Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the all out assault the New York Times is waging on Joe Biden's age, and whether he can survive the polling that indicates a vast majority of Democrats (!) don't want him to run again. Then, they welcome Forbes contributor and attorney Allan Marks to discuss in detail the latest Supreme Court decision West Virginia vs EPA and its ramifications on climate change.
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I'm here with Nick Hausman, who is on vacation still, showing up, doing the work.
Well, hey, let's not make it sound like I'm on vacation still, like as if I'm always on vacation.
But I'm glad to be here, well-rested, very relaxed.
I have a feeling that you might change that mood for me, though, Jared, unfortunately.
Yeah, we got stuff to talk about.
Man, we got people getting assassinated.
We've got the media going after the president.
We got to talk about all that.
We also are going to welcome on to the podcast later on Alan Marks, who is a partner at Milbank LLP and the host of the podcast Law, Policy, and Markets and a contributor to Forbes.
We're going to talk about the Supreme Court's disastrous ruling against the EPA.
But before we do, Nick, over in Japan, The former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated, killed while giving a speech at NARA Japan for his Liberal Democratic Party.
Shockwaves throughout the system.
I fear, unfortunately, with the way that our political environment is going right now, this is something that we're Maybe going to have to get used to seeing politicians suddenly get attacked, but this is a really, really bizarre thing, not only for the act itself, but where it took place and who unfortunately got killed here.
You know, people might not be completely on top of Japanese politics, so he wasn't in power.
But I think my initial response was, yes, he was.
And then I was like, well, how is the Prime Minister of Japan, like, just standing on a street with very little security?
It sounded like it was very impromptu, but I think the point is, is that, you know, the guy that shot him had to make his own gun.
It was a two-shooter.
That was the most you could shoot out of that thing.
And, you know, basically, it was very simple and easy for him to do, unfortunately.
Listen, the past couple episodes we have been, we've been stretching our wings at the Muckrake Podcast.
We've been getting the frequent flyer miles, getting taken care of, of course, going over to Britain with Boris Johnson getting thrown out on his ass.
And now this situation, you know, I want to point out when it comes to Japan, what you just brought up is absolutely correct.
There's not a lot of security at these events.
It's really a regular thing for the politicians to just sort of mingle with the people.
And I think it's important for Americans to always remember that our situation, the environment that we live in, in which, I don't know, going to a parade or simply going out and getting your groceries, it does not have to feel like you are literally putting your life on the line.
Every time you go into something or go to an event, this is Exceedingly rare in Japan.
And by the way, I'm sure that everybody has seen this all over the place.
Republicans, right-wing wise-asses who are like, oh, I thought gun violence only happened in America.
Listen, first of all, shut the hell up.
Nine people in a year die in Japan from gun violence.
Meanwhile, in America, we average roughly 300 plus a day.
Meanwhile, this whole thing of, oh, if you outlaw guns, people are just going to build their own.
I would love to see some of these MAGA chuds Go out and build their own guns.
I would I would love to see that because they couldn't and they wouldn't It's a really tragic thing.
But let's uh, let's let's not miss the force for the trees here Well, we've discussed that mindset before, where in certain aspects, if this one thing doesn't solve the issue 100% completely, then it's not worth doing.
It doesn't work.
And this is another one of those examples where, you know, to get into an argument with somebody where you're saying, well, we can reduce mass shootings by 25%.
Like, wouldn't you want to do that?
And the response tends to be, ah, what's the point?
That doesn't, won't do anything.
It doesn't end in mass shootings.
And I'm like, I just, can you, have you helped?
I think you tried to help me before and maybe you have to do it again.
To understand how you get to this point versus just being intellectually dishonest, knowing that it's simply a platform or an issue that you are opposed to wholeheartedly and will say whatever you can to shit on whatever possible solutions that might arise.
Well, I think you hit on one of the main points, which is intellectual dishonesty.
I mean, we've gotten to the point, really, and I was talking about this the other day.
Over on the Twitter machine, like, you know, the hypocrisy of the Republican Party in the right is just so well documented at this point, and it doesn't do anything.
You know what I mean?
Like, it used to be the thing, you'd watch the Daily Show, you'd see one guy saying one thing one day and another thing another day.
They do not care about having, like, intellectual honesty and or, you know, like principles that are consistent.
That's not the big deal here, particularly because the right wing is much more about having malleable ideas.
It's about, oh, if something affects me, then I have a certain idea, but if it affects other people, I have another idea.
And that goes back to this whole thing, the idea of like, oh, if you ban guns, people still get it.
We talked about it.
You ban drugs.
I'm sorry, but you know, the war on drugs didn't do anything besides disproportionately affect minorities and poor people.
Period and and in all of this it's just about wanting what you want and finding any way forward Possible in order to make that argument and here we see it again.
It's it's so It's done in such bad faith that it's actually literally disgusting that like a person got murdered here It's obvious that like a gun made this possible And meanwhile you're gonna go ahead and take this around and try and turn this into some sort of a judo throw To like the left wing for wanting gun safety Sure.
Well, you know, the other thing that's funny is that geopolitically I started racing in my mind was thinking about, is this some sort of signal?
Is this the first of a bunch of dominoes are going to fall like World War I or something?
But it sounds like this was pretty much, you know, a one-off, you know, person who is some sort of ideologue guy who pulled this off against the odds.
Well, okay, so the alleged shooter.
I mean, everybody saw him do it.
Everybody knows who did it.
We still have to call it an alleged shooter.
This was a veteran, I believe, of the Japanese Navy.
There have been conflicting reports, but it's starting to seem like he has links to a group called the Unification Church, which we don't have time in this episode, unfortunately, to get into the winding web of the Unification Church, but we talked about it on a past episode.
This is the group where part of them are literally having their services holding semi-automatic rifles, many of them worshiping Donald Trump as some sort of a warrior king, believing that their prophet is the next coming of Jesus Christ.
This is something, unfortunately, I'm not telling you that the Unification Church is going to go out there and murder a bunch of people, even though most of their sessions are talking about how war is coming, and you need to arm yourself, and you need to be prepared to war against evil people.
But I do have to tell you that as global stability, economic stability, political stability, as all those things fall apart, and as we lose more and more trust in leaders, This is the kind of stuff that happens.
Like, you literally start seeing people, you know, go out there and commit political violence.
So I don't know if we're looking at a domino situation, but we are looking at a situation that very well might be previewing where we're going.
Well, let's not forget that Lauren Boebert had just tweeted the other day that we need to terminate this presidency.
Don't do that while I'm drinking water.
I can't say something like that while I'm drinking water.
But, you know, I have a feeling she might get a little bit of she might get a call from the FBI just to, you know, say hi, because, you know, you're not really supposed to say that stuff, right?
Like that's supposed to be illegal, I think.
Certainly from a representative of Congress, you know, who doesn't really I mean, no.
Oh, by the way, you know why she said it was because Marjorie Taylor Greene was getting all the oxygen in the media and they had to one up each other every other week.
So here's here was our she hadn't been in the news for a few weeks.
So here we are.
No, I enjoyed, I mean, literally the only good things that Lauren Boebert can do is gain attention for herself and give the customers of her restaurant explosive diarrhea.
Those are the only things she's actually good at.
This entire push that she has done, she also came out and said she wanted to get rid of the divide between church and state.
And they're making it very clear how they feel about this stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is about horse racing, Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to get everybody on your side, but also is going ahead and saying the same thing that Republicans have been saying for a while.
Maybe the Second Amendment will help take care of the Supreme Court.
Maybe this is going to turn into a situation where we have to elect a fascist.
You always sort of play with those things.
And before we talk about the problems within the presidency, which we have to, I want to make the record very, very clear.
Just because Abe was assassinated does not make him a likable politician.
It doesn't make him somebody that people should laud.
This was a person cracked down on freedoms.
He was a nationalistic, paranoid, militaristic asshole.
He basically was carrying out a Make Japan Great Again campaign.
is who this person was.
So let's not sit here and pretend like this person was some sort of a saint.
Still, didn't deserve to die in political violence, period.
Absolutely.
And it's funny because, again, I'm not going to pretend I know the intricacies of Japanese politics.
I'm glad that you could fill that in for us a little bit because, honestly, the impression you get from him was that he was an upstanding, good... By the way, anybody standing next to Donald Trump will come off as surely much more competent and rational And that's what he came up to me, but, you know, it sounds a little bit like, you know, we can like Liz Cheney, but what she's doing on the January 6th committee, but we have to remember that her politics are really still awful.
Yeah, don't forget who she is in all of this.
Don't forget who any of these people are.
Everybody now wants to play this sort of like chess, where all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden Robert Mueller or James Comey, they're our friends, they're on our team, they're saving.
No, they're not.
That's not how politics works.
That's not how the real world works.
This is a tragedy.
Shouldn't have happened.
Should not have happened.
But we're also not going to sit here and pretend like this person was like some sort of a saint.
I think that's a problem.
Absolutely.
So yeah, so where are we going to go from here though?
This is nerve-wracking to some degree.
So now we have to talk about just how things are developing.
Nick, we've been talking, we've been on this beat for a few weeks now.
There has been so much that has been happening in terms of not just the Biden presidency and disappointing a lot of people, but particularly how sort of the The media and the coverage of this is creating a narrative.
And when you see articles, when you see studies, when you see all this stuff, you have to remember this isn't just being put out there in order to entertain people or quote-unquote inform people.
A lot of this is manufacturing consent.
It's actually sending signals to political operators back and forth.
And we have to start today with a little something that's been happening with Joe Biden before we get into the meat of this, which is Biden did sign an executive order to react to the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
It needed to happen.
It was a long time coming.
This executive order, I have to tell you, it doesn't do a whole lot.
Here's what it does.
One, it pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to prepare a report on medication abortion.
Okay, cool.
Prepare a report.
See what happens.
Two, it takes steps to protect contraception.
Absolutely needs to happen.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Three, it asks the Federal Trade Commission to look into protecting data.
Thank God!
That actually needs to be done.
I don't know if it's going to happen.
We'll see if big tech lets it.
Let's hear very quickly from Joe Biden what he has to say about this executive order.
Based on the reasoning of the court, there is no constitutional right to choose.
The only way to fulfill and restore that right for women in this country is by voting.
By exercising the power at the ballot box.
And again, what does it come down to, Nick?
You gotta go out and vote in November.
Everything else is out of his hands.
I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to keep hearing that.
I'm so tired of hearing the word November.
Aren't you tired of hearing the word November?
Stop telling me that I need to vote for you to make this happen and try and do something.
Right.
I mean, it's a big cop-out.
You can just sort of say that for everything, just kick it down the road every single time you don't want to do anything and say, oh, well, no, in November we can do it.
Meanwhile, they've had 50 years to contemplate this.
But let's just not even, you can't hold them to the fire.
Biden wasn't president for the last 50 years.
But they had a month or two months before this decision came out that they knew it was coming out where they were not doing anything.
Well, and let's talk about those two months real fast.
Let's hear from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Let's see what Kamala has to say about this situation.
When you look back, did Democrats fail past Democratic presidents, congressional leaders to not codify Roe v. Wade over the past five decades?
I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled.
Certain issues are just settled.
Clearly we're not.
No, that's right.
And that's why I do believe that we are living, sadly, in real unsettled times.
So Nick, I just want to take a second to let this really sink in.
I want to read this answer.
Of course, this comes from Costa.
This is the idea of were past Democratic politicians, past Democratic presidents, your administration, were you wrong not to go ahead and codify Roe v. Wade in the law?
And this is the response, and I want to read this, quote unquote, I think that To be honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believed that certain issues are just settled, and that's why I do believe that we are living, sadly, in real, unsettled times.
She believes.
Nick, I, I, okay, I've sat with this.
For no less than 15 minutes, really, linguistically, trying to go through it.
And listen, Harris's answers... And by the way, didn't somebody prepare her for this question?
Like, how?
How did nobody prepare her for it?
But that's the question you have to ask every time she speaks in front of the press.
Every time.
And misspeaking is one thing.
Sometimes people aren't good at speaking.
She gets... We've seen linguistically, she gets flustered and she just starts talking.
I want to actually go down into the essence of this, Nick.
I think that, to be honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed that Roe v. Wade was settled.
That's That's madness!
It wasn't settled.
How could you have rightly believed it was settled?
How do you even start to say that?
Well, okay.
I'm going to carry some water.
In theory, because you have these people under oath who are being interviewed to become Supreme Court justices saying that stare decisis is the law of the land, in theory, if you wanted But the problem is the word rightly.
You were wrong.
You were wrong.
it was there and protected, and people were saying it was protected. - But the problem is the word rightly.
You were wrong.
You were wrong.
And I have to tell you, and Nick, you're in the same basket as me.
If the administration would just come out and say, we were wrong about this, wouldn't that go a little ways towards making this just a tiny, tiny little bit better?
Well, that was the question I was going to ask you about this whole thing.
It sounds like what you wanted them to say, listen, we screwed this up and we are now going to take every step possible to fix it as quickly as we can.
You cannot sit here and tell the people who are expecting you to protect their rights and their well-being, hey, they might have done this, but we were also right to not expect them to do it.
That's literally like being a night watch person and having the crime take place on your watch and saying, how could I have thought a crime was going to take place?
We hadn't had one before, I guess.
That doesn't work.
And I got to tell you, I want to read from this.
Nick, when we were sending stuff back and forth for this episode, man, there is so much stuff that came out from the Biden administration this week that was maddening.
And I want to point out, this is from a Washington Post article.
It's titled, Two Long Weeks Inside Biden's Struggle to Respond to Abortion Ruling.
I want to read this first thing.
White House officials defend the urgency of Biden's response and the actions he has taken on abortion.
The president is showing deep outrage.
All right.
Joe Biden's goal is not in responding to Dobbs.
It is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
What the hell is that?
It's your fault, Jared.
It's your fault.
Oh, it's my fault.
It's my fault.
Yeah, because because Who thinks that telling their base that they're outside of the mainstream Democratic Party, who thinks that's a good way to get people to like go along with you?
I guess whoever wrote that, whoever said that, I mean, it was stunning.
Stunning.
And, you know, we've been talking about this for a long time, right?
You've been talking about it probably more than me as far as being vociferously upset with the administration.
And this is a clear example of, I mean, I don't want to say tone deafness, but it's not, that's not strong enough.
Nick, in this article, people in the administration literally said that they were caught off guard by the timing of the ruling.
Do you remember, and I want our listeners to remember this, the week that Roe v. Wade got overturned, you and I recorded our podcast for Tuesday, much like we're doing right now, and we said, Roe v. Wade will probably be overturned this week.
Keep attention, we'll cover it, we'll talk about it.
Did we not say that?
You said that, and you kept talking about it for the weeks leading up to that.
We kept having to talk about it because of that.
Weeks?
It was clear, it was obvious we knew almost exactly what day, because you knew they were going to dump it on a Friday.
It's ludicrous to cover your ass with that kind of excuse.
Okay, in all seriousness, did we sacrifice something to a dark god to know the future there?
Listen, you don't want to insult my hobbies or anything like that.
The first rule of QAnon, don't talk about QAnon.
Did we gaze into a crystal ball?
No.
No.
Do I or you?
I have sources in the government.
I have sources in the Supreme Court.
Do you have a source in the Supreme Court?
I do not.
How in the hell did we, a podcast, know this was coming and the administration of the President of the United fucking States of America get caught off guard?
How?
Well, okay.
Because the answer is they weren't caught off guard.
This is just their excuse.
Unless you want to take them for their word for it that they were.
I'm tending to think that they're just making shit up because they just aren't competent or they're not organized.
You know what I mean?
There's no other way to explain that.
They had to know when it was coming up.
They had to know before it got leaked in February, whatever that word, March, what is time.
They had to know before that.
I'm just dumbfounded by that.
That's their excuse.
So let's go ahead and hear from the Democratic establishment.
Nick, I'm going to say a name here in a second.
You tell me if we've been hearing this name recently.
You ready?
Yeah.
Ready?
Quote unquote, one of the reasons he was elected, Biden, was that he's a decent person and there's no doubt that he can raise his voice, but it doesn't come naturally and it doesn't land well.
Said David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Barack Obama.
He's getting around, is he not?
So, okay, yeah, go ahead.
Well, I just want to finish this quote.
People got the president they voted for, and I think those are good qualities that he has, but they may not be the qualities that some people, comma, particularly activist Democrats, comma, are looking for right now.
Activist Democrats!
It's slander!
It's literally throwing punches by a guy who's probably trying to get Buttigieg to run and have him be his campaign manager, and that's what's happening.
Alright, you just took my point, goddammit.
But yes, what is Axelrod's angle here?
Well, who is he trying to woo?
He's obviously tired of doing his podcast, and he's ready to get back into the ring.
Well, I'm tired of him doing his podcast, too.
Right.
We're not.
We love doing our podcasts, by the way.
But I will say, and this is important, the New York Times, who by the way, we've been talking about this, has just been like coming for Biden hard.
Listen to this.
This is a New York Times poll that's hidden in the article about it.
A New York Times Commission poll has shown 64%, 64% of Democrats do not want Joe Biden to run for re-election.
Democrats do not want Joe Biden to win for reelect run for reelection 64% of Democrats Nick yeah it And listen, would they vote for him again if he gets the nomination?
Like, sure.
But it certainly doesn't give you that kind of huge voter turnout that he got in 2020 that he needs to rely on to win again.
Listen, I may just be an unfrozen caveman lawyer.
I may not know the wild and wooly ways of the modern world.
If 64% of your party doesn't want you to run for president again, do you think it's a good idea to just start whining about the activist base and the extremist base of your party or people outside?
Is that a smart way whatsoever?
This administration, and I'm not talking about Joe Biden here, by the way, I'm talking about everybody underneath.
The communication staff, the political staff, they are terrible.
Wow, it's remarkable.
They were so good under Obama, at least they were so disciplined they wouldn't make mistakes like this, they didn't get the gang back together apparently.
They did not, and I'll tell you who's noticed that as well.
Let's talk, Nick, because it's not like the New York Times would run an article that was basically a submarine tack of Joe Biden, would they?
Oh, listen, everyone likes a good submarine when you're taking a bath.
Nick, we have to talk about this article, which is titled, at 79, Biden is testing the boundaries of age in the presidency.
I agree.
How do you feel reading this?
I agree.
I agree with certainly the way they're describing, characterizing him and his energy and his oration and all those things.
It's not great, Bob.
It's not great, and I don't know, demographics of our audience, I don't know how many of them ever played Mortal Kombat.
But in the fighting game Mortal Kombat, there'd come a moment where you defeated your opponent, and they would just be out on their feet, and they would say, finish him!
And that's when you went in for the finishing move.
And I have to tell you, the stuff that we've been talking about over the past couple of weeks, this article That we're getting ready to talk about.
It literally trafficked in a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't have heard back in 2020 outside of right-wing Twitter.
Am I right?
Right.
Without question.
Oh, the Overton window has changed.
I mean, the liberal institution, the democratic institution does not want him around.
Listen to this opening.
When President Biden leaves Tuesday night for a four-day swing through the Middle East, which, by the way, we're going to have to talk about and it's awful, he will presumably be more rested than he would have been if he had followed the original plan.
The trip was initially tacked on to another journey last month to Europe, which would have made for an arduous 10-day overseas trek until it became clear to Mr. Biden's team that such extended travel might be unnecessarily taxing for a 79-year-old president.
Nick, that's the opening.
He's flying in a... Listen, it's tough when you fly in a plane that's got a bed in it.
It's taxing, even just doing that.
So come on, man.
You know, I flew once to Paris from L.A.
That's a tiring trip.
And back?
Come on.
I couldn't lead a country after doing that.
Nick, they literally are saying in the opening that it's affecting.
The ability, his ability to be the president.
I was sleepy on the way up in the elevator on the way up to the Eiffel Tower.
Like, I totally can relate a little bit to that.
Not really, but OK.
OK, so as we're doing it, and I want to remind you, everything that we're seeing David Axelrod do, and if you want to listen to the shows over the past couple of weeks, we've been talking about this so much of this.
And Nick, you've read this too, whenever they want a Supreme Court justice to retire.
Right?
They're like, he really respectable career, it might be time for him to go.
Right?
Like, why don't you gracefully do that?
Mr. Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking up that weak point on page 14 of a memo, and rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up to the last minute.
Which, by the way, the message of that is, you don't need the 25th Amendment.
It's fine.
Right?
Yeah, he's doing well.
He's doing well.
And then, but they acknowledge Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago, a political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shakeups.
His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was and some aides quietly watch out for him.
He often shuffles when he walks and aides worry he will trip on a wire.
He stumbles over words during public events and they hold their breath.
Down here they say he's a five or a five-and-a-half-a-day-a-week president.
This is brutal!
Oh, it's going to get worse, Jared.
Wait till the midterms happen.
It's going to get a lot worse.
Yeah.
Imagine if what we think, a landslide even, because there's another poll that came out about Who treats Roe v. Wade as a voting issue?
This is a really important thing.
You can have a huge part of the country that wants Roe v. Wade to be codified or whatever, but they're not going to get off their ass and go vote for it necessarily.
That's what's so interesting about that whole thing.
And that's what rallies the Republican base.
So if it doesn't happen where there was still hope that, hey, maybe the Democrats are going to hang on.
Let's say it's a landslide like everyone thinks it was going to be for the Republicans.
Oh my goodness gracious.
Then, because Biden won't get anything done, they're going to impeach him.
It's, you know, it'll be over.
So they're kind of priming the pump at this point, right?
If you look at it through that lens.
They absolutely are.
And I want to point out, like, we're in year two of this first term.
We're in year two of his first term.
Obviously, things are not going well.
The narrative, I mean, we talked about it in the very, very beginning of this.
Narrative in a presidency is everything, right?
It's how things appear.
It's what's communicated.
In this case, the liberal media, the liberal media, the gatekeepers here, have decided that Joe Biden cannot run for the presidency again.
And already in year two, we're literally talking about decline.
That's where we're at.
And you're exactly right.
It's just going to get worse.
I'm kind of curious though, going forward, the way this has now been set up, the way we deal with politics, is any president ever going to achieve more than like 50% approval rating anyway going forward?
Unless there is a major shift in our political environment.
And that could happen.
I think the manufacturing consent that we were just talking about, You know, I think if they got behind somebody like a DeSantis or whatever, you know, look what they did with Reagan, you know?
It was like there was no possibility that was ever going to happen, and then all of a sudden you have these major landslides and tectonic shifts.
It could happen.
I guess.
I mean, I can't see DeSantis ever getting that more than 50% or whatever approval rating, but...
I don't know.
It just feels like, you know, would Lakers fans ever, like, become a Knicks fan?
Like, no.
That would be death to them and their fandom.
It's hard to imagine you could get that kind of crossover to achieve more than whatever, you know, because what we used to see, you know, 60s, 70s approval ratings.
I mean, we should go back and find out the last time a president got that high.
I think it's been quite a while.
- Nick, when we started this show two years ago, and we were covering Donald Trump, and just white-wing descent into fascistic madness, did you ever think things were gonna get weirder?
Like, did you ever have a moment where you thought, man, this might get weirder?
I know that I kept telling you, Jared, wait until next week or whatever, right?
I know I said that a lot of these times, so I'm like, yes, I think we knew this could get, and weirder might not be the right word, but yes, this is going to continue to devolve into... Harrowing?
Yeah.
Harrowing's a good word.
It is just, it's, man, every day just watching this take place.
All right, everybody, we're going to have to go talk to Alan Marks.
We're going to get into this EPA decision by Supreme Court, and we'll be right back.
Hey everybody, welcome back, and I'm pleased to have actually a friend of mine, Alan Marks, who's also a partner at Millbank LLP and the host of the podcast Law, Policy, and Markets, and a contributor to Forbes Magazine and did an excellent article on their recent decision regarding the EPA and SCOTUS.
So, Alan, thanks so much for coming on the show.
I really, really appreciate it.
Thanks, Nick.
It's a pleasure.
Well, I thought you could come on here and at least give us an overview because I think there's a lot of misinformation that was going on about what the decision meant and if it rather, if it completely like neutered the EPA from ever having any teeth to enforce anything anymore going forward or what did actually, what did the Supreme Court say about that and what their, how that works in the real world?
Yeah, good question.
Actually, let's start with what it does not do.
There was a case several years ago, the state of Massachusetts against the EPA that established that the EPA does have Both the duty and the power to regulate greenhouse gases.
And this case does not change that.
So the EPA still gets to regulate carbon dioxide and methane and other other bad things that come off of power plants and other emission sources that increase concentrations in the atmosphere that cause climate change.
The other thing it does not do is say to the EPA that you're not allowed to regulate power plants.
Ever since 1971, the EPA has done that and they're still allowed to do it.
So it's not the end of the world as we know it.
What the court did do was tie the hands of the EPA in actually dealing with these things.
So it said, sure, go ahead, Here's your job.
Fine.
Even as Justice Roberts said, in the opinion, it may be what the EPA is doing is the best solution to the crisis of the day to deal with greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide and climate.
But we don't want you doing it this way because Congress did not authorize you to do so.
Now, that's, you know, previously debatable.
The dissent by justices pointed out that that's kind of a silly way to look at it, that in fact, it's pretty easy to infer from the Clean Air Act that the EPA does in fact have the full range of its tools available.
And what was at issue interestingly was a set of rules that were not even being enforced.
There was a clean power plan put in place by President Obama that was pretty quickly stayed by another court, by the Supreme Court, while there was challenges to the rules.
Never was implemented.
The Supreme Court today did not have to decide this case.
There are new rules that are going to be coming out, but they're not there yet.
Trump's rules that he put in place were set aside by a court back in January, right around the time of the inauguration of President Biden.
So there's no reason the court had to take this case.
And what they did is they came out, they basically said to the EPA, you may not tell states to regulate your power grid in ways to cause shifting of generation from coal to natural gas, or from natural gas and coal into renewables, which is what the EPA wanted to do under President Obama, but has not yet had doesn't have a rule now to do that.
Instead, they said all you can do EPA is regulate at the power plant level, Uh, to make the existing plants or new plants that are to be built cleaner than they otherwise would be.
But that does not let the EPA shift the power system wholesale from bad polluting things into things that are clean and green.
So I got a question for you, Alan, because I'm endlessly fascinated by lawyers.
I mean, you are always out.
You're the only one, I think.
I think more people should be fascinated because I think obviously this is where the limits of a liberal society are sort of tested, right?
You're on the front lines constantly going back and forth.
You know, there are rulings that sort of affect smaller things.
There are massive, massive rulings that basically take the snow globe and shake it up.
Can you talk about where this ranks on that scale?
Like where in your field and always dealing with stuff like where where is this on the Richter scale?
Let me put that in two pieces.
So if you're just looking at energy in the environment, it's an important ruling.
It certainly is, because it constrains what the federal government can do.
Uh, but it's not, it's not, I would, I would put it somewhere in the middle.
Uh, it, it, there could have been a much worse ruling that could have come out of this that really would have been more problematic.
Um, if you look at administrative law, which is sort of an arcane area that people really didn't focus on as much for the last 50 years, because you didn't really have to, that is now going to be a hot area of the law because that gets to the core question of how does the government function What's the division between the branches, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary?
And I was talking to a friend who's a professor of administrative and constitutional law, and he was saying this case will be in the casebooks they teach in law schools for what administrative law does.
And what's basically happened here is the court has said, We're going to make it harder for regulators who are experts to do their jobs based on science or based on costs or based on the very democratic process that they're involved in, unless Congress gets more into the weeds and Congress is frankly able to do and is much more specific and granular about what Congress wants.
And the current does that knowing Congress, given polarization, is completely incapable of doing that.
So it ends up supplanting the democratic process of rulemaking through the executive and the democratic process of what the legislature and the Congress should do and putting the courts ahead of themselves.
And as the dissenting opinion in this case mentioned, they said, look, the day that the court has to be the ones deciding what we do about climate change is a very frightening day.
You know I'm curious when we talk about Roe v. Wade and a lot of the people who are proponents of having it overturned we're saying that it's it's not in the Constitution so it has to go to the states for instance.
I kind of feel like is that sort of a similar concept that's going on here where the EPA isn't in the Constitution and these people who are reading it as if it's 1791 are sort of have the same kind of disdain for it because it doesn't like it's in their jurisdiction?
No, I'd say it's actually different.
A lot of people don't realize which president created the EPA.
And by the way, it wasn't even an act of Congress.
It was President Richard Nixon, through an executive order, who created the EPA in 1970, five months before the Clean Air Act was passed by Congress.
And passed, by the way, completely overwhelmingly by both parties.
There was a very bipartisan effort to get rid of smog, first kind of discovered and described chemically by some very smart folks over here at Caltech in Los Angeles.
To really understand what's going on when you have emissions from cars and power plants and steel plants and factories, and why does that hurt human health?
That's not been a partisan issue.
Most people think that we should have cleaner air.
Not much of an argument about that.
In this case, from a constitutional standpoint, it is clear that Congress has the ability to enact statutes that direct the government to protect public health.
To protect the environment.
And that's what these statutes did.
The constitutionality of the Clean Air Act was never at issue.
What was the question is, how do you, as a textual matter, interpret what Congress intended in giving power to the executive branch to enforce the Clean Air Act?
It was a very technical reading of Section 111D of the Clean Air Act.
I think they got it wrong, but it is the law of the land because the Supreme Court said so.
Well, speaking of the law of the land, so you've been in this business for a while.
You've been playing a trade with the law.
What does it feel like to be in a situation where, for years and years and years, I mean, we've all known that corporations and the wealthy have used the law to sort of, you know, sort of rig things in their own direction.
How does it feel to finally look up the ladder and see a Supreme Court that is not just so ideological, but also is so aggressive in their rulings and are obviously pushing in these directions?
Like, what does that do for somebody who's working within that system?
How does that feel to be on the other side of that?
Well, first, I think it's really hard to stick this case in that basket of things where the system is rigged in favor of big capital.
The market value today of the U.S. coal industry, all the companies involved in it, is about $19 billion.
Now, it sounds like a big number until you realize the size of the economy and the size of the energy sector within it.
Energy is over $1.5 trillion.
The utilities alone are almost $1 trillion.
Those are big numbers.
And there are a lot of big companies, energy companies, also big tech, companies like Google and Amazon that are big consumers of power, including renewable power.
The filed briefs in the court arguing the EPA should have this power.
and should be able to implement rules like they had done under the Obama administration.
So this is not big business, this is a business, a dying business, the coal industry, which was able to kind of hang on.
And you see the same thing politically in the Senate, where currently the clean, or the climate package, which had been proposed by the administration, which had passed the House, sort of got stuck, And one reason it stuck is Senator Manchin from West Virginia.
West Virginia, of course, is the second largest coal state.
Wyoming is number one.
And this is an industry which is shrunk, shrunk by by half just in the last 12 years.
You know, not to belabor Roe v. Wade, but it's obvious in my mind, and we've known that for 50 years, they've been planning this and signaling that this is what they want to do, and they've been trying to get the Supreme Court to then reflect that decision.
Was there a lot of the same kind of thing happening?
Do you feel like in the last years, several years going back, in terms of attacking the EPA or being able to remove some of these, is this more about a diabolical scheme that they've been trying to plot for a long, long time, and there's been signals going forward up until now?
Yeah, I gotta say who they is.
Republicans.
Yeah, I mean, I do think that there is definitely a strain within the Republican Party, which is long been beholden to fossil fuels, to oil and gas and to coal.
It's not slightly not the same everywhere.
I mean, one of the biggest champions of wind energy is actually Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa, which is one of the earliest big movers as a state in favor of wind.
You know, when Perry was governor of Texas, he got the state to put seven billion dollars into the CREZ transmission system, which is the reason you have so much development of wind, especially, but now solar happening in Texas, which is also a state, of course, which is very favorable to fossil fuels. which is very favorable to fossil fuels.
I think this is complicated.
And not all these interests are going to fit neatly into a spectrum of left or right or good or bad.
I do think the long term trend toward decarbonization is going to continue, regardless of what's happening.
But as a lawyer who works with investors, who works with clients that are putting money into investments, I will say that when there's uncertainty about what regulations are going to be, that chills all investment.
And it's better if you know what the rules are so you can price them and plan around them.
So uncertainty is a problem.
Nick, to your question, too, about how this case kind of came about, there was litigation going back to 2016 around Obama's Clean Power Plan.
And there was also litigation around the Trump, what they call the Affordable Clean Energy rules that came after out of the EPA.
This case or other cases that are consolidated into it have been bouncing around It's important to the D.C.
circuit for a few years.
And I do think they fit into that broader question of will we decarbonize and what shape that will take.
And at the end of the day will regulations reinforce positive investments in clean and green energy or will the lack of good regulations or bad regulations slow that down somewhat.
Let me follow up on that real quick, because I'm wondering if you feel like there's any kind of intellectual honesty towards the argument that the right will have in terms of if we move too quickly with what, let's say, the EPA wanted to do to get us into cleaner modes of fuel, then that will mean that poor people are going to suffer because the infrastructure now that exists, well, those prices are going to go way up high, and then that's going to make life even more crippling for them, which is why we can't quickly do anything with our energy to make it, you know,
I think the answer to that is no.
If you look at what's called the levelized cost of energy, which is basically a way you can compare the marginal cost of new generation from different sources, and we can get in the weeds on that if you like as to how you calculate it.
It depends on the discount rates and a lot of assumptions about how energy is used and where you're located.
But in general, I think it's safe to say in the United States that renewable resources like wind and solar have come down in price so much over the last decade, the last 10 to 15 years, that they are now cheaper than, or certainly no more expensive than, new gas-fired resources, and they're cheaper than coal.
And the reason for that is, although the capital costs may be higher up front, as you know, interest rates have been historically low, there's plenty of money sloshing around the system, but there's no fuel.
So, operating costs are very low.
So, even if you're in areas where you have an intermittent resource, which means, you know, the solar plant's not producing power at night because the sun is going down, or the wind is blowing, you're still, over the life of that plant, going to get kilowatt hours onto the grid at a lower cost than you would if you built a new coal plant and had to go buy coal for the next 20 or 30 years.
So I think the economics of the fall in gas prices and the dramatic fall in solar and earlier in wind costs are the reason why you're seeing this shift in It would be nice to have regulations that reinforced that trend rather than causing uncertainty, but I think that that's here to stay.
Your question about increasing costs and the economic justice of it, you know, that's for state regulators to sort out in how they design rates.
In many places, residential rates are subsidized by larger commercial users.
There are some areas where it's actually the opposite, where industry is subsidized by higher rates on ratepayers.
The idea of any regulatory system for energy in any state is you spread those costs over enough people so that the share of the cost is actually fairly low and rates are affordable.
And if you need to subsidize people who can't afford it, you do that and you should.
And if you have a system which is neither affordable, nor reliable, nor clean, then you need to change the rules.
So I think you and I probably would disagree quite a bit on the outlook of what's going to happen in terms of energy and decarbonization, but I'm always willing to listen to other ideas.
How do you see this going forward?
Like if this is going to have a Supreme Court that might strike down this type of stuff, I know you're a market guy, you're very interested in that sort of solving the solution.
How do you see this playing out over the next few years?
Because I think we're reaching a real crucial point in terms of how energy is produced, where we go forward.
I feel like the fossil fuel industry has a pretty good grip on a lot of different parts of our political and economic systems.
How do you see this playing out?
So, look at where greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
come from right now.
And, by the way, we have lower greenhouse gas emissions than we had, we're below the peak.
The troubles were not coming down fast enough, not even close.
And, you know, if you look at the IPCC working group reports, the three of them, I mean, one basically said, you're in deep trouble.
The second one said, no, no, you really are in deep trouble.
You're not listening.
And the last one basically said, well, I told you so.
If you look at extreme weather events, you look at extreme heat, you look at ocean acidification, you look at sea levels.
I mean, we're not paying attention nearly enough globally and domestically.
And yes, the Supreme Court is definitely making it harder because now rules for agencies like the EPA, like energy regulatory agencies and others, you know, whatever we do will be too little, too late and too costly.
And it didn't have to be this way.
So I think you and I find some room to agree on it.
If you look where greenhouse gas emissions come from in the U.S. right now, about a quarter of all U.S.
greenhouse gas emissions, so mainly carbon dioxide, but also methane and NOx and others, come from the generating power, from generating electricity.
That's the second biggest contributor.
The first one, slightly bit more, is transportation.
So let's say we plug in EVs.
Let's say everybody shifts overnight to electric vehicles.
Yay, problem solved.
And I'm working right now on EV charging networks and other things that, you know, depend on that.
But again, it's more complicated.
If I'm switching over to EVs and I'm plugging into a grid, like in, say, Wyoming, which still has a lot of coal power, I've actually made things worse.
I just went from gasoline to coal to power my car.
So you've got to couple this electrification of mobility of motor vehicles with the decarbonization of power production.
That still has to happen.
The other thing is we use power for a lot of things, or energy, I should say, for things other than creating electricity.
Industrial heat.
You can't really do that with electricity.
You burn something for that.
Well, what's it going to be?
Is it going to be coal?
Is it going to be gas?
Or is it going to be hydrogen?
And if that's hydrogen, is that created in a clean way with electrolysis?
Although that's, at the moment, fairly expensive, but, you know, it's going to come down.
Or is it being created with natural gas?
And it is natural gas, are you going to, what are you gonna do about methane emissions?
Are you going to, you know, have people that now you have to increase costs and you should in order to monitor methane emissions to be truthful about what's actually coming out and deal with it.
It is certainly more expensive to try to take carbon out of the atmosphere, which is still an experimental technology.
Then it is to capture and sequester it.
It is more expensive to capture and sequester it than it is to not produce in the first place.
And the easiest way to not produce it is to use energy less or more efficiently.
And it would be nice if we had an alignment among the branches of government and actually get laws that don't.
The market is getting there, but it's going to take time.
I think one of the things that frightens me the most when we're talking about this, particularly like a move like just take the electric electrification of vehicles, is that one of the animating influences among, take the Republican Party, is the idea of catastrophic concepts, like literally trying to create more gas guzzling things in order to confirm identities.
You know, like I'll go for a run and like there will be some guy driving by with a truck that is like the size of a small house.
That now has, like, a button installed in order to, quote-unquote, roll coal.
Right?
In order to piss off the liberals.
Have you not seen this, Nick?
There's no way you've seen this.
I have not.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
There's no way they would let that roll into California.
There's no chance there's a single one of these in California.
No chance.
Yeah.
What does roll coal mean?
So, basically, this is really dumb shit.
I'll just go ahead and preface it.
It is dumb shit.
It's literally a button that you can get installed in one of your trucks in order to burn more gas in order to spew black smoke to upset people.
Okay.
That's a literal thing.
Wow.
And when you look at all this, and this is something that worries me, Alan, is that So many of the things that we actually need to do, because everything you just said is stuff that we actually need to do if we want to, you know, curb climate change, is that so much of the Republican Party and the movement that they represent is dedicated towards using identity and anger to keep those things in place, right?
Like, oh, you're not a real man if you're driving around in an electric vehicle, or, you know what I'm saying?
Like, that's the thing that concerns me, and there's like a cultural aspect to it.
Like, how do you I don't know.
How do you convince people to, like, leave that stuff behind?
So I worked on the Hill as a member of Congress.
It's interesting.
I and everybody else on his legislative staff were Democrats.
He was a Republican.
He was a liberal Republican from New York back when those things existed.
And bipartisanship was something that people talked about, but actually also did.
And what that often meant is getting deals done.
A lot of it, by the way, was getting deals done outside of the view of public cameras.
So I think increasing polarization, increasing transparency, increasing misinformation and the abuse of it by elected officials and some parts of the media.
I mean, I think those are trends that have gotten so much worse.
And that's what's really getting in the way.
So the problem isn't just someone using identity politics.
The problem is someone I think using it in order to block discussion with people with whom you don't agree.
We need to be able to convince people who don't agree with us that there's something for everybody if we could just roll up our sleeves and get it done.
I think there's a tendency among regulatory agencies to be staffed with the kinds of people who are experts in things, where expertise is valued, where science matters, where you want to be pragmatic And that's what I think.
I think one reason you see this trend right now, especially from, you know, conservative justices on the court to pull us away from expertise is because they'd like to supplant it based on other values.
Yes.
Now, then you have the question of what are the values, and what should values be?
Law is just a way, institutionally, to express values, and at the moment, we have a lot of folks who would like to drive wedges between people who basically otherwise have the same values in order to suggest that we don't, and that division makes it harder to get things done.
I'm kind of curious, if you look at the way this Supreme Court ruling came out, do you feel like it kind of puts a target on the back of the EPA?
And if so, are there other government agencies you feel like that could also be the target of the Supreme Court, you know, in terms of, you know, taking away their power to actually be experts in the field?
Yeah, I mean, the reason why administrative law casebooks in the future might include this case is because it has a lot more applicability than just to the EPA.
There was an idea, I won't get too in the weeds, but there's this idea of the Chevron Dr. Information from a case that involves Chevron versus NRDC that basically said when Congress passes a law and Gives the regulator authority and it's not crystal clear what that authority is What's the scope of what the regulator is supposed to do that?
We will defer to the regulator in this case defer to the EPA to decide what Congress wanted it to do and The only time you don't do that is if laws that are clear ambiguity in it Or if it's ambiguous, but Congress has not specifically acted to do something different.
Here, we've got a whole new way of looking at that, where first the court had to come up with a textual argument that says that the statute, the Clean Air Act here, was ambiguous.
That itself is not something that the majority and the dissenting opinions agree on.
And then it said, we're not going to change the Chevron doctrine.
We're still going to defer, except if there's a major question.
Well, what's the major question?
And there are some cases, you can even look at some of the circuit court cases when Kavanaugh was a judge before he became a justice.
You look at writings that Gorsuch has had.
You can look at some of the things that John Roberts has said in the past.
And it's clear that this idea of what a major question is, is changing.
And it's changing in a very big way.
After this case, it looks as if regulators can't do anything that's important.
Because if it was important, Congress would have been more specific.
I don't know how you get through that.
It's going to be interesting to see how regulators have any idea what their authority is and why you aren't going to see just a flood of litigation of people challenging any regulation they want because it could have an impact.
And I think that's why this is going to be big.
If you look at other Supreme Court cases this term, there are a couple of other ones that are relevant to this too.
OSHA and its authority over workplace safety and the CDC's eviction moratorium and whether they had the authority to regulate that on the basis of public health.
Those were both set aside by this court in similar administrative ways.
So this is part of a broader picture of whether the court will allow agencies to do their job and defer to allow any deferred deference to them as far as what the scope of their authority is.
Here there's actually also some lines in the majority opinion that suggest that it's not that Congress has to act in an opposite way from their instruction.
It's enough that Congress is able to act.
If a law passes the House and not the Senate, well that I guess means Congress doesn't want it.
So we're going to infer, therefore, the court says, that regulators can't do that thing because you've proven a negative.
Congress failed to act even though the statute they did pass, in this case 50 years ago, seems on its face pretty clearly to authorize the types of regulatory activity that's the issue.
Yeah, and I think I'm trying to think of what an anti-bat signal would be.
But, you know, it's basically a Riddler signal or a Joker signal.
You know, the way the Supreme Court has worked is it has sent out messages or signals like these are the cases we need to hear everything from contraception to gay rights.
I mean, and in this case, I think you you brought up a really important thing, which is really concerned me, OSHA.
I mean, the regulatory state at this point, basically the entire progress of the 20th century, is on the cutting board at this point.
And, you know, whether it's all going to get rolled back or whether there's even a possibility for it, I mean, it's pretty obvious that this is sort of the idea that the progress of the 20th century was a mistake.
And this stuff can be done away with.
But I want to make a point that there's a through line to all of these things.
And I think that the thing that stitches these things all together is money, right?
This is all in an effort to make businesses operate in a cheaper way where they don't have to worry about killing people, basically, right?
Well, and I want to go ahead and, Alan, I'd love to hear what you have to say about this, because this is one of the reasons why this ruling bothered me so much, and why, you know, bringing up OSHA is a problem.
I come from, like, a, I come from a factory family, right?
I mean, like, you know, OSHA was around, but it wasn't really paid attention to that much.
But the specter of things like OSHA, like, really drove a lot of industry out of America.
You had a lot of factories that would leave, you know, the And now it really seems like if you listen to what a lot of these Republicans say and what a lot of this ideology is, it's about trying to bring that back.
It's about trying to reestablish manufacturing, reindustrialize America.
And I got to tell you, if we're going to hit these points to curb climate change, that's not going to help.
And it feels like that's kind of the path this is on at this point.
Yeah, so the opposite of progressive is regressive.
Yeah.
And most government laws that have been passed since, well, you actually go back to the 20s and you look at child labor laws.
That's where a lot of this starts.
But you look at the New Deal period, you look at the post-war expansion and federal direct investment in infrastructure.
You look at the 60s and 70s in environmental and workplace safety and public health.
You go further forward to the Affordable Care Act, but you don't have to go all the way there.
You can take a pause and look at Medicare and Medicaid.
All of these things were designed where government was going to make life better for people.
And, by the way, foster economic growth.
It's not like it was antithetical to economic growth.
To the contrary, the interstate highway system facilitated huge amounts of growth.
You know, if the government took health care burdens off their shoulders of employers and let them compete on a level playing field with the companies in Europe and other OECD countries where the government provides health care, I mean, you'd unlock a lot of competitive energies.
So, I do think securities regulation, we could talk for that in great detail.
There have been some very interesting cases on that in the past year under the Fifth Circuit.
You know, what is the scope of the regulators' ability to regulate investment markets and protect investors?
And, oh, by the way, should climate change and risks associated with that be part of the disclosures that companies are required to make?
There's a proposed rulemaking on that topic.
All of these things are set back if government's unable to act or if the scope of government authority is constantly being called into question.
So, if you have a court which is grinding slowly, or maybe radically, the wheels of government to a halt, it isn't necessarily going to take you back to where you were, or at least make it harder to continue on that path.
Now, the counter-argument to that that people will have is, oh, we have to have a free market and let the market decide.
Well, you know, that's fine, but it only gets you so far.
Just look at renewable energy.
It's a massive business.
And it's a business that's been created in part, not just in the U.S., but globally by government assistance.
So government intervention in the economy, not just for quality of life reasons, can actually spur innovation.
It can spur economic development, can spur investments.
And then you have separate things like the tax code and the social welfare state that let you decide how you ameliorate the effects of inequality that come with that so that people don't suffer disproportionately.
Well, and if you don't regulate this stuff, it ends up in a monopolistic market anyway.
I mean, you know, we would probably have electric vehicles if it wasn't for, you know, combustible and fossil fuel energies at this point.
I mean, you know, you have to put some sort of thing on there so the economy doesn't melt itself down.
We've seen that over and over and over again.
But those brakes, I think, have been beaten off at this point.
I think one of the other things to remember is the United States is not an island.
We are functioning in a global economy.
So the policies that India enacts, and the rapid pace of economic growth when they're in an earlier stage in economic development, is going to increase the amount of fossil fuels that are burnt.
And all those cars are not going to be electric, and if they are, they're not being plugged into a grid that's free of coal.
What happens in Europe, what happens in China matters a great deal.
China is investing hugely in offshore wind.
I'm working on some projects here, but just put it in perspective.
The United States today is trying to develop offshore wind about 30 to 35 gigawatts worth off the coast of the Atlantic in the Northeast, and potentially in North Carolina and California and other places.
Europe already has that much installed.
China has added that much just in the last couple of years.
China's also still building coal-fired power plants.
So, you know, how do we in a global economy find a way through collaboration domestically and internationally to make investments in things that don't have external negative costs more likely?
And how do we lower the cost of doing that so that whatever the services that's being provided or the goods being provided are affordable?
Today, if you ask me what I'm really concerned about, yeah, sure, the Supreme Court is on my list, but I got to say inflation, interest rates, inequality, there's other I words to probably come first.
I think supply chains and supply chain disruptions have got to be looked at.
How public health responds here and overseas to things like pandemics ripple through, and that's one of the reasons why we have inflation and supply chain dislocations right now.
This stuff is all connected, and we should spend a lot less time in our individual silos like Energy might be a lot more how these things can impact us in ways that are not expected.
I think climate change forces the attention on how interconnected we all are, but it doesn't mean that we're acting accordingly.
Well, I got to remind everyone that they need to read your article you wrote recently in Forbes, and it's A-L-L-A-N, Marks.
So, check him out there.
And you also are a partner at Middlebank LLP.
Are you speaking for them as you appear on our podcast?
No, no, no, no.
Actually, thanks for asking.
No, the views expressed are entirely my own, not my firm's and not my client's.
Oh, I just want to make sure we got that straight, too.
But, Alan, thank you so much.
We're going to have you back on at some amount of time later to answer some of those questions that we posed throughout the pod.
Would you come on and do that for us?
I'd be happy to.
I will tell you, we've migrated a little bit from my core professional expertise in law and energy and infrastructure and all, but it's been a real pleasure.
That's what we like to do, Alan.
And how do the good people find you out there on the social media networks?
Oh, LinkedIn, Alan Marks, or millbank.com.
So you're not on Twitter?
You're not on Twitter?
I have a stealth mode on Twitter.
The more I tweet, the fewer people look at it.
Well, Alan, thank you again so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Nick.
Thanks, Jared.
All right, everybody.
And that was Alan Marks, a partner at Milbank LLP and a contributor at Forbes.
And we were talking about the Supreme Court decision against the EPA.
You know, it's pretty frustrating.
And for anybody who not only has kids, but cares about the future, I mean, like looking at the possibilities with climate change and what the Republican Party is up to in terms of winding back that progress, it's nowhere good, which is why we have to defeat this thing.
I kind of feel like, you know, like I mentioned, I made the point, kind of maybe got lost in there at the end, that this is really about money, right?
This is about how we make things cheaper and for corporations to make more money and then that'll trickle down.
And I suppose, you know, if there are people being raised to say, of course, that's a completely valid way to approach this thing.
And that's really where I think That might be the bigger issue beyond like Republican, Democrat and conservative or progressive.
It's the notion of like, at what point are we, does greed, you know, take over or should we be helping the common man?
Well, I just want to say, first of all, I mean, you might have noticed in that interview, Alan and my politics are really far apart, but we can have like a respectful conversation.
And quite frankly, I'm happy as shit that he's out there fighting the good fight, trying to make markets do this stuff.
That's important.
It absolutely is.
The thing that I'm most afraid of, and it goes back to the idea of money, is what I was sort of speaking to, which is there are a lot of people with a lot of money.
Who are really not interested in moving in that direction.
There is a ton of money interested in that regression that Alan was talking about.
And their ability to take over the political environment, we have been watching.
That's a large part of this.
You know, we can talk about Trump.
We can talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
We can talk about any of these assholes.
But when it really comes down to it, there's money underneath all of it.
It's like an underground river that changes everything above it.
And that is the problem in this.
There are way too many people who are making way too much money standing in the way of this progress and trying to regress things to go back to trying to reindustrialize.
We're in 2022, looking at climate change coming over like an avalanche.
We know it's real.
We know it's going to have real consequences.
And there are still people trying to not just not deal with it, but to accelerate it.
And that's the concern there, and you're absolutely right.
It's money.
And is it any surprise to you?
Because the country was founded in a way to protect slavery so that they can continue making this money that generationally is still affecting us now, to this day.
It's property.
And we talked about that when this ruling was handed down, which is this country, its main focus is the In all of this, and neoliberalism particularly, it is the focus that freedom is freedom of property.
It's the freedom to not have the government tell you what to do and what to do with your property and to do with your money.
And this is the extreme farthest end of this.
That is this on speed, more or less.
Absolutely.
And it's frustrating because we can see how intoxicating the politicians can be to appeal to people on that realm and how we can be so easily swayed for people to join that cause.
And after enough generations of this, of hyper capitalism, you know, it's probably as indoctrinating as any of the other kind of things we've seen where people, children are being taught, you know, It's the ideology.
The ideology gives you the story that hides the material realities.
By the way, I'm very glad I got to tell you about rolling coal.
I'm so glad that I got to introduce you.
How stupid is that?
I mean, I'm getting visions of like Grease in the movie where they shoot the fire out of the back like it's gonna make your car go faster or something.
That's more or less what we're talking about here.
And that's the whole point is...
A lot of people want to look at it as a generational thing where it's like, well, this generation can't give up their big trucks.
No, they're doing that to their kids, too.
And it's a bunch of kids who are terrified that they're not as manly as their dad or not as manly as their grandpa.
And meanwhile, they're buying bigger and bigger trucks and they're basically acting out these roles.
And it goes back to what you were saying, which is the politicians who are able to act upon that and prey upon that and use that as a lever to get them By the way, to vote for and mobilize for the exact people you're talking about.
The people who have no interest in actually modernizing anything because it's about their wealth and their power.
And meanwhile you have everybody who's just like, this is what a man does and that's their story that keeps them helping those people down the chain who are making tons of money from this.
You know, meanwhile, I have a beer waiting for me.
I got a pool to go sit in right now because I'm a slave to the same kind of, you know, capitalistic ideals everybody else is, right?
You know what, buddy?
You go enjoy that beer.
You go enjoy that pool.
And I hope our listeners have something that they can find a little bit of joy in.
We're going to be back on Friday with our Weekender episode.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to support the show.
By the way, people are stepping up and supporting the show.
I cannot thank you enough.
We absolutely depend on that support.
That's the reason we don't run ads.
That's the reason we're able to have probing conversations other people are afraid to.
It's because you support this show.
That's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We'll see you on Friday, everybody.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeASMH.
