We Need To Talk About Trump’s Maritime Murders

Kate, Melissa, and Leah are joined by Professor Rebecca Ingber of Cardozo Law to break down the blatant illegality of the administration’s murders of alleged “narcoterrorists” in the waters off South America. Then they dive into last week’s oral arguments, which featured cases involving “crisis pregnancy centers,” asylum claims, and whether internet providers are responsible for their users’ copyright violations. Favorite things: Kate: This wild deposition https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3m6hocksqgk2e; Disappeared to a Foreign Prison https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/01/disappeared-to-a-foreign-prison, Sarah Stillman (New Yorker), Olivia Dean https://www.oliviadeano.com/, Sabrina Carpenter’s White House slapdown https://x.com/SabrinaAnnLynn/status/1995876972405420114?s=20 Leah: Dunking on this nonsensical op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/opinion/supreme-court-trump-congress.html; Republican Anger Erupts at Johnson as Party Frets About Future https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/us/politics/republican-women-speaker-johnson.html, Annie Karni (NYT); Hands Off Chicago https://www.handsoffchicago.com/ Melissa: WaySoft Cashmere Beanie https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/24C281EB-9217-4551-A142-69B3378CF724?ingress=0&lp_context_query=waysoft%20cashmere%20beanie&visitId=6bb6fc96-f5c9-4bf9-bf45-9e2a49e55793&lp_query=waysoft%20cashmere%20beanie&lp_slot=auto-sparkle-hsa-tetris&store_ref=SB_A071728516F2I0FE66LP3-A09316971MJ28AWTE591I&ref_=sbx_s_sparkle_sbtcd_logo; Ziwe interviews Eric Adams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9CmFvGEXXk; Prince Harry on Colbert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plsvrxGZnyA; Troublemaker; The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford https://bookshop.org/p/books/troublemaker-the-fierce-unruly-life-of-jessica-mitford-carla-kaplan/7c9f797585b2da8d?ean=9780061578946&next=t, Carla Kaplan; Victoria https://www.netflix.com/title/80201726 (Netflix) Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025! 3/6/26 – San Francisco 3/7/26 – Los Angeles Learn more: http://crooked.com/events Order your copy of 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/9781668054628 Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/strictscrutinypodcast/?hl=en, Threads https://www.threads.net/@strictscrutinypodcast, and Bluesky 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.

• 0:00Leah Litman?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. It's the holidays, which isn't exactly a stress-free time, but it is a time to start some new traditions, good ones. Therapy can give you the space to create new, meaningful traditions, providing clarity amid the holiday chaos. And BetterHelp is a great place to go to find quality therapists. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the United States. BetterHelp also does the initial matching work for you, so you can focus on your therapy goals. You just fill out a short Q&A to identify your needs and preferences, and they leverage their more than a decade of matching experiences and industry-leading match fulfillment rate to find you the right therapist. They typically get it right the first time, but if you aren't happy with your match,

• 0:45Leah Litman?

  you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works, with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com/strict. That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash strict.

• 1:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:31Speaker 02

  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."

• 2:01Leah Litman?

  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 Leah Litman.

• 2:09Melissa Murray?

  I'm Alyssa Murray.

• 2:10Kate Shaw?

  And I'm Kate Shaw. And we are halfway through the court's December sitting, so we've got some argument recaps for you, but we're going to start with some legal news. So news, then recaps, and we will end with some court culture.

• 2:20Leah Litman?

  We are not going to cover last Thursday's outrageous Supreme Court shadow docket order greenlighting Texas's racially gerrymandered maps. We couldn't wait until Monday to rage cast that one, so we dropped an emergency episode last week. It's in your feed if you haven't had a chance to listen just yet.

• 2:37Melissa Murray?

  Instead, we are going to start with another enormously important story. As you may know, listeners, Pete Hegseth, although we are now increasingly referring to the Secretary of War as Hague Seth, because he seems to have no idea how things work at The Hague, and we are going to be covering Hague Seth's murder strikes. And the story, of course, involves the increasingly urgent set of questions that have been raised by the administration's bombing campaign against boats in the Caribbean and now the Pacific. And we have discussed this issue before, but now we have new reporting that raises new legal questions about one specific event and underscores the serious legal questions that surround all of these boat strikes.

• 3:22Kate Shaw?

  And to help us break it down for you, we brought in an expert. So we are joined by returning guest and friend of the show, Rebecca Inger. Beck is a law professor at Cardozo Law School, a former State Department lawyer, and a real expert on all things international law and the law of war. Beck, welcome back to the show.

• 3:36Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me on.

• 3:37Kate Shaw?

  So Beck, just to start us off, can you remind us of what we know about this bombing campaign and the legal questions that it raises before we plunge into this kind of latest round of Washington Post reporting about the September 2nd strikes?

• 3:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, so since September of this year, the Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign of What are essentially summary executions of suspected drug traffickers at sea. This started in the Caribbean Sea and then spread beyond to the Pacific as well. And the administration announced that the first strike on September 2nd killed 11 people onboard that vessel. And at the time, and many times since, the president said he was going to keep going. And in fact, he and members of his cabinet have joked that no one is going to want to go fishing anymore. So since that time, there have been, and I looked up the latest count before getting on the show, 87 people killed in 22 strikes. And you might wonder, what's the legal authority for all of this?

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Can the president just kill people he suspects of crimes at will? And if so, then what would be the point of our entire criminal justice system? And we can get into this in much greater detail, but the very brief answer is that this entire killing campaign is not only just unauthorized. Some people have talked about it as unauthorized, as if a congressional authorization to use military force would somehow solve all the issues, but it's actually quite specifically murder.

• 4:59Leah Litman?

  So that's the state of play with basically all of the strikes. And then we got new reporting, originally in the Washington Post, now matched elsewhere. And the new reporting suggests that during a September attack on a fishing boat, the initial strike did not kill everyone onboard, but instead left two survivors in the water. And then a second strike killed the two individuals who survived the first strike. Subsequent reporting has suggested these individuals were waving their hands. There was also apparently like a 40-minute gap between the first and second strike when they are deciding about what to do. Beck, what new legal questions does this new reporting raise?

• 5:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, these are really horrifying facts when you lay them out, aren't they?

• 5:42Leah Litman?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 05

  So this second strike that has been reported, and this is the strike on the survivors clinging to the debris on that first boat after it had been blown up. This has been breaking through to the public and on the Hill in a way that the rest of the killing spree somehow was not. And given that I just said the entire campaign is murder, you might wonder, well, okay, well, what's different about the second strike? Can you have anything worse than murder? And so there's a risk that this focus, I think, on the second strike clouds the illegality of the rest of the strikes generally in the minds of the public. But one reason that it's breaking through I think is that even if, even if you accept every single one of the manufactured facts and legal characterizations for these killings, and to do that, you have to accept that the transporting of drugs is an armed attack in the United States, you have to

• 6:26Speaker 05

  assume that there are a bunch of organized armed groups out there that the administration won't even name, who are the equivalent of state military forces engaged in an armed conflict with the United States that we somehow didn't know about until now. And you'd have to accept that the men on these boats are somehow themselves actual fighters in those groups, either akin to combatants or directly participating in hostility somehow by transporting the drugs. Now, all of that is false and twisting beyond recognition, the laws governing the use of force and hostilities, but even if you assume all that, you still can't shoot them when they are what we call order combat, which means they're incapacitated in some way. And sometimes it can be complicated to determine if someone is incapacitated, but shipwreck is actually a paradigmatic example. So if we are in an armed conflict,

• 7:11Speaker 05

  as the president claims, then this would be a classic war crime. It's not, it's murder because we're not in an armed conflict. But one reason that might be, it might be breaking through is because it is so recognizably wrong. You know, we're not used to having to find language to talk about the president going on a killing spree, but the law of armed conflict, the military trains on this, these are classic examples, these could have been PowerPoints in an Ops Law course, and I think it's also built into the public subconscious.

• 7:38Melissa Murray?

  Beck, can we talk a little bit about what the actual law does say? Because this isn't just magical thinking. There is actual law on this issue. There is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, for example, which applies to individuals who are in the armed forces. What does it have to say about the prospect of military personnel following a legal order? So if this is in fact illegal, and it was ordered by the Secretary of War or someone who is an underling to him, what do enlisted people have an obligation to do under the UCMJ?

• 8:09Speaker 05

  So, under the US law governing the armed forces, soldiers have to, they must obey lawful orders, and they can be punished for disobeying lawful orders. But lawful is an important caveat there. And in fact, soldiers have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. And of course, they can be held accountable for crimes, they can be held accountable for war crimes, they can be held accountable-

• 8:30Melissa Murray?

  I think I saw a video about that.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  And it's not a defense to say, as I think we're all more than aware, having seen, you know, just one movie, that it's not a defense to say, I was just following orders. So if it sounds like this can put soldiers in a pretty tough position when they're given orders they find questionable, I think that's right. And I think one of the horrors of all of this is the position that the administration has been putting soldiers and sailors in. And it's presumably for this exact reason that the rules for prosecuting soldiers for following unlawful orders, and this is US domestic rules as well as international law, they tend to clarify that this applies to clearly unlawful orders or manifestly unlawful orders. Now, an order to, for example, give no quarter, an order to say that there shall be no survivors,

• 9:16Speaker 05

  that's an example of a manifestly unlawful order, and so too is an order to fire on the shipwrecked. And in fact, it is so textbook an example that it's actually used in the DOD Law of War Manual as its example for a clearly illegal order. And for those who are interested in a deeper dive on this, I highly recommend an excellent explainer that happens to be on Just Security on this precise issue by my good friends Tess Bridgman, Ryan Goodman, and Michael Schmidt.

• 9:40Leah Litman?

  So I could go on about all of the horrors about this, but I just want to kind of acknowledge a few. One is that after reporting about the survivors, you know, being bombed and murdered, Secretary Hegseth retweeted a Turning Points USA spokesperson and indicated, "Your wish is our command, Andrew," that's a spokesperson, "just sunk another narco boat," as if they are doing these kind of like murders on demand. There's also been reporting that maybe Hegseth suggested the final call was made by another military officer, so he's like foisting blame on another officer. At the same time, he is posting images of Franklin the Turtle murdering people, you

• 10:25Leah Litman?

  know. Justice for Franklin. He did not deserve this.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's an element of... You know, I've got your back, and yet I've never heard of the guy with respect to

• 10:34Melissa Murray?

  Right. Like, I'm a big tough man, but also it's all his fault.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 10:39Kate Shaw?

  In terms of additional developments, so The Post initially broke the story that reporting has been matched elsewhere. And then last week, senators were both briefed and shown video of the strike or strikes. And the video evidently showed that after smoke from this original strike cleared, it revealed that there were two survivors in the water. They were clinging to wreckage, as the Times reporting just Friday suggested they were waving for help. And then the follow-up strike killed them. So, you know, some of these lawmakers were clearly deeply shaken by what they saw. It led several senators, including at least one GOP senator, to actually call for public release of the video. So that, I think, has not in any way, like, tamped down congressional interest in continuing

• 11:22Kate Shaw?

  to pursue this. But not every senator had the same reaction.

• 11:27Melissa Murray?

  Others, like Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who was inexplicably engaging in what seemed to be Gen Z cosplay by wearing a quarter zip, he emerged to claim that the videos didn't capture anything illegal, but rather the conduct that was being targeted was quote-unquote "highly lawful and lethal." He's also clearly trying to test out some kind of legal justification for these strikes. He said the video showed two survivors trying to flip a boat that he said was, quote, "loaded with drugs bound for the United States." Question about all of this, Beckham. You have these two various versions on both sides of the aisle. What is it that Congress can do, what Congress should do, and what are the available avenues of accountability here?

• 12:12Speaker 05

  So Congress has a lot of control over the use of force, over decisions to use force, and it has a lot of tools at its disposal if it is ready to start flexing its muscles, which sadly have been, I think, atrophying. I mean, it can hold hearings, it can subpoena documents, it can subpoena officials for interviews, it can pass legislation prohibiting force, which it also doesn't need to do because it's only lawful if it is authorized force in the first place. But nevertheless, it could set up a commission to investigate crimes, they could even withhold money. And of course... They can impeach the Secretary of Defense. They could impeach the president. And individual members can keep using their platforms to keep talking about this. And some of them have started to do.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  And so I think that while there's a risk that this second strike obscures the illegality of the campaign as a whole, I think it's also an opportunity to start laying bare for the public the absurdity of the administration's legal claims here, that transporting drugs is somehow hostilities against the United States. And so, you know, in a way, drilling down into it and actually showing people, demonstrating what is out there, getting that video out there if they are able to do so, is going to only further highlight the gross illegality of the entire campaign. And, you know, if they can get the video out, I, you know, I'm reminded of the political sea shift following the publication of photographs of American soldiers torturing prisoners in

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison back in the early War on Terror years. This, of course, states me a bit. And there, as here, the specific criminal acts that were taken by those soldiers weren't necessarily part of the approved official policy under the Bush administration's torture program, but they did grow out of, quite clearly, that permissive atmosphere where abusive detainees was being justified. And so, and in that case, those individuals were court martialed. And perhaps more importantly, I think it fueled a political uproar that may well have spelled the beginning of the end for the administration's torture program.

• 14:11Kate Shaw?

  All right. Well, I guess we can hope that some kind of similar public reckoning is at least beginning to be set in motion by these revelations. Beck Ingber, always great to have you with us. Thank you so much for joining us today.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 14:28Leah Litman?

  Strict scrutiny is brought to you by Earth Justice. If you listen to our show, you probably know this already, but Earth Justice is a powerful legal force protecting the environment from Trump. Earth Justice sued Trump 45 over 200 times, winning more than 80% of cases that had a final decision. And they're raising legal challenges to Trump 47 at an even more breakneck pace. Earth Justice's lawsuits are scaling up to match the moment, and the scale of threats, more attorneys, more cases, more public land fights, and more climate enforcement. They're scaling up to protect our public lands and our climate. They represent clients free of charge so that everyone from communities, tribes, and conservation groups gets top-tier legal representation, even if they lack resources.

• 15:10Leah Litman?

  They have defended countless acres of the Arctic from fossil fuel projects and will continue to do so. And this work, their work, is important for all of us. Our climate can't afford massive new fossil fuel infrastructure. The consequences affect every one of us. Think about the wild places we love, species hovering at the edge of extinction. Our climate, what we protect now, will define what future generations inherit. And that's where you come in. Earth Justice lawsuits are entirely donor-funded, so they rely on people like us to support their work. We invite our listeners to help Earth Justice take on the fights ahead. All gifts are tax deductible, and donations made through December 31st will be matched up to $25,000. Donate to Earth Justice to support their lawsuits and protect our planet.

• 15:53Leah Litman?

  Every gift through December 31st will be matched to double your impact. EarthJustice.org/strict.

• 16:01Speaker 06

  CrookedCon 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.

• 16:41Leah Litman?

  One more piece of news before we dive into those recaps. Last week, there was reporting that Pamela Jo Bondi's DOJ was making preparations to seek a re-indictment of New York Attorney General Tish James, evidently by trying to bring in an assistant US Attorney from another district.

• 17:00Melissa Murray?

  This district apparently was Missouri. Well, guess what? The Show Me State showed her. MS Now reported on Thursday that the grand jury refused to indict. This is both great news on its own, but if the administration keeps trying and manages to get an indictment, it will provide additional support for Tish James's already strong case that this is really a malicious and vindictive prosecution. So interesting turn of events, as it were, a bench slap, if it were, as it were, to Pamela Jo.

• 17:34Leah Litman?

  So let's move on to argument recaps. The first case we're going to recap is First Choice versus Plattkin. This is the case we previewed with New Jersey Attorney General Matt Plattkin.

• 17:46Kate Shaw?

  Okay, I'm going to sort of sound conspiratorial for a minute, but weirdly I have to ask you guys something.

• 17:50Melissa Murray?

  The tin hats were right. We know.

• 17:52Kate Shaw?

  I, at least on this little point, and who knows, maybe on all of it. But basically, I could not get the document that is referred to as a day call on the court's website to load before the argument. So I actually didn't know who would be arguing. Usually, like a day or two before, you see exactly who's arguing in what position for what case. So I actually didn't know who'd be doing the First Choice argument. And as it turned out, up first for First Choice was Juan Aaron Hawley, who we have mentioned before, as the attorney who led the challenge to Miffa Prystone, was a key member of the Dobbs team, and is allegedly on the Trump administration's shortlists for an appellate judgeship. So she argued for First Choice. And we actually got a dispatch from inside the courtroom from Mark Walsh, who is the Supreme Court correspondent for the ABA.

• 18:34Kate Shaw?

  And he let us know that one Senator, Josh Hawley, who is married to First Choice's attorney, Aaron Hawley, was also in the House. Mark shared with us.

• 18:42Melissa Murray?

  Did he run there from Capitol Hill?

• 18:44Kate Shaw?

  I didn't get any intel about his mode of transportation, but it's not far, so very possible he could have jogged over.

• 18:49Melissa Murray?

  Probably could sprint.

• 18:50Kate Shaw?

  Could have sprinted. Wouldn't even necessarily have broken a sweat. But however he got there, he was in the courtroom. He stayed for the entire argument, which is pretty long. And interestingly, also, in addition to the Hawleys in the courtroom for bar admissions, that is, people who are sworn into the Supreme Court bar typically before the oral arguments, was a group of trans lawyers who are part of the National Trans Bar Association. The group announced this admission ceremony on its website, noting that swearing in a new cohort of trans attorneys is a testament to the community's, quote, "unwavering presence and resilience." So it sounds like a great ceremony and really glad that Mark brought it to our attention.

• 19:25Melissa Murray?

  I love resisting in any way possible.

• 19:27Kate Shaw?

  Yes. And making John Roberts say, "A group of attorneys from the Trans Bar Association," which John Roberts would have had to say to call them up, is honestly an act of resistance.

• 19:35Melissa Murray?

  Can you imagine if Sam Alito was saying it?

• 19:37Kate Shaw?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Melissa Murray?

  And he had that Arthur the aardvark fist at the side, just like clenching. That'd be even better.

• 19:43Kate Shaw?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Melissa Murray?

  All right, let's break down this argument. As we discussed with Attorney General Platten, this is a case about a procedural question. When can the recipient of a state subpoena go to federal court to raise a First Amendment objection to that subpoena? Recall that First Choice received a subpoena from the New Jersey Attorney General's office, and the Attorney General says that is because the office was engaging in routine enforcement of the state's consumer protection laws. First Choice clearly thinks that that's not the reason. Instead, they argue that the Attorney General is hostile to the fact that First Choice is a crisis pregnancy center, which is a pro-life organization that, among other things, seeks to dissuade women from seeking abortions.

• 20:24Melissa Murray?

  As we also noted in our conversation with General Platten, the case is indirectly about access to reproductive care. But as we'll discuss, it wasn't really on the table until Justice Barrett raised the prospect of reproductive care quite late in the argument. Although Erin Hawley, in her remarks, did refer to pregnancy centers and suggest that the Attorney General had, quote, "assembled a strike force against them," end quote. I wonder if it was an elite legal strike force. Release the Kraken! Sidney Powell! Right.

• 20:57Melissa Murray?

  That was, oof, that was quite the pull. So. Only five years ago, folks. I know, I know.

• 21:04Leah Litman?

  If we characterize this case as a procedural case, that's also on some level about abortion. Hawley mostly wanted to characterize this as a major civil rights case about nonprofit donor privacy, akin to cases such as NAACP versus Patterson, an important Supreme Court case that held that the NAACP could not be compelled to release its donor lists in Alabama in the 1950s. Yes, the crisis pregnancy centers are likening themselves today to the NAACP in the 1950s. This is Aaron Hawley's contribution to critical race theory. Hawley took a very broad position on how her client should be able to get into federal

• 21:46Leah Litman?

  court to make its First Amendment argument about donor privacy. The lower courts have said, of course, you can raise First Amendment arguments, but right now, all you have is a subpoena, which New Jersey represents isn't even self-executing without additional state court action. So for now, you have to await further state court developments before you can go to federal court.

• 22:07Kate Shaw?

  First Choice has two arguments for why they should be in federal court now, now, now. So the first one is that there is a credible threat of enforcement, and the second is that the subpoena itself violates the First Amendment, and in particular, the First Amendment right to associate, because a reasonable donor would be chilled in giving and associating with the organization by the existence of a subpoena like this without any further action necessary. So there is an important question of New Jersey state law here. It's kind of an antecedent question, and that is whether the subpoena is self-executing. So despite New Jersey's representations about its own subpoenas, Hawley kind of resisted that, including by repeatedly invoking the Latin meaning of subpoena as if that somehow resolved the question.

• 22:46Leah Litman?

  It's Latin, folks.

• 22:47Kate Shaw?

  Yeah, Latin.

• 22:48Leah Litman?

  That means it's important.

• 22:50Kate Shaw?

  But despite my finding that pretty unconvincing, at least a couple of the justices seem to be kind of rearing to, but actually, this question of obviously state law. So here is one Neil Gorsuch on this.

• 23:04Speaker 07

  I don't know how to read that, other than it's pretty self-executing to me, counsel.

• 23:11Leah Litman?

  This is the new face of federalism. Blue states don't even know their own laws.

• 23:16Melissa Murray?

  And the attorney arguing for New Jersey, Sandeep Iyer, conceded that if these subpoenas are in fact self-executing, then first choice can immediately go to federal court to challenge the subpoena. So if this court, in its infinite wisdom, decides that these are self-executing subpoenas, first choice would win. But other justices, like Justice Barrett, seem to accept that these subpoenas are not self-executing.

• 23:41Kate Shaw?

  Did you find that so demure and modest of her to like at least allow that a blue state can decide what its own damn laws mean?

• 23:46Leah Litman?

  So mindful, yeah. Well, again, do not be fooled. And she will invalidate them, right?

• 23:53Melissa Murray?

  She does this.

• 23:54Leah Litman?

  Based on their own understanding of their laws.

• 23:56Melissa Murray?

  This is how she lures you in, Kate. She lures you in with a reasonable prospect.

• 24:00Kate Shaw?

  Even the federal government here, even the federal government here was like, no, Neil, this is not up to you. Jersey says they're self-executing. We should treat them that way. But to your point, Melissa, like, yeah, Amy may find another way to side with first choice.

• 24:14Leah Litman?

  She's definitely going to find another way to side with first choice.

• 24:17Melissa Murray?

  There are billions of possibilities for first choice, as we will unveil.

• 24:21Leah Litman?

  Yeah. So there weren't a lot of questions for Holly, which, a little unclear how to read that. You know, often, at least sometimes, that's because a side is doing well. And the justices did seem sympathetic, but I also got the feeling they were a little distracted, maybe totally consumed with Texas redistricting and maybe the National Guard case. But the questions.

• 24:46Melissa Murray?

  Or emotional support billionaires.

• 24:47Leah Litman?

  Who is to say? Who is to say? The questions there were for Holly were pretty friendly. So Justice Kagan asked, how would you prefer to win type question? Justice.

• 25:00Melissa Murray?

  She knows her colleagues.

• 25:01Leah Litman?

  Right, exactly.

• 25:01Kate Shaw?

  If you gotta win, how would you like us to do that?

• 25:04Leah Litman?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Leah Litman?

  Justice Jackson was a little mixed. Justice Sotomayor seemed more skeptical.

• 25:11Melissa Murray?

  The federal government also argued here, of course, on the side of first choice, and it at least had the decency to note that there was some tension between first choice's chill theory and some of the court's standing jurisprudence, like Clapper, for example, and of course, the SB8 case, Whole Women's Health versus Jackson. So it asked the court to side with first choice under the threat of enforcement theory.

• 25:36Kate Shaw?

  And arguing for New Jersey, as Melissa already mentioned, was Sundeep Iyer, who I thought was really good in a way that was both understated and pointed. And it came out in a couple of places. So, one, I thought, I'm sorry to harp on this, but I was so enraged by Gorsuch on this, like, self-executing point. He had, I thought, a nice response to Gorsuch, contemplating declaring himself the ultimate authority on New Jersey state law, as well as everything else. So let's play that clip here.

• 26:01Speaker 08

  I will say that if, again, the question that this court has is about the meaning of state law, I think there are entirely appropriate ways to resolve those questions, for example, by remanding the case to the Third Circuit with instructions to certify the question to the New Jersey Supreme Court, as is consistent with typical practice.

• 26:21Melissa Murray?

  And what, and the question is? Shorter, Iyer. Sir, you are no Bruce Springsteen.

• 26:29Melissa Murray?

  The stone pony would never accept you, anyway. Iyer also made very deft use of Lyons and Clapper. These are two awful decisions in which the court denied standing to plaintiffs it was not sympathetic to. Lyons is a case in which the court denied standing to an individual challenging the Los Angeles Police Department's policy of putting suspects in chokeholds. And the logic of the case was that even though Mr. Lyons had been put in a chokehold already by the LA Police Department, because he wasn't able to show that he was going to be put in a chokehold again in the future, imminently, he had no standing. And Clapper is a case where the court denied standing to lawyers and NGOs representing

• 27:13Melissa Murray?

  Guantanamo detainees because they had not established that it was sufficiently likely that the government would listen in on their conversations. So here's an exchange between Iyer and Justice Gorsuch talking about the prospect of donor declarations.

• 27:29Speaker 07

  Really? I mean, that, I mean, we're going to now pick over the tense of the verb that they chose? I mean, they're saying if we'd known that this was going to happen, we wouldn't have given. Perforce, if it's going to be disclosed, we won't give. I mean, doesn't that just follow night from day?

• 27:47Speaker 08

  We don't think so for a couple of reasons. First, this court's decision in Lyons makes perfectly clear that a backward-facing allegation of harm isn't sufficient.

• 27:58Speaker 07

  I understand that.

• 28:00Kate Shaw?

  So Iyer also, I thought, made very clever use of the Whole Woman's Health decision, so let's play that clip here.

• 28:05Speaker 08

  For one thing, this court has always made clear that you don't bend the rules of Article III standing based on potential fears of preclusion. And in cases like Whole Woman's Health, for instance, this court noted that there may not always be available a federal forum for a federal constitutional claim challenging seduction.

• 28:25Speaker 09

  So you're not saying they wouldn't be precluded?

• 28:27Leah Litman?

  And while we're going through, you know, the greatest hits of the Supreme Court, Justice Jackson also referenced the ICE case, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement case, the one that blessed the Kavanaugh stops, Vasquez, Portomo, here.

• 28:40Speaker 09

  Isn't it interesting that we don't have credible threat in other areas? I mean, I'm thinking about, for example, Perdomo and, you know, the situation, I'm looking for it in my notes, in which people are saying, we're fearing that we're going to have these adverse interactions with ICE. We have evidence of this happening, and the court seems to say, not enough. We don't employ some sort of a credible threat analysis in that context.

• 29:10Leah Litman?

  Now, as we said, Hawley didn't say much about pregnancy and nothing about abortion, mostly referring to First Choice as just a nonprofit. But Justice Barrett definitely did, in an exchange with Iyer, that was a little bit spicy.

• 29:24Speaker 10

  I mean, you had this Project Strike on the pregnancy centers. You know, the Attorney General had essentially, you know, what your friends on the other side would say, declared war on pregnancy centers. So if it is true that the... Non-self-executing subpoena is enough if it's in the context of other government statements. Why wouldn't that be satisfied here?

• 29:43Speaker 08

  My friends on the other side don't let the actual factual allegations get in the way of telling a story about hostility here, but I think that story is just not borne out by the record evidence that's been offered here.

• 29:56Leah Litman?

  And Iyer did go on to say, if there were a record of state hostility and targeting, that might be enough to get into federal court. But here, there just isn't that kind of record. But as in the Texas redistricting case, facts, we hardly knew ye.

• 30:12Melissa Murray?

  Well, it's not just the absence of facts. It's that she, like, this is sort of the Fox media orbit in which they're all existing, where anything that has to do with the Crisis Pregnancy Center is obviously going to be the target of some blue state sinister plot. Right.

• 30:28Kate Shaw?

  Like, like the NAACP and its member list in Alabama in the 1950s.

• 30:32Melissa Murray?

  Exactly.

• 30:32Kate Shaw?

  Indistinguishable.

• 30:32Melissa Murray?

  I found that so insane.

• 30:34Kate Shaw?

  It's the, I think it's the first sentence of Holly's brief. It's like, it is all over the brief.

• 30:38Melissa Murray?

  Well, it is. It was the first sentence of her opening argument.

• 30:41Leah Litman?

  Well, this is not the first time these right-leaning organizations have done this. You know, this was Americans for Prosperity versus Banda, right? Like, they also, you know, invoked NAACP cases from the 1950s when they were arguing, you cannot compel us to release information to the state.

• 30:59Melissa Murray?

  I just want to point out that NAACP members in the 1950s were in danger of literally being lynched if their identities were known. Like, these folks are just basically giving money to crisis pregnancy centers.

• 31:12Kate Shaw?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Leah Litman?

  But, but you know, when you think about it, like, there's no discrimination against transgender people today or ever, which is why the court can uphold

• 31:21Melissa Murray?

  Not by law.

• 31:22Leah Litman?

  bans on gender-affirming care. But there is massive discrimination against crisis pregnancy centers.

• 31:28Kate Shaw?

  Yeah. So and it's not just Barrett who seemed receptive to this account. Roberts kind of seemed sympathetic to this account of sort of targeting pregnancy centers, as Holly called them in this clip.

• 31:41Speaker 11

  Counsel, you referred to the fact that you've addressed these subpoenas to car dealerships and things like that. Your friends on the other side don't represent a car dealership.

• 31:51Kate Shaw?

  This is not a car dealership, madam, right? This is something very, very different.

• 31:56Melissa Murray?

  Very different. Justice Kavanaugh also asked about a brief he described as the brief of the ACLU siding with first choice. This was a bit of a misstatement. It was actually the brief from FIRE, that is, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. But the ACLU was on it, and it just seemed like a very cynical move to suggest that there was some sort of broad cross ideological consensus that first choice was being targeted and should win.

• 32:27Leah Litman?

  Yeah. I did read the transcript to suggest that the justices are going to rule for the Crisis Pregnancy Center, quite possibly, likely, with some Democratic appointees joining them. And it really made me wonder whether some of the justices, including specifically the Democratic appointees, might be influenced by the larger context in which this case is being decided, which includes very abusive, targeted investigations of, for example, Media Matters by the Texas Attorney General and potentially abusive investigations by the Trump administration as well. And they wonder, like, well, should those entities be able to go to federal court immediately? And I don't think those concerns mean they have to rule for the petitioners Crisis Pregnancy

• 33:10Leah Litman?

  Centers here in order to protect the interests of targets of investigations that are truly pretextual and abusive and baseless. But I did wonder if that was influencing their perspective.

• 33:21Melissa Murray?

  Yeah. I mean, is this an appeasement strategy? I mean, just, I don't mean appeasement in that sense, but if the idea is to put on the books law that would help those who are truly the targets of investigations that are pretextual and abusive, why wouldn't you entertain the prospect that maybe your colleagues would just come up with a different line of reasoning to avoid all of that precedent when it truly was some blue state group?

• 33:43Kate Shaw?

  Yeah, this is, yeah. But there was, there's a lot of the kind of Vulo versus NRA energy, right? So that's the case in which the Democratic appointees all join their Republican colleagues. Sotomayor even wrote the opinion, right, finding that the NRA was targeted by blue state officials right here in New York. And that thereto, the ACLU was on the side of the NRA as it was on the side of first choice in this case. So yeah, I think if we could be assured that the justices will neutrally and fairly treat future targets, like this is a strategy that makes a lot of sense. But obviously, that's

• 34:13Melissa Murray?

  It's like bringing principles to a gunfight.

• 34:15Kate Shaw?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Melissa Murray?

  It's like, okay.

• 34:19Kate Shaw?

  I mean, one other, one other observation that is, I think, similar to the one that Leah was just offering, but like a slightly different cut is just kind of how thoroughly the politicization of law enforcement under the Trump administration has poisoned all of our assumptions about the enforcement of the law, right? Like, so just even the kind of discussion that we're having suggests that the Democratic appointees might be nervous about red state targeting of unpopular, left-leaning causes. And that is just like the world we live in. This is not

• 34:44Leah Litman?

  Donald Trump literally announced that in an executive order, right?

• 34:47Kate Shaw?

  Yes.

• 34:48Leah Litman?

  Like, he is going to be targeting, like, left-leaning NGOs and whatnot.

• 34:51Kate Shaw?

  Yeah. And that is just where we are. And so, yeah, maybe it would be better for nonprofits to be able to get to federal court, to raise First Amendment challenges if law enforcement is going to proceed that way, like at the state as well as the federal level.

• 35:02Leah Litman?

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• 35:47Leah Litman?

  to blame for rough days after drinking. PreAlcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make PreAlcohol your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. When I was at Crooked Con, I really wanted to go out to celebrate the wonderful event. And there was an after-party with amazing drinks. And Melissa and I weaseled our way up to Tommy, who was standing close to the bar, so we could get some. And then, before we raised our glasses, toasted and celebrated, we all had our Zbiotics. No joke, we actually took our Zbiotics pre-alcohols, kind of like a shot. So we knew we could enjoy the evening and the day after. And I did. I had my drinks, had a great time. And then the next day, I was up super early to go pastry hunting, which is what I always do when I travel.

• 36:31Leah Litman?

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• 36:59Speaker 12

  Right now, the midterms are the biggest story in American politics. But however they go, the Democratic Party is going to have to do some serious soul-searching. Join us, Washington DC, November 5th through 7th, at the Second Annual Crooked Con. It's going to be the Pod Save America hosts and some of the smartest people in politics. We're going to try to answer some big questions. Stuff like, if we won, how did we win? If we lost, how could we possibly have lost? And with 2028 around the corner, where do we go from here? If you believe in democracy, community, and fighting for the future, now's the time to grab your tickets to Crooked Con 2026. Head to crookedcon.com to get your tickets now.

• 37:46Leah Litman?

  We have some other recaps to get into. We will go shorter on some of these. The next case that we want to talk about is called Cox Communications versus Sony. This case is the latest to ask the justices to grapple with what sorts of upstream liability might attach to the misconduct of internet users. So earlier cases on related questions have involved the liability of platforms like Twitter and Google for terrorist attacks.

• 38:11Melissa Murray?

  At issue here is a jury award against an internet service provider for user copyright infringement. The petitioner in this case, Cox Communications, is among other things, one of the country's largest internet service providers. And the respondents, Sony and other record labels and publishers, say that Cox users infringed their copyrights by doing things like file sharing, and that Cox is secondarily and vicariously liable for that copyright infringement. A jury sided with Sony, awarding over $1 billion in damages, an award that was affirmed in part by the Fourth Circuit, though the Fourth Circuit did order a new trial on the question of damages. Cox says that letting the Fourth Circuit opinion stand

• 38:54Melissa Murray?

  would fundamentally change ISP's relationships to its users, requiring them to engage in massive evictions of alleged infringers and possibly result in service being pulled from entire universities, towns, and communities. Sony says that Cox was told again and again about all of this copyright infringement, and yet, the company took no action in response.

• 39:17Kate Shaw?

  So the case has a complicated procedural history, as Melissa was just alluding to. It also involves a number of intersecting bodies of law. So there is tort doctrine, including contributory and accessory liability. There's substantive copyright law. You have the federal statute, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Folks who know both platform regulation and copyright law seemed pretty unimpressed with the performances in this case. And by that, I mean both the justices and, to a degree, the attorneys in the case, who are Supreme Court practitioners, but not really experts in either kind of platform governance or copyright. So maybe the justices in this case, recognizing that they are not, in the immortal words of Elena Kagan, "the nine greatest experts on the internet",

• 40:00Kate Shaw?

  will try to go small in a similar way to their approach to kind of other... Cases on related topics like Twitter versus Tomna, like Gonzalez versus Google.

• 40:12Leah Litman?

  Yeah, it did seem as though they are likely to side with Cox and reverse. They seem troubled by the notion of this sort of broad imposition of liability here, in particular, in the context of some of the consequences they were told would flow from letting the lower court opinions stand. You know, the idea that ISPs would be forced to cut off service to entire communities, universities, military bases, in order to guard against the prospect of crushing liability like this. But they also seemed a little troubled by the just trust us attitude of both Josh Rosenkrantz for Cox and Paul Clement for Sony. So it's not clear to me how they are going to get there. I think Brett Kavanaugh will like the way.

• 40:52Kate Shaw?

  Honestly, there was a lot, the invocation of like, cutting off service to military bases was so obviously pandering to Brett Kavanaugh.

• 40:58Leah Litman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be like, will you throw a temper tantrum for me, too?

• 41:04Leah Litman?

  The court also heard oral argument in Urias Oriola versus Pamela Jo Bondi. At issue in this case is the relationship of the federal appeals courts to the Board of Immigration Appeals. That is the agency tribunal that individual immigration judges' decisions get appeal to. And in this case, the question is about whether an individual who had requested asylum experienced persecution. Under federal law, to obtain asylum, the noncitizen must establish either past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution.

• 41:38Kate Shaw?

  And the question here specifically is about how federal courts review a Board of Immigration Appeals determination that a set of undisputed facts does not rise to the level of persecution. So the individual in this case, or actually, an individual and his family, requested asylum on the basis that he and his family had been targeted by a hitman working for a drug lord in their home country of El Salvador. The immigration judge, and that ruling was affirmed by the Board of Immigration Appeals, or BIA, held that these events, which did occur, did not rise to the level of past persecution that would qualify these individuals for asylum.

• 42:10Melissa Murray?

  So federal immigration law structures judicial review differently for questions of law versus questions of fact. So the statutes require courts to defer on the BIA's findings of facts, but not on questions of law. So the question here is how a court should treat a determination that a set of undisputed facts doesn't rise to the level of persecution. Is that a legal determination that the federal court gets to review, exercising its own independent judgment? Or is it a factual determination, which requires courts to give significant deference to the Board of Immigration Appeals?

• 42:45Kate Shaw?

  And in this case, the court seemed inclined to think that this kind of determination just had too much kind of factiness in it, too much factual content, for the federal courts to be second guessing administrative judges' determinations. Which I have to say, yeah, I know, it's a little different after the court's decision, which we talked about in our emergency episode, to entirely second guess the lower court's determination in the Texas redistricting case. It does feel to me like there's this like chasm opening between the rules and the law sort of mattering in some places. Like, they will take seriously this question of-

• 43:21Melissa Murray?

  Or for some people.

• 43:22Kate Shaw?

  What kind of review, yes. But it's like, so there's all these different ways that there is this chasm. So like, between the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal courts. Like, the lower federal courts are still acting like the law and the Constitution matter, Supreme Court not so much, and even on the Supreme Court across different categories of cases. So we're just going to jettison all of it if we want to give the Republicans a few extra seats in the House of Representatives. And we're going to take very seriously these questions about the exact relationship between the federal courts and an administrative agency on some questions versus other questions in a case like this. It is pretty hard to keep the faith, you guys.

• 43:58Melissa Murray?

  I can think of a unifying principle.

• 44:00Kate Shaw?

  Tell us.

• 44:01Melissa Murray?

  So when we're trying to deport people of color and the BIA said we should do it, we defer to their fact finding. When we want to disenfranchise people of color and the lower federal court said, we can't do that, we don't defer to their fact finding.

• 44:17Leah Litman?

  That's called colorblind constitutionalism, right?

• 44:21Melissa Murray?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Kate Shaw?

  It all makes sense.

• 44:22Melissa Murray?

  You see it.

• 44:23Kate Shaw?

  I see.

• 44:23Melissa Murray?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Leah Litman?

  But back to this particular oral argument, you know, my read of the argument was similar to yours. It seemed like they're going to say this particular question, at least whether the facts give rise to a claim of persecution is subject to substantial evidence review, even though, as Justice Kagan acknowledged, you, that is the government, quote, "have some good arguments in this case, but honestly, none of them come from the text," end quote. Womp, womp.

• 44:49Melissa Murray?

  Okay. The court also heard oral argument in Olivier versus Brandon. This is a case about a significant federal court's doctrine, sometimes called Prycer Heck, which was set down in part in a case called Heck versus Humphrey. That case established the set of rules for when you can raise certain kinds of challenges under Section 1983 rather than under habeas law. And this matters because it is much easier to proceed under Section 1983 than it is under habeas review. And the decision in Heck, which is a Scalia decision from 1994, makes clear that the court doesn't want Section 1983 to be used as an end run around limitations on habeas,

• 45:31Melissa Murray?

  which would invite what are essentially challenges to sentences using something that's not really supposed to be used for assessing challenges to sentences.

• 45:40Leah Litman?

  So the petitioner here, Olivier, was arrested and fined for violating an ordinance targeting protests outside a public amphitheater. He argues this limitation violates his religious freedom because he is a Christian who feels called to share the gospel. And so he filed this Section 1983 claim, seeking an injunction against enforcement of the state law in the future. And the question is whether his prior conviction under the law precludes his Section 1983 suit because it is a challenge to a criminal process that belongs in habeas.

• 46:11Kate Shaw?

  So his lawyer, Allison Ho, had to do a pretty delicate dance to try to represent her client and maintain that his claim was not barred by this Hecht decision while remaining appropriately deferential toward the great man himself, because as Melissa said, this was a Scalia opinion. So that was kind of a tightrope. I will say, I am not sure I've ever heard Justice Thomas be friendlier to an advocate. I don't know if you've felt the same way. So Ho is married to Judge Jim Ho, who we don't even talk about that much on this pod anymore because he has been so overtaken by some of his colleagues on the Fifth Circuit and some of the writings that they have issued.

• 46:44Leah Litman?

  Just wait for birthright citizenship, the resuscitation of Jim Ho.

• 46:50Kate Shaw?

  Well, what else is he gonna have to say about it? It's gonna be at SCOTUS.

• 46:52Leah Litman?

  No, but the logic of it. And like, he's gonna get props, I think, for how people start thinking about it.

• 46:58Kate Shaw?

  That's entirely possible. In any event, I have no idea if she and Thomas know each other. I assume so because Judge Ho and Justice Thomas are very close.

• 47:06Leah Litman?

  You sweet summer child.

• 47:07Kate Shaw?

  I just don't, I don't think she clerked for him, but he's not usually this friendly even toward his own former clerks when they are arguing there, was one takeaway from this argument.

• 47:16Melissa Murray?

  All right, I'm gonna let that drop. On the substance, this is a genuinely tricky case. The claim that Olivier is raising necessarily implicates legality of his prior conviction, even if he is not technically trying to challenge or reopen it. And there will be other cases like Olivier's where someone does remain under some sort of sentence of supervision. And so their claim really would seem to be more squarely barred by Hecht. A lot of the justices' questions in this case seem to circle around what the implications of ruling for Olivier would be for cases like that.

• 47:53Leah Litman?

  Yeah, so my take on the argument was that a majority of justices understand intuitively that this particular challenge can't be barred and isn't barred. And a problem that they are running into is that Justice Scalia wrote some, in my view, pretty sloppy opinions in this area with way overly broad language. But it seems like a majority of justices see some ways of limiting it and distinguishing the prior cases. Justice Alito might be a holdout, but who knows? He might say that at least this particular petitioner gets to challenge the prospective enforcement of a statute.

• 48:28Kate Shaw?

  I actually thought they were more skeptical of him than I expected, given that he was a Christian plaintiff raising a religious liberty claim, even if that's not exactly what was before the court. Because they are very cross pressured, right? Like, they have to treat his gospel, everything that Justice Scalia wrote.

• 48:43Leah Litman?

  Exactly. You can't question the great man.

• 48:46Kate Shaw?

  But, you know, he wrote some stuff that I think might mean Olivier loses, and they don't want that either. So I truly don't know which is their major preference and which is their minor preference. We will see how it shakes out.

• 49:02Leah Litman?

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• 50:27Leah Litman?

  And there's a huge variety of options and fresh ingredients to choose from. You can choose from a rotating seasonal menu of over 300 meals, or you can let their platform provide personalized recommendations. Like apple pie, bread, pudding. You know, I match with that one. Menus are updated weekly and new chefs are always joining the team. So meals will never be boring or repetitive. Taste, comfort and craftsmanship in every bite from the award winning chefs behind Cook Unity. Go to cookunity.com/strict or enter code strict before checkout to get 50% off your first order. That's 50% off your first order by using code strict or going to cookunity.com/strict.

• 51:08Speaker 12

  Right now, the midterms are the biggest story in American politics. But however they go, the Democratic Party is going to have to do some serious soul searching. Join us, Washington DC, November 5th through 7th, at the second annual Crooked Con. It's going to be the Positive America hosts and some of the smartest people in politics. We're going to try to answer some big questions. Stuff like, if we won, how did we win? If we lost, how could we possibly have lost? And with 2028 around the corner, where do we go from here? If you believe in democracy, community and fighting for the future, now's the time to grab your tickets to Crooked Con 2026. Head to crookedcon.com to get your tickets now.

• 51:58Kate Shaw?

  Let's move on to some court culture. First, we have a unanimous 11th Circuit opinion. This is now like a week and a half ago, but we recorded our Thanksgiving episode a bit early, so we have some things to kind of catch you up on. This was an opinion authored by another noted liberal squish, Judge Pryor, upholding sanctions against Alina Haba and others. Pretty interesting.

• 52:20Melissa Murray?

  So in addition to that 11th Circuit opinion bench slapping Alina Habbas for frivolous lawsuits, we also got a third circuit opinion, this time on Trump's efforts to install hacks as the temporary US attorneys in various districts. And this one again involved Alina Haba, who had been appointed the interim US attorney in New Jersey. This opinion had a different rationale than the opinion bench slapping Lindsey Halligan from the Fourth Circuit. Here, the court said that because Pamela Jo Bondi relied on other authority to appoint Haba, the appointment was unlawful. But nevertheless, the opinion strongly cast doubt on Halligan's appointment as well. And just a reminder

• 53:05Melissa Murray?

  that next week, going into all of this, it's going to be a big one at SCOTUS. We have lots of cases that are on the docket to be argued, and a lot of them relate to some of these opinions in that they are big questions about the authority of the executive branch, in particular about the future of the interaction between the executive branch and independent agencies and the administrative state. Also, questions about the global economy are at stake in at least some of the cases tangentially. So, we are flagging all of those because, again, what could go wrong? But we did get these glimmers of hope from the intermediate courts of appeal.

• 53:48Kate Shaw?

  In terms of the slaughter case that's going to be argued on Monday, if you're listening on Monday, it's like, the arguments are too early in the day for drinking games, at least in

• 53:57Melissa Murray?

  Are they?

• 53:57Kate Shaw?

  most time zones. I do sort of feel like we should be coming up with slaughter argument

• 54:01Melissa Murray?

  Wine o'clock somewhere, Kate.

• 54:03Kate Shaw?

  Right. So, okay, so here are my quick suggestions. What are you actually opening, Melissa? Is it a seltzer? Is it something spicy? It's a seltzer. It's a seltzer. All right. We are recording on a Friday afternoon. That would be fine if it was something stronger. Okay, so here are, if we were going to do a slaughter drinking game, here are my ideas. One, we could just also do place over/under bets, but like, how many mentions of Scalia's dissent in Morrison

• 54:25Melissa Murray?

  Oh, gosh.

• 54:26Kate Shaw?

  are we likely to get? How many mentions of the executive power? All of it, which they have like tried to redline into the Constitution, but is in fact not there, not in Article II, not anywhere. Wonder about every derisive reference to bureaucrats, every tendentious comparison of Trump to FDR.

• 54:46Kate Shaw?

  Those are, that's like my epic.

• 54:47Leah Litman?

  If you adopted all of these, you would honestly, you'd be drunk. You, you would be falling out of your chair.

• 54:53Melissa Murray?

  You'd be that raccoon in the liquor store bathroom.

• 54:55Leah Litman?

  Exactly. By 10:30 in the morning.

• 54:58Kate Shaw?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Melissa Murray?

  I think there are also going to be some references to Alexander Hamilton.

• 55:01Leah Litman?

  Yeah, for sure. Energy Dispatch, et cetera. Yeah, the vigor of the super manly presidency that is being held by the super old guy who falls asleep all the time and is being manipulated by some real psychopaths. But is very unitary. So that's all how it works. Some other court news, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the birthright citizenship case, so it will now decide whether the president's executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to some people born in the United States is legal. And a part of me thinks that Sam Alito is like frantically preparing a list of people

• 55:46Leah Litman?

  he thinks aren't actually American and should be deported, that he will include as an appendix to whatever he writes in the case.

• 55:54Melissa Murray?

  I'm just, did I just speak Jim Ho into existence?

• 55:57Leah Litman?

  Yes, you did.

• 55:59Kate Shaw?

  Yeah, because when we started recording this episode, we did not yet have a grant in the birthright citizenship case. And because Leah monitors breaking news like a hawk during our recording sessions, we now have had a grant. I didn't even see it come across the transom, but there it is.

• 56:13Melissa Murray?

  I didn't mean to manifest that, sorry.

• 56:15Kate Shaw?

  But you did that.

• 56:16Leah Litman?

  Yep. You know, another kind of piece of news that happened, the chief justice granted an administrative stay in another request for emergency relief brought by the Trump administration as against a lower court ruling. This is in a challenge to the limitations on what immigration judges are allowed to say publicly. So shadow docket season really seems to be heating up just in time for the holidays.

• 56:44Melissa Murray?

  Just, just so I understand the nature of that case clearly, the president who vowed to make the First Amendment great again and to allow people to express themselves freely and fully wants to crack down on what immigration judges say publicly?

• 56:59Leah Litman?

  Yes. This is not cancel culture or censorship. This is some third thing.

• 57:08Melissa Murray?

  To be determined.

• 57:09Leah Litman?

  Exactly.

• 57:10Melissa Murray?

  All right, cool. All right, since those are our least favorite things, let's turn to our real favorite things, things that we did, saw, bought, or read in the last week that we really like and think that you might like, too. So Kate, why don't you get us started?

• 57:26Kate Shaw?

  All right, so this is, again, like, a week or two old at this point, but I'm not sure how exactly these came into the public domain, but Chris Geidner posted a bunch of the transcripts from the depositions in the Chicago case challenging the use of force by CBP and other DHS officials, led, right, my member, by Greg Bavino. And the transcripts, I've just never read a deposition like this.

• 57:47Melissa Murray?

  Oh, yes, you read the Laura Lumer, Arby's in her pants one.

• 57:51Kate Shaw?

  Okay, okay, there is no Arby's in, this is, okay, there's hundreds of pages, and so I cannot guarantee there is no Arby's in the pants type exchange anywhere. But it was, if anything, substantively more insane. So Bavino, the, like, sort of legendary Chicago civil rights lawyer, Locke Bowman, and this DOJ lawyer. It truly, somebody should just set it on the stage because it is that dramatic, a set of exchanges. So that's all I'll say about that. That case, we should say, which we've now mentioned a bunch of times, was voluntarily dismissed. It had been pending on appeal in the Seventh Circuit. Couple of other things to mention. Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker has an incredibly difficult but really amazingly reported and horrifying piece about the third

• 58:35Kate Shaw?

  country removals, which we have talked about. My one critique of the piece is that there is not enough focus on the Supreme Court's culpability in allowing this outrageous campaign of sending people to just unspeakable horrors in our name. But she really did very difficult reporting to even get in touch with folks who, kind of by design, have been rendered almost unreachable. And many of these people who lived decades and raised families and held jobs in various parts of the United States have been sent to places that they have no relationship to, sometimes incarcerated. It's just, like, unbelievable horror show. So definitely recommend that. Lighter note.

• 59:17Kate Shaw?

  I have been listening to a lot of Olivia Dean. Maybe you guys knew Olivia Dean. I did not. She's amazing. And also, I guess, bridging those two, both music and, I don't know, immigration horrors, Sabrina Carpenter, whose politics I didn't really know, delivering this just like furious slap to the administration when it tried to use one of her songs in a vile propaganda video depicting brutal ICE tactics, really gave me a lot of joy this week. Go Sabrina Carpenter. Didn't know she had politics. She has good politics, and I'm so happy.

• 59:45Melissa Murray?

  She's petty as fuck. Yeah, I really like.

• 59:47Kate Shaw?

  So you think it's more that than politics? It's more just like, you took my song?

• 59:50Melissa Murray?

  No, I think it's both. It can be both. It can be both. Do you remember that guy? What's that guy? Barry, what's his face? Keown. Yeah, like, she dated him and he cheated on her. She literally did a concert, he's Irish, so that's the backstory. He cheated on her. She did a concert where she had everyone dress up in the Union Jack. Like, I was like, wow, that's some petty shit. Like, nothing Irish people love more than being reminded of the British Empire. Yeah.

• 1:00:18Leah Litman?

  Okay, my things are also probably in the petty register. So, the dunks on Sarah Isger's New York Times op-ed in defense of the Supreme Court, I lived for those on Friday morning. Like, the gist of this op-ed, which I don't think this is an exaggeration, is that the court's steady stream of decisions empowering the executive branch to be a dictator is actually a big master plan, if you squint enough and look closely enough, to empower, wait for it.

• 1:00:48Melissa Murray?

  Wait for it.

• 1:00:49Leah Litman?

  Congress. Real howler. Got to hand it to her. You know, we do try to make this podcast lighthearted and inject some humor and levity into it. I just don't think I can come up with a funnier bit than that. Like, yes, the Supreme Court might be massively expanding executive power, but what if maybe they weren't? Yeah, okay, so.

• 1:01:09Melissa Murray?

  What if it was all a ploy to make Congress great again?

• 1:01:13Leah Litman?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:01:15Leah Litman?

  Number two, seeing slash reading Republican women coming to the realization that the patriarchy is never going to be totally cool with them, enjoyed some of this. So here, I'm talking about the reporting about Nancy Mace, Elise Stefanic, and others being unhappy with Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. And I'm just going to read a quote from a New York Times story about this. Quote, "Some of them said privately that the Speaker had failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues, suggesting that doing so was a cultural challenge for Mr. Johnson, evangelical Christian who has often voiced firm views about the distinct roles men and women should play in society."

• 1:02:00Leah Litman?

  End quote. Ladies, it was in his name. His mama tried to tell you. Exactly. Exactly. So that's my number two. Number three, I am wearing my Hands Off Chicago t-shirt. You probably can't see it in the video, but I am wearing it. Was in Chicago for Thanksgiving. Absolutely loved it. You know, there were protests all over the holiday, which was very cold, you know, against ICE's presence in the city. A great way to spend the holiday. Also, in other Chicago-ish news, this is unrelated, I scored a touchdown in Turkey Bowl, and it may or may not have involved me pushing over a 13-year-old, but I still won.

• 1:02:43Leah Litman?

  Okay.

• 1:02:46Kate Shaw?

  This is, I need to, I need to tell you, I need to tell you. So my son David takes the bus to middle school every day, and the one lesson that I have really imparted is, you know, you have to like really shove sometimes to get on the bus in New York City because it's crowded in the morning. I'm like, you cannot step on anyone smaller than you. Like, that is the lesson. You cannot do that.

• 1:03:03Leah Litman?

  In my defense, it's unclear if I actually like caused this person to tip over, right? I did tag them, and then they fell over, but, you know.

• 1:03:11Kate Shaw?

  Uh huh. All right. Well, David also doesn't always heed me, so it's fine.

• 1:03:17Melissa Murray?

  Okay, I'm just gonna note, we are recording this on Friday. Friday was the morning where the temperature in New York was unseasonably fucked up cold. 18 degrees when I got up this morning. And I typically don't wear a hat because I feel like hats mess up my hair, like it just like smushes it down. But my friend gave me this way soft cashmere beanie and it was so fucking cold that I'm like, let me put this hat on. And I loved it because it was like big enough and oversized that it didn't actually smush my hair, but it kept me very warm. So I may be getting on the hat train. So there it is. But my other favorite things this week are something that you all can get into right

• 1:03:55Melissa Murray?

  now. So I am loving the mayor emeritus, outgoing mayor Eric Adams lame duck interview with Ziwei. And this is absolutely, I don't know if it's performance art or what, but it's my favorite thing ever. She asks him a question about whether or not someone of his age should be out in the club. And his response is basically, let your haters be your waiters when you are seated at the club night of success. And I want someone for the holidays to gift me a Lingua Franca sweater that just says, club night of success, because that is where I am going to be in perpetuity for the rest of this administration. He also discusses

• 1:04:38Melissa Murray?

  being 64 years old and getting out of the shower and noting his glistening six packs, plural, so he has more than one of them. I don't know how that is physiologically possible, but respect, sir. It is absolutely hilarious. And whoever did the editing on this clip, you, ma'am, are a top tier editor. It's just excellent, the way it ends. It's fantastic. Also on YouTube, Prince Harry on Colbert, A plus content, loved it. And I am also very much enjoying the biography of Jessica Mitford. She is one of the famous Mitford sisters, the communist Jessica Mitford. It's called Troublemaker, The Fierce Unruly

• 1:05:22Melissa Murray?

  Life of Jessica Mitford by Christina Delane and Carla Kaplan. And it's fantastic. And again, because I'm an Anglophile, I just got into all of the Victoria episodes that just dropped on Netflix. And this is a very good salve for people who just cannot keep watching The Crown over and over and over again, although I have been. So this is nice. I'm enjoying it.

• 1:05:46Kate Shaw?

  All right, some housekeeping before we go. First, from Hysteria, "Holiday season is basically here, which means we are all one burnt appetizer away from calling in Ina Garten for help." Man, I wish I had her on speed dial, that would be so helpful.

• 1:06:01Leah Litman?

  For sure.

• 1:06:01Kate Shaw?

  But, good news, Erin and Alyssa actually did call her in, so they are talking with the Barefoot Contessa, no other, a host about everything, about her early days with her husband, her time in the White House, her secrets to hosting without spiraling. So, new Hysteria episode drops today, subscribe so you never miss an episode.

• 1:06:19Melissa Murray?

  Have you followed Tom Hurd on Instagram? No. Tom Hurd is this amazing comedian, and one of the things he does is he dresses up in a brown bob and a blue shirt as Ina Garten, and like, has this like, enormous cosmopolitan. He's like, hello, isn't that fabulous? Like, I called my friends Jeffrey and TJ, and the whole thing is, like, if you watch the Barefoot Contessa, it is supremely funny. So, listen to Hysteria and then go check out Tom Hurd on Instagram, and it'll be amazing.

• 1:06:51Leah Litman?

  It's a good FYI. So, one of the things, maybe the thing I am most excited about in the new year is, we are heading to the West Coast for the first time ever. So, this is for you jurisprudence heads. This year, the courts aren't just shaping policy, they are throwing the Constitution into a blender and reshaping the entire future of the country. So, we are bringing the full strict scrutiny treatment with us to California. The breakdowns, the historical context, the side-eye, the feminist legal rage, the puns that might have some innuendo, all of it.

• 1:07:28Kate Shaw?

  So, we are so excited. Melissa lived for years in Oakland, taught at Berkeley, Leah is like, kind of home of her heart is really in California, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:07:38Leah Litman?

  Oh, yeah. She used to teach at Irvine.

• 1:07:39Kate Shaw?

  Yeah, but not for that long, but I just feel like her connections are-

• 1:07:41Leah Litman?

  Three years.

• 1:07:42Kate Shaw?

  But I'm just saying, I think of you as more deeply connected to California than just because of your time in the faculty.

• 1:07:46Leah Litman?

  Yes, no, that's totally fair.

• 1:07:47Kate Shaw?

  I think that is like, your soul home, and-

• 1:07:49Leah Litman?

  I'm going to bring the most special t-shirts to California.

• 1:07:53Kate Shaw?

  And she brings a lot everywhere, so get excited. So we will be on March 6th in San Francisco at the Herbst Theater, on March 7th in Los Angeles at the Palace Theater. We are going to get into election law, executive power, reproductive rights, the cases keeping us up at night, and there are a lot. But you know, we will do all of this in a fun way.

• 1:08:12Melissa Murray?

  So buy your tickets now because this West Coast jaunt is going to be so chaotic and so epic. You definitely, we are like, we are going across the country. I will be eating LA quality donuts. That sugar is unparalleled.

• 1:08:29Kate Shaw?

  Wow.

• 1:08:30Melissa Murray?

  So come for the legal analysis, stay for the sugar-fueled roasts of wet Kavanaugh and Sam Alito. You can grab your tickets right now at crooked.com/events before they sell out. Just going to say, I think this would make an amazing holiday gift for a stricte in your life. Like, be a hero. This is the way. This is the way. Just a tip.

• 1:08:59Kate Shaw?

  Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked Media production, hosted and executive produced by Leah Littman, Melissa Murray, and me, Kate Shaw. Produced and edited by Melody Rauel. Michael Goldsmith is our associate producer. Jordan Thomas is our intern. Audio support from Kyle Seglan and Charlotte Landis. Music by Eddie Cooper. Production support from Katie Long and Adrian Hill. Matt DeGroot is our head of production. And thanks to our digital team, Ben Heathcote, Joe Motoski, and Johanna Case. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny on YouTube to catch full episodes. Find us at youtube.com slash at Strict Scrutiny Podcast. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Strict Scrutiny in your favorite podcast app 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.

• 1:09:55Speaker 13

  Corrupting our democracy works best when we forget that we, the people, are in charge. I'm Stacey Abrams, voting rights advocate and host of Assembly Required. In my podcast, I'm talking with some of the sharpest minds in politics and in civic activism to help us figure out how to fight authoritarianism and win. My podcast doesn't just diagnose problems. We give actionable steps to help you feel a little more connected and a lot more empowered to make change in your communities. So check out my podcast, Assembly Required. New episodes drop every Tuesday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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