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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the SCOTUS taking up the absolute immunity case in April and whether they might just grant Trump immunity from everything. They then say Adios, muchachos to Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and all his awful methods that set back democracy by decades. And then they answer many of your great questions.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of my great podcast.
I'm J.D.
Saxton.
Listen, everybody.
We have a packed show.
This one's a big one.
We got Trump in the Supreme Court.
We got Mitch McConnell announcing his retirement as the Republican leader in the Senate.
We've got Wendy's getting wild.
We have 10, count them, 10 listener questions.
My God, what a busy show.
I hope that Nick Hausman doesn't have any type of a voice impairment today, because that would be awful.
Testing, one, two.
Well, you know, we'll see how good this caffeine-free tea works, but I think I'll be able to make it through.
What's your tea?
If Nick is doing some tea, because I drink a lot of tea, what do you drink?
What's the flavor?
I don't even know.
Maybe it's Earl Grey, perhaps?
I know it's non-caffeinated, which is kind of nice, because I don't drink caffeine.
You didn't even look at the type of tea before you put it in?
I was so desperate, I just grabbed it and I put it in there.
I took down some Earl Grey the other night.
It was good.
Yeah, and you know what?
I forget how much tea is actually kind of nice.
It's really, it's warm, it takes care of you.
Alright, well that does it for Tea Corner of the Weekender.
Real quick, everybody, go over to patreon.com slash montcraigpodcast and support the show.
Gain full access to the show.
Listen, we got so much to talk about today.
It's crazy.
But also, a reminder, The State of the Union.
Nick, I didn't even know the State of the Union was happening next week.
Snuck up on me.
The Republicans wanted, you know, to disinvite Biden from even doing it.
Some people were saying it.
We love it, folks.
We love the crazy GOP.
That is going to be this coming Thursday, and it begins at 9 p.m.
Eastern.
Nick and I are going to go live immediately after the speech.
We are inviting our patrons to watch along to see not just our analysis and our reaction, but we'll be taping the weekender edition for next Friday.
Then, that is next Thursday, and as I grab my calendar, it tells me that's March 7th.
And again, the State of the Union begins at 9 p.m.
Eastern.
We will air immediately after it is over.
But Nick, We got to talk about the Supreme Court.
The highest court in the land.
Non-biased jurors who are taking care of the Constitution in the United States of America.
They have announced that on April 22nd, they will hear Donald Trump's argument that a president should be immune from prosecution for any crimes committed in their time in office.
This is the big one, folks!
It's the big one.
What are your initial reactions to this?
There's a lot to dig into here.
Well, you know, I want to know, like, how are they going to argue something that's not in the Constitution?
I suppose that the answer to that is that that's what the Supreme Court is for.
They're supposed to figure out the little gray areas that are not explicitly laid out in the Constitution.
So I get it.
But I think my first reaction will ultimately be or is they're guilty.
They're saying they're guilty, and now they're trying to just pull a loophole to get out of it.
You know what I'm saying?
And this is what Trump tends to always do.
So I think this is their admission of guilt.
And it's hard to believe that they're going to maybe get away with this, which it sounds like they have a legit 50-50 chance of doing.
Well, I'll start off by saying that what you just said exposed one of the great truths of both America and also the legal system, which is all this shit is made up.
And it really doesn't matter if it's in the Constitution, if it's not in the Constitution, if these people in a stolen Supreme Court, we'll get to Mitch McConnell in a little bit, if this stolen Supreme Court decides that the president is immune from any type of prosecution for their actions within office, which we'll get to in a second, Uh, they're gonna do it!
And, uh, quite frankly, there's really nothing on the books that stops them from doing that.
A reminder, the Supreme Court gave themselves the power to do this, and on top of that, they, uh, they are in the position to help wealthy white men stay in power and stay away from, uh, any sort of, uh, consequences of their actions.
I'm gonna say something here, Nick, and, um, this is gonna, I, I don't know, maybe this is expected, maybe it's unexpected, I'm not sure.
The point of electing a president has always been to put a leader in charge of the country and they have always committed crimes while in that office.
It is almost impossible to find a president of the United States of America who hasn't committed crimes on behalf of the wealth and elite class.
Um, that that has been a traditional unspoken gentleman's agreement within the halls of power.
Again, when the Federalists did this at the very, very beginning, they just thought that a bunch of wealthy white men of power would be able to handle themselves and you know, they would be able to take the resources and move things around.
The question here.
Is what happens if there's a ruling on this?
Like, what happens if you literally say the president can do whatever they want?
It opens up a giant Pandora's box, the likes of which will put us in a constitutional power crisis.
His lawyer said, quote, that if a former president was prosecuted, it would usher in a destructive cycle.
That's correct.
It would usher in a destructive cycle, particularly with the way politics are now.
He also said, quote, the presidency as we know it will cease to exist.
Well, because of that that unspoken agreement, that is technically true.
But when you start making this law and you start making the the unspoken explicit, shit gets really weird.
And this has a lot of repercussions that could come from it.
And I don't think you could overstate how dangerous this thing is.
Well, it's also very circular because there is a law against insurrectionists, and they're probably going to take the stance that until he is prosecuted for being an insurrectionist, we're not going to validate that opinion, and we're going to judge this on whether he's immune.
How would you ever?
This is the case.
The case is to prove that he's an insurrectionist.
And they're going to be able to push this thing back.
And then they probably say to themselves, we're going to let the voters decide in November in a similar way that they did with McConnell would pretend with the first Supreme Court justice.
So let's let the people vote for me to deal with all that stuff.
But I want to make one thing clear.
Ginny Thomas.
We're all familiar with Ginny Thomas, right?
That would be Clarence Thomas.
Friend of the pod, Ginny Thomas.
Absolutely.
Who is so sort of widely insane.
We know that she believes the 2020 election was stolen, right?
Absolutely.
Yes.
Now, we're pretty sure that she sleeps in the same room as Clarence Thomas.
I mean, we've heard allegations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, separate beds, whatever.
But they live together, I think.
They probably share a lot of the same thoughts.
So I don't think it's a stretch to assume that, like, Clarence Thomas probably thinks this has been a stolen election and then probably Alito.
And so then you get the other guys, you know, you get the Kavanaugh's and those guys, like, sort of on board with some of that stuff.
And I could easily see them saying, yeah, we'll just delay this thing until it's and see if he wins.
And then he'll just dismiss the whole thing.
And then we'll be done with it because we don't believe that it's a legitimate investigation anyway.
Which, by the way, everything that you just laid out is undoubtedly true, but also like the circularness of it like comes back to haunt you, which is, well, if he didn't do anything wrong and he was actually just protesting a stolen election, why do you have to give him immunity from crimes?
Right?
In that case, then he's just carrying out the actions that he should.
And this brings us back to what so often gets lost in all this stuff, Nick.
We live in this world where we don't question, you know, or many people don't question the law or politics or whatever.
They just go about their lives and, you know, some people think about it and other people don't.
We run the Muckrake Podcast, which is the home for political sickos.
We're the type of people who get in the weeds and talk about this stuff.
There's a reason why we're all here.
Other people just sort of take it for granted that the law is the law and that's what it is.
This is what it's supposed to do.
It's supposed to arbitrate the difference between different realities.
Like, in this case, you literally have millions of Americans who believe that election was stolen.
It was not stolen.
Period.
That's the end of that story.
But the fact that they believe it then takes us to the next step in all of that, which now, all of a sudden, you have the highest court in the land, which has been stolen and, again, was illegitimate from the very beginning of its inception, more or less, Like, it can now go ahead and give this asshole, not just immunity, but it can go ahead and give a green light for right-wing assholes to do whatever they want at any given moment.
Nobody in this party wants to admit that they lose anything, that reality is real, it can change, it can be malleable.
All of a sudden, the general contract That a nation is supposed to be.
The reason why we're supposed to have nations wink, wink, nudge, nudge, besides, you know, carrying on white supremacy and the accumulation of capital and resources and the oppression of others, the reason it's supposed to happen is we're supposed to be a nation of laws.
That's what they always tell us.
That's going out the window.
That's gone.
Basically, at this point.
And we're creating a two-tiered class by saying, listen, some people are above the law, other people are at the mercy of the law.
Which is how it's always been.
But making it explicit.
The threads that hold all this stuff together, they start disintegrating.
And that's when stuff gets really weird and really, really dangerous.
Oh, I mean, I always say this, that, you know, democracy exists only in so much as we're willing to believe that it exists.
Absolutely.
And so that's probably the reason why it's gone.
It's done.
You know, we've gotten such a huge section of this country that does not believe in democracy at this point or what they think is democracy.
It's so utterly twisted.
It's frightening.
But as much as we like to shit on the founding fathers, and it's fun to do that.
We should.
You know, if you were to take away or if you were to grant absolute immunity to a president, you basically would change his title to King.
You know where I'm going with this, I think.
I mean, well, listen, I want you to make the case because in the conventional history of America, this is why America exists.
Exactly.
We actually fought a whole war to ensure that we would not have a leader of the country.
Time out.
Time out.
Because this is our show and this is what we do.
That was the rhetorical reason.
Well, given like it's 40% of the reason, right?
I think you want to be free of the taxes and the economic control, and therefore everything that the king does is tyrannical, and also you want to get away from the European-based, like, religious control.
Like, yeah, that is part of it, but do not underestimate the fact that they wanted more economic control over their destinies.
All right, well, I will say this.
In the amicus brief that was filed by Lawrence Tribe et al.
about this case, they cite an unending amount of the founders and the writers of the Constitution who were explicit in their oration that they did not want to grant absolute immunity to the president.
And the question, though, is that while he's in office, There seems to be enough of a coverage there.
And that has sort of made sense in the past.
But once he is out of office, and even Mueller was a guy who weighed in on that, like accidentally or not, there is no way to be able to have him protected after that.
So this whole thing is just, especially because there are so many originalists on the court right now who want to live like it's 1777 or whatever.
When's the Continental Congress? 1790?
When do they actually get written?
When did the Constitution get written?
Well, the Constitution goes into effect in 87.
87.
So, you know, they want to live like it's 1787, and yet they're not going to respect that argument that the Founders themselves will have used.
And they'll use their own argument against them about why they can't get an absolute immunity, and I have a feeling that's going to be, they'll just put it off.
They're not going to be able to have to make a ruling.
You know, the Supreme Court, in June, is out for, like, months.
I don't know if everybody really knows this.
They just take off and they're not around for months.
No, no.
I mean, Clarence Thomas needs to get in his RV with Jenny Thomas and cruise the highways and byways on the dime of Harlan Crowe.
I mean, what, do you expect them to work?
Forgive me.
And so, yes, so as a result, they can simply kick this can and then, you know, hope that Trump wins, I suppose.
And then he'll just, the worst part about this, no one's talking about is that the The President should not be able to go to the Justice Department and say, dismiss these things against me right now.
And he will, and they will follow that.
And that's really, that's now officially the end of democracy.
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