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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss just how radical the Supreme Court has gotten with a 6-3 edge in conservative judges. Plus, they go through Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the January 6th Committee and what Joe Biden must do to get any part of his agenda done.
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I needed Nick back, particularly as we talk about everything.
Welcome to the Weekender Show.
Reminder, if you want all of this episode, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Nick, how we doing, buddy?
We're doing, we're doing, we're getting through it.
You know, times are what they are.
I believe in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they say they're indifferent, but dark could be the other word we could talk about.
Nick, times are what they are.
As always, we have to deliver some bad news on this episode and deal with some stuff, but I promise you we're doing it in order to try and make this better.
Tell me if this is broken record.
Tell me if this is deja vu.
A 6-3 decision!
Among the Supreme Court.
Nick, you and I both know the Supreme Court is a non-political body, impartial judges.
You can't predict what they're going to do.
They're there to measure the constitutionality of our laws and our systems.
Nick, Nick looks, Nick, Nick, Nick looks burdened.
No, I look like I'm about to leave and just walk off this pod.
How tired of shit are you of the Supreme Court, Nick?
Well, you might, I'm old enough to remember us doing a podcast probably like two years ago talking about how the, you know, the Supreme Court justices are not impartial judges.
These guys are as political as the people that we elect to Congress and to the Senate.
So if we need, if we can take that, like here's a little question.
Do we accept that on its face?
Because if we can, If we can buoy everything, you know, according to that fact, then all these decisions make a lot of sense to a party, the GOP, that is slowly or quickly losing control over the country because of demographics and changing demographics.
So it all makes sense and that's why it's easy to now predict what's going to happen over the next few years.
It's still, and before we get to the latest crime, and by the way, I use the word crime, I do not use it lightly.
Like, this is literally a crime against humanity that we're getting ready to talk about, and we have to get in deep into this thing and talk about the history behind it and the ideology and what's occurring.
But, you know, this, it never ceases to amaze me.
It's a fact that stops me dead cold in my tracks every time I remember it, which is there's a 6-3 conservative majority, a reactionary majority on the Supreme Court and the Republican Party in the last 20 years.
has only won the popular vote one time.
One time!
One time in 20 years!
And it is a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, which makes you, um, yeah, should make you physically ill.
I'll just say that.
You know, the founding fathers had thought that the Electoral College was going to be a good idea for the representation of smaller states and whatnot.
But you had to wonder if in the back of their mind they still wanted to have this patriarchal view of like, hey, the old white folks are going to be able to handle this no matter what happens.
We need that.
And that's where we're at.
It's clear, you know, with Clarence Thomas, for instance, who never asked a question for decades.
What is happening with Clarence Thomas?
He's into everything now.
You and I talked about it.
This is a guy who slept through most of the hearings and the arguments.
All of a sudden Clarence Thomas does this, Clarence Thomas does that.
My only guess at this point, I don't know what you think about this, apparently Ginny Thomas is trying to overthrow the government of the United States, did something for the old man.
That's the only thing that I can say.
It's like that, what's the movie with Statham?
With Robert De Niro?
No, I was gonna say Jason Statham.
What's the one where he has to keep his heartbeat above a certain level or his pulse?
I think I've seen this one.
That's good.
It's Crank, right?
At this point, Clarence Thomas is feeding off the energy of Ginny Thomas trying to overthrow the government of the United States.
That's the only logical answer in all of this.
Oh, I'm getting much more of the Robin Williams De Niro movie, Awakenings, right?
Where he gets dopamine and all of a sudden he's awake after all those years.
Either way.
An attempted coup does wonders for the heart, is what we're learning.
So today, six to three, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency, which we gotta get into history of that, where it came from, why we needed the EPA in the first place, in order to get a preview of what's getting ready to happen, The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA has no constitutional right to regulate emissions in order to fight climate change and the dangers of climate change.
It is a sword through the back.
I was going to say through the heart, but this is a knife in the back of the EPA that basically says that governmental regulation is not constitutional.
And this isn't going to be the end of it.
We are literally talking about a full-fledged attack on our regulatory institutions that have, by the way, been on life support for years now after relentless attacks on them, basically saying that there is no way, shape, or form that the federal government of the United States of America can combat climate change.
That's what got handed down today.
I kind of look at it more as, you know, it's really hard to turn a profit, Jared, when you have to, you know, avoid killing people with your power plants.
It is the hardest thing in the world to make a profit if you don't want to kill people, I tell you.
It's that pesky, you know, guy in the suit with the clipboard who keeps coming around every month to make sure that our emissions are going in the right spots and that we're not polluting the air too much.
You know, it really and by the way, like I'm going to be dead before it bothers anybody.
So I don't give a shit because I'm going to have all that money that I made investing in the in those public IPOs.
This is what we're gotten down to.
When you mix capitalism with democracy, you work out.
Yeah.
Remember I said all I would hope for for this government was that they don't kill people.
It pretty much kind of covers my only hope for this thing.
Well, that's out the window too.
Three Mile Island, you know, there's the endless list of these huge corporations that do not care whether they kill people without the EPA's intervention is long.
Shout out to our dead listeners who died in a winter storm in Texas.
Shout out to our Flint listeners who still don't have clean water.
Shout out to everybody right now who's being poisoned by people pursuing profit.
I mean, really.
I was sitting here, Nick, getting ready to talk about this, and one thing just kept doing laps around my mind, and it's the idea of the social contract.
And for anybody who isn't aware of this concept, the social contract is the idea That governments exist because me and Nick and the person listening at home right now, we say, guess what?
There's a measure of our freedom, just a measure of our freedom, right?
That we give away.
Our tax dollars that we give, right?
Our loyalty, you name it.
We hand it over to the state and the contract says, in response for what I hand to the state, that measure of freedom, my tax dollars, my loyalty, you name it, that the state Has to do well by us.
It has certain things that it has to do.
By the way, up at the very top of it, we're talking elementary, basic shit.
Not killing us.
Not killing us.
But here is the problem, and I want to get down into the weeds on this thing.
This is not surprising, and it's not surprising for a few reasons, but first and foremost of it is, this is the basis in which this country was founded.
This literally is why the United States of America was founded.
It was founded by a bunch of white, wealthy men who wanted to protect their property.
They believed that property equaled freedom.
And that as a result, the only thing that was actually sacrosanct in the world was the protection of their property.
That was it.
That was the basis of the United States of America.
By the way, for everyone listening, that also includes slaves, right?
So they found the country based on this.
And let me tell you this right now.
This is a fundamental existential crisis.
Should the government be able to regulate capitalism and keep in check the dangerous, illogical, but also murderously logical pursuit of profit by these people?
That is one of the biggest questions that we have had since the founding of this country.
And where we're going right now with all of this is, I cannot tell you any other way, it's a hellscape if we continue down that road.
Well, they already had telegraphed this was going to happen when they basically said that CDC has no influence either with their policies, which is ridiculous because, again, when we talk about precedent, there have been decade upon decade of precedent of these systems Helping us and we listen to them and they're unassailable.
The CDC is not political.
The EPA isn't really political.
Well, wait a second.
Hold on Nick.
Let's let's let's get something clear.
This Environmental Protection Agency.
I just want to get on the on the record.
Who was the commie pinko bastard that brought that in?
Absolutely.
It had to be like, you know, I don't even know FDR.
A flaming socialist Radical, I have to assume.
Yeah, yeah.
I can picture him right now, what he looks like.
Yeah, he looks like Richard Milhouse Nixon.
And he looks like Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Nick, tell the people at home, how was the environment in the United States in the 1970s and 1960s and 1950s?
What was the water like?
What was the air like?
Well, you could kind of go visit China to find out now.
You could, because it killed people.
And estimates show, scientific experts show, that the EPA Literally saves hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
I'm not exaggerating that.
That's not me trying to stand in the corner of like this big giant agency.
It literally saves hundreds of thousands of lives.
It was brought forth by Richard Milhouse Nixon.
And the reason it was brought forth is because Nixon, like the president he served under, Dwight D. Eisenhower, both Republicans, They believed, based on what we're talking about, that the government should regulate things for the safety of people.
And if you don't save capitalism from itself, what happens if you let capitalism just go all by itself, Nick?
It's the scene in Hunt for Red October when they point the submarine in the direction of the oncoming missile, not missile, what's it called?
Goddammit.
Torpedo.
Torpedo.
And then, you stupid fool, you killed us, whatever he says in this Russian accent.
It is the most self-destructive thing that humanity has ever come up with.
And it requires, and even Adam Smith knew this, in 17-fucking-76.
Somebody has to save people from themselves.
And the Supreme Court and all of these people that support them, all of these donors who are going to not only make money off the destruction of the world, but on the aftermath of the destruction of the world.
They get it on both sides.
That's how this game works.
They have decided, listen, fuck all of y'all.
If you plan on living forever, like, you're not getting in the way of us making profits.
That's exactly what this ruling was.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny because OSHA will have to be next, I imagine.
Sure.
Go on.
Why?
Why not?
By the way, IRS, why do they have jurisdiction?
Well, timeout, timeout.
They do want some of our tax dollars.
They don't want all of our tax dollars.
Like, the wealthy don't need to pay that.
You and me and the rest of the schmucks, we got to pay tax dollars.
Yeah, okay, fair enough.
But at least we got decades of good feeling about these programs, right?
It took a long time before a politician might have come and began the process of changing our people's minds about how effective the government could be, right?
We had decades after Oh, just a golden era.
Let me check my notes.
Ten years.
I think it's eight.
You want to say it's ten?
It might actually technically if you want to get down to the calendar.
I think it's eight years.
Nine.
Also the difference.
Fucking yes.
This is all Ronald Reagan.
He was the one who began that.
This is why it's so dangerous to run on hate and fear, you know, and the suspicion of the government.
Because you plant the seed, you might not know when that tree grows.
But it might take a while, but this is how we get to Trump, you know, who attacks the WHO and the CDC.
These are unassailable institutions that exist to better the common good.
It's unbelievable that we're in this point now where we want to basically kill ourselves.
We want that.
We have people who are advocating for this right now just so they can make another dollar.
First of all, some mandatory weekend viewing.
Go and watch Ghostbusters, which is a beloved movie of all of ours, but also watch it and think about the era that it was in, and think about Ronald Reagan and anti-authority and anti-government.
Because that is a product of its time, and the main villain in that movie It's the EPA.
Shut it down.
Shut it down now.
Shut it down.
This man has no dick.
And all of that is literally from that era that did exactly as you're saying.
Now, when people hear EPA, they think, oh, I'm going to lose money because you're trying to save us.
Spot it out.
That's literally what people think.
It's a totally twisted thing.
And by the way, I want to make this very, very clear for people.
You've seen so many commercials You've heard so many calls for action.
Basically, you've been told that climate change is up to you.
You have to buy the right products, you have to change the way you do things, and you have to recycle.
And by the way, you should do all those things.
You actually should just go ahead and do those things.
That's not what's killing the world.
What's killing the world are states.
And by states, I mean the United States of America, one of the biggest polluters.
Well, the United States is one of the biggest polluters.
The United States Armed Forces are by themselves one of the largest polluters in the world.
If any of this is going to be curbed, it has to happen at the state level.
And this right here, it is an absolute kneecapping of that idea.
And it is dragging us back to the idea that our fates, your fate, the fates of your children, the fates of the people you love, doesn't even come into the equation when you're thinking about property.
It's wealthy people's property and pursuit of profits that matters over your literal life.
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