Kevin Burke reacts to the big decisions announced by the Supreme Court

The podcast Campus Files is back with more stories of scandal, crime, and intrigue on college campuses. It is not hard to destroy a college. It's almost like a university under siege. Listen to and follow campus files. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hour number two on an outstanding guest, a man has joined us many, many times over the years. Judge Kevin Burke. for three plus decades, a judge with Hennepin County multiple times as their chief judge. And we always love talking to Kevin, like arena, all guests on the John Schuster, Coldwell Banker hotline. Kevin, I just ran upstairs and had half of a donut. Where does Kevin Burke rank donuts? as a breakfast treat. Like, how does it compare with, like, a croissant or a bagel or an English muffin? It's not as good as a bagel. You're a bagel guys. Dave Harrigan, what do you want to say about that? It's been fun having you on the show, Kevin. You have a great rest of the day. Yeah, we've got to go. Neither one of us really loves. I think the, I think both of us are pretty clear. The bagel overrated. Oh.

He's speechless. I mean, he's speechless. I mean, once we attacked him on the bagel, he refuses to accept it. He's right now out of order. He will hold us in contempt. No, I want bagel with locks and red onions and some capers. Yeah, the whole thing. Now, do you have a good place in town where you go for a bagel? I go to Brueger's, but... I'll go any place. Ideally, I'd go to some deli in New York. That'd be pretty good. But I don't go to New York very often. I'll give you a place, Kevin. El Mars. It is a New York-style restaurant. They primarily serve great classic New York-style pizza, but I think it's Thursday, Friday, Saturday. They make bagels, and they are very, very good. Marty's Deli, good bagels. There's some good places in town. Let's get to the main topic of the day, multiple important legal issues determined by the Supreme Court yesterday. The one that is garnering the most attention, obviously, is the executive order from the president trying to end birthright citizenship. In this country, the executive order was thrown out. The justices, Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Judge John Roberts joined the three liberals. Brett Kavanaugh did also. You can explain the difference how Brett Kavanaugh joined the other two conservatives where he differed a little bit. Did they, in your esteemed opinion, make the right decision? I think that the birthright citizenship was not the most important case decided yesterday, but let me just focus on it. First of all, the five justices who ruled the language of the Constitution is quite clear. If you look at Samuel Alito's dissent, a guy who claims he's a textualist. Yes. There's nothing in the Constitution that says what he wrote. Now, the problem about Brett Kavanaugh's concurrence is this. Brett Kavanaugh invited the Congress to eliminate birthright citizenship. And you can see that Trump... picked up on it right away. Yep. That means that issue is going to keep floating around, I think, for a long time. I doubt very much if the Congress is going to pass the birthright citizenship, but it's an issue that'll keep, there'll be some people who will keep fighting to eliminate citizenship. for a relatively small number of people, meaning hundreds of thousands, but it's not like you're dealing with half of our population or anything. I think the most important case was the slaughter decision, which allows President Trump or any president to remove employees.

And this is why I think this is really critical. Every government, state government, federal government, the British government, the Canadian government, have a cadre of professional civil servants who work from term to term. Their loyalty is... to the EPA or to whatever department they live. In theory to the government, not to the president himself. Right. Now, with the slaughter decision, President Trump will be allowed to remove large swaths of people. And you'll notice in the Justice Department advertising for lawyers. They're advertising not do you know about the rules of evidence, but are you prepared to commit yourself to advancing President Trump's agenda? So in 2008, what will happen to our country if a Democrat becomes president? Option A, you could fire everybody in the federal government and start from scratch. Or I think a better thing to do would be to say, now we have to decide what should the federal government look like. So President Trump, without the authorization from Congress, eliminated the Department of Education. It's not about just recreating it. It's about saying and debating, what should we do? as a federal role for education. And so I think it's the effect of the slaughter decision is you can't remodel the house. You need to basically knock it down and start from scratch once the next president has an opportunity to do that. I want to stay with this, but I definitely want to get back to birthright citizenship, but I want to stay since you brought it up. I just, I know what you're saying, and first of all, Kevin, I'm not convinced that on February 1st, Donald Trump will be gone from the White House. I mean, he might view himself as president for life, or by the way, JD Vance or Marco Rubio could win, just in my political opinion, if the Democrats keep going further to left, and the Republicans run, Marco Rubio, Democrats might be in deep trouble, even with the... all the antipathy towards Donald Trump. But, I mean, this is where even true Republicans, true conservatives should say as another checks and balances. I mean, you use the EPA where if I'm just a government employee of the EPA. I'm following the code of what we're trying to do within that apparatus. And certainly every president, Clinton, Obama, let's just call the Democrats, had an influence on who they pointed ahead that. But the overwhelming majority of these folks were skilled in that area and executed their jobs. And now...

Kevin, you're just lackeys of the president going forward. You will not conduct anything impartial. You will not try to provide a counterbalance to the presidency. You will just espouse whatever position they are offering up. And I'm sorry, I don't want that out of my government apparatus, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat controlling the White House. Well, you don't want that in any organization, that if your employees are afraid to challenge you, you're not really going to grow as an organization. It's a very simple thing is dissent has an important role in the development of whatever place you work for. The State Department, for example, used to have a dissent. award. Each year they gave a cash award to the best dissent by a State Department employee. You know, a lot of these issues are not clear. That's right. And you really want to have robust debate. Or the other area is you kind of alluded to it, it's scientists. Yeah. You really don't want to end up saying, we will load up. the federal government with people who are opposed to vaccinations, and everybody's going to be healthy after that. Yeah. Let's get back to birthright citizenship. Let me do this, Kevin. Let me just squeeze in a break before we do, because I do want to get back to that. I also want to get back to another campaign finance decision that the Supreme Court offered up where it just seems to me we're headed to. There'll be no limits. And we think we're at an amount of money that's obscene now. With elections, we're headed to no limits and, excuse me, billions and billions of dollars. And I think that's absolutely the wrong way to go. Former Chief Judge of the Hennepin County Courts multiple times and a judge within the system for 30 plus years. Kevin Burke with us here on CC. Hi, my name is Lloyd Lockridge, and I'm the host of a new podcast from Odyssey called Family Lore. In this podcast, I'm going to have people on to tell unusual and sometimes far-fetched stories about their families. I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita. And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true. He gets a patent one month before the Wright brothers. Oh my God. Please follow and listen to Family Lore, an Odyssey podcast, available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. or wherever you get your shows. Will I get to the bumper music theme next segment? We continue with our friend.

Judge Kevin Burke is with us. Okay, birthright citizenship. Let's get a few things out of the way, too. There are many, many countries across the globe who have birthright citizenship. So that nonsense that the president offers up is not true. This whole birther tourism, the idea that millions and millions are coming here, that's also not true. But for people, Kevin, who honestly say, if someone who came into the country, not through the proper legal channels or someone is visiting and a child is born here. And they have questions about that. What do you say about that argument from people trying to be honest and not just so hyper-partisan about the issue? Well, it's a small number of people looking at our whole population. And I saw Stephen Miller's reaction to the Supreme Court decision, which was to suggest we should bar pregnant women from coming to the U.S. Now, just think about that for a second. How absurd is this? Oh, my God. What months do we want to employ this? So are you really seriously going to tell women who are coming here for a vacation? You can't come as long as you're pregnant. That's absurd. Are we going to be checking them? Like, at the airport, say, you know. We've got this little test. We need to go to the bathroom and pee, and then we'll wait and see what the results are. For every female that comes to the country. The whole idea, it seems to me, goes to this problem. Right now, we have seen a decline in tourism, which is important to the economy in many places like Minnesota. The image that we are creating by fighting with Canada, by taking on Europe, and then by the idea of suggesting, well, maybe pregnant women won't be able to come to the U.S., I think I'll go vacation in France. So this is kind of getting out of control. But it goes back a little bit to my comment about Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah, right. Brett Kavanaugh kept the issue alive. that, well, okay, if we can't completely get rid of them, we'll just get rid of the pregnant women. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me with Stephen Miller says a lot of just inane, for my opinion, borderline racist comments on a regular basis. Let me get back to another comment you made about Samuel Alito and other conservative scholars and judges who tell us all the time. I just go by the words in the Constitution. And also I want to include the folks who, when they push back on any sort of gun legislation, will say, nope, Second Amendment, what the Second Amendment says, I'm not going to alter that in any way. If they're going to alter birthright citizenship, they're altering what the Constitution says. Isn't that pretty crystal clear?

Well, it is if you accept the five justices who ruled that way. But there are many people who don't. I want to pursue this. But I would remind them that the Second Amendment decision that is so sacrosanct. was a five to four decision that overruled decades of precedent, including comments from former Chief Justice Warren Berger, who said the idea that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to get arms is silly. So if you want to consider a go. attack and continue to fight on birthright citizenship because it was only a split decision, then the gun thing is going to be there. Now, the gun thing actually didn't get a much publicity, but yesterday the Supreme Court accepted cert, meaning they're going to have an argument as to whether the Second Amendment bans assault weapons. and they've taken a couple of cases to deal with that next fall. So we could be next June on WCCO discussing a Supreme Court decision that allows everybody to go get a bazooka. Yeah, I mean, think about the debate we've had for a well. Yeah, I just, I think it's so funny, Kevin, when people are. literal on the Constitution or call someone an activist judge. For a lot of these folks, Kevin, you know what an activist judge is when someone offers an opinion they don't agree with? That's... Oh, you're completely right. That's when they're... Now, the other thing that I think we should talk about, though, is the decision on campaign finance. Yes, that's where I was going. Because we have now reached the stage in which oligarchs... can contribute unbelievable amounts of money. And it started with Citizens United, but it's pretty much been done in now that there's little, if anything, the present U.S. Supreme Court will accept as a regulation of campaign finance. That can undermine our democracy because you're talking about huge amounts of money. Maybe in places, for example, Maine. Maine's going to spend a godawful amount of money on their Senate race. But as a practical matter, if you get seven mailers a day or six mailers a day, will it change your opinion on Susan Collins? Probably not. The first five have enough. So a lot of this is just going to be dumped on us.

And, but I really do think that these two are important. One, the federal government needs not be run by people whose only allegiance is to the president, which the slaughter decision did. And then the second one, which is, as we select our leaders, we can't afford to have it just decided by billionaires. That's where we're at, right? And I, as a political and personal opinion matter who gives my opinion here, I hate it. I think if we could reduce our elections to like four months and just dramatically control the money, we would be better off. I believe we would get better candidates. However. I want us to follow the laws of the land and the Constitution. And are they doing that? Are they now saying in particular because of Citizens v. United that basically any guardrail on money and elections is either out of here now or soon to be gone? Well, there's a political element to this beyond just the Constitution and its text as an illustration of The Supreme Court ruled that states, which constitutionally is supposed to run elections, can count ballots that are received after election day. Correct. And yet you have these textualists like Samuel Alito blasting that decision at being terrible for our democracy. You know, I bet any dollars to donuts because they know you like donuts. Thank you. That there are everybody, a lot of people listening to us mailed their tax returns in and made sure it got postmarked on April 15th. Yeah, funny. Funny. So the idea that, oh, my God, how could we allow this to happen? Because we do it all the time. Yes. That is exactly right. All right. One last thing. I'm reminded often that when Donald Trump had the three selections and, you know, Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, that there are many liberals out there who thought the world was going to end. And there are decisions every single day where they're 9-0. or as we've talked about some cases here where more often it seems to be John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett side with the liberals. But there are many people, Kevin, who look at the rulings with the three self-described liberal justices where they say, when do they move, that they don't move, that they're just a block, that those three are always in lockstep.

And that seems every bit as partisan as the accusation towards the Trump judges. Do those folks who make that point, are they correct? I think there's an element of correctness with it, but I think it goes like this. Ideally, the Supreme Court would have more 9-0 decisions. But to be in fairness to them, they select cases. and they tend to select cases that are close calls. There's a split in the circuits. Yeah, they're difficult decisions, right? So you're difficult decisions. I get the idea that not everything could be unanimous. But I saw a chart, I think it was in the New York Times today, that showed the split, the number of six three decisions going back 20 years. we're really in a polarized court. And I suspect, but I don't have any inside information, that the to do between Samuel Alito and Ketanji Brown Jackson or Elena Kagan, they don't get along very well. Yeah, seems so. I think it's hard. If you don't respect somebody, if you secretly think, They're a raving lunatic. It's really hard to reach compromise with them. Can I jump in on that? Should somebody listen to this? Now, wait a second. You're a Supreme Court justice. That's fine if you don't get along for whatever reason, but you still have to interpret the law. And if the three liberal justices are always together time after time after time, are they just espousing their political views or are they espousing how the Constitution is written and how it's interpreted in today's times? Well, I think it's hard to generalize, and I'll give you this specific example. The present Supreme Court in the slaughter decision overruled a precedent that was a case that was 90 years old. The same conservative justices in the Dobbs decision overruled precedent. So if you end up saying that the three justices in the, quote, liberals are just dogmatic, is at least from a conservative standpoint, they're saying, hey, this is a decided issue. And you guys are the ones who are making stuff up as you go along. But in the end, I think it's...

They all need to, they need a professional to come in and work with them. You know, because the opinions are too long. Nobody's actually going to read the whole decision. And they take shots at each other that you don't really need. No. It shouldn't be that way. Kevin, always a pleasure, tremendous insight. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Keep playing excellent golf and enjoy the fourth. Okay, bye-bye. Kevin Burke. Swift takes when we return. The Recap Show is an inside look for fans into the world of global soccer, women's sports, and all things, gal culture. From the inside perspective of two World Cup champions and Olympians. Follow and listen to The Recap Show wherever you get your podcasts.