No, The Supreme Court Didn’t Make Trump Unilaterally More Powerful

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Welcome to another left, right and center, everybody. I'm David Green. Well, the Supreme Court has wrapped up another term. The justices are on their way to vacation. I'm sure they have signed each other's yearbooks. You know, have a great summer and all of that. And depending on who you listen to, they have, before leaving, completely redefined the power of the executive branch.

Maybe they have expanded its powers. Maybe they've rained it in. Or maybe, as with, so much in our democracy, there's nuance in all this. And we're going to try and dig into that today. When we look back at the decisions from cases that this court heard over this past term, what is the story of this court and the justices? And from executive power to our elections, what course are they helping to chart for our country? Moa Lathie is here on the left. Sarah Isger is here on the right. And Sarah, were you really having Supreme Court stress dreams,

or is that just something that you said on social media? Oh, no. I had a dream that Elena Kagan had invited me over to her house for like a very casual cocktail party. And then at the end, she hands out party favors. And the party favors are adorable puppies. For everybody. For everybody with little bows on them and everything. And I was upset and stressed and anxious because on the one hand, the puppy was incredibly cute and sleeping and very well behaved. And on the other hand, I do not have the capacity to take on a puppy right now in my life. So what allegiance do I owe? What duty do I owe to the puppy? what duty of good guesting do I owe to Elena Kagan. It was a pure stress dream.

Wow. It's so weird. I had the same exact dream. You're so weird. You're so weird to dream this. Well, Sarah, maybe you need a couple weeks and not have to think about decisions that are coming out every couple days. Yeah. I think you deserve it.

But bear with us at least for this hour to keep talking about this. And then we can let you take a break. I mean, I guess the big birthright citizenship decision is where I would love to start. The justices beat back the president's executive order on birthright citizenship, but would have denied citizenship to children born to parents in the United States who were here illegally or temporarily. And, you know, when I couple that with the court's decision striking down the president's tariffs back in February, is, are we seeing some sort of guiding philosophy here for how this court does set boundaries for some of what the executive branch wants to do? Okay, this entire conversation is just going to be me trying to slather on the nuance like it's sunscreen for the 4th of July.

Great. Let's make it the nuance party. And then Mo and I can just get super dramatic and then you can rain us in and tell us why the narrative doesn't hold. Okay, feels like a lot of the country is doing that right now. So perfect. I'm not going to do the whole history of the Supreme Court, but let me back up a few terms here. And remember that during the Biden administration, they shut down Biden's executive orders on student loan debt forgiveness. eviction moratorium, vaccine mandate, clean power plan. These were all executive actions that the president took. And what the Supreme Court said was you did not have a statute from Congress that gave you the authority to do this. You need to go back to Congress and actually get a law passed and only then can you move forward with this. And a big question was whether the Supreme Court would continue that, right? It's only a norm. It's only a trend if you repeat it under a different president. And so that's why the tariff's decision is the most important Supreme Court decision

of the last quarter century probably. Because it once again tells a president, they cannot act alone. They cannot act without Congress, but it's a repeat. It's the second time. And that makes it wildly important that Congress needs to get back in the game and that we're not going to do government by executive order. The birthright citizenship case is similar. It is also a president acting through executive order without an act of Congress to go by. So in that sense, it fits that same trend. By the way, nationalizing the Federal Guard, Alien Enemies Act, these were all areas where Donald Trump got shut down by this court this year.

But the birthright citizenship case had a few other things going on. First of all, it's 194 pages. The work that I do for you guys, listeners, I mean, so you don't have to. Yeah, you read every page. Look, I'm going to admit I still have to go back and read some footnotes. But there were two different decisions here, really. There were six justices who said absolutely no to the executive order. But there were four justices who said they would be willing to look at a law from Congress

that maybe had some other definition of birthright citizenship. There's been a lot of hand-wringing over that fact that therefore birth-right citizenship is hanging by a single vote, that this is not. now a live issue that hadn't been live for 100 years. This is where I want to slather on some more nuance, because there is something to that, right? We hadn't looked at birthright citizenship for 100 years. But the last Supreme Court case to look at birthright citizenship itself gave four exceptions to birthright citizenship in an era where we didn't have jumbo jets. So for instance, if Congress passed a law saying that someone who comes here on a one-month

tourist visa, eight months pregnant, has a child always intends to go back and always intends to take the child with them back, that that child is not entitled to birthright citizenship for justices said they might believe that that could be in line with the language of the 14th Amendment, which says all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. So their argument is like, if you only come here for a couple weeks and you always intended to leave, you never really availed yourself of the jurisdiction of the United States. So those justices left some sort of just the door open at like a sliver to continue having this conversation. And only if Congress passes a law. Which is another theme of today,

I think, like Congress could be doing a lot of things to resolve some of these big questions that came up in these cases. And again, that's only four votes. It's not five votes. So I don't think the birthright citizenship case actually turns out to be that important. But note that it was 6-3, not on ideological lines. Last term, we only had 9% of cases along ideological lines with all three liberal justices dissenting. This year, that number spiked to 22%. That is incredibly high for a number of cases decided along ideological lines. Now, I will flag several of those cases, while 6'3 along ideological lines were not ideological cases, unless all of you have very strong feelings about the alien tort statute or the Cuban repatriation laws. But nevertheless,

a huge spike from what we saw last term. And there were cases like transgender athletes participating in women's sports, like the slaughter case on whether presidents can fire the heads of independent agencies that were absolutely along ideological lines and ideological. Moe, let me ask you first. And I want your general thoughts on sort of this court throughout the show. But I mean, when it comes to birthright citizenship, I mean, Sarah's describing a world where there's sort of this, on one side, this is an absolute right in the United States of America. And on the other side, it's like, let's talk about this. And there are some nuanced questions about the law that could create some exceptions. Mo, are you okay with this opening the door to a further conversation about this?

I mean, I feel like a lot of doors are always being left open these days on a lot of issues. So whether or not I'm okay with it. I mean, this is the new normal. Look, I think the birthright citizenship ruling was a good one. I hear the anxiety that people have that because it was so divided, it does open the door to finding a backdoor way to overturn it down the road. But it, to me, just as a casual observer, it feels like it came a lot closer to settling this than we were before. I'm not too freaked out by it. But there have been several cases in this court where there were other things I thought had been settled that they reopened the door to. So, you know, I don't think this term is going to give those who are concerned with the court reason to finally breathe a huge sigh of relief. Generally, I think this term was a mixed bag for a lot of reasons.

I think, and I'm going to channel Sarah just a little bit here, a lot of the hyperbolic concern that this shows that they've just given complete and total control to the president. Like, no, they didn't. And we've seen some cases where they pushed back on the president. We saw some, you know, really concerning cases where they gave more control. So I don't know that there's a big takeaway on what they gave to Donald Trump. There are a couple places where they maybe redefined the presidency. Sarah was brought up the tariffs case as one of the key ones that shows a limitation on the presidency.

But the slaughter case cuts the exact opposite way and maybe equally as important of a case in terms of the precedent it sets. By giving the president the right to fire at will, not for cause, any member of an independent agency. that overturns, what, decades and decades? Hundreds years. A centuries worth of precedent and undercuts the notion of there even being such a thing as an independent agency. Now, for some people, that's a good thing, right? A lot of there are people out there who've argued they're part of the executive,

and so they should be treated like any other part of the executive. But it does now undercut the notion that there are independent agencies that can and should be separate from the whims of the president. And that could have real long-term implications. Sarah, was that in any way a political decision by a conservative court to give Donald Trump what he wants? Or do you see sort of a legal underpinning for that and a shift in our country about the relationship between federal agencies and whoever is president or Republican, Democrat,

or otherwise? Yeah. So Mo's 100% right that we can ditch the word independent when it comes to these agencies. They are not anymore. Now, this only applied to principal officers at these agencies. So Senate confirmed people. If the president is appointing someone to a Senate-confirmed position, what the Supreme Court said was that while Congress has the ability to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on people the president may want to execute his policies, Congress does not have the ability to force the president to work with people who refuse to execute his policies, which is in

fact what happens when you have an independent agency that is within the executive branch acting based on powers delegated to it by the president, who is the sole holder of those powers in the executive branch, but then isn't accountable to anyone. Congress can't fire them. The president can't fire them. So legally, I think this decision is correct. But I'm with just, Justice Gorsuch, who wrote a separate concurrence talking about why this was policy-wise, a total disaster, because what we've done now is place enormous amounts of power with the president, right, to be able to fire these people and replace them with political allies, while at the same time not diminishing any of the power of these agencies that have been going hog wild.

I mean, at the point that the FCC is doing climate change and the FCC is, you know, FCC is punishing late night comedians. What we have to have is a Congress that is doing its job and to remove all of the discretion from these agencies because they are no longer independent. They are simply acting on the president's will. And so like start taking back some of that power. And what Justice Gorsuch was saying is, yeah, but there's a problem with Congress trying to take back this power. Any president will now veto that. And so you have to have a veto proof majority. And that's asking a bit much, isn't it? And so that's why Justice Gorsuch was highlighting how important cases like the student loan debt forgiveness case and the tariffs case are because if you hold Congress and the president to those same rules, that if you're trying to solve some new problem but with an old, old statute in vague language, no, we're going to expect Congress to speak clearly to pass new laws before these agencies can step into new areas.

Mo, does it give you any, I don't know, relief that the court decided that there's an exception for the Federal Reserve that they ruled in favor of Lisa Cook to not be fired on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors? Yes. I mean, it does. Between that case and the tariff case, you know, I've seen a few, some analysis out there that the court was kind of saying, you know, maybe the brick wall for the presidency is like the economy, right? And so those. those two give me some concern. But Sarah, I actually kind of want to pull on a thread that you were just starting because the court saying Congress can solve so many of our problems if they got up and do their job. But it did seem to me that on a couple of the cases this term, they kind of undercut Congress in some ways. And the slaughter case was based on a congressional statute. Now, you're saying they thought the statute was weak, right? So I'd be curious, like, what Congress can do differently to protect that. No, no, sorry. The,

the slaughter case did strike through a portion of a congressional statute that said the president could only remove these agency heads for cause. I'm saying moving forward, those agencies can't exercise power without clear congressional authorization. So this is my question, right? If part of our argument is that so many of these problems could be taken care of if Congress did its job, here the court struck through the provision in statute. They did the same on campaign finance, right, which is, I know we're going to talk more about. They did the same earlier this session on Voting Rights Act. Yep.

So in these cases, Congress actually had done something. Yep. And the court took that away. So, you know, maybe we were oversimplifying when we said Congress just needs to do its job because sometimes the court won't let them. We're going to take a really quick break. And then Sarah, I'm going to let you answer Mo's question. And this kind of conversation, just sort of figuring this out together, it's what I love about our show.

and if you all want to engage in it, come join us because we're on Substack. You can join the LeftRane Center Substack by going to KCRWLRC.substack.com. That's KCRWLRC.substack.com. We're going to keep talking about the Supreme Court when Mo and Sarah and I come back with more left, right, and center.

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and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive, but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube. All right, welcome back to left, right and center. I'm David Green with Moe Alethe and Sarah Isger. We've been talking about the Supreme Court term that just wrapped up. Sarah, I just want to say we're grateful to have you here.

You've literally written the book on the Supreme Court, written a book this year on the Supreme Court, last branch standing. So it's great to have your wisdom always, but on days like this. I think Mo is just asking you kind of the implications for Congress in some of these decisions and places where Congress might be able to do something. coming out of these decisions, but also places where it seems like the court actually, you know, undercut the power of Congress and beat back on some decisions they've made. What do you have to say about that? Okay, most totally right. And this is absolutely worth a real conversation about.

But the examples he gave, I think, go into some different buckets. So for instance, the slaughter example where they're striking down part of an act of Congress about for cause removals in these so-called independent agencies, that I think is totally in line with the make Congress do its job, make the president do his job, because what you're not going to allow Congress to do is just give away all of its power. That's not shutting down Congress to say you can't delegate away your responsibility and sort of a Tom Sawyer, you know, make someone else paint the fence way. So slaughter, I don't think, fits into that bucket, though they are striking down a portion of a congressional statute. Campaign finance, another good example and a different bucket from me.

So in this case, mind you, they upheld Mississippi accepting ballots five days after election day under a federalism idea, right? The Constitution allows Congress to regulate these sort of questions for elections. But if Congress doesn't, it is up to the individual states to make these decisions. And so a majority of the court held that Congress had not spoken about when ballots need to be received by only when your ballot needs to have been voted and therefore be up to state. So if Mississippi wants to accept them five days later, you go, girl. No problem. Other state wants to do another time period, no problem.

But there was another case on campaigns, which was campaign finance like Mo said, in which the court held that parties could coordinate with their candidates. So I also think that campaign finance is an area where, again, striking down laws of Congress is a little different than in other areas because so often Congress passes incumbent protection laws for themselves. the court striking down a law from Congress that violates the First Amendment, meant to protect their own interest. I'm a-okay with that. The last bucket is the Voting Rights Act bucket that Moe is mentioning. And not only do I think that's actually the epitome of the types of things Mo is is actually trying to get to, this idea of striking down an act of Congress when they're trying

to actually engage with a problem. But it's not the only case like that that's going to push back on my thesis. But I think the Voting Rights Act one is the most recent and the most impactful. Here's the pushback. And I want to use that term loosely because I'm not really disagreeing with you, Mo. I think that's a problem for my team, so to speak. The pushback I would say is, you know, at some point, you have to use judgment. If Congress is violating the Constitution, we want the Supreme Court to step in and say so, especially when it comes to race discrimination. Now, we're not. We're not. We're We have two very different views of what the 14th Amendment's purpose was on the Supreme Court. In camp number one, the 14th Amendment is the second founding of the United States.

And so in many ways, you just start over and you have a colorblind constitution from that point forward. In the second understanding of the 14th Amendment, the 14th Amendment takes into account what came before it and allows the government to use race when necessary to remediate those past sins of slavery. So it's not colorblind. It, in fact, is very color conscious if we're trying to help fix the badges and incidents of slavery, which, of course, at this point, would also include Jim Crow. I think both of those have a lot of interesting and persuasive history behind them. But this is the fight that the court has been having now for 20 years,

and you see it in the affirmative action case, the Voting Rights Act case, and even the birthright citizenship case. These are all cases that may be about different policy issues as far as like what your headline looks like. But for the court and for the nine justices, they're the same case about the 14th Amendment and this idea of the second founding of the United States. And what is the central question in the 14th Amendment that you feel like the court is sort of grappling over in all of these cases, just so we're clear? Can you use race at all in any part of society, even if you're trying to use it for good, because the court that thinks that it should be colorblind says, you may think you're trying to use it for good, but actually you're

not, because if you're treating someone differently because of the color of their skin, there can never be a morally justified reason to do that. And the other side is like, yes, there can be because we are but a few decades out from de jure, legally based segregation. And so, yeah, sometimes we're going to have to take race into account to make that better. And the other side answers, yes, but look at something like affirmative action, where then every black person graduating has an asterisk next to their name. They probably didn't earn their spot. That's an affirmative action spot, which of course was the life experience of Clarence Thomas.

And fascinatingly, and I get into this a little in my book, also the experience of Sonia Sotomayor, even though they then come out differently on affirmative action itself. but both of them were told that they did not belong because they were clearly just affirmative action applicants. And I would just note, like, Sonia Sotomayor being told that by a law firm partner who was talking to her at a recruitment dinner, of all the people, if you look at her sort of undergraduate resume, she would have gotten in anyway, right? She was just a stellar student. And so for this guy to say, presume that she only got in because she was a Latina is the problem of a first. affirmative action for a lot of people. So anyway, that's what I think the justices are grappling with. That's what the 14th Amendment fight is over. But it spans all sorts of different specific

issues, Voting Rights Act, birth rate citizenship, affirmative action, et cetera. Anytime you hear the 14th Amendment, remember, that's a bigger, larger philosophical fight. Mo, what concerns you or doesn't about us having this larger conversation about race and how it should be used in our laws on issues like affirmative action and a lot of these cases, as Sarah said, that really is, you know, I mean, you can find this question come up repeatedly now and in a lot of the cases like this that we're seeing. Well, I think Sarah laid it out very well when she laid out the two sides of the argument, right? Being told that no aspect of society should look at their race is in essence overlooking the experience that members of their group have lived. That we are trying to

solve for? This is where Chief John Roberts famously writes, and the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Now, I think the left think that that's a quaint notion, but I do think that that is held in good faith. And again, it's not a partisan difference between the two sides. It's an ideological difference between the two sides. And I think for a lot of people, the belief is that it was so systemically baked in for so long that there are going to have to be some affirmative steps taken to overcome that. Yep. And that's where I think that concern of being purely 1,000% race blind, colorblind all of the time can never match people's lived realities. All right, you're listening to

left, right and center from KCRW talking to Moe Lathie and Sarah Isker about some of these big cases that we've seen come down from the Supreme Court. And I want to get back to one of of them, which we've mentioned already this campaign finance decision. It was 6-3. The justices have lifted the cap on how much the parties can spend in coordination with federal candidates. Republicans challenged the laws it was as a violation of their party's First Amendment rights. The courts agreed, and now candidates get to sync up their messages with the national party, get more access to campaign money. Democrats are arguing that these limits were necessary, I guess, Mo, I'm just wondering, just because the Democratic Party doesn't have the amount of money that the Republican Party has right now, like, isn't this a decision that could kind of go both ways over time and not really favor one party over the other?

Yep. And let's, just to address something you just said, so the DNC is like a huge dumpster fire right now. Like, they've got no money. They're getting outspent, outraised by the RNC. They're like negative $3 million after you look at their debts. I mean, it's... But they actually have very little impact on the midterms. The midterms are the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and their Republican counterpart,

the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and their Republican counterpart. There's a lot, they're a lot closer to parity there. Republicans have a slight edge in the money that the party committees can spend in the midterms in both the House and the Senate, but it's not an insurmountable edge. Democrats have a huge. huge edge in individual candidate fundraising this cycle. So the candidates that we hear about in the news every day, the James Talarico's in Texas,

the platiners in Maine, the, you know, we can go down the list, Cooper in North Carolina. Democrats have a lot more money, the candidates than the Republicans. So in terms of the practical impact for this cycle, what this does is it actually gives Republican candidates, it sort of levels the playing field for them in terms of campaign finance, in terms of the campaign spending that they can do. So it's going to be just a lot more competitive at the individual campaign level as a result of this. So Democrats had actually an advantage that they've now lost.

In some ways, though, and I think this is something Sarah and I have both talked about and agreed on. One of the biggest problems with our politics today, one of the biggest contributors to the dysfunction of our politics today, is that we operate in a completely weak party system. We have, over time, because of campaign finance laws, because of the democratization of the process, we've eliminated the smoke-filled back rooms. That neither of us would have been invited into. A thousand percent. And given the power directly to voters in primaries, and by limiting campaign contributions so much over the years, we've taken away party's ability to really do anything. Our national parties don't fund their campaigns.

They don't select their candidates. And in fact, in some places with open primaries, party members don't select their. their candidates. They've opened it up to anybody to select their parties candidate. So we've been living in this system where the parties are so weak, they have no control. So outside groups step in. And as a result, super PACs have become the new center of gravity in our politics. What this ruling does, actually, is make those super PACs just a little less necessary. Makes them just a little less relevant. Because the parties can funnel money into race is when they want to.

Because now the parties can once again work directly with the candidates, which they could only do up to a certain point up until this ruling. Now, this only works. This only helps alleviate dysfunction if there is complete and total transparency. If every dollar that goes to a party committee and that is then shared with a campaign has got sunshine on it and we can see it. as opposed to the dark money, transparent money in my mind beats dark money any day of the week. So if we are actually strengthening the party infrastructure and eliminating or reducing the need for

dark money super PACs, that could be a good thing. You're saying it could be less corruption. I mean, the DNC said that this ruling was a quote, invitation for corruption. You're saying with the right safeguards in place, having the party handling, these things could be. I'd much wrap the money the big money is going to be in this race no matter what. Do you want it controlled by a bunch of anonymous big spenders or do you want the public to be able to to see it transparently? Those big spenders may be the same people, but at least we'll now know. And anytime we know, transparency to me is the one form of campaign finance reform that has ever

quid pro quo, right? Those individual contributions stay. Two, we have individual contribution limits to parties. That stays. Then we have earmark bands. You are not allowed to give to a party and tell the party that actually that money is for this specific candidate and I want you to spend it on them. So the circumvention rule is the third prophylaxis here. And so what the Supreme Court said is that no, you can't have a fourth prophylaxis of then limiting how much the parties can coordinate with their own candidates. So I think legally it's correct. And even if you're like, well, I don't know, look, campaign finance reform hasn't worked. Tell me what the goal was.

And it clearly under whatever goal you may have said did not work. more money is coming into politics, less accountable. There's been no upside to the last 25 years of this frolic and leap through the meadow of trying to limit campaign finance spending except helping incumbents and, of course, squeezing the balloon out so that the bubble is super PACs and small dollar donors. So let me get to the political side, super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with candidates. So they can raise this unlimited amount of money and they can spend it however they want, but they can't talk to candidates about how to spend it. And they also get no discount for buying TV, which the government mandates, the candidates get a discount for buying TV,

and that parties get a discount for buying TV. So not only for all the reasons that Mo said, does this diminish the attractiveness of super PACs, you can coordinate with the party, the party can buy your advertising for you at a discounted rate. And importantly for me, the party will now have these carrots and sticks to actually pick their standard bears over multiple cycles. Right now, a candidate only has the interest to win the next election. Parties are the ones that had the interest to actually have long-term policy platforms that they would advocate for over multiple cycles. But if they don't have carrots and sticks to keep their candidates in line and the candidates aren't even able to

talk to them, then the parties cease to exist. That's what happened over the last 20 years. And so now we may actually be able to have policies, Congress doing its job, and diminishing super PACs because you can't talk to them and they can't buy discounted ad rates. And wouldn't that be a great thing? All right. We will come back after a break and continue talking about the Supreme Court and get to some sort of the larger questions about what the story of this court has been in this term. Mo and Sarah and I will be right back with more left, right and center.

You've probably noticed that when a big story breaks, the headlines, they can feel completely different. I was looking at coverage of the college protest crackdowns and ground news pulled together over 50 sources covering the same event. CNN described them as peaceful demonstrations, while the New York Post called called them violent campus chaos. Same story, completely different framing. That's why I've genuinely been using ground news while researching topics for this show. Instead of bouncing between outlets, trying to figure out what's actually happening, I can compare reporting from across the political spectrum all in one place. You can also see who owns different outlets and factuality ratings that show how objective or loaded a source tends to be. Go to groundnews.com

slash LRC to get 40% off the unlimited vantage subscription. That's groundnews.com slash LRC. Again, groundnews.com slash LRC. I really think you'll appreciate what ground news is doing. Support comes from Lacey. Lacey's Road to 2008 summit at the Intuit Dome on July 14th and 15th will bring together policymakers, industry executives, community leaders, team USA athletes and others working to accelerate climate innovation, and investment in greater Los Angeles. Help make cleaner air a legacy of the 2028 games. Register to attend at lacai.org slash road to 2028. I're back with left right and center. I'm David Green with Sarah Isger on the right and Moa Lathie on the left. Well, I just want to come back to something that you were talking about.

You know, we mentioned that the Democratic Party is not doing a great job of fundraising right now, even if Democratic candidates in many of the races that we often talk about in these midterms do have sizable war chests. Like, given now that we have a big Supreme Court decision that says that the party can coordinate more closely with candidates, does that sort of change whatever problems the party needs to fix right now if you say that the DNC is a dumpster fire? I mean, look, the way this has historically worked, I presume it's the same on the Republican side. The DNC and the RNC play minimal roles in midterm elections, right?

They are inherently designed to be presidential cycle institutions to focus on the next presidential election and to build the overall infrastructure that everybody can tap into. But the party committees that are tasked with winning down ballot and midterm elections are the Senate campaign committees and the House campaign committees on both the Republican and the Democratic Senate campaign committees. And the Democratic Senate campaign committee and the Republican, like, their strength lies in sort of the moment in any given cycle. Republicans are doing okay right now, but the Democratic Senate campaign committee is doing far better than the DNC because Democrats see a potential path to retaking the Senate, and so there's energy flowing there. The same can be said at the House level.

So the DNC has to get its act together and needs to do. it in short order, but it really needs to do it by the time the midterms are concluded, because that's when they take over in terms of getting ready for the presidential cycle. Also, donors are rational beings, and if the party can't coordinate with the candidates, you're going to be just as likely, if not more likely, to give to a super PAC than to give to the party. So this decision itself will change how much each of the parties can raise. I wouldn't be surprised to see the DNC's fundraising pick up quite substantially because they can now coordinate with their candidates. But the Senate campaign committee and the House campaign

committees, this is where I would expect to see the most movement right now, right? Because if you've maxed out to your favorite House candidate as a donor and you need a place to go, you can now give to the D-Triple-C and feel more confident that that money is going to be used to help the candidates that you care about. And again, you then see this virtuous cycle where parties start to re-inflate and be actual players in this ecosystem. I think about a race, you know, like in Texas, you know, James Talarico and Ken Paxton. And let me ask this, not like specifically focusing on that race in this year, but that kind of race, like where you have, you know, a flawed candidate from the party that has tremendous advantages in a state, kind of an upstart candidate on the Democratic side that, you know, is energetic, charismatic, you know, faces a lot of obstacles in a state like Texas. in a race like that, will we see sort of money and strategy play out differently in the future because of this decision?

You would expect money to matter a great deal in that race, especially on the Democratic side, because they're the ones who have to overcome the structural disadvantages with voter turnout operations, grassroots, you know, turnout's expensive to do. And introducing the candidate. That takes television ads. That's expensive to do. You know, it's interesting, though, if you look at who's getting their homework done, Ken Paxton has 1% of self-identified Harris voters voting for him. James Talarico has 9% of self-identified Trump voters voting for him. Now, James Talarico needed to get more Trump voters than Ken Paxton needs to get of Harris voters.

But that's a guy who's getting his homework done. He needs that number to be a little bit higher. He needs the polling to be a little bit more in his advantage before we have. head into Labor Day right now. It's about tied. I don't know what Mo would say here, but, you know, a five-point lead would make me feel pretty good, very good if I'm the James Talarico team. I think a three-point lead is actually the bare minimum you need going into Labor Day when partisans tend to, quote, unquote, come home so that even if they don't like Ken Paxton, a lot of them are going to end up coming home, so to speak. But a three-point lead isn't at all

out of the question for James Talarico with two months left to go till Labor Day. I guess what I'm getting at Mo, like it too, like given if that's the position that someone like Taylor Rico is in, like does having the parties able to coordinate more closely with a candidate really change that much? Or if, you know, people in the party want to spend money on a race to try to get a candidate to win a Senate seat, like the money's going to flow to that person. Does this change that much in our politics? It could.

It makes it so much more effective because they can share this is a race that's going to thread a needle holding onto the enthusiasm of the base while picking up those Trump voters. They can share polling. They can talk about which ads are working and which ads aren't working. Those are all things they couldn't do last week. That will be wildly important. Let's look at a different state, right? Because James Talarico is not going to have any – he's not going to want for money.

I mean, he's got a tremendous grassroots fundraising operation. So he's going to have the money that he needs as long as that grassroots money keeps coming in. And having the party now being able to coordinate with him, that's just extra help, right? And I'd say same is probably true for Ken Paxton. Let's look at a different state. Let's look at Ohio, the Ohio Senate race, where you've got two candidates. It's a very competitive race. You've got the incumbent appointed senator John Hustod.

You've got former senator Sherrod Brown. Neither one of those guys is exactly lighting up the grassroots donor base in the same way that Tala Rico is. That's where this becomes a lot more helpful. The most important resource any campaign has is the candidate's time. Number two is money. How it allocates this finite budget is important. Sherrod Brown can now work with the party and say, you know what?

I've got some work I need to do to sort of reintroduce myself to the people of Ohio. So I'm going to use my campaign dollars to run the positive ads about myself and my vision. and you, Democratic Senate campaign committee, can take care of defining my opponent. It's that kind of efficiency that could be incredibly helpful. Rather than stretching out those campaign dollars to have to do both the positive and the contrast message, they can now coordinate that as opposed to just hoping the super PAC that supports me is delivering the message that I want. By the way, campaigns actually really dislike super PACs for a lot of reasons. Yup.

Right? And chief among them is because they can't coordinate, you have no idea what a super PAC is going to say in the ads and you may dislike it. Or know that it's ineffective, but you can't tell. I mean, it's a mess. Well, can we finish with some sort of big takeaways? Sarah, I mean, obviously you wrote a new book about this very court. I'm curious if any of these decisions in this term, you feel like did it surprise you? Did it change any of your thesis, so to speak?

The huge jump from last term in the number of six, three decisions is meaningful. You really can't do the Supreme Court in just one term increments. You have to kind of look at larger trends. So let's hold on a second. I want to see what the next term looks like because right now 22 percent is more the outlier. 9% was also quite low last time. Generally, we've seen, you know, 10, 15%. So let's see if this is the beginning of a trend or an outlier year because of the cases

and I don't know what they had for breakfast that morning. And just so we're clear on the trend, you're sort of watching to see if this would be more and more decisions that fall on these ideological lines that seem to have jumped a little bit to 22%. The other thing we saw this term was the breakup, so to speak, of the Thomas Samuel Alito Gorsuch threesome. Last term, we had the same number of decisions that were six, three, or five, four with only liberals in dissent, as the number of decisions that were six, three, or five, four with only conservatives in dissent and all the liberals in the majority. And it was Gorsuch, Thomas, and Samuel Alito, who were together in all of those six three with conservatives in the minority in the dissent cases. We didn't see that this time. Not a lot of them together. Instead, the six conservatives really mixed it up. They were all over the place. Brett Kavanaugh-Gorsuch, once again, repelling each other, having very different outcomes in a lot of cases. And the other thing I'd note is in past terms, we've also seen that Clarence Thomas is often the justice most likely to be in dissent, which I know surprises a lot of people because they think he is the Arch Conservative and therefore winning most of the cases. That was not true last term or this term.

It was, maybe not surprisingly, Ketanji Brown Jackson. But, you know, that 22% and all of the other numbers maybe back up with Justice Brandeis once said that he could do the work of the court in 11 months, but he couldn't do it in 12 months. That's what the summer break is for. Hit reset, take a break from one another. Start over again on the first Monday in October. As Brett Kavanaugh has said, it's a team of nine. As Amy Coney Barrett has said, it's like an arranged marriage with no option for divorce. Well put. Moe, let me get your just kind of final thoughts about this court. You know, we talked about a lot today, a lot of nuance. You know, Sarah pointing out that she's kind of watching whether this is becoming a trend that you have these ideological decisions, but it's still only 22% of the decisions.

So this narrative that this is a conservative court that supports Donald Trump seems to break down. But I just wonder, as you look at this sort of moment in these cases, is holistically, people who are freaking out on the left and worried about this court in the direction of a country? Like, what's your message to them? Yeah, I don't think it's as clean as people on either side would like it to be. I agree that there's... Just to be clear, the right is talking about impeaching Amy Coney Barrett this week.

Everyone's freaking out. Yeah, that's fair. Fair point. Yeah, so I don't think there is necessarily a clean, singular narrative about what this court is. and what they should be. I think maybe one of the closest ones is they keep telling Congress to do its job in different ways. I still have some concerns about what that actually, how that actually plays out, right? Like, if you're angry at this court, I get it, right? On some of the big decisions, I get why you would be. They've ruled in our favor on a number of key issues, but I get why you'd be

upset with them on others. They're not wrong to say Congress has to resolve this. This is something that Sarah and I keep saying. I guess where I have some concern still is, does Congress actually have the room and the mechanism to resolve some of this? Because if the court, going back to our earlier conversation, is overturning some of Congress's efforts, then that has me concerned. If the campaign finance and clay decisions tell us anything about our elections, then it, you know, the elections are how we choose the Congress that is supposed to resolve these issues. And if they are making it more difficult in certain ways to elect a Congress that is going to be protecting the people that we hope to protect, then that has me concerned.

But I don't think that there's like a singular brush we can use to paint this court. at least not after this session alone. All right, one thing I want to tell all of you out there listening, if you have questions, we would love to hear them. We'd love to hear your voice, and maybe we'll play your voice on the show. Record a voice memo with a question that you might have, maybe 30, 40 seconds or so send it to us at LRC at kCRW.org. We'd love to hear from you.

And let's move on to our left, right, and center, rants and raves. Mo, I will go to you first this week. It's the 4th of July, America's 250th birthday. I'm excited. I'm excited to celebrate our nation's birthday. Despite all of the flaws, despite all of the challenges, despite the hyper-polarization that seems to be tearing this country apart, our experiment continues.

The great American experiment continues. And I do want to celebrate that, at least for as long as I can. What bums me out is I feel like the best place I can do that is as far away from D.C. as I can get. DC this weekend feels tense, even around something like the nation's birthday, around the 250th celebration. You've got people who want to get away because they don't want to be anywhere near this president. You've got people coming into town, though not as many as he would like us to believe. to celebrate. He's made it primarily about himself as opposed to the nation. So I think he has missed a huge unifying opportunity. But what does give me hope is seeing and hearing about all of the celebrations

that are going to happen all over the country that have nothing to do with Donald Trump. They have nothing to do with any singular politician. Americans still celebrating America. And I think that's still worth something. All right. Sarah. Well, I was going to talk about Neil, the 2,200-pound elephant seal who's a teenager wrecking havoc in Tasmania. But you're not going to do that? Instead, I will do a little light reading for the group. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent, of the governed. And if I could dot, dot, dot here. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. What's kind of fun about that for me is that I think of Jefferson as a political opponent. I don't like his presidency. I don't like his policy beliefs. I don't think he was a good man morally. But wow, we agree on that. And maybe we can all find something about that, you know, this weekend. I'm supposed to follow a reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Well, I'm still going to try. And this is, this, I think, is related. I am really psyched about the U.S. men's national team in the World Cup. I just, and I think this last match against Bosnia, you know, there was a red card that was, to me, ridiculous that was given to the United States. I don't know what the motivations were. but I mean, we played the last 30 minutes of that match, a player down. And that's really impressive. And still scored a second goal.

And still scored a second goal. USA. There you go. That happening in this moment, that team going forward, as we talk about kind of a really exciting but complicated celebration, I think is really cool. But I appreciate the reading of the Declaration of Independence here on left, right, and center. And I appreciate you both, Mo and Sarah. and I appreciate everyone who works on this show,

including Leo Duran, who is the producer. Our executive producer is Arnie Seiple. The show is recorded and mixed by Nick Lampony. Todd M. Simon composed our theme music. Left Right and Center is a co-production of KCRW and Fearless Media. We're distributed by PRX. I'm David Green. I appreciate you joining us and come back next week.

We'll have more Left, Right and Center. Download and subscribe at KCRW.com slash LRC, the KCRW app or wherever you find podcasts. Left, right, and center is produced and distributed by KCRW.

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