the highest consequence. Okay, what is my plan for every single one of those things happening?

• 28:23Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, how do I mitigate my risks?

• 28:25Speaker 00

  How do I mitigate my risk? How do I mitigate harm to the people that I love? You can do something. And so, yeah, just, just want to recognize it's a tough time. It is a scary time. If you want to hear us say it, it is a scary fucking time. But there are things that you can do. You've heard me say it a million times before. You are a person with power. Now's the time to use it.

• 28:49Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, and I want to add on that point. Bigger picture, like, yeah, if the fascists have control of the security services and the courts and the federal government and all that, it's scary and it feels like they are unbound. But they are actually bound. There are still political constraints on Trump. And we're seeing it just with this, how quickly they are walking back. They're like, oh, the Medicaid portals shouldn't have been shut down.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:17Michael Liroff?

  You know, like, they get outrage from people and say, okay, you know, some of their boundaries that they're testing right now, they're going to find a limit in the courts. Some of them, they're going to find a limit in what Congress is willing to accept. And some of it, they're going to find a limit in what the people are willing to accept.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 29:38Michael Liroff?

  And. Just being a doomer makes it harder for you to be a part of that political constraint of them. You have to be optimistic that we can limit this damage collectively and individually.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. Next question here. Hey, I live on Hoopa Indian Reservation and all my children are tribal members. I just read this concerning article today. It says that Trump is using old Supreme Court cases that say that basically Native Americans are not US citizens. I realize they're using the argument to argue against immigrant birthright citizenship, but if that argument holds up in court, does that then imply or give room to the argument that members of federally recognized tribes aren't US citizens either?

• 30:28Peter Shamshiri?

  This is a good transition out of what we were just talking about because there are reasons to be concerned here and there are reasons not to be very concerned.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question.

• 30:37Peter Shamshiri?

  Couple of ways to think about this. In the broadest sense, Trump is trying to narrow the definition of citizenship very drastically, which puts almost everyone at potential risk. The citizenship of tribes was historically, even after the 14th Amendment was passed, a matter of debate, in part because the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause turns on whether you are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. And in the case of tribes, it's actually very unclear whether that would be true or not. But in the 1920s, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to members of the tribes. So my instinct is that for now, Indian citizenship is safe because I do not

• 31:17Peter Shamshiri?

  see the political will to go after that legislation. I do not see that sort of momentum on the right. And there is a law in place saying they're citizens. So this is something that I would not be concerned about unless and until you see that sort of political momentum develop on the right to actually take steps in this direction.

• 31:38Michael Liroff?

  Just a little context that will help you the understand these cases. You know, there are two sort of classic ways you get citizenship. Two different regimes. One is where you're born and one is the citizenship of your parents. Where you're born, they call it just solely, or which means like right of the soil, I think, something like that. And that was basically the US position before it was an independent nation. All right. England was just solely when we were colonies. But, you know, the founders were really racist. And so there were exceptions. There were two exceptions. One was for the children of slaves and one was for Indians.

• 32:21Michael Liroff?

  But, you know, those are things that were worked out by the 14th amendment and by laws passed. And so they're citing these cases because they want to wind back the clock a lot. And, you know, the resolution of the civil war is a big impediment to what they want to do. But historically, these cases, I don't think you should be worried that these cases are about Indian rights, you know, native rights. They're from a time period when that was in issue. But, you know, like Peter says, that's one that's been politically worked out in a different way than just in the courts.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Next question from a current law student. First, pour one out for you and your job prospects right now. I'm a 3L law student. I think, Michael, this question is like squarely in your arena. For the last two years, I've been judgmental of the Biden system's weird centrism and the hollowing out of constitutional rights by the court. But I was always comforted by the fact that at least our agencies and departments would do creative things, ala Lina Khan, to fight conservatives. Taking an antitrust class for my final year of law school has left me with a deep foreboding fear of what these institutions would do in conservative hands with a conservative court. So is there any hope that the bureaucracy will stall

• 33:46Speaker 00

  the fascism of the next four years? I'm very scared, specifically about corporate capture, given the way I am being taught antitrust.

• 33:56Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, antitrust is is an area of law that's gone pretty terribly, mainly because there's been big influence from major conservatives, right? It's Robert Bork has ruined antitrust. And so you are right to be concerned. I do think, yes, I think there are career civil servants who take their oaths very seriously, take their jobs and their responsibility to the American people very seriously and who are right now thinking, you know what? I'm staying. I'm staying until they kick me out.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:36Michael Liroff?

  And I'm gonna gum up the works.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Relatable.

• 34:39Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, there are Reddit threads about this. A lot of people being radicalized by the Elon Musk email saying, I was going to leave. I was looking for jobs and now fuck this. I'm staying.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:55Michael Liroff?

  Which is heartening. That being said, you know, the Trump administration is aware of this as well. This is a big thing. They want to purge their bureaucracy. And so this is an area where solidarity with workers in the federal bureaucracy is important, not just for workers' rights and not just because they're our fellow citizens, but because they are in position to slow things down and Trump knows it and is trying to get rid of them. And so those are people we should be protecting and it should be a focus of our concern and our energy and our activism.

• 35:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. I do wanna go on a slight tangent about antitrust in particular. So antitrust is about competition between businesses and preventing monopolies, right? Maybe one of the big lessons of the past few years is how important antitrust law is. And how devastating the abandonment of traditional antitrust principles has been. And that is something that occurred basically at the behest of certain conservative academics like Robert Bork in the 70s and 80s. There are all sorts of economic reasons for antitrust laws, anti-competitive behavior like monopolies. It creates all these inefficiencies. It's bad for the economy. I took a class on this at Wharton once.

• 36:23Peter Shamshiri?

  I got a B+. Don't remember anything. But the other, the other thing that effective antitrust policy does is prevent the consolidation of economic power into the hands of a few freaks.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:37Peter Shamshiri?

  And we can see where the abandonment of that policy has led us.

• 36:42Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 36:43Peter Shamshiri?

  This is a world where we have let one South African acquire an unreal percentage of the United States market. And the output of that is, yeah, there are just a few freaks who get to dictate our policies because they have all the money.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, one day we will do a, a full episode or two on that. I, I don't want to commit to two, but one doesn't feel like enough.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, seriously.

• 37:12Michael Liroff?

  So we got a lot of questions like this, you know, this one was from someone who potentially had a job in the US Attorney's Office, but we see this all the time with big law, with various prosecutors, et cetera, et cetera.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:25Michael Liroff?

  So this questioner says, I think I have a sometimes naively optimistic hope that if I get a job in an objectively bad office, I can help reform it in some way. My question really is, do you think that is going to even be possible for good people to get jobs under the Trump administration to try to foster internal dissent? And I was wondering if you think there's any good work to be done under the Trump administration? Is every agency/department going to be stripped of its ability to serve the public? Is it worth it to do any work inside the system?

• 37:59Speaker 00

  I think that this is a good question because it's clearly like on the minds of a lot of people. Again, just in this like environment, this context of like real uncertainty, like, okay, if, you know, if legal aid is defunded, like, where am I going to work then? Right? Then like, maybe it's just government jobs? Like, I, you know, I, I get that people like are really trying to work through, like, what are viable career paths? Where I can have impact and do good work? I don't want to be the person that's like pouring cold water on your face or whatever, but-

• 38:32Peter Shamshiri?

  But someone has to be, huh?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. I do think that people get really wrapped up and it's, it's sort of like a hyper individualistic focus that you're in, you know, a hyper individualistic, you know, very much just one person, just me posture that you don't need to do. Let's just take a step back. When have you, and, and I, I really don't mean this to be harsh. When have you heard of a person

• 38:59Speaker 00

  going and, and starting work as a baby attorney at a prosecutor's office for the Trump administration? And they foster internal dissent.

• 39:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Hmm.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  They muck up the system. They change things from the inside. You need to think about what it is, look, ba- objectively bad office, objectively like evil work or not. Think about what it means to just work at a big office.

• 39:25Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  A place that has a lot of employees. Think about what the work you will be asked to do on day one. You're not at any of these jobs, at any prosecutor's office, right? You don't get a file and somebody is like, "You're lead on this case and you'll be prosecuting an innocent person." You get fucking baby attorney work and if you don't do it, you don't have a job anymore. Like, we need to think realistically, right? And I think we get a lot of these questions in big law too. Like, we, in particular, the three of us on the podcast, when we speak to law students, when we travel and talk at law schools- I would say every appearance that we make, we have a question from the audience that's about working for Big Law.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  And the answer is the same. Don't get too wrapped up or convince yourself of your ability to do good, to absolve yourself morally of the choices that you're making. Make the choices that you're making about what work you do and how you spend time based on what, like, the actual reasons why you're doing that work, which might be to make money, to pay off my student loans, to support my family, whatever it is. I want to make a lot of money. Just be real about it because we're asked a lot, and it feels a lot of the times that we're asked to give you, like, a moral pat on the back and be like, yeah, you can make this a net good to society that you have this random job, right? And that's just not there.

• 40:53Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, and this is, you know, again, this is not a moral judgment. Michael and I both did Big Law. I did Big Law for six years. You probably have a lot of debt. They pay a lot of money. It can be a life-changing amount of money for a lot of people. That's fine. Go get it. But do not kid yourself about what you're doing, all right? You're not going to change Big Law from the inside, okay? You're going to be fixing typos in briefs your first year. What are you going to do? Fix them progressively, right? They provide legal counsel to banks. So what's your plan, Donnie Brasco? You're in the fucking CIA? You're going to take them down? What are you, what are you talking about? It's 1 million times more likely that Big Law will change you than the other way around.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:36Peter Shamshiri?

  So, yeah, just go in with your eyes straight ahead, you know?

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:41Peter Shamshiri?

  You don't have to lie to yourselves. You're in business.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:45Peter Shamshiri?

  If you want to be in business, be in business. But please.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:49Peter Shamshiri?

  Please don't ask for us to give you absolution. We cannot give it to you.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  We cannot, we cannot, we cannot. If that bothers you, if to be in business and play that game bothers you, as it did for me when I was looking for law jobs, then don't do it. But don't do it on the, like, weird promise to yourself that you're going to change the system from the inside.

• 42:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  You just won't have the opportunity. It's just not realistic.

• 42:12Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, you're just going to be doing doc review. That's it.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  One more point on this. Let us be realistic about how change happens within systems and within places that you work. That happens through unionizing. Don't be hyper individualistic to think that as one person, I'm going to change this whole system. Unions are what change workplaces.

• 42:33Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And if you try to unionize Davis Polk, they will kill you with a gun.

• 42:40Michael Liroff?

  Right. I also want to add that this isn't really in tension with our last answer about career bureaucrats, career civil servants.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 42:48Michael Liroff?

  Who have been there, who are in, you know, mid level or management positions.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 42:54Michael Liroff?

  Who know the system in and out. It's just a posture, a very different posture than an entry level or first year joining up person. Like, it's just, it just is. You miss the window if you want to be the bug in the system.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 43:14Michael Liroff?

  You needed to be signed up at least four years ago.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:19Michael Liroff?

  And I'll add, and all those people I think are fully expecting that they eventually will get fired for what they're doing. Okay, next question. Do you have any advice for protecting coworkers if ICE comes calling, especially for those of us who might work in a payroll or HR office? Also, what advice do you have for citizens who don't want to comply with broad racist inquiries into our legal status, but who also don't want to end up in jail or on a military plane because the ICE agents don't actually care who they're rounding up?

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is a good question. This is on the minds of a lot of people. I cannot emphasize enough, y'all, I cannot emphasize enough. Wherever you live right now, at least in the United States, there are organizations, there are immigrant defense, you know, community organizations, there are immigration law firms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, who are working on exactly this stuff. I have already seen in Austin, multiple things about know your rights for immigrants, community defense, deportation defense, right? So engage.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  With the local resources that you have. But really broadly, I do think this is a really good question. To the question about protecting your coworkers. If ICE comes to your workplace. I have a graphic and hopefully we can share this at least as a PDF attachment on the Patreon. If not, if there's a way to sort of like embed this graphic within the app. So that it like comes up on your screen during this question. But I just kind of want to walk through. So an ICE agent or a group of ICE officers come to your workplace. The first thing that you should do is review that agent's identification. Obtain a business card. You should ask the agent to step into an office or a room. That's like off a main reception area.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  You don't want to do like, you don't need to have this conversation out in the open. Because that is giving ICE agents more information always, right? Because they're seeing who's there, they're looking around, all of that kind of stuff. Ask what the agent wants and ask for any documents that the agent has. Like, do you have a warrant? Do you have a subpoena? This documents thing is important because it's going to tell you whether or not you need to comply with what they're asking. If the ICE agent has no documents. Oh, I don't have anything to turn over to you. I'm just here to ask some questions. I was wondering about whether or not this person got hired. I was wondering about your hiring practices in general, whatever it is. If there are no documents that they can show you, your compliance is not required.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  You are not legally required to answer these questions without some sort of legal documentation that you're required to do so. That legal documentation can come in two forms. On the other hand, they might have a subpoena. They might have a warrant. So let's talk about subpoena first. There are different kinds of subpoenas. Judicial subpoenas are signed by a judge. Administrative subpoenas are signed by an ICE official, not a judge.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  Your compliance is only required if it is a judicial subpoena, if it is signed by a judge. And even in that case, your compliance is not immediately required. Your workplace might be able to challenge it in court. So the HR office, the legal office, payroll, whatever, if they're giving you, or just management, if an ICE agent is handing over saying, "We have a judicial subpoena. This has been signed by a judge." A subpoena is usually asking for documents and other information. This is signed by a judge. Your compliance is not immediately required. You can say, "We're going to review this and we can get back to you." If it's an administrative subpoena, not signed by a judge, it's signed by an ICE official, your compliance is not required.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  You can take that document. You can say, "Thank you so much. I'm not giving you anything today." Your compliance is not required. That is not a judge's signature. All right, let's talk about warrants. Warrants are a little bit like, you know, kind of like maybe the highest form of compliance required, but warrants have internal requirements in order to be valid warrants. So if it is an administrative warrant, again, signed by an ICE official, not a judge, your compliance is not required. That is not actually a legal warrant that requires that a person turn themselves over or that evidence be turned over. Now, if it is a judicial warrant, meaning it is signed by the judge, if it's an arrest warrant, signed by a judge, and it identifies your workplace, where you are,

• 47:50Speaker 00

  or that facility as the location, compliance is required. They can arrest that person in that place. Now, if it's an arrest warrant without the required precise, accurate information, an arrest warrant, but it doesn't say a location or it identifies a location other than where you are, your compliance is not required. A lot of this stuff, y'all, about like dealing with ICE, dealing with police, a lot of it, keep in your mind, I'm not going to obey in advance. They have to show you that you have to legally comply. Yeah. I'm not just going to comply because somebody shows up. These are well within your rights. Make sure that the people at your workplace know these things. Make sure that you're engaging with the resources.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  Again, that people are certainly, certainly putting together in your community right now.

• 48:39Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, and I just want to add, back in 2020, Greyhound said they were no longer going to allow ICE to do routine checks on their buses. And then shortly thereafter, an ICE agent tried to do a routine check on a bus. And according to some witnesses, the bus driver told him to gargle my balls.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Gorgeous.

• 49:01Michael Liroff?

  If a Greyhound bus driver can do that, you can too.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 49:06Michael Liroff?

  Take strength.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  1,000%.

• 49:09Michael Liroff?

  Take strength from that.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Last week, Chicago Public School Teachers Union, they had already passed in the past, they had already said, we're not going to comply with, you know, any like ICE raids or anything at our schools. We're not going to turn families or our students over to ICE. That was already what the union had agreed to in the past before Trump became the president. Because teachers in that union are trained on that sort of thing, teachers, I believe at an elementary school, turned ICE agents away last week from coming into the school. And now many Chicago public schools have it posted on the outside. ICE, you cannot come into this school, right? So there is power, again, in learning what your rights are and making sure everybody at your workplace is on the same page.

• 49:53Michael Liroff?

  And I think to an earlier point, Remade, about changing workplaces and all that, there are unions of bus drivers that include Greyhound bus drivers.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 50:03Michael Liroff?

  It's not surprising that union members know their rights and are standing up to ICE. Unionize your workplace if you can.

• 50:11Peter Shamshiri?

  The last thing I want to say about this is sort of what not to do. And this applies not just to ICE, but to all matter of issues. I'm going to say what not to do. Don't listen to anyone on TikTok who is telling you about your rights and how to affirm them. There are smart people there. There are people who know what they're talking about on TikTok. They are the minority by a degree that can barely be comprehended by the human mind. The advice I have seen on TikTok in terms of like, your documentation if you're trans, what to do at protests, it is egregiously bad. I don't know if you guys have followed this, but it has like gone viral on TikTok.

• 50:56Peter Shamshiri?

  That you should wear oversized boots at protests so that they can't track your footprint and know your foot size.

• 51:04Michael Liroff?

  What?

• 51:05Peter Shamshiri?

  What? Folks, whoever came up with that is actually illiterate. Like, this is a person with no functioning brain? Wear sneakers that fit. I don't know, at protests. That is like literally the best footwear advice you can get. My point being, there's a ton of bad information masquerading as good information floating around on TikTok.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Don't listen to any of them. Don't listen to any of them.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I saw actually, an actually damaging and real example. I saw this on Instagram of what to do if you see ICE. Like, if you're outside in a crowd at a market, whatever, and you see an ICE agent, like, what you should do. This advice was that you should yell as loud as you can, "La migra."

• 51:49Michael Liroff?

  La migra, yeah, I saw that.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Meaning, like, immigration enforcement is here? Like, scream it into the crowd so that everybody knows? Y'all, this is dangerous. Think, think for five seconds. That is extremely dangerous. Do not put a crowd into an insane amount of fear without verification. I have also seen on social media already tons of reports. ICE is at this intersection in Austin. ICE is in Houston about to go into this workplace. Again, we live in scary and uncertain times. All of these reports, in order to be valuable, in order to actually help people be safe, they need to be verified. Reports that just make people scared.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  If you are telling somebody information that will make them not go get groceries that week, that will make them pull their child out of school, that will make them think twice about going to the hospital when they're hurt or sick, you need to make sure that that information is correct. You need to think about, am I actually making people more safe? Or am I inserting, like, more and more and more layers of fear and uncertainty into the system that is trying to make us afraid and uncertain all the time already? Just in terms of brass tacks, like... How you might engage with this kind of thing. I've seen social media accounts and hotlines that are working on verifying and aggregating reports of ICE activity, like in different locales, in different cities. If you see ICE somewhere, take pictures, take notes about where they are and how many

• 53:20Speaker 00

  officers or how many ICE vehicles you see. And then look in your community where, like a destination where sending this information would be helpful. If there is a social media account or a hotline, the verification is really important here. You know, I mentioned earlier about this idea of we keep us safe and also about like being in community with people and that we're in a moment right now where we're called to build stronger communities. We need to be clear, though, about what that means. Being in community means literally be in community. Who do you spend time with? Who do you help out? Who do you show up for? Is there someone you can give a ride to?

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Is there a meal train you can organize? Can you get cold weather supplies to folks who need it? Is there a teach-in that you can attend and learn something while you meet other people who are also interested in building strong communities and opposing fascism right now? There are people working on this where you are right now. Be in community with them and don't talk to the cops.

• 54:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. Do you listen to the kindly old couple who tell you not to talk to cops?

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 54:33Michael Liroff?

  They're great.

• 54:34Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Peter Shamshiri?

  We got one that says, "Hearing Biden's call for term limits for Supreme Court justices during his farewell speech before leaving office was giving me massive road rage. How about you?" This is a good excuse to talk about his farewell address, which was a surreal experience. So during Biden's farewell address, which is the speech you give right before leaving office, he warned of an oligarchy, he advocated for higher taxes on the rich, he called for cracking down on money in elections, he called for term limits for Supreme Court justices.

• 55:12Peter Shamshiri?

  He called for a ban on stock trading by elected politicians. On top of that, he declared the Equal Rights Amendment to be in effect. You guys, did you guys see this?

• 55:22Michael Liroff?

  He only half-assed that.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 55:25Peter Shamshiri?

  The Equal Rights Amendment is a constitutional amendment that was proposed and almost passed a few decades back, came very close, never did. There were some very tenuous claims that it passed in 2020, I think when Virginia adopted it, but it was widely understood that that was a symbolic gesture because the deadline for passing it had long since passed. And Biden was just sort of like, that's in effect, which like the president can't just declare. It doesn't matter. It's, it's, it's literally meaningless and hollow in a way that felt almost symbolic. Like, this whole speech had like a surreal quality because this is the sort of stuff you would call for in the beginning of your term.

• 56:06Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 56:06Peter Shamshiri?

  And it would be one thing if he was fighting for all of this throughout his term. And then when he leaves, he gives a speech that's like, you know, keep fighting, I still stand behind these things. But this is a dude who did nothing on any of these issues, really, during his time in office.

• 56:22Michael Liroff?

  And actually hindered a lot of them.

• 56:24Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 56:25Michael Liroff?

  Hindered court reform. He set court reform back, like legitimately.

• 56:31Peter Shamshiri?

  I mean, it's unbelievable. Like, you, you want political credit for these things? Disgusting.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  Surreal is right. Surreal is absolutely right. This was Dali, this was Ernst, this was Mirel, this was Magritte. Like, it was, it was so wild to watch this. I mean, I didn't even watch it. I just saw clips and it was just like, how is this happening? How is this your farewell? Like, it's a whitewashing on top of a creepy haunted house, on top of, you know, like an animated corpse. Like, it's just, it was wild. I think I posted it with like one of the posts that I actually hate, which is just something that's like, you know, quote tweeted, but the only thing that the person... Ads in the quote tweet is like LMAO.

• 57:16Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  That's all I could do. That's all I could do. Like, you're just like, oh, my God.

• 57:22Peter Shamshiri?

  The only thing that could have made it weirder is if he ended it with, like, free Palestine.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 57:28Peter Shamshiri?

  It was, it's bizarre.

• 57:30Michael Liroff?

  I mean, just like on the Equal Rights Amendment, just for example, like, what actually fighting for it might look like is directing the archivist to, you know, add it to the Constitution, printing out official copies of the Constitution that include it and pulling the old ones from the shelves, like, making a big full-court press. And I think this is sort of like emblematic of he didn't want to fight. And so he's, he's saying these things would all be good, but they were all things that he didn't want to fight for.

• 58:03Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. But wouldn't it be even better if we got them without having to fight?

• 58:07Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. I appreciate that you think all these things people said you should be doing for the last four years were good ideas. Maybe if you'd given a shit about them and thought they were worth the expenditure of political capital, we'd be in a different position now.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, did he think this was like a memory change machine where, like, by giving this speech, we would, like, remember the past four years differently? Like, bro, we know what you said and did on all of this stuff.

• 58:34Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 58:38Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, I'll ask this one because it's not for me, apparently. If you were US senators, Rhiannon and Michael for Senate, in parentheses, what specific questions would you want to ask for a Supreme Court justice nominee? Or to broaden it out more, what would you want to do to improve the judicial nomination process?

• 59:00Speaker 00

  This is a good question.

• 59:01Michael Liroff?

  It is. I would start with, like, basic stuff, like, you know, birthright citizenship. I would just ask them, you know, if Wong Kim Ark was correctly decided, for example. I would ask them things like that, basic questions that implicate the conservative project. I would ask them whether or not they thought Trump v. United States, the immediate decision, was rightly decided. And, you know, you can expect that conservatives would either dance around or decline to answer these questions. But then I would, if I were in leadership in the party, I would instruct my entire party to vote no.

• 59:43Michael Liroff?

  And demand answers from people on this. And then if they lie, if they say, yeah, birthright citizenship is the law of the land. And I think it was correctly decided and then ruled differently in three years. I would fucking drag them before a hearing and ask them if they lied under oath to Congress. And I would investigate them. I would subpoena personal records that they have, communications about birthright citizenship and look into whether or not they lied, you know, et cetera, et cetera. That's, I think, if you take this seriously.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Michael Liroff?

  This is how you have to do it. Like you have to ask real substantive questions, basic ones, but basic ones that implicate our, you know, political structures right now and our political fights right now. And then demand answers and then try to impose consequences if people lie under oath. That's it. Like that's.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. You have to treat it like you're the government, right?

• 1:00:46Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  This is a process of government and of governing, that it has consequences for all of society. And so you should take it seriously. You should treat it as politics. You should treat it as political. You should treat it as governance. But those are really good answers, Michael. Something that I was thinking is like, oh, a specific question that I would ask. You know, sometimes in conversations, like in my personal life with immigrants who like suddenly have like very anti-immigrant sentiments or, you know, talk about like supporting deporting people or saying there are too many undocumented people or whatever. Sometimes like I've reached or achieved progress in those conversations by pointing

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  out the laws and the system by which that immigrant benefited and asking why it is that they'd like to revise that system so that nobody else gets that benefit. And so, I don't know, there's something to that. I can't think of a specific question, but you know, saying like, what's a law, maybe that's like controversial at the time or something that you benefited from and, you know. What do you think about, you know, it being applied in this way or the other? And yeah, I think it's just about treating it as like an important political process, not just the questions that you ask, but how you respond to and treat their answers. I think that's really important.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  It's not just that you ask a good question, but that you do something politically, that you react politically, that you do something in your governance opportunity that you have through your position with the substance of the answer that they get.

• 1:02:25Michael Liroff?

  Right. And I think a good example of this, although it's not about judicial nominees or even about a specific nominee's answers, but that just like right around the time we're recording this, Senate Democrats had agreed unanimously essentially to advance Trump's nominee for the Department of Transportation to a full vote, because I guess the guy's not super controversial. I don't know. I don't know much about it. But then Trump had the big spending freeze that we were talking about at the top of this episode. And 22 of the 47 Senate Dems essentially switched their vote on the actual floor to no.

• 1:03:06Michael Liroff?

  They voted to advance him, but then were like, Trump, you know, transgressed a political boundary. And so we are retaliating by switching our vote to no. It should have been all 47.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Michael Liroff?

  Like, there was reportedly a meeting where they, where some senators tried to organize so that it would be all 47, but leadership wasn't on board. Schumer wasn't, wasn't with that.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Of course not.

• 1:03:31Michael Liroff?

  And, and Durbin didn't whip for it. And so it was only about half the caucus. It should be the whole caucus. That's how you should treat these votes. They are political. They are part of the political give and take. And so at least 22 senators are thinking the right way about this stuff on some of the nominees. And I think that's how you have to be thinking about it, like.

• 1:03:53Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, that's enough from both of you.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Call me Senator, bitch.

• 1:04:01Michael Liroff?

  Dude, Peter as Senator from New Jersey would definitely get found with gold bars under his pillow.

• 1:04:09Peter Shamshiri?

  What's the point of being Senator from New Jersey? You can't get some gold bars. All right. "The flow of five to four is seamless, yes. Would you say that this is due to y'alls relationship with one another? Great editing, combination, something else. If I had a podcast with two other people, I'd be worried about talking over one another, hogging the spotlight, etc. How do you manage juggling these difficulties while getting your point across?" Finally, a question with some fucking respect on it.

• 1:04:39Michael Liroff?

  That's right.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Compliments in here. Thank you so much. This is lovely. No, I mean, one thing, y'all, we've been doing this for four years. Like, like we-

• 1:04:48Peter Shamshiri?

  Actually, five.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Five?

• 1:04:49Michael Liroff?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 1:04:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, this is the fifth anniversary coming up.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  We've been doing this for five years. Okay, we've been doing this for five years, so we, at this stage, absolutely have a rhythm. We can sense now, like, I can sense when Michael is talking, when he's reached the end of his point.

• 1:05:07Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Like, because we just talk to each other constantly, you know? Like, in this three-person conversation structure. We have to say, of course, that we are supported by excellent, excellent production and editing by Leon, by Andrew, by Dustin, by Rachel in the past-

• 1:05:25Michael Liroff?

  Katya before her.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  Katya before her. So it is absolutely a combination. But, yeah, I mean, the three of us talk every single day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. So, yeah, we just really, we know each other at this point. Yeah.

• 1:05:43Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, it was a bigger struggle early on, and there were a lot of reasons for that.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. We were recording separately, some people in person, some people remote.

• 1:05:55Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Michael Liroff?

  The first few episodes, Peter and I were in the same room, and Ree was on remote with like a slight delay.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Michael Liroff?

  And that made it tough, and then- Covid moved us into our individual closets at the time. And that helped, actually.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Michael Liroff?

  It was a lot. The first year or so, there was a lot of figuring it out.

• 1:06:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, the first, like, maybe 10 episodes were like heavily edited.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, very much so.

• 1:06:24Peter Shamshiri?

  They had to go back and re-record all sorts of shit. It was, it was a mess for a while.

• 1:06:28Michael Liroff?

  Multiple rounds of re-recording on some episodes.

• 1:06:31Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Michael Liroff?

  Which is crazy in retrospect.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  I'll say too, you can't discount the power of prep. We still prep every single episode together. We are still on a call every single episode before we record the episode. That really sets you up, you know? So, yes, it is seamless. It is gorgeous to listen to. We know that you love it so much, but we put in work to make that happen.

• 1:06:52Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Last question, this will be a quick one. If you could destroy any big law firm, end of Fight Club style, which would it be and why?

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Okay, everybody say it on three, two, one, okay? It'll be three, two, one, say it. Everybody's big law firm that you would, that you would destroy Fight Club style. Okay, I'll count down. Three, two, one.

• 1:07:13Peter Shamshiri?

  Jones Day.

• 1:07:14Michael Liroff?

  Jones Day.

• 1:07:20Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 1:07:26Peter Shamshiri?

  Next week, probably McCutcheon v FEC. Little campaign finance episode for you, unless something crazy happens, who knows? Follow us on social media at 54pod. Thank you for subscribing to our Patreon. You are our true and loyal friends. We'll see you next week.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Love you.

• 1:07:44Michael Liroff?

  Love you, everybody. Bye bye.

• 1:07:55Michael Liroff?

  Five to Four is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Nefok and Andrew Parsons provide 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.

• 1:08:34Peter Shamshiri?

  Michael. All right, he said, "My internet is fully out." His internet was also on Medicaid. Oop. Michael, we're buying you a new house in a major metropolitan area.