David French: MAGA Is Making America Less Free

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. Do I welcome back to the show opinion comments for the New York Times co-host of the legal podcast advisory opinions former JAG officer. It is David French, welcome back David. - Tim, great to see you. - Good to see you too, man. - We'll have much to discuss, including ending with your class conversation about just war theory and LSU football. So we'll get to that. I have minor good news for listeners and an appreciation for people that we're calling Katie Britton, others office. The Venezuelan family had mentioned a couple of weeks ago now at Gariani and Freddy's, did finally get out of the Dilly detention center and they were back in Venezuela. I mean, probably the best news would have been if they were able to stay in America, but that's neither here nor there. At least they're no longer in a detention center, appreciate the audience that engaged on that. Less good news on some of the other stuff, related to the detention. So I wanted to start there. You wrote a Times column this week talking about now, about a year old, the remains of Osterk's story. There's a legal ruling about that that reflected back in that story and talked about just kind of the perniciousness of this policy by the administration. So why don't you just cook on that? - Sure, sure, sure. So let's go back to March 20, 25 March of last year and there was this footage that was really, when you knew it in context was really shocking. It's this young Muslim woman. She's bundled up for the winter and it's cold weather and some plain clothes officers come up to her. One of them puts her his hands on her, she screams. Next thing you know, there's several other plain clothes officers. They kind of gather around her, lead her away, shackler, lead her away. And if that was a video of an arrest for say a violent crime, you know, a murderer, armed robber, something like that, it would not be a shocking video. It'd actually be kind of a benign arrest. I mean, she wasn't thrown to the ground or anything like that. But then you heard why she was arrested. She was arrested and detained for deportation because she was a co-author of Tim, what is really a pretty milk toast op-ed? - Yeah. - I mean, it was anti-Israel, no question about it. You know, it was calling for a tough university where she was a graduate student to, you know, boycott Israel, you know, wanted the school to call what was happening in Gaza, genocide, like very standard rhetoric, like very standard rhetoric. She was one of four authors. And immediately the news comes out that she was being deported under this relatively obscure legal provisions. They give the Secretary of State essentially total discretion to deport a visa holder when the Secretary of State in total discretion decides that they're a serious threat to the foreign policy of the United States. And when I first heard this, I thought, that can't be right. Like even in the Trump administration. - She's got to be texting ISIS or something. - Yeah, she's texting ISIS, she's shoplifted, like something else is going on. But no, as the court proceedings unfold in and there was a bail hearing after she'd been detained for weeks, Tim, for weeks. There was a bail hearing. And the judge in the hearing was like, no, this is, she was detained for co-authoring. Again, this was not an op-ed calling for the op-bilan overthrow of the United States of America. It was an op-ed engaging and bog standard pro-Palestinian rhetoric. Like the most standard pro-Palestinian rhetoric. It wasn't even written in in inflammatory ways. Pretty dry, to be honest. And no, in fact, she had been detained for weeks for writing an op-ed. And the reason I wrote about this, this incident that occurred in 2025 is because just last week, there was a federal judge in California who struck down the, or issued a declaratory judgment, declaring that the statutes that Rubio had used were unconstitutional, at least as applied to protected speech. In other words, the government was relying on unconstitutional statutes to deport non-citizens for their speech. And so I wrote about that for a couple of reasons. One is, I'm just getting all of this sort of, Normie Republicans who are desperate for Normie Republican to kind of unite behind around 20, in around 2028. And a lot of them have fixed their eyes on Marco Rubio. Well, Rubio, in his little sphere of influence, has been a bit of a 10-pot dictator. That this is-- - The worst. - At the worst. - Something to the worst last week in the account. - I mean, this is inexcusable. Like these people, and what we found out is, and what the courts found out as the, there were factual findings and investigation of all this, is that the administration worked with a pro-Israel activist organization called Canary Mission, got a list of about 5,000 people to further scrutinize who had engaged in a pro-Palestinian rhetoric or anti-Israel rhetoric, whittled that down to between 100 and 200 people to target them for further investigation, again, around their political speech. So, if you're thinking about this as, wait a minute, could this happen in America? Like, what is happening? You're on the right track. But when the judge struck down these statutes, the reaction in parts of the right was just really volcanic at the very idea that non-citizens would enjoy free speech rights. Just volcanic. Some people are even calling it the Constitution is a suicide pact. Suicide pact, because it lets graduate students write op-eds. I mean, what are we even doing here? I mean, this is so-- - I mean, Ben Shapiro, even like in the more mainstream of the right wing, he wrote this, you put this. Like, we should deport people who hate America and aren't citizens, the administration, was making the precisely the correct moves on this front. - What the heck, and what was making this particularly pernicious is that if you actually read the text for the Constitution, if you read the Declaration of Independence, if you read the founders, sort of the idea that American liberty is for American citizens only, was totally alien to them. I mean, that's just not the way that the United States was envisioned. - Well, all of them were born in a foreign country for starters. - Well, I mean, and you know, it's so funny Tim, one of the things, I feel like this is my nerd moment. Like, this is the nerd moment. Like, I've been waiting for my whole life. I've loved to read about the debates around the founding. I've loved to read about the founders my whole life. I've read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and was just waiting in a corner, Tim, to like pounce on the right moment in American history to be like, this is all so relevant because it is. You know, what's so interesting is we're refighting a lot of the fights around the founding. And it's the Trumpist right that is essentially trying to reinvent the founding of the United States. To pull, you know, for all their talk and Trump won the 1776 project and all of their tattoos about patriotism and all of this stuff. A lot of these guys are essentially trying to unwind big parts of the founding to make America less free and more chauvinistic and nationalistic. - And more white. - But we have, you know, going back to the alien and sedition acts in 1798. You have been like Thomas Jefferson, principal author Declaration of Independence, James Madison, principal author of the Bill of Rights saying, no, the blessings of American liberty extend to non-citizens who are in our midst. And this is very, very clear. And Jefferson even goes so far as to say, if you are attacking the quote, "friendless alien." The citizen is next. And we have seen this, we have seen this. And we can go into the law of it all. But the text of the Constitution backs this up as well. The ban on Congress of bridging free speech is a blanket ban. It's not for citizens. The Fifth Amendment, which was also another constitutional amendment the court used to overturn these statutes, protects the deprocessory rights of persons, not just citizens, persons. And so the text of the Constitution, the clear intent of the founders, the Declaration of Principles and the Declaration of Independence, which does not limit unalienable rights to Americans, all men are created equal. All of this is said that from the founding, this idea that non-citizens in our midst have no rights at all is just alien. And here we come with Marco Rubio coming in and exercising this really stupid grant of discretion that Congress gave presidents and secretaries the state years ago, exercising it in the most brutally authoritarian way. And creating literally Tim, I could class of political prisoners in the US. Well, I want to bring this up for three reasons. One, I want to let you nerd out. Two, when I did a big rant about Marco Rubio not being the normie administration last week on the show. I was focusing on his failures in diplomacy, which I think is the main job of Secretary of State as far as I can tell. But he's got a lot of hats. Yeah, but I left this aside, the immigration part of it, which is maybe where he's shown his most authoritarian impulses. But the other reason I want to bring it up is I mentioned on the show a story of Mariam Tomasebi and her husband and son a couple weeks ago now. There was an article in the nation. She had written from inside of Dilly Prison, an article from the nation. And I've now been emailing her a little bit. And so I just want to say up front this story is so insane. It's similar to the remains of ostrich thing that's like, my source for this is what she is telling me, right? And so is it possible there's some other thing happening? I guess, but the administration hasn't shown us anything. And now we've seen the administration's track record. of doing things exactly like this. So I don't have any reason not to believe it, but I do just want to say that. So the story for people who missed the last time I mentioned it, there was an online smear campaign. This is kind of really similar to the Austrian story, but instead of being about me, and the Israel was about, it was kind of the pro-shah Iranian crowd. Very much times that he's mother-in-law, or husband's mother, was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before any of the people that are detained were even born. This kind of petition went up online, that they were targeted, they've been detained, they're from California, they were sent to, well, Mariam and her son are in Delhi, the husband's in a different detention center somewhere else, so they've been separated. The email she sent to me, she says, again, this is her testimony. Our case is the first of any green card holders in the history of the country, that the government's taking their legal status away, not because of anything that they have done, but because of family relationship, the government's presented zero evidence, except for this Rubio letter that you have been talking about, David, that Rubio letter resulted in the attention of her child, a 10th grader, saying that he's a potential threat to U.S. foreign policy. She says he's an average American teenager that's been harmed beyond belief by this. The family doesn't even have a speeding ticket to its name, no other crimes. The government hasn't offered them a single pathway out of detention, or even out of a country for 150 days, talked about weeks in the ostracase, they've been in detention for 150 days. Unbelievable, unbelievable. I mean, now again, I will do the caveats, but at some point, this is what happened with the ostracase is the government has to put up or shut up. In other words, when you go into court, there's got to be evidence there. And what the administration's very good at doing is making sort of sweeping, condemnatory statements, and then not backing them up with any evidence at all. Like this op-ed, one of the things you're talking about, Ben Shapiro's statement and others about people who hate America, Steven Miller, people who hate America. If you read the op-ed, you would see that she doesn't have a lot for Israel. You know, no question about that. And as I said in my piece, I disagree with this op-ed. I'm not sitting here defending somebody who's like on my side of an argument. This is somebody who I disagree strongly with the op-ed, but you know, this is the United States of freaking America. And if you can't debate a tough PhD student on this matter, who's the snowflake here, right? I mean, like, come on. And so here you have a situation where, once again, you had this sort of hate America. And then you hate America is not a grounds for, what does that even mean? Who's defining that, right? But that's not even-- Trump hates America in some ways. In some ways, he's attacked our country and our history in some pretty incredible ways. Yeah, I mean, he's compared us to Putin's Russia. I mean, this is the kind of thing that he does. But this sort of idea that you're going to make these big sweeping declarations. And time and time again, not always. Sometimes, you know, we hear one story. And then when the evidence comes out, we find out that the person who's being deported did some serious things, you know, sometimes the facts actually align for the administration. But we've seen this movie before, Tim. Big sweeping declarations when it comes to put up or shut up and court, they have nothing to put up. And this is something that's very important, I think, to emphasize. We're seeing this, people being detained in tough conditions, detained, imprisoned, when they're not actually accused of a crime. Indefinitely. Indefinitely. That's what she said to me in the email. She's like, I've been in for 150 days. Even if Rubio's detention order was somehow constitutionally valid. Why is a non-criminal spending weeks in difficult conditions in detention? And when they're not even being accused of a crime, this is something that I think keeps getting glossed over in a lot of our debates. Again and again, you see the administration bragging about the brutal way that it treats immigrants. You see immigrants like being led in humiliating fashion, up airplane steps, bound, hand in feet, shackled, hand in feet, like criminal defendants coming into a courtroom of people who, you know, armed robbers, suspected murderers, et cetera, bound, hand in feet. And the people who are bound, hand in feet weren't even in the country illegally, in some cases, where if you're dealing with the TPS deportees, they were here legally. Right. And now they're being deported, bound, hand in feet. And what planet is this not barbaric? I mean, this is absurd. We're treating non-criminals worse in some ways than we treat certain classes of actual criminals in the United States. Yeah, way worse. It's staggering. Way worse. It's staggering. And the other thing that Mario said or emailed to me is like that the conditions like in these metal trailer prisons they're in are crazy in Delhi. And we've seen that reporting from other people. You know, folks that I've had on the program, like Jonathan Blitzer. So it's horrifying. I'm going to keep on this time of study story for people and let folks know if there's anything they can do. But, you know, to your point about the way that the administration's now acting, one thing that we've been saying recently because it's true, is that it was like a modest change in tone. In some ways that I thought was kind of pernicious, honestly, from like the gnome to the Mullen DHS, where they're doing less of like the ASMR, you know, immigrant cruelty porn. But then yesterday they're back. This is probably the picture you were just referencing, Mark Wayne Mullen posts a picture of the Haitians, you know, going on to a deportation fight, shackled, and you know, talking about how it's keeping the country safe. That's like, these people came to the country legally. You can't go to the country through a legal process. It's like, okay, it's fine if you want to change the policy. It's not my preferred policy. But to dehumanize them and treat them like criminals and thugs and threats to the country is disgusting. - And was it you, Tim, that tweeted? No, I think it was Jesse's single who tweeted out that same thing. And it was like every time. And it was like bragging and showing and puffing the chest out about this dehumanizing treatment of people who are not criminals. And then in the bio, first word, Christian. And if this doesn't sum up so much of the quote unquote Christian activism of the Trump era, it's again and again and again. You will see somebody celebrating cruelty. You'll see somebody spreading lies. You'll see somebody engaging in the most vicious speech and cruel speech online. And then you go to their bio and it's like Christ is King or Christian. And I mean, this is a bit of a tangent. The long term damage to, in particular, the evangelical church is going to be very significant. It's going to be very significant because there will come a time when people will wake up from all of this and in their foggy hangover from all of this cruelty, we'll say who, what? Let us down this path. And the number one answer is going to be the white evangelical church. That's going to be the number one answer, at least from the grassroots up standpoint. - Guys, this summer it's getting kind of sweaty down here in the bayou. And boy, as I mentioned on the show, think about how sweaty it's going to be up in Baton Rouge with all the hot air coming out of the tiger faithful as we begin the lane kiffin experience. And if you're going to be in a sweaty environment, you want some clothes that keep you comfy, keep you from overheating. And one way to do that is with our friends, Mac Weldon's air knit fabric. The Mac Weldon air knit fabric is super cozy. I've been doing that V-neck tea. I got out of V-neck, I was very big into V-neck teas and the odds, I was a V-neck tea man for a while. And then I stopped. I don't know why I stopped. 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Feel as effortlessly cool as you look with Mac Weldon. Go to Mac Weldon.com and get 20% off your first order of 125 bucks or more with promo code double work. That's m-a-c-k-w-e-l-d-o-n dot com code the book. I asked you if you all met this yesterday, an email from a reader that was like, why isn't there more focus on, yeah, obviously, Christians should believe in treating everybody with dignity, it's fundamental to the faith, but just kind of as a rhetorical matter. A lot of people that are being deported and that we're treating like this are Christians, are we sending them back to places, you know, I mentioned the story yesterday about the couple that got sent to Guatemala back to this, you know, kind of gang-ridden part of Guatemala they were from and the two parents get killed and the baby is left there, let next door bleeding out mother. And a lot of cases like these are Christians that we're doing this to. - Oh, absolutely. And what makes it even worse, Tim, there's a recent, you know, I've just gotten some information [BLANK_AUDIO] refugee resettlement for persecuted Christians. Okay, so this is the big pro-Christian administration. So in 2024, the last full year of the Biden administration, there are 29,479 persecuted Christians, refugees permitted to resettle in the United States. That's the highest number since 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, 32,000 persecuted Christians. 2026, Tim. Four. Zero. Zero. I went high on my guess. You went high. Zero. Zero. And in fact, what we're seeing is persecuted Christians and sometimes being deported back to the places where it persecuted them. Yeah, we're doing the persecuting. Actually, it's negative. Zero is too nice to them. Zero is too nice. If you count as a negative one for every persecuted Christian, we persecute. You know, the number is deep into the negatives. That's a stunning stuff. I mean, you know, and it really does demonstrate the just a total upside-down morality right now in which in which so many Christians are approaching politics and just totally upside down. And to the extent to which they're cheering on an administration that is abandoned Christian brothers and sisters around the globe who are facing unimaginable persecution in some parts of the world. Just unimaginable. And like the gates of the United States of America are now close to them. What are we doing here? Like what are we doing here? It's sick. And just maybe the prime most kind of clownish example of this hypocrisy. I'd like to show a video. It's a gentleman that was so performative and as Catholicism, one of my people unfortunately, in this case, that he went on to kind of a Christian broadcast in QVC to sell little totems from saints to old ladies and then did a lot of performative legitimacy and and demonstrated just how Catholic he was. simultaneous to that he was tweeting about how he likes to masturbate to ice detentions. Like he makes him so excited when immigrants get detained by ice that he masturbates to it. Unfortunately for him, he was an illegal immigrant in the country and got to experience some of that brutality and he described it on the Pears Morgan show. I didn't really understand the physical reality of of how institutionalized the brutality is in America. The one man in which they arrest you, they put your manacles, your hands, your feet, chaining together. I mean like everybody is arrested is like an MS-13 gang member and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television. I was weeping like an old woman for an hour and I was like oh, I really have to go to get this out of my system. I think maybe in the past I've been a little bit blusy when people talked about their trauma, a little bit kind of cavalier when people talked about you know stuff kind of lingering with them but I get it now and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. David, it hurt more than he thought. Wow yeah. You know Tim and part of the irony here is this guy Milo Yanopoulos is one of the architects of Trumpism. I mean this is a guy who you remember I remember this very well 2015 2016 he was the guy running around calling Trump daddy. He was sort of the clown prince of the alt right at that time. His star was rising in 2017. You know think of him as like the Tucker Carlson-esque slash Nick Fuentes-esque style troll of Trump won until his star came crashing to the ground in 2018. He's been trying to crawl back into prominence ever since then. He's not a good guy. This is not a good guy and I tweeted something out that detonated like a small bomb on that infernal website and I was just like this is why the attack on empathy is so evil because if we have to wait for person after person to actually experience the brutality of this administration before we wake up then the human cost is going to be staggering. But if instead we can have a modicum of empathy look at somebody who's being frog marched out of the country in manacles as shackled when they did not commit a crime and we can't have any empathy for that then we're going to guarantee just continued brutality and when I tweeted that out I'm not saying Milo's a good guy. Often we learn about brutality from people who are not good guys. That's who we learn about brutality for. But it's a perfect lesson. This guy was one of the architects of the destruction of empathy in our culture. I mean he's one of the chief offenders. Anytime you can tweet about masturbating to other people's misfortune you're horrific. And then it's an old story Tim. It happens to you. I don't get one exception in this case. I don't know. No exception. The not even one. No exceptions too. I haven't done it. I just wanted to check with you. And then you get to this and you're like this is the oldest story in the book. You know you're that's that old statement. You're reaping. Ha ha ha. Here I go. And then you're sowing. What the heck? What is happening? And just this is another example. So people got mad at you as the anti-empathy crowd that was mad at you. Who is mad at you? Anti-empathy crowd. And then some people are like how are you giving any credence to my love's words? He's a clown. He's an evil clown. Well yeah. He's been an evil clown. But as I was explaining to you know some friends of mine who are sort of pushing back on my tweet. 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You still talk to a lot of people who are still Republicans and then you also have a ton of people in a really deeply hate you. You're hearing from both groups in different times. All the time. Even you can talk about the immigration stuff. It's just broadening it out to the state of play as we head to Labor Day. We head to the midterms. I'm wondering what you're hearing anecdotally from people in your life about the Trump 2 experiment. Has it changed since last year? It has changed. I would say the 180 from December of 2024 to right now amongst sort of normy Republicans is headspinning. Because December 2024 I would think was the absolute high point. Because this was the vibe shift, Kamala lost. She lost nearly but decisively. It could be narrow and decisive at the same time. In other words, it was an unambiguous loss. She loses nearly but decisively. The Republicans feel like, "Okay, I held my nose for Trump. But look at what I've gotten. I've gotten a defeat of DEI. Wokeism is on the run. It's the vibe shift. We've won a cultural battle for the first time in a long time." Then it was by mid-late December that you began to see Trump was replacing exaggerated wokeism with idiocracy. It's kind of like the headset and RFK and Tulsi appointments and then all of the richest people in the world in the first row of the inauguration. It's kind of like that period where he started. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You realize, okay, he's triumphant, but all the warning signs for for the looming disaster, we're already all there. This was not- coming in with Mattis and Tillerson, etc. This is coming in with Patel and Hexeth and Nome. And then as these things happen, you began to just see growing and growing and growing discomfort. To the point now where nobody that I would call an "normy Republican" and my life is at all trumpeting their trump vote, they are deeply upset at things like the Ken Paxton, you know, the way in which the Ken Paxton supporters are trying to bully them into continuing to support the Republican nominee, even though he's arguably outside of Donald Trump, the most corrupt politician in America. They're tired of the endless cloutery. And then MAGA in my experience is doubling down except the fringes of MAGA. Like what you would have thought were some of the most extremist MAGA people like a Marjorie Taylor Greene, they're the ones who are out. Well, because to be on the fringe, you believe some things. You might believe some cookie things, you know, but you believe some things. That's different than a cult. You really have to be able to use a magnifying glass to tell the difference sometimes, but there is a difference. Look, here we are at September, things can change between now and November, but I think if present trends continue, what you'll see, the anecdotal, the anecdata that is all around me, I think the way you would see that reflected is an election results in the following way. If you get a double digit or close to double digit Ossoff victory in Georgia, if you get a double digit or close to double digit Cooper victory in North Carolina, what you're going to see there is that's your very clear tangible evidence that a lot of normy Republicans are either not Republicans anymore, their independence, or maybe they're very soft Democrats, or just sort of totally up for grabs. And I think if you're a Democrat, you know, I saw this great, great comment online from Jeremiah Johnson, who's a great follow, by the way, really like his stuff. And he's like here, look Democrats, Cooper is in a swing state, arguing a reddish swing state, this is a Trump victory state. He's probably going to win in a swing state by 10, and yet a lot of the democratic world and media world is going to focus on some DSA candidate who wins a D plus 80 district in Brooklyn, right? The future is with the people who can win in a swing state by 5, 10 points. That's your future right there. And there also, I think, the leading educators of the discontent of a lot of Republicans, not of the base. The base is still going to support Trump if they turn out, but of a lot of the people who previously you would have said, it's going to take a lot for this person across the aisle. It's going to take a lot. And so that's what I'm kind of seeing. Do you have any Texas anecdote for me? Do you have any hope for Friday? Do you have any friends who are Republicans? So like, I'm just, I might have to do Tallariko without a dream. No, I know personally two to three time Trump voters who are out on Paxton completely not going to vote for him or vote for Tallariko. I know Republicans who have, you know, Texas Republicans, who've never voted for Democrats, who are going to vote for Tallariko. Now, that anecdotish should not give people too much hope. I'm very, I'm very leery of hope in the state of Texas. It's Lucy with a football with Democrats for a while. But let me just put it this way. You have one candidate here who is really hustling, who is really trying, who is putting everything into the race, who is reaching out and extending all of branches to centrist Republicans. And you have another candidate who's jetting off to London or Iceland. I forget where it was with their, you know, their paramore on July 4th weekend. I mean, it's, it's not just that Republicans nominated a corrupt guy. They nominated a corrupt lazy guy. You know, so here's Tallariko who's doing everything he can do to try to win. And you've got Ken Paxton who's treating it like he is the birthright. It's his birthright to be the senator from Texas and that winning the nomination was all he had to do. And then he's got this army of online trolls who quite frankly are doing him no favors by being just gigantic assholes online to anyone who expresses any doubts about Ken Paxton. And so, look, Tallariko is well to my left on a number of things. But I will tell you this, if character is destiny, there is no contest in this election. There is no contest in this election. I guess you could take this from political or a legal standpoint. Like the Trump ego stuff, and we're talking to Ben Tara Slater today who has a great profile on Trump's ballroom obsession. You know, there's a Supreme Court ruling on the ballroom. The coin is out. And the coin seems like blatantly illegal. I guess, like, let's do it from a legal standpoint because I did this frustrated rant on the next level with Sarah and JVL this week where I was like, you know, I am not a lawyer. Once you'll start talking about standing, I'm just like, what about what is legal and illegal? And it's like, yeah, it is illegal. I would think for the president to just create a slush fund with going around Congress or he gets to build things and tear things down at his whim. I followed how a bill becomes a lot. And it's plainly illegal in the statute that he can't put himself on coins. And yet they're just doing it. And it's like, well, we'll get to it in the 2027 session. That's frustrating to me. It is frustrating to me, but there are also good reasons why this system exists. So essentially, the way the court system exists is if an unlawful action has been taken, it can be challenged only by people who have suffered a concrete injury from the unlawful action. In other words, otherwise, the courts just get converted into sort of a, almost a third layer of legislature and a kind of a, well, they're going to be the final say on everything, the unelected judges. So the way that we have narrowed the court's authority over American life is we make sure that if I walk into court, I have what's called a concrete and particularized injury. In other words, this thing has hurt me. And so what's very unfortunate about the case is they had a very weak, weak allegation of standing, which is essentially this person who comes sort of around like once a month or so, thinks that the new construction is like just a giant eye sore. So who would be injured by this though? You know, this is a weird situation, right? It is a weird situation, but you know, then to make it even weirder, in some circumstances, the court has recognized what's called aesthetic standing. So for example, if you want to go to a national park and see crocodiles or alligators or whatever, and there's a policy that removes all the alligators, then there has been aesthetic standing. Now this is something from years ago that the current court majority has never really loved. And so we're in like this transitional period. But the quick answer to that would be, let's suppose somebody makes money from giving White House tours that they can't give anymore, would be an example or somebody who's, this just seems kind of crazy to me because I guess Congress is the one that has to, he's going around the system. I don't know what I mean, it's weird. It's not like like the way that it's illegal is not, nobody's being harmed by the coin either, but it's against the law. So I have a t-shirt that I wear that says I love the Constitution. So I take a backseat to no one and like I love the Constitution. But the founders were not all Jesus. You know, they did not get everything right. And one of the things that they got wrong to our great chagrin is that Madison in particular and others believed that I, if I was Speaker of the House, I would feel that I had my own independent authority. And I'd be pissed if the president started to intrude upon my sphere of influence that that people will try to grab as much power as they can. And so therefore Congress as Congress would assert its prerogatives over the president. And he underestimated and what he got wrong about that was he underestimated partisanship. So he underestimated that Mike Johnson right now would view his actual threat to his power not Trump stomping Oliver Congress. But him resisting Trump stomping Oliver Congress because then he'll lose his primary. Right. And so this is where the Jeffries become Speaker. But the Democrats don't take the Senate so they can't actually pass a bill to stop it. Does Jeffries have standing then? But does Congress have to say, hey, like, can they go and say we didn't go around. He wasn't, this wasn't funded through the normal funding process. Yeah. Well, it gets very difficult. It does get very difficult because congressional standing is not something that is traditionally necessarily available. It's only available in like very specific situations. But I'm not going to say that nobody is out there that has standing over the demolition of the ballroom. I think that that is a little bit bold to say it's harder to say that somebody would have standing over the coin, for example. But we're going to be in a situation potentially after 2027 where even if the Democrats only take the House to fund anything, to fund anything, there's going to have to be a necessity, a necessity of democratic buy-in. God willing. I don't know. They just did a continuing resolution because they don't want to have a shutdown fight. They might wimp out. Well, that's a whole nother set of questions. I mean, you know, but the bottom line is We underestimated before 2016 the extent to which the American experiment itself hinges on to at least some degree the honor system. And I think Tim, one of the things that we need to do after we get through this terrible period is we need a period of constitutional reform. We need a period that says, look, the anti-federalists were right about some of the critiques of this constitution, and it is time for us to do something about it. And I've got ideas and thoughts. Here's number one, Tim, reform the pardon power. If we don't do that, we're idiots. Like we're just idiots if we don't reform the pardon power is my view. And then number two. Age caps, 28th, 28th amendment. We have age floors. Why not age caps? Age caps, I think, is a very good idea. Modern reform is a very good idea. There's multiple ideas right now regarding how we can avoid there ever being another Donald Trump. My dream goal, my wish, I want to change the first sentence of article two of the Constitution of the United States to jam the president back into the box that he was supposed to be in when the country was founded. So if you want to know what the president was supposed to do, you've all lived in, says this very well. My friend, great conservative thinker, the president is supposed to be the steward of the laws passed by Congress. In other words, that's what it means to be the executive. He executes the laws passed by Congress. Article two, though, says the executive power shall be invested in a president, but it doesn't define the executive power. And an anti-federalist writing under the name of Cato back all those years ago accurately said this sentence is vague and inexplicit. Wait a minute. This is what this is who Cato, the institute is named. Cato is not named. Cato, the institute is named after Cato, the ancient thinker and so was Cato, the anti-federalist. So we're going all the way back, right? Okay. That's right. You've got a lot of Cato's out there. So this Cato said it's vague and inexplicit and he was right. It doesn't define the executive power. So what I would want to do is say a president of the United States shall execute the laws passed by Congress totally changes the valence because there you're not saying, what is this executive power? Is it this freestanding thing that grants him independent authority? And this is where so much mischief has been poured into our system is through this concept that there exists something called the executive power that is different and apart from executing a law. And that's created enormous problems. And I know that's a reach goal, Tim, but look, that feels challenging. We will break out of this deadlock at some point. And American history tells us every deadlock breaking requires substantial legal reform or you will go right back to where you were before. And so we have to be thinking about this. I mean, this is an urgent matter. The other thing, let's just imagine what can we do about mass pardons? Well, because the pardon power is horrifically broad, nothing much. But one thing that you could do is if you did actually break the law jam in 2028, you could impeach and convict every Trump official who takes a preemptive pardon and ban them from federal office forever. You won't be able to prosecute them for federal crimes. But I think it's important to think about these things because we're going to re-need if we want to have a healthy democracy, we're going to need a period of accountability in reform. Amen to that. One way to actually get power to do some of these reforms, you have to win elections. So, I do want to hear that. There's that, Tim. Oh, well, yeah. So there is the political side of that. I'm doing a lot of that next week about what the Democrats should be doing to be more successful on the political side. So let's talk about the legal fighting. Is this big postal service case? What's your level of alarm about that right now? My level of alarm that the actual postal service regulations will go into effect is low. A lot of people misunderstood the Supreme Court's ruling on this. This was a ruling in essence that said, okay, you brought the case too soon that the actual executive order just was saying, hey, I'm directing you to create a regulation. So the regulation exists, we don't know what we're adjudicating. And so now the regulation exists and it was promptly enjoined. There's actual standing to contest it. The dispute is ripe because the regulation exists. There is no impediment to actually looking at it on the merits. And this is one of those cases where Tim, I never like to say, it's impossible for the court to rule for Trump. Let me put it this way. On this point on the merits of that, I would fall out of my chair and shock if the Supreme Court ruled for Trump on it. One other stuff you're looking at as far as midterms than shenanigans. So the main shenanigans I'm worried about are actually post-vote. Yeah, same. I do think it's within the realm of possibility that you would see ice agents being deployed to polling places. But something that blatant would begin to have some real electoral blowback, it's after. And here's the way I would put it, Tim, think of it like this way. If you were looking at the Hungarian elections, they could use extreme measures to try to reverse the outcome of an election in Hungary. But if the outcome is so lopsided, then in that circumstance, you sort of swamp the possibility of post electoral fraud. So where I am very, very nervous is if you have a situation where, let's suppose the house stands or falls on five or six races. I think we could skip through that. I think they're going to, whatever we'll see what happens, but the Senate is where this is. Yeah. And then you end up in a state like Texas where Republicans control the state or Iowa. And that, let's say, Tolerico wins by 40,000 votes or 20,000 votes or something, you know. And the control of the Senate is at stake. You will see, I'm going to issue as close to a promise as I can possibly issue, that if the Senate stands or falls on James Tolerico in a 0.2%, you will see massive shenanigans, massive. And here's what's particularly dangerous when you're talking about who is entitled to sit in Congress, Congress ultimately decides who is entitled to sit in Congress. And so what that means is it gives the political branches of government an enormous amount of room to run if they're going to be intentionally corrupt. And so this is something that I'm very concerned about. I'm very concerned about the way in which the Constitution gives the final say over who sits in Congress to Congress. But what if, you know, one side of Congress is thoroughly corrupted and convinced by electoral conspiracy theories or not convinced but carries them out anyway because of a Machia pure will to power? I think that's a very significant threat for which we are not fully prepared. And I try to alert people about this with a particular attention to the House because in the House there are abundant opportunities for shenanigans. Right. Because all these different districts just abundant opportunities. I tried to point this out and had a lot of people saying to me, Oh, David, that wouldn't work because the law says A, B, and C. And like, I know, but, but if you were alive in 2020, you know that the administration will take a law that says A, B, and C. And they'll say it really means D, E, and F. Right. And then try to convince Republican elected officials to follow their warped interpretation of the law, like the electoral count act and the pressure they put on Mike Pence. So I'm trying to highlight, what are the laws that exist that are just ambiguous enough to give them room to run onto Fox News or room to run onto Newsmax and say, the Federal contested election act allows us to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then we're off to the races. And that's what I've been trying to highlight. We do have like the most modest silver lining good news on the Fox front, which is Maria Bartiromo was fired. And the report from Dylan buyers about why that was is that she was trying to pursue a story related to China and the 2020 election voting conspiracies. The Trump was pushing and that's prime time speech a couple months ago. This was obviously sensitive to the network, given that they'd pay $800 million, give or take in fines for their lives about the 2020 election Fox executive sent a text to producers time in the couldn't go to air. Bartiromo took the screenshot and sent it to the White House. She got fired. So maybe Fox behaves a little better this time, I guess is a I mean, they have about 787,500,000 reasons to behave better in the selection cycle. So I hope you're right over on the board takes me and Sam are going to go through Maria's highlights and little lights just for kicks. Okay, just rapid fire to I think there's this vote. I was just curious your take on in the House this week. It was the protect economic and economic freedom act was basically amending the higher education act of 1965 to make that would prevent colleges from having access to certain funds. If they participated in a non expressive commercial boycott of Israel or if they were obstructing students unreasonably from participating in academic programs in Israel, I thought this was interesting. Dash, you about just a free speech guy because as I was reading about this this week, the [BLANK_AUDIO] non-expressive boycotts. It stems from this 2022 ruling about how like a boycott saying you're going to boycott his first amendment, but actually boycotting is not, I guess. I don't know. Well, this issue is so complicated, Tim. Okay. So we can't do it rapid fire, you mean? It's not rapid fire. So, for example, boycotting is very often expressive activity, absolutely. At the same time, national origin discrimination can be very much unlawful. So, if your boycotting is resulting in national origin discrimination. So, for example, let's suppose you want to hold a conference in a hotel that is bound by public accommodations laws that prevent national origin discrimination. And you say, no Israelis, you know, no Israelis. That's national origin discrimination. And so, you know, and be careful, guys, who say, well, I want to engage in this kind of national origin discrimination because it's a good national origin discrimination, but you engage it in other contexts that's bad. No, no, no, no, no. If you want like non-discrimination provisions that protect people from discrimination on the basis of national origin, sex, race, sexual orientation, et cetera, you can't say this discrimination good, that discrimination bad. So, I think a lot of these Israel boycotts actually run a file of non-discrimination law because it's national origin discrimination, if you say. It's interesting because it's just kind of hard to imagine a bill like this passing if like a college was like, hey, we're going to boycott Saudi Arabia. Right. It's going to hard to imagine a Congress having a bill about that. But I am, let me put it this way, I am a free speech person who also supports our non-discrimination laws. So, and I think that the free speech and non-discrimination laws can and should coexist. Now, on the edges, they will, you're always going to have rough edges where they rub up, but as a general matter, think about it like this. In the 1960s, there was a guy who ran a barbecue shop. I believe he's called Piggy Park. And he claimed that he had a religious liberty right, a first amendment right, to exclude black customers. From barbecue. And that he had first amendment rights to exclude black customers from eating barbecue. And the Supreme Court said, this is passionately frivolous. Your religious liberty rights do not extend to a right to exclude black customers from eating barbecue. Now, same facts. And you say, I want to exclude Israeli customers, national origin discrimination. Yeah. Now, that's different. Yeah, sure. The coffee shop story. There's some disgusting things to have here. It's just the campus participation stuff. I don't know. I caught my eye this week. That's all to be continued. I do want to end with the LSU just with just worth there. You posted this yesterday. I'm about to teach my law of war class today at Lipscomb. Today's discussion topic of the SEC. Of course, we're on LSU football and invades Louisiana with Thomas Aquinas. I believe the war was just discussed for people don't know. LSU is advancing a very noble pursuit, which is that there were some there were there are some fifth year seniors that were unfairly discriminated against when they were not aware that the NCA was going to change the rule and give them additional year of eligibility. So these if your seniors declared for the pros, but they really weren't good enough to make the pros. And none of them made it on to any of the teams. But then after they declared the NCA changed the rules and LSU saying, come on back home, baby. Main campus here. We're doing hot yoga. You know, we're doing it. We're we're yelling really inappropriate cuss were a chance at the Clemson fans. We need the best defensive lineman possible to make sure that, you know, we have Louisiana supremacy in football. To me, open and shut case a very noble Louisiana judge that I'm going to be nominating for the Supreme Court if the Democrats ever get in power rule the yesterday that LSU has the right to do this. He was a Baton Rouge judge. Certainly no conflicts there. The attorney on behalf of the LSU players said that the SEC and NCA they were trying to prevent LSU from getting these players were getting served a cold cup of gum bell and they were going to have to drink it cold. And I don't know. So seems like it seems like it's like an obvious situation to me, David. What let's say you Tim in these last 10 years, you have displayed such an admirable freedom for partisanship. You know, you spent years being employed as a Republican, you know, and then you're able to see with clarity who Donald Trump is and you shed the partisan baggage. And yet you found her on the shoals of LSU tight football partisan. Come on, Tim. Tim, see this what for what it is. This is like bringing the Hessians to put down the American Revolution. That's what this is like mercenary NFL players coming back to try to play college football after they have left school. They have been in the pros even for just a cup of coffee just for a short time, Tim. And there's a good reason why the southeastern conference threatening to kick out LSU. And Tim, all I'm going to say is welcome to the Lane Kiffin Excuse. You are just on the first hill on the roller coaster. I am loving it. And so you you do think that Thomas Aquinas would approve of the SEC agenda. Some people responded with just, you know, jokes, but some people like actually went through the Aquinas analysis. And the most interesting was one of the one of the rules for a just wars. It has to come through the lawful sovereign. And they were saying that if the SEC invades, that's like the prince invading, not the king. The king is the NCAA. So Aquinas would say no to an SEC invasion, but yes, to NCAA. Thank you to Thomas Aquinas, STCD to all the people who disagree with the honorable judge in Baton Rouge. David French, I appreciate you very much. Oh, I heard good news about Nancy. I got your wife. Yes, yes. Yeah, she's two years from the end of her treatment, cancer-free, from a particular kind of cancer where you can't ever say like totally in the woods now and forever, but two years for this kind of cancer is very, very, very, very important. And so getting through that two years that, you know, again, God willing, she remains cancer-free and there's never any guarantees, but the risks really start to fall off the cliff. And we're just very grateful because we think back to three years ago when we got the diagnosis to be where we are today is just miraculous thank God, thank her doctors. And can I say something to him? Please. I'm so sick of people pointing out Muslim, you know, Muslim Americans who do bad things and try to make them a stand-in for all Muslim Americans. Thank God for our doctor who is from the West Bank in Palestine who saved my wife's life. We love that man. And the idea, the idea that men like him and women like him are not welcome in this country is an absolute anathema. So I want to give a shout-out to my Palestinian West Bank doctor, or Nancy's Palestinian West Bank doctor who gave her the most loving and excellent care you could ever receive. And there are so many countless folks, Muslim folks like that in and around America who are who are contributing like that. And so I just want to say that because I'm so sick of the cherry-picked hatred of Muslims that I'm seeing all over the online world right now. I love them. I'm so happy for your family too, David. So I'll give Nancy our love and thanks for sharing that and we'll see you next time, all right? Thank you, Tim. Everybody else have a great weekend. I'm heading up to Baton Rouge for the Lane Kiffin experience. I'll see y'all on Monday with Bill Crystal, though. Go Tigers. Peace. The Board Daily is brought to you thanks for the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.