Ryan Goodman on the Trump Administration and the Supreme Court
Filmed July 2, 2025
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I am Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again by Ryan Goodman, professor of law at New York University, co-editor of the Just Security website. A really must read if you want to follow what’s going on in the world of law, and the courts, and the rule of law in the United States. National Security, also a very important part of that. And Ryan also has a Substack, which you should be reading every week, and accounts on social media you should be following every day. Anyway, Ryan, thanks for joining me again.
RYAN GOODMAN:
My pleasure. I look forward to the conversation.
BILL KRISTOL:
We spoke almost exactly five months ago. We’re speaking now just for the record here on July 2nd, Wednesday morning. Supreme Court term is over. The “Wonderful Big Bill” has passed the Senate, and I think it’s probably going to pass the House today so just to locate people. President Trump was in the Everglades yesterday touting his detention camp there. Ugh. Okay, that’s enough editorializing for me. I’ll just say this to the audience, one of Ryan’s great virtues in my opinion is, I mean I’m political philosophy background, so I’m probably too much of a 30,000 foot man want to jump to big macro conclusions based on maybe not quite enough evidence. A lot of our friends, I think, especially lawyers, litigators, are extremely good, and very important in terms of their grasp of the details. And obviously if you’re a litigator, that’s what you deal with.
You’re in a court arguing a case before this judge with this set of laws, and facts. Very few people I think are able to get into that middle ground. I don’t know what that would be. I don’t fly planes, 5,000 feet, 8,000 feet. You’re high up enough to see things, but low down enough to see the details as well. And Ryan has a great ability to do that. And so I’m really pleased that you’re able to join us here. Our conversation from five months ago stands up well, you were alarmed just a month into a couple of weeks into the Trump Administration. I want to talk about immigration. I want to talk about the unitary executive, and executive power about universities, and law firms, well the courts in general, and the Supreme Court. But maybe just begin by, here we are in early July, just before July 4th. What do you think? How is it compared to what you expected?
RYAN GOODMAN:
Thanks. Thanks so much for the introduction. I always love having conversations with you, and learning from you. I mean, it’s in many respects worse, and in some respects I think better than I expected. So, in many respects worse, I think there are a lot of danger signs coming from the US Supreme Court that they don’t recognize the existential moment that we’re in, and are not ready to meet the moment in terms of a real authoritarian power grab. So, if they did, I think some of their decisions would come out differently, or the ways that they write the opinions would come out differently, because they would put up different guardrails. So, that’s one part that’s alarming, and worse than I had anticipated, and then, or I’m not sure I expected that much from them. But the other one that I think is the most significant is the internal security apparatus turned against the American public.
So, the use of the military, including the Marines in LA, and the mobilization of a highly militarized ICE force on the streets of the United States within the next 24 hours backed up by tens of billions of more dollars from Congress. That to me is the most alarming part that we’re in. And I guess I’d maybe register one other one, which is the weaponization of the Justice Department, which we can talk about, but the use of criminal prosecutions against perceived political enemies, which is just starting to percolate. That’s the worst. Then on the positive side, I do think there’s been quite a bit of pushback from the lower federal courts in ways that are reassuring, including from Trump appointed judges, and judges appointed by other Republican presidents. That I think is because the executive branch has overreached so much that they’re getting that kind of pushback. To me, I think that’s where we’re at right now, and that the world in which we’re currently having to grapple with.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, that’s extremely helpful. I got to say really clear, and I think it disaggregates sort of what’s going on a bit. I am not quite sure where to begin. We could begin with where you began, which is with the Supreme Court, and where they stand. Maybe we’ll do that. It’s in a way backwards because in a way one has to understand the existential moment as you put it. We probably should be discussing, we’ll have to discuss DOJ, and DHS, and the weaponization of the Justice Department, and all that. But since the Supreme Court, which is sort of creating the problem that the Supreme Court is, as you said, not in your view quite dealing with, or facing up to, but well, whichever you think is better, you want to begin with the DOJ, DHS side of the Trump Administration side of things, or the Supreme Court side of things. Then we can also get to the lower courts.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Either which way? I think maybe the Supreme Court just because the term—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, let’s do that. Since the term just ended, and that’s what people are curious. So, what’s the overall judgment, and what are the key indicators of both not facing up, but sort of facing up, or were there a couple exceptions where they did face up? What are the big moments for you?
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah, I think the biggest moments for me, maybe this is because a bit of an optimist, and I even put that out there in the sense of one should assess my analysis with the idea that I do tend towards a more optimistic outlook on things. And so if I’m pessimistic, it’s a sign of something. So, the optimistic part is to focus first in my mind as you ask the question, the first place I thought of is the bright spots. So, the Supreme Court in two significant opinions on immigration, does indeed find against the Trump Administration. And parts of those opinions you put them together are basically nine-0. So, the use of the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court is not yet deciding on the merits of whether or not it’s legitimate for the president to invoke the Alien Enemies Act against a gang.
Even though this is like a wartime authority only used against foreign nations. That’s still to be decided. And that will be decided by the next time that… Maybe by the next time that we speak, but on the due process question of whether, or not those individuals who are alleged to be TDA gang members have due process, have habeas rights, must be given sufficient notice of the Supreme Court’s, been strong about that, and has in fact slapped down one of the most right wing judges, for lack of any better term in Texas by the Supreme Court, not only saying that these individuals get due process stopping the flights out of the country until they do, until the lower courts figure out what exactly those parameters are. But also, very interestingly, the court allows there to be, and this is going to be a technical term, but I’ll explain it, a putative class.
So, before the class of individuals in that case were decided to be a group that could file on behalf of the entire similarly situated set of individuals. The very far right wing judge did something no other judge has done, which is actually say, “Oh, no, you’re not a class.” Every other judge that has heard an Alien Enemies Act case has said, “No, you guys are all similarly situated.” And the Supreme Court in fact said, “It’s not even a class determination. We’re going to say you’re a putative class. Looks like you’re a class, it’s a kind of a preliminary determination”, that’s really important for legal experts because it means that other lower courts can also start to act more quickly, and find a putative class as a provisional matter, and then have the case move forward. So, that was a really significant, when it comes to due process, I also think, just to take it outside of the Supreme Court lens, that’s where I think there’s a fissure within Trump’s base, because there are certain principled conservative viewpoints, and influencers who are deeply disturbed by the absence of due process in these cases.
So, we are seeing the libertarian group, I think, fracture because of how outrageous the administration has been. And that’s where the Roberts courts has stepped in. So, that’s the positive side. The negative side is, I think the best way of putting it, the way I think of it is, and this is me trying to do the mind reader thing with the justices, I think these Supreme Court justices in particular Roberts, Alito in particular, are on a multi-decade project that maximizes executive power. Charlie Savage had a book over a decade ago in which he, in fact, presciently identified this. He went through the archives of what Roberts, and Alito had worked on when they were in executive branch, and he said, “This is the project, and they’re trying to obtain a majority so that they can enact this, not political, I would say ideological vision.”
And we saw the precursor for this with the immunity decision last year. It went well beyond just as a president, I mean, a former president immune from criminal prosecution it aggrandized, huge powers in the executive branch. And we’re seeing this manifest in the Supreme Court term this year. And to me, I don’t know, this is the mind reading part, all that I think is just pretty obvious. The mind reading part is maybe they think this guy here in the Oval Office now is here for three, and a half more years. We’re writing for the ages, as Gorsuch said, in the immunity opinion, we’re writing for the ages. We’re like, this is decades out. Our president is going to stand the test of a hundred-year time. And for that timeframe, they’re just building, building towards a very powerful executive, minus the costs that might come with it with a particular president who’s anomalous in some respects, and extreme. And that to me is very concerning, because then in these cases, they’re giving him more, and more, and more, and more power.
And so some of those, let me be a little bit more specific, is definitely the unitary executive. The idea that the president controls vertically everything within the executive branch, and therefore the court is going to, in all likelihood—they’ve already signaled this through their decisions—give the president the power to remove people from multi-member independent agencies at will whenever he wants to without cause. That’s one building block that they’ve been building for a long time now. And then I guess the other one is the CASA decision, which is just a few days old while we’re talking. And that’s the decision that says that court should not intrude on the executive branch through issuing nationwide, or universal injunctions. And my view of that one is it’s not trying to hand something to Trump, it’s just the way that they were going to go. At some point, they were going to go in that direction.
They’ve been signing it for years. And it’s one of the cases in which I thought if you actually get down deep into the case, surely to goodness, even if that’s what they want, and there’s reasonable minds definitely can come out with the idea that nationwide injunctions are bad. They could have also said, “Well, in this particular instance of birthright citizenship, we’re going to still find against the Trump Administration.” There are a couple ways they could have easily done that. One is pointed out by Justice Sotomayor, which is, well, this is at a preliminary stage, it’s a balance of irreparable harm. There can be no irreparable harm to the executive branch on birthright citizenship, because it’s so flagrantly unconstitutional. That’s a very good argument. They could have done that. Another one was Justice Barrett says, “Well, we’re going to remand this down to the lower courts to determine whether, or not this particular form of the injunction meets a certain narrow test.”
And the narrow test, is it necessary to provide complete relief to the states, for example. So, there’s no option but to have it be nationwide given the ways that the state’s interests work with citizens within their country traveling in, and out of the state. So, it would have to be uniform. And she says, “Okay, we’re going to let that go back down to the lower court.” I don’t have a better word for that than disingenuous because that had been fully litigated in the lower courts. So, I think the litigators, and the judges must have been in puzzling, like, “What are we supposed to do? Just do the exact same thing again?” And they could have resolved it right then, and there, and just said, “Well, of course this is the only way to provide complete relief on birthright citizenship.” And they didn’t do it. So, I think Trump is supercharged after that opinion as he did with a performance with a press conference. So, that’s where I think it’s not understanding the moment that we’re in with this particular person in the White House.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, it seems like they haven’t given him that many victories on the big substance yet. Perhaps whether it’s Humphrey’s Executor will be radically limited, or struck down, and we’ll see what happens on some of these other Alien Enemies Act, even some of them that presumably might go against Trump, presumably on the executive order on birthright citizenship. But certainly procedurally, I guess is the way I think of it. Maybe I’m simple minded, but they’re giving him the benefit of the doubt an awful lot. And again, maybe in a very narrow sense, some of those decisions are their judgment calls, or whatever.
It’s a matter of court procedure. It’s not a of high constitutional principle, but the effect of it is to let him go very far in practice down the path he’s on without the courts being able, while curbing really the ability of the lower courts to do much to stop him. And in that context, that DVD decision at the beginning of last week, so that was the sixth three decision on Monday, I guess before the six-three decision on Friday that you mentioned the CASA decision. Maybe you could say a word about that. I found that a little startling, too.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah, so the case is about giving individuals the statutory right that they have to contest deportation to a country that’s not of their national origin if they fear torture. So, it’s a statutory right, that these individuals all have, and the government instead has tried to deport them, and has sent the individuals to South Sudan in order to, without recognizing that statutory right. And that’s the one where the judge actually froze in place the flight when they landed in interim country in Djibouti. And so it’s a dramatic case in which people just, all they want is their statutory right to assert that they might be subject to torture, which I think they have a strong argument for that. And then the court overturns essentially the judge’s order without any explanation. Everybody’s just guessing. We don’t even know what was wrong with the order. And there’s a level of cruelty to it because it’s like really? You’re stopping that, and his order is a very solid order.
BILL KRISTOL:
It was an order enjoining the going ahead with those flights, right?
RYAN GOOADMAN:
Exactly.
BILL KRISTOL:
Going ahead with such deportations until the statutory right is satisfied. Yeah.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah, and he’s been so accommodating to the government, allowing them to provide the due process even on the military base in Djibouti, and not having them facilitate their return to the United States in order to get their due process. So, very accommodating in those ways. And the other part that’s really important is that underneath all of this, this is one of the cases in which the government has either tempted contempt of court orders, or has violated court orders. It’s one of the ones in which they’ve played this game, that is incredible to me. So, it’s one of the cases in which the judge issued his order, no more flights until people get their due process. And then Secretary Rubio boasts that they’ve sent more flights out, and the government comes into court, and says, “Well, Judge Murphy, your order was for the named defendants, which is DHS, and DOJ”, and it didn’t name the military, and those are military flights. And so he clarifies his order.
He doesn’t do new orders like clarifying like “No, no, no. It applies to the DOJ obviously facilitated the military flights”, for example, and DHS did. Like, how did those people get onto the flight? And so, the Supreme Court is giving a blessing to all of that. It’s not even touching that. No explanation for it, et cetera. My hope is in a certain sense that the reason that the court did what it did is a very technical reason, and that it’s one of Judge Murphy’s orders was nationwide, and the other orders were not, they were specific to the people who were on the flight to South Sudan. And that’s what the court was doing because they were about to issue the CASA decision on nationwide injunctions. But here we are a few days out from the CASA decision, if that’s the explanation, where are we? They didn’t do that. And then other immigration cases as well, which the court is not being great on immigration for decades now. But the other immigration cases are the court overturns lower court opinions on the protection, the temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and others without explanation. And, once again, the irreparable harm analysis you would think would count enormously in favor of people who will otherwise be removed to situations in which they would face humanitarian—not necessarily persecution, because that’s a technical term under the law—but they would face severe humanitarian threats to their lives. And the court, without any explanation as to why it’s doing it, just pushes it again, pushes it again, pushes it again on a preliminary basis in favor of the administration.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. That’s what striking. It’s the preliminary basis. And, of course, what they’re often doing in these cases is lifting, as I understand it, stays, which lower court judges have put on administration actions, so they’re not reaching the merits. They’re just saying there’s not enough of a reason to stop the administration for now. But we’ll get to this later. But, I don’t know, somehow one does feel, I feel at least, that I guess Lincoln says it somewhere in the middle of the 1850s and all the debates on Kansas, Nebraska, and then Dred Scott, that, you know, at some point you are entitled to deduce from things that don’t quite say we are now finding in favor, the administration is going to do what it wants.
If they do eight things that sort of procedurally make it much easier for the administration to do what it wants and make it much harder for lower federal court judges to stop them, I don’t know. It seems like there’s a certain pattern there. Either they honestly just believe that’s where they’re going to end up substantively. These actions are unreviewable or within the administration’s discretion or in accord with the law, or they’ve just decided they don’t want to pick a fight with the administration. But, in effect, the two end up kind of pretty similar to one another, right?
RYAN GOODMAN:
100%, and they’re doing it without oral arguments.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. And another sign that they [inaudible]
RYAN GOODMAN:
And that’s the other one, birthright citizenship and unsigned opinion, yeah, no oral arguments in the super majority of the cases. The birthright citizenship is an exception. No oral arguments, unsigned opinions, no reasons given. I mean, when I was in law school, we talked about court systems around the world or in history that had done things like that. And I mean that used to be anathema to the US judicial system. And just to invoke, for folks who don’t know this already, but Stephen Vladeck’s book on the shadow docket is a must-read analysis of the advent of the shadow docket. And one other point to make about it, and Steve wrote about this after the CASA decision on nationwide injunctions. One of the most important opinions in that case is Justice Kavanaugh.
Because what he says in his opinion is, “Don’t worry, we’ve got the shadow docket, and that’s going to take up a lot of the slack here because lower courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions, but, we, the Supreme Court can, and we’ll just do it through the shadow docket.” Which is just remarkable because it means what many people have been concerned about the legitimacy of that very process, he’s saying will now be on steroids. Because how else can they do it with dozens of these cases around the country? Hundreds really. And that’s his solution is much, much more of the same. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, one last thing on the birthright citizenship, which struck me, which is when Trump issued that executive order, I think it was the first day, January 20th, I was on various Zooms and text chains, some of which you were on. And they were, “Oh, this is a sop to the base. Of course this will be struck down maybe nine zero, maybe seven two, and the court will probably even just look forward to striking it down so they can get credit for being even-handed, even if they’re going to uphold some other stuff.” What struck me about the case last week is they went out of their way to say not a word about the substance of it. Now, that’s not why the government by the administration had appealed. They had appealed on the universal injunction side.
But, as I understand it, correct me if I’m wrong, the Supreme Court can, A, it can order, it can say, we want to hear arguments on the merits as well, and we’d like your briefs by April 1st or whatever, or they can just decide it honestly without hearing any briefs, if they don’t think they need briefs or oral argument. A year ago, in the immunity case, they went way beyond what was necessary, if I’m not mistaken, to write for the ages—was that Gorsuch—a very broad opinion. Here they went out of their way not to do that. So I assume eventually they will not uphold that executive order on birthright citizenship. But they haven’t exactly gone out of their way to say, this is the Trump administration, one of its first executive orders is blatantly unconstitutional, which would’ve been an interesting way to end the term and it would’ve had, it would have had educative effect in one direction.
It feels to me like they’ve bent over backwards to have an educative or non-educative effect in the other direction. You know, I mean, would’ve been very hard to reach that, right? I mean, just because the government, the administration chose to appeal, of course it did on its the grounds they thought they could do best on, but the court can say, “This is a very important issue. It’s the 14th amendment. It’s a big executive order. We just want to resolve this all at once and please, let’s have the oral argument,” whatever. Right? And that would’ve been doable. And they’ve done things like that in the past.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah. Everything you said, I agree with, and I am pretty sure I’m getting this right, Kavanaugh wanted to do that. I think on the Alien Enemies Act case. He said, “Let’s just go to the merits. Let’s just go to, ‘can the president invoke this?’” Because it’s a huge waste of time in some sense as well, if it’s going through all the lower courts and finally now we’re out from that opinion and it still hasn’t gotten resolved. And, yeah, they could have done it here, and they could have done it in multiple ways, just the way you described it, or they could have done it in the analysis on irreparable harm. And, as you also say, there is not a single syllable spent on the merits. There’s no reference whatsoever in a majority opinion or the other opinions from the six justices as to the merits, as to whether or not it’s constitutional, the executive order. And they could do that. They could even make… there’s so many ways they could send that signal and make that reference, really extraordinary.
BILL KRISTOL:
What strikes me, I think this is sort of analogous. I think you mentioned at the very beginning the fact that we have National Guard and troops and Marines still in LA. They withdrew a few, but they sent it a new bunch of Marines to replace some of the other ones. But certainly the executive order that Trump issued at the time and all of his rhetoric around it and the Justice Department’s, made clear they think they can send in federal troops when they wish. I mean, if they think they’re useful, if they think state and local authorities aren’t doing a good job, if they hear reports that there could be problems somewhere that might affect some federal building, they have a very, very broad language in there. And I guess when that happened, that seems to me, again, a lot of people I was talking to, oh man, that’s a red line. Oh boy, that’s going to go to court, and that’s going to be huge.
And now it’s, I don’t know, a month later, I guess, and I don’t think there are a lot of riots happening right now in LA and ICE is doing its thing, pretty… seizing an awful lot of people is one’s impression. In fact, they are. That’s a fact. We have the numbers, I think, and I don’t know if this is the case with the courts just not being set up to stop certain things or choosing not to stop certain things or a little of both.
But, I mean, I guess I would’ve thought of all the things if you’d said in the first six months Trump’s going to deploy troops into LA, keep them there, and basically say he has the right to do this whenever he wants, wherever he wants in the country, both federalizing the Guard and active duty Marines, in this case, I guess I would’ve said, “Gee, I don’t know, isn’t that going to be like a big problem?” But it doesn’t seem right. Maybe I’m wrong though. I don’t know. And how much of this is a choice and how much of this is just the courts can’t stop a lot of stuff.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah. No. Yeah. So I do think… a number of thoughts on it. One, as you say, that is their theory of the case that he can do it whenever, and it really is. So one of the things I’m tracking are these extremist positions that the administration, the DOJ is taking before the courts. So on the federalization of the Guard, the DOJ before Judge Breyer in California in the district court level, in fact says, and I think it’s multiple times, but it says in the oral argument, one of the hearings, “The president can do this on the basis of no evidence.” No evidence that it’s needed to have the Guard protect ICE agents or buildings, on the basis of no evidence. And Judge Breyer says, “Really, you’re making the argument they can do it on the basis of no evidence?” And they’re like, “No, that’s our argument, no evidence.” I mean, that’s one part of the extremity of it.
And then the second one, which you mentioned, Bill, which is that their briefs say that it’s just if there’s some inability to carry out law enforcement functions, and admittedly, the State of California has a little bit of the other extreme, so they’re like, oh no, if it’s completely impossible to carry out the functions. And Judge Breyer, somewhat, I think, goes too far in the direction of California by saying if it’s a modicum of, if there’s significant intrusion on federal functions, it still wouldn’t count. But the government’s position is very extreme. The government’s position, as you mentioned through the executive order, who would’ve imagined the executive order is about anywhere in the country. It’s not just in LA and the executive order on its face is just such an affront to political protests and First Amendment rights because there’s so many things wrong with the executive order. But the one that I think is fundamental, and I’m certain that it worries people in the US military is it is not predicated on violence. It’s not predicated on riots. It’s predicated on violence or political protests.
The part of the executive order that applies across the country that’s anticipatory or preemptive also is only based on protests, if there is a threat of protests. So that’s how extreme that is. Back to your particular question of what can the courts do about it, at some level I was a little surprised even that Judge Breyer at the District Court did try to stop on the administration from the federalization of the Guard because courts give so much deference to the executive branch. There’s also some indication from the Court of Appeals panel, even though they find in favor of the Trump administration, that they say, “We’re also not going to accept the Trump administration’s position,” which is that this is all complete and deference political question doctrine, that the court shouldn’t be involved. That they do some analysis of the facts, which I think is positive, but courts are weak in this particular space. To me, it’s one of their spaces in which courts… one should not rely on the courts.
I don’t have faith that the Supreme Court is going to push back against the power of a president to say that there’s a national emergency and need to bring out the National Guard to protect federal buildings, federal functions. Now, that said, I think there are strong arguments, and I’ll also be candid about another part of it. I think there are strong arguments that had not been raised by the litigants, which is surprising to me. But there’s strong legislative history on these provisions, the statutory provisions in which Congress basically said, yes, there is this authority to use the National Guard or US military to protect federal buildings, federal functions, but you have to find that authority in a specific statute. That’s the Posse Comitatus issue, because otherwise you’re using military for law enforcement purposes. And that’s now still being litigated, and the courts are very slow on that. But I think part of what Judge Breyer might be doing there is giving the plaintiffs a lot of room to have discovery. And then I think we’ll probably get into this in part of the conversation on the use of ICE separately.
But the other piece to watch for besides all the kinds of slippery slopes I’ve implicitly referred to is the other slippery slope. But what exactly is the purpose of the Marines and the federalized National Guard? Because one of the issues that’s now come up before Judge Breyer is that there was this mass drug raid on marijuana growing facilities outside of the LA County area, and they brought in the Federal Guard for that. And the Department of Defense has published the still photos. These are members of the National Guard standing in what almost looks like a desert behind them. There’s no protesters. Protesters aren’t protesting drug busts. So the slippery slope of where exactly the National Guard will be used, I think, is also a sign of to do the through line, a sign of how the ICE agents, ICE officers are going to be used, the militarized ICE forces ’cause we’re seeing a slippery slope in that as well, in terms of what exactly is their mission or what exactly is the constraints on the kinds of force that they’re using or the objectives that they’re serving.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Well, that gets us to the unitary executive, but really beyond the unitary executive, which you discussed some to the, I don’t know, the personalized unitary executive, if that’s the right way to say it, and the politicized politicization of the law enforcement parts of the US government, DOJ, Justice Department, and I guess DHS in certain respects, and maybe DOD, now that we’re thinking of since, so they’re still reporting to Secretary Hegseth has to okay what’s happening with these forces. So say a word about all that. I mean, the courts can react to all this, but here we’re talking a little more about the, I mean, if the executive branch, it’s understanding of what the rule of law means, I guess, maybe is one way to put it.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah. So, I mean, if we also trust Hegseth’s own writing and what he put in his books, he certainly seems to favor a very aggressive use of the military against perceived political enemies domestically. Secretary Noem sent a letter to Hegseth that was leaked. I think it’s the San Francisco Chronicle that obtained the full letter in which she was asking the military to perform clear law enforcement functions of arrests. I mean, that is such a red line and so well established. I can’t begin to describe how egregious that is that you’d use the military for those purposes that are in her letter. And she has a general counsel that you would think would have to sign off on those kinds of requests. But when I say red line, once again, the most out there aggressive reading of executive authority inside the Justice Department, inside the Office of Legal Counsel on this very question of use of the military domestically has always drawn the line that they cannot engage in those kinds of activities like arrests. This comes from Office of Legal Counsel opinions dating back 1960s.
And then they start to get into these ones that are like landmark opinions by Judge, formerly, William Rehnquist when he was in the head of their OLC, Office of Legal Counsel. Over decades, they’ve drawn that line. So that’s her just breaking right through it. And then, to me, the greatest worry is what we’re seeing in the country. I mean, we are seeing things that I would never have imagined. You’ve spoken about it much more eloquently than I have, Bill, which is masked militarized forces on American streets snagging people and putting them in the back of vans. And we know that, at a minimum, two things, one, they are not going after hardened criminals because they’re trying to meet their quotas. And, two, they’re at a minimum making a bunch of mistakes. So we even have multiple Justice Department filings in court admitting to administrative errors of getting the wrong people, and in fact, sending them to CECOT Prison in El Salvador and elsewhere.
And that is not only the country that we’re living in today, which is to me like this internal security force. I started some of my academic career and practice on human rights. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff we were seeing in the Americas with when you talked about the military, it was actually the internal military. And the ICE is, and not only are we seeing that, but we’re on the cusp of tens of billions of dollars being infused into ICE right at the moment that this is all happening, just to ramp up that force. And once you do that, I’m not quite sure why you need the Marines, because they seem so pumped up in a very militaristic way, and both in their fatigues and their heavy arms, and including in instances in which they’re going to a Home Depot or whatnot to arrest just very ordinary people.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
And then these people get sent to various ICE holding facilities. I suppose some of them will be sent to this new place in Florida.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yep.
BILL KRISTOL:
And then what? I mean, that’s what I guess I also was struck by, it seems like it’s very hard for them to get by. I mean, in principle, they can be deported I suppose, because they didn’t fill out some form sometime or they are undocumented or the documents they say are shaky or something like that. Or they had protected status and lost it. A lot of them get arrested as they seem to be showing up according to the law, according to the requests of the US government. They’re not hiding from the government, a lot of them, right?
RYAN GOODMAN:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
But I don’t know, they just get… I mean this fulfills their quotas for detention and deportation I guess. But it doesn’t seem like they have that much recourse at that point, no?
RYAN GOODMAN:
Oh, I agree. I think that, so a lot of that is not necessarily illegal as you’re describing it, and as it’s just morally unethical and I think anti-democratic in the sense that there’s a lot of survey evidence in the exit polls from the election that that is not at all what Americans voted for or support. And we’re seeing that in the numbers as well. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but it is important that Adam Cox— who is a preeminence expert in immigration law—and I wrote a piece in December of 2024 in which we anticipated this because we said they’re not going to be able to meet their quotas. There’re just so many logistical administrative constraints and the like to meeting the quota of mass deportations as promised, especially of hardened criminals. And what they will do are these kinds of legal trickeries, which is do things like, not only the people that you described, but do things like strip people of their temporary protected status and then they become illegal.
Then they’re not in a sense of the ways in which people describe illegal. They no longer have legal status to be in the country and then at the hundreds of thousands they can be deported. Presto, like that. And it’s, some of that is being litigated, but that’s also what the Supreme Court just ratified what we talked about earlier by saying that Noem can do that with suspending the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, for example. And what Adam and I said is that’s the way that they can get to that point. And as you said, this is not only people who are in the country.
They’ve been in the country legally, and they have not been hiding from the government. They filled out all the forms. They applied through the one-pass process under the Biden administration. Some of the rhetoric during the campaign, you could see how it slipped. They would say, oh, well these people are still here illegally because what Biden and Kamala Harris did that was illegal by providing them pathways. But that’s ridiculous and atrocious in its reasoning. And not only are they… Have been here legally, have presented themselves to the government, aren’t people who have committed any crimes, let alone like serious crimes. But on top of all of that, they’re also people that have been contributing to the community. If we remember back in the campaign with the notion that Haitian… the smearing of Haitians in Ohio, Trump promised that he was going to remove their status and the mayor and the Republican governor were saying, “These are people we want here.”
And the industry within the state we’re saying, “These are people we want here because they’re contributing in important ways that we otherwise can’t survive or our economy is doing so well with them here as workers and members of the community,” et cetera. And that’s what’s happening. And that’s part of this new mission. And there’s obviously been pushed back by some industries and Trump has vacillated back and forward them back and forth. And most recently, in the last 12 hours, I think it is, he’s back to saying that he will allow for farmers to have responsibility over migrants in the country undocumented, who he also referred to as their owners, I think a Freudian slip on his part. But yeah, so it’s just extraordinary. That’s where we’re at. But can they do that within the bounds of the law? In many respects, yes. Is that what people voted for? In all respects, no.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, immigration law gives them, I guess a ton of flexibility. Now, of course, Congress could change the law or make clear that certain things aren’t acceptable or change the quotas or change temporary protected status to less… to longer term protected status. But of course, Congress is doing nothing. So that’s another very deep problem in how the separation of powers is supposed to work. Maybe we can get to that in a second. But I guess final basket of things would be for me, the weaponization of the Justice Department of the US government, really of the agencies, education and many others that under the guidance, I suppose, of justice and DHS against the universities, against the law firms, against external actors, in a way that I just, of course people, new administrations, reinterpret laws and regulations and can find, can rethink grant processes and so forth, but they just going after individual firms they don’t like and universities they don’t like without even a pretense that they’ve evaluated the field and the following, people fall afoul of our new regulation, regulatory structure, whatever would be a traditional way of doing this.
A kind of neutral principles. Wasn’t that a phrase that I remember from my youth auditing some law school class or something. I mean, there’s not even a pretense that, right? It’s that we’re going after you, Harvard, and we’re going to find some other reason to go after you. Now if the first one gets stalled out and stalled in court, I mean, I guess the courts seem to have done a little more and the law firms that are fighting have won their cases. Harvard’s sort of won its cases so far, or at least one, injunctions I guess. But I don’t know. How do you think that all plays out? And of course, how much of it is about… That is the case maybe where the courts can only do a limited amount, too. But so much of it is intimidation, isn’t it? And not winning the case. exactly.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah. So I think, so with respect to the universities and the law firms, it’s one of these instances in which as you say, it’s not based on the neutral principles. And some of those neutral principles are written into statute and regulation, and therefore it’s flagrantly illegal. And the firms that are choosing to fight it in court are just winning across the board. And when I say across the board, I mean multiple judges and the entire executive order is invalidated, even including parts of the executive order that have to deal with suspension of security clearances. And that is usually one of these domains that an executive, a president has an extraordinary discretion and they’re losing even on that because it’s so obviously retaliatory. And similarly, like the Harvard brief, the very first complaint that Harvard submitted, it’s a wonder of a brief because you also understand all the back and forth that happened internally between Harvard and the administration.
And it’s absolutely ridiculous what the administration did. They just were not trying to even give the patina of legality to the processes in which they would go about it. Even to the point that if I were a lawyer advising them, I’d say, look, if you really want to hurt Harvard, you need to go through these particular loops and check off certain boxes to get there. And they don’t even do that. Now, maybe that’s because they’ve got dumb lawyering. I don’t know what, but it’s just running roughshod. I think maybe because they aren’t trying to win in court, they know they’re going to lose on the law firms. And it’s just the intimidation and the intimidation is enough to chill other actors if they don’t group together in solidarity. And Rebecca Hamilton wrote an amazing piece at Just Security a couple months back about how the universities need to act in solidarity, the law firms need to act in solidarity, drawing from experiences of other countries in which civil society has done so against anti-democratic forces in the government. So I think that’s a huge part of what’s happening and how law can vindicate certain rights, but it is also really only one piece of the democratic pushback because it doesn’t fully, it’s not fully effective given the intimidation, the chilling effects that can happen. So that’s one piece of it.
And then just to highlight, I think another aspect as to where we are right now in the country, the weaponization of the Justice Department, the weaponization of the White House, there’s so many pieces of that to highlight, but the ways in which Donald J. Trump goes after enemies and perceived enemies by using the power of the government to me is illustrated in something that I haven’t seen anybody else, references that might just be that I haven’t read widely enough. Just something that recently happened and I was writing it up, I was just describing it for something and then in writing it up, I was like, oh, my God, look at what I’m actually writing. Can you believe this? Because we’ve normalized it and here’s what it was. Elon Musk threatens that he will help people primary Republicans who vote for the massive spending bill. He threatens that and then he threatened it again. And he threatened not just that again, but then he most recently last like 48 hours, threatened that he would create a third party.
What happens within 12 to 24 hours? Donald Trump on Truth Social says, oh, well, we’re now going to use DOGE to look into all of the government contracts and support for Elon Musk’s companies. And that’s just, excuse me, that’s just fucking crazy that the President of the United States is going to try to directly penalize somebody for political activity. Elon Musk is fully within his rights if that’s what he’d like to do. And all he’s saying is expressing political views and using his political muscle and the President of the United States, it doesn’t even do it silently as Richard Nixon might’ve done, but he is publicly saying, we’re going to retaliate against you in a way that’s unethical, illegal, and the rest of it.
And that’s where we’re at. And when I say that’s where we’re at, who noticed that? Who talked about that? Did that even get much attention or analysis on news shows and the like? Just in terms of the significance of what the President of the United States had just done? I think not in part because they flooded the zone, and this is just a regular part of what happens these days.
BILL KRISTOL:
We just have, I think, normalized too much internally that, of course, he just says something. And justice and DHS and everyone else too, the Education Department in the case, they cooperate obviously with DHS or other agencies and different areas, health and human services in some cases with the grants and so forth to medical schools and whatnot, and hospitals. And that’s just the way our government’s now working, a personalized ability to direct, to strip people of grants or to cut off grants or go after people in court or institutions in court. I mean, it’s pretty astonishing. You mentioned Watergate, it just struck recently. I don’t know why I was thinking about this. The contrast, right?
I mean, Nixon does try to go after personal political enemies, you might say, using parts of the US government, FBI, CIA, right? He has real resistance inside the government to doing that. And he has to use rogue characters who look, don’t do a very good job, don’t really have the agencies behind them, incidentally, they have to conceal it from their own bosses in some cases and so forth. The Justice Department investigates, they appointed special counsel. Case goes to, I think it’s the DC office, DC US Attorney DC brings a case before Justice Sirica and DC’s court, right? I mean that’s part of the Justice Department. They’re busy prosecuting—
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
…these people who were arrested at literally, at Watergate, at the Watergate. Nixon fires the special counsel, Ford takes over. They put another special counsel. So far as I know, the cases kind of chug ahead pretty much without too much disruption. Then they confirm a new attorney general. I probably have the sequence here slightly off, Saxbe and I don’t know, early ‘74 I guess. He has to promise to Congress that he’s not going to simply take orders from Nixon.
He doesn’t. It all goes ahead. The cases go ahead, and Congress does its own thing. That’s a whole another thing that’s missing here, of course, the Watergate hearings and Nixon ends up having to resign. For stuff that’s infinitely less honestly than Trump has done, I would say. But also what’s striking to me is all these internal guardrails existed then, and we assumed they would exist. Nixon assumed they would exist. That’s why he had to do things surreptitiously. The actors assumed they would exist.
I mean, I do not think these guardrails do not exist. There’s no one at the FBI or CIA saying, sorry, you can’t do that. Or at least to our knowledge, and certainly the Justice Department and White House counsel, people are retiring, John Dean testified…. I mean, just the whole thing is, so it’s revealing of a system that was stressed by Nixon but basically fought back, if you want to put it that way, or resisted him I guess the better way to… And then Congress indeed passed various reforms and the executive branch itself instituted various reforms about walls between the White House and Justice Department and so forth to fix the problems that the Nixon thing exposed. We’ve now sailed so far beyond those problems, haven’t we? I mean and suddenly whenever you think of Bush and Obama, and there were issues obviously in the War on Terror and there were issues with Obama’s executive orders.
All of that was so still within the context, I’m going to say, of post-Watergate America, so to speak. And Trump’s first term was somewhat in that context. Jeff Sessions appoints a special counsel. What’s Robert Mueller? Robert Mueller is the successor to other special councils. And the Justice Department does resist doing certain things. Barr goes a little further than you and I would like, but at the end of the day, he won’t do certain things and DOD won’t do certain things and so forth. And Esper gets fired as a result and there’s still resistance at the very end. Those last two months, the degree to which the second term is just sailing has already in six months, gone—if I could just editorialize, I’ll finish up my editorializing and listen to you actually explain stuff, but—sails so far beyond anything that was plausible for the last 50 years, really. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?
RYAN GOODMAN:
It’s unbelievable. It’s absolutely unbelievable. And I guess the only other two pieces I’d put on that are I do want to, so one thought I’ve had is that we had some signs of this in terms of how much Trump tried to get down this path in the first administration. And there was an opportunity for Congress to do something, I think it’s called For the People Act, H.R. 1. There were some reforms in there and they didn’t even pass it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. And that’s when Democrats controlled. Yeah, Congress.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Absolutely. They had control, they controlled the White House. And it’s like really? Because a lot of people at Just Security, we did the same thing we had… Before the election were decided, we just said, it doesn’t matter who’s at the Oval Office, here’s good governance ways of reforming so that you can kind of autocrat-proof in a certain sense. We didn’t put it that way, but democracy-proof in the other direction, government from an abusive White House and to try to balance out checks and balances. And I do think that it’s another part of why we’re in such a dismal situation. As you mentioned earlier, that Congress is not acting, Congress is just not performing its role. Part of me wonders if that’s also why the Supreme Court is doing what it’s doing, which is it’s still writing for the ages. And it might be thinking, well, if there’s a Democratic administration, White House next time and Republican Congress, then there will be more of this dynamic of checks.
And so we’re not writing for the next three years, we’re writing for the far, far future. Is that how they’re coming out in this just extraordinary way of blindness to the situation that we’re in and treating it as though that we’re in a normal situation, which Congress is going to provide a check? One other piece of what you just described, I also agree, this is across the gamut. It’s using the IRS, it’s using all of the agencies that he can. And it’s personalized. It’s about loyalty. And one other piece of it that strikes me as to where we were on our last conversation, where we are today, there was writing, I did a bunch of writing about anticipating would Donald Trump, and I said he would, try to order the Justice Department to criminally investigate his perceived political enemies?
And there was a lot of analysis. New York Times then did a big piece in it as well. What did he do in his prior term? What did he try to do that he was pushed back on? And would he try to do that again? And now that’s another that’s just totally normalized. Totally normalized. Like the criminal investigation of ActBlue. He just tells the Attorney General, this is what I want you to do, and she’s doing it. And she knew, I think, in her nomination hearings to say the words, to mouth the word, she said, “The Justice Department will be independent. We’ll never take orders from the President.”
She knew that that’s what she needed to say, just to sail through the nomination hearing. And here we are so many months in and the executive orders themselves time and again, in the writing it actually says that he’s ordering the Justice Department and the Attorney General to investigate the firms and all sorts of other things like that. And the Supreme Court has allowed for all of that. That’s the tight unitary executive model. And that’s the quote, “new normal.” But hopefully through conversations like this one, people will not accept it and will in a certain sense, take a step back to see the bigger picture of where we’re at, where you start to connect the different data points.
BILL KRISTOL:
Maybe we close with where do you think we’re going? I mean, maybe, I don’t know what the reasonable time horizon is. Six months, 18 months, three and a half years? But one can imagine I guess the Supreme Court having hedged quite a lot and bent over backwards, from your point of view and mine, I think doing certain things that would think, okay, there are some red lines and one could imagine maybe some even within the administration, one could imagine not continuing in this way we’re going right now. One could imagine, I suppose, an even more radicalized situation where, I don’t know, they look for an excuse to deploy troops in a lot of places because there’s disturbances or protests as we’ve said and so forth. What are the range of possibilities or scenarios? What do you think are the most likely one or two?
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah. I think the Supreme Court will eventually slap down the administration on birthright citizenship. I think it’s going to be a closer call on the use of the military for protection, as long as the administration stays pretty much within the confines of using the military to protect federal functions like federal buildings and maybe protecting ICE agents, though that one, to many legal experts, including myself and Steve Vladeck and others and Liza Goitien, crosses the line. So I think that one to me is one to watch for. It’s the use of the military in other places across the country on pretext and other reasons, because it’s really just about a show of force and creating the power structures in the country in a certain direction.
I hope that the Supreme Court recognizes that that issue is also a potential precursor to the use of the military and other devices, but especially the military to interfere with free and fair elections through intimidation and having the military deployed against protests and the like. So that they realize if they give the administration a pass at time one, when there are maybe violent protests or something like that, they need to put up the guardrails that it cannot be used at time two for things that directly threaten our democracy. So that’s to me one of the things I’m watching for and very worried about, very worried about.
The second one I’m quite worried about is the use of the Alien Enemies Act, because if they can use it in the ways that they try to use it, which I think is based on a complete pretext and legal fictions including intelligence-based fictions on the relationship between the TDA, Tren de Aragua gang, and the Maduro government. We know from The New York Times and from the classified document, the intelligence community flatly rejects the theory on which that’s all based. Is the Supreme Court going to just turn a blind eye and pretend that they don’t know that? Are they going to give him a blank check? Because I think then if they can use it for that purpose, they could just start to use it for other purposes and they could also just start to begin to say, “Look, it’s the Alien Enemies Act. It allows for a summary deportation of nationals of that state.” It’s much easier for us to determine that somebody is a Venezuelan than it is that they are TDA member. I’m very worried about that.
I assume that we will get an adverse ruling out of the Fifth Circuit, which is where the case is right now. They’re such a conservative bench that they’re much further to the right of even the US Supreme Court, and then that will be teeing it up for the US Supreme Court. I think that’s really an important one. And then the other one is this use of ICE agents inside our country, masked agents, heavily militarized, that are in some ways you might think being used against undocumented immigrants, but they’re used against everybody in so many different respects. Everybody would then have to prove their citizenship, so it affects everybody down to the tee. That to me is one of the biggest concerns, and I’m not sure that the law or the courts are up to dealing with it. I do think that that’s one in which public outrage and the ways in which the market responds to it is important.
And then that’s one other piece I just want to add to it, which is I do think some of the actions by the government are so extremist that they really are just not taking in so many different ways the US national interests into account, that it is now beginning to alarm parts of the business community in ways that could also be another significant pushback. And there was an inflection point over the last few weeks in which a collection of business leaders issued a joint letter, which is unprecedented. They have not done something like this yet in the Trump administration to say, “Look, your assault on higher education is endangering US competitiveness. We cannot withstand this.” And I think that’s another piece in which the illegal activity and the costs of it in other ways, not just the costs in terms of unconstitutional action, might put a break on the slide that we’re currently on with this administration.
BILL KRISTOL:
And the law firms, we can close to this, but you a world you know much better than I. I had the feeling there was an initial real capitulation. It could have just become almost universal. There was that push back and maybe the situation stabilized, and the four firms that are fighting, I guess at one accord, so maybe that’s a good sign. But I don’t know, within that world, where’s the balance of… Where are things going? A lot of these firms have ducked and dodged and accommodated quietly and stayed out of the crosshairs, and maybe that’s doing no great damage to this country and maybe it is if all pro bono work is now friendly to the Trump administration. I don’t know, it’s something people like me don’t have much visibility into that. What’s your sense of that world?
RYAN GOODMAN:
I think in some ways, the tide is switching back in a positive direction, or has been, in the sense that there was a stop to the number of firms that were capitulating openly. I do worry that there’s still other forms of capitulation or self-censorship or limiting the kind of pro bono work that they do because they don’t want to stick their neck out, but there has also been a lot of solidarity behind the firms that have litigated it. One of the things I really like seeing, and I am trying to be very honest about what is and or is not happening in a positive direction, but it is good to see major clients shifting away from the firms that capitulated and going towards the firms that have litigated, because the clients are saying, “Why would I put myself in the hands of somebody who would just capitulate like that rather than a fighter?”
That’s very positive, and I think the firms are also having internal pressures with younger generations of lawyers who do not want to see their firms capitulate and are keenly connected to more democratic and egalitarian commitments, and I think that’s another pressure on these firms to be doing the right thing. Since the administration has taken the unusual step of appealing one of the lower court decisions, I think we’re now about to see a court of appeals vindicate the law firms as well, which is just another sprung positive sign in the direction of adhering to the rule of law and reaffirming the firms that have taken that route.
BILL KRISTOL:
So it sounds like in several of these areas, we’ll see more from courts and from higher courts I guess, and we’ve seen an awful lot of activity from district court so far, a little bit from the appellate level and more procedural stuff from the Supreme Court, I guess. It does sound like we might know by, I don’t know, Christmas a little more about where things stand as it were and where the balance of power is. And I suppose we’ll also see if the administration feels like they maybe have overreached at times and it’s more prudent to go more slowly, or not. I don’t know. These last few days has gotten me a little rattled with the Everglades stuff and all that. It doesn’t seem like… Fine, they’re losing some public opinion polls, they’re down to 42% approval and they have disapproval on some issues where they had approval before like detention and deportation maybe as part of immigration policy. But so far at least, it doesn’t seem like they think they’re paying a big… Trump’s not shying away from embracing the mass deportation agenda, that’s for sure.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah, even to the point that I run a mental subroutine of thinking, “This is so outrageous, it’s so politically costly, some of what they’re doing. Is it because they are not worried about having free and fair elections?” That’s my thought process, and not like I think it’s a paranoid thought process. I think it’s a realistic one.
BILL KRISTOL:
Or they think that the public was unhappy for now, but once they deport a million people, there’ll be all these… I don’t know, people will like the country better or something and the economy won’t pay as big a price as people think. I suppose you can rationalize it that way, but it is striking to me how central it is to their own… The mass deportation thing is both central to what they believe, I suppose, or certainly what they think their supporters want and what they are committed to doing. If Trump tries to back off, as you said earlier, if his hotel buddies call him up and say, “Hey, this is unmanageable.” He backs off for 12 hours, but then they remind him, someone does, Vance or Miller or something, that this is really key.
And he understands that once you’re riding this tiger, you can’t just have it pause every now and then, so I think he… I don’t know, maybe that’s wrong, but I am struck by how far they seem to be charging ahead on that front. And the same with the whole politicization of justice and DHS and all that. They may feel they haven’t paid much a price. So far, they’re getting their people confirmed. There’s this fellow, Bove, who carried out some of the early politicization and weaponization of justice. He’s probably going to get confirmed for an appellate court if understand it, in a couple of weeks, I guess.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah. So I think that, like you said, with respect to the immigration, and in some sense, I think it’s also about changing the country’s demographics. I think there are some just absolute true believers that are driving this in that direction, Stephen Miller in particular, or as an example of it, and that they think it’ll be costly or there will be a rough transition until you get to the point that they’re trying to get it to.
And yeah, with such a supplicant senate, the idea that somebody like Emil Bove gets through is just extraordinary, especially given that there seemed to be this reckoning with the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo that you would think would create a fissure. You would think that Republican members of the Senate who are committed to conservative outlooks on how the law should be would throw up a roadblock here. Emil Bove doesn’t check those boxes. He just seems like a loyalist. He seems like the word that he says he’s not, which is a henchman, based on everything we know about him, and the idea that the Senate, including principled conservatives, would allow for that is just a remarkable moment.
Now, maybe Senator Tillis who’s on the Judiciary Committee will behave differently. So there’s me holding onto a little bit of that hope with respect to the Bove-like appointments or career appointments. And we’ve seen it once with Ed Martin going down in a ball of flames, and thanks then to Senator Tillis, but it’s just so astonishing and I think it’s astonishing in terms of a next chapter that we’re also thinking about. I’m sure you’re thinking about it, I’m thinking about it, which is Supreme Court vacancies.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, say a word about that. That’s a good thing to close on since it’s a dramatic thing, and it could happen soon, right? I don’t know.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Yeah, I think it could happen this summer. I could imagine that Justice Thomas for example, or Alito, would think, “Now is my moment to step down because the president is at his most powerful.” Certainly pre-midterms, that might go the other direction in terms of where the country’s at with the Senate locked up for him in the way they are, with them approving people if they do approve people like Bove, without it creating a rupture. So I think it’s such an important moment that’s coming for the country because of how critically important that life tenure position is, so that the country also does understand how the current Supreme Court in its six-three makeup is behaving and the way in which it’s greasing the slide away from a democracy that we can all recognize. So I think that’s going to be also an important powerful educative moment for the country. And right now, I don’t think we’re in a really good place to have that conversation. But Supreme Court appointments often create a focal point and so much energy goes into that educative effort. That might also be an important opportunity.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s interesting actually. Well, we don’t know if that would happen. I guess sometimes they resign right at the end of term. That hasn’t quite happened yet, it could happen next week. Sometimes they wait till later in the summer, but yeah, there’s a reason they would want to… If they want to be sure that Trump could appoint someone who they would think is following their footsteps, if you’re Thomas or Alito, I should think it’s safer to resign this summer than to wait until the end of next term when you’re heading into a midterm, it could get delayed. Trump could be weaker, there could be more Republican defections. I guess there could be fewer Republican… It’s hard to say, there could be fewer Republican defections, so yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. Well, that would be something. Well, if that happens, we’ll have an emergency conversation here and discuss, because that would be very interesting, the Supreme Court fight. But this has been terrific, Ryan. Thank you. Really, it’s a very educational and important, I think, conversation, and thank you for taking the time to do it.
RYAN GOODMAN:
Thank you so much. I look forward to the next one.
BILL KRISTOL:
Me too and thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
