Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
We're discussomg the fallout from Thursday's presidential debate, highlighting President Biden's poor performance and its potential impact on his campaign. We also cover significant Supreme Court decisions related to abortion access and gun rights for domestic abusers. Additionally, the episode touches on Oklahoma's controversial move to make Bible teaching compulsory in schools and the importance of staying informed and engaged as crucial political and legal battles unfold.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
White American Jesus, My name's Brad Onishi, coming to you from a minivan in San Diego, here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I just want to make clear, Brad, as I understand it, this is actually your minivan, not just like a minivan in San Diego, but a minivan that you're permitted to use for various things, including on-the-road podcasting.
Yeah, I'm traveling today for a conference and my family's with me.
They're all sleeping.
It's early in the morning and I'm in the van away from the hotel room so that I don't wake them up.
Here to talk to you all, or talk with you, Dan, about the debate and also some things to do with the Supreme Court and perhaps Oklahoma.
So, friends.
I'm going to talk today with Dan about the debate here for the next however long.
I may sign off and let Dan take the Supreme Court stuff at the end of the show, but we'll see what happens.
I think both of us have a lot to say about the debate, as you can imagine.
So Dan, let me throw it to you and take us through a summary here of what many are considering a disastrous night for Biden, for American democracy, for everyone involved in this country.
With that great setup, it's all yours.
What happened?
Yeah, so I want to start with CNN's sort of summary of this.
I mean, CNN, they're the ones that hosted the debate, right?
They are, for people on the right, the epitome of the media that's always in the tank for Biden and Democrats and whatever.
But this was their take, and I think it was largely accurate.
They said, I'm just reading from CNN here.
They said, if Joe Biden loses November's election, history will record that it took just 10 minutes to destroy a presidency.
It was clear a political disaster was about to unfold as soon as the 81-year-old Commander-in-Chief stiffly shuffled on stage in Atlanta to stand eight feet from President Donald Trump at what may turn into the most fateful presidential debate in history.
Objectively, Biden produced the weakest performance since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon started the tradition of televised debates in 1960, then, as on Thursday, in a television studio with no audience.
Minutes into the showdown, hosted by CNN, a full-blown Democratic panic was underway at the idea of heading into the election with such a diminished figure at the top of the ticket.
Biden's chief debate coach Ron Klain famously argues that, quote, while you can lose a debate at any time, you can only win it in the first 30 minutes.
By that standard, the president's showing was devastating.
The tone of the evening was set well before the half hour.
That's that's the summary from CNN.
There's some things.
I think there probably is some overstatement in there.
And again, only time will tell.
But it was a pretty unmitigated disaster for Biden.
I think that there's no way to spin it.
There's no way to varnish it.
So I want to talk about Biden for a minute.
We'll get into Trump.
Trump was Trump and did Trumpy things.
CNN did some things that I think are problematic.
I think everybody that hosts these debates falls into the both-side-ism stuff with the debates.
And I think there was some of that.
What happened with Biden is I think he looked and sounded like the caricature that the GOP has put forward for months.
He looked, he was soft-spoken.
He was almost unintelligible at times.
He was, you know, it was gaffe-filled.
It talks about his just physical demeanor was bad.
And I think it really stands out.
If you remember the State of the Union, remember how nervous everybody was about the State of the Union and what will Biden be like?
And there had been this kind of crescendo of the Biden age stuff.
And then it came out and he gave a really strong performance and people were like, OK, and all the headlines were like, you know, Democratic operatives feel better.
Everybody takes a deep sigh of relief, etc.
This is the opposite.
This is this is what's happening.
A few notable Biden issues.
And again, Biden has always been a gaffe machine, right?
He is like, he's one of those people that will pick the wrong word out of the cloud and insert it into the sentence.
And for those of us who are prone to the same thing, we get it.
But when you're the President of the United States and you have this kind of scrutiny on you and you're on a national stage, when you say things like, we finally beat Medicare, Not what people wanted to hear.
He probably meant Big Pharma, he meant the drug companies, whatever.
He says, we finally beat Medicare.
He didn't, in my view, hit Trump very effectively on abortion.
The one club you have walking into this to just hammer the other person didn't land it.
The most predictable question about his age, he flubbed it and started talking about other stuff.
And there was a killer Trump line in there.
Like, you know, people always look for this, like the zingers, the one-liners, the soundbites.
And Trump said, I really don't know what he said at the end of that last sentence.
I don't think he knows what he said either.
It was a killer line, and I'm afraid that it probably resonated with people who were still tuned in at that point.
So yeah, there's by all accounts pretty widespread panic among Democratic operatives, all the renewed talk about possibly changing the ticket.
We can say more about that or circle back around to it, but just a pretty unmitigated disaster for Biden.
And the biggest thing I'll say is we've got things to say about Trump.
But it was all outshined or diminished, I don't know what the right metaphor is, by Biden.
What Biden did was basically create a context in which there was essentially a free pass for all the Trumpiness of Trump that now is not what's standing out in people's memory or in media accounts and so forth.
So throw it over to you for your thoughts on Biden, or you can lead us into Trump or CNN.
We've got a lot to talk about here.
But yeah, overall, just pretty unmitigated disaster for the Democrats.
So, ahead of this debate, we had a situation where the Trump campaign and Trump himself were doing something that to a lot of us might feel incoherent.
It was like, in one hand, Joe Biden is sleepy Joe who can't put a sentence together.
He's so old, he doesn't know where he is.
The other one is Joe Biden is hyped up on drugs and Mike Johnson said energy drinks to the point that if he does well, it's because he's on cocaine or some other, you know, performance enhancing drug.
When Mike Johnson said energy drinks, I just thought of this, that office clip where Michael, another Mike, is trying to scare his office colleagues not to do drugs.
And he says, do you like to do alcohol?
Is that fun to you?
That's how I imagine Mike Johnson talking to his kids about underage drinking, but nonetheless, we're not here to talk about that.
In one sense, you're like, that's incoherent, Trump campaign.
Like, is Joe Biden a evil genius or is he so old he doesn't know where he is?
But you know what, Dan?
It's never mattered to the Trump campaign whether it's incoherent.
You know what matters is?
Give anyone who'll listen a caricature and then whatever one Biden falls into, just play on that.
Obviously now it's going to turn into Biden is so old he's not up for the job and they're going to run with it.
Fox News and everyone in the world on the right and everywhere else is wondering that this morning.
Is Joe Biden up for the job?
One of the things you and I say often, Dan, is that when right-wing figures get out in open water, whether it's like the megachurch pastor who's used to nodding heads at church, whether it's the right-wing media figure who is a podcaster and isn't used to being debated in a public forum with people who disagree, whether it's just a politician who's not used to pushback,
They often look foolish because they're so used to this like enclosed ecosystem where they don't ever have to kind of justify their reasoning or provide evidence and so on.
And I think that is a phenomenon on the right more than the left because of the ways that those media environments work.
I bring that up because I think last night was a moment where Joe Biden emerged onto a stage where more Americans obviously were going to see him than normal.
There were going to be people tuning in.
This was on CNN.
We're going to come back to CNN and how the debate went.
But CNN is not MSNBC.
I think a lot of people view MSNBC as kind of the lefty network, which, you know, we could talk about what that means in American politics, etc.
Fox News is obviously a whole other thing.
CNN is maybe that one place where there is some mushy middle in some, you know, strange moderate sense.
So the fact that it was on CNN means this was a place that some might have tuned in that those those mythical swing voters, those mythical moderates, those mythical suburbans who are unsure, blah, blah, blah.
I think we can say something for certain.
Nobody tuned in who was undecided and was like, well, Mr. Biden got my vote because that was pretty convincing, right?
Like, Dan, you know, we talked on our bonus episode this week about Obama and those years, and, you know, there was just people who would see Obama for the first time and just walk away, you know, flattened, like, that man has my vote.
I'll give you another example.
We can get away from the Obama example.
I remember being in the living room When Sarah Palin was announced by the McCain campaign and she came out and gave her like first speech the hockey mom infamous like here's Sarah Palin America speech and I had a family member who watched it with me and was like overwhelmed and they were like Wow Okay, and I could see on that family members face.
It was like well, that's something to think about.
Yep There's no one who did that last night with Joe Biden.
And it's different.
He's an incumbent.
He's been around American politics for decades and decades.
But.
You know.
This was this was universally not a good showing now.
There's more to say here.
I'll throw it back to you.
But, you know, we need to get into CNN.
We need to get into calls for Biden to drop out.
We need to get into Trump himself.
So back to you to kind of take us where you want to go.
And as we try to chart all those different facets of the event.
Yeah, so I mean, let me go with the calls for Biden to drop out, right?
Because there's going to be more concern for that.
That's like the thing that people are going to say out loud now.
And there are all other kinds of questions, right?
What does this do to fundraising?
What are the effects on the polls?
You know, everything you just said, there's another piece of it where I'm like, I think for the sliver of truly undecided voters who probably watch this, it's like, these are our choices, really?
Like these two clowns, like this is what we've got?
So here's the trick, because I understand it with the whole Biden dropping out.
There's no way by the rules or whatever, the rules of the party, to throw Biden off the ticket.
They can't be like, you can't run for president anymore.
They could have an open, that is the Democratic National Convention, could have an open nominating process on the convention floor, right?
People have heard about that.
We know this is this creaky method and dusted off and hasn't been used forever and so on.
But it's a it's a pretty tall order, most agree, given Biden's overwhelming, not surprising, but overwhelming primary success.
And you have all of those, you know, Washington insiders and the delegates and people like that, that are they're just not likely to Choose another person.
So effectively, everything I've read, and if you've seen different or have a really strongly different opinion, I'm interested in hearing it, but most people say if this is going to happen, Biden would have to step aside.
He would need to step aside to make a replacement feasible.
And Politico said this, and I think that this was a good sort of summary, said, if that happens, his other names from Vice President Kamala Harris to Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, J.B.
Pritzker, to numerous others could be placed in nomination.
The candidates who could span the Democratic Party's geographic, ideological, and generational wings would be working to sway the thousands of Democratic delegates to support them on the first ballot.
And you would have an honest-to-goodness convention.
In addition to those pledge delegates, you would also have to win over the superdelegates.
Those are those ones who are often the party insiders and so forth.
And that's a pretty fraught exercise, most on, you know, progressives are not super fans often of the superdelegates because they tend to be very Traditional, moderate, Washington insiders, on and on and on and on.
So it would be a difficult process.
It could happen.
People are like, it's not too late.
It could happen, but it would need to happen soon.
But I think everybody also agrees, and we'll see what happens, that Biden is not likely to.
And yeah, so that's the Biden replacement thing.
Your thoughts on that or taking us into Trump?
All right, well, let's just talk about Biden.
So let's talk about both Biden and Trump at the same time for a minute, because I know it's on people's minds.
So I want to go here, but we should not be here with Trump.
David Frum, who I don't always agree with, had a great piece this morning at The Atlantic and just said, look, put Biden aside.
This should have never been allowed.
Like for Trump to stand up on a stage to be running for president again is an overwhelming failure on the part of our country.
This is a man who led an insurrection.
The elevation of Trump as a legitimate candidate with the issues that he faces and the person that he is was, yeah, and I think Froma's right.
The idea that this was a legitimate debate between two legitimate candidates is a false premise.
This is a man who led an insurrection.
This is a man who has attacked democratic foundations at every turn.
This is a man who's been convicted of 34 felonies.
This is a man who's been, it's been decided in court that he is guilty of sexual abuse, at least in an adjudicated way.
His organization has been shown to be fraudulent.
I mean, there's no way that he should be up there as a candidate for president of the United States.
So friends, do not overlook that in our talk about Biden, okay? - Mm-hmm. - And Frum's take in the piece in "The Atlantic" this morning was, look, Biden aside, what is the real concern here is not letting Trump be president because he's an existential threat what is the real concern here is not letting Trump be president And I agree.
I agree.
And what Fromm was saying is like, you know, no one's going to save us, Joe Biden or anyone else.
What we have to do is ourselves not allow Trump to be president.
And I agree.
So I'm going to say, Dan, if Biden's the nominee, I'm voting for Biden because of the, why?
Because of the existential threat to America, to democracy, to the world that Donald Trump poses.
Now, two things can be true at once, okay?
If we do a weird exercise, okay, and I've tried to run through this this morning in my head, where Nikki Haley is the candidate, and it's Haley and Biden standing up there, Would we still wake up and think, why is Biden the Democratic nominee?
And I do think yes.
I honestly do think yes.
I still think there'd be a lot of people out there like, this is a weak incumbent president who is 81 years old.
He's past his prime.
He doesn't look like he's up for the job.
How about Gretchen Whitmer?
How about Gretchen Whitmer plus Wes Moore from Maryland?
Right?
You know, a Midwestern governor, a woman who's amazing and has had an incredible track record, a young black governor from from the other part of the country.
That's a winning ticket.
Let's go.
Not to mention whoever else you want to throw in, Newsom or Harris or whatever.
I think the answer is yes, that Biden would still be viewed as this weak, like incumbent past his prime president.
Now, the difference is And you, I'm going to get some emails about this.
I don't think Nikki Haley would be, now I'd have to, we don't know, but I don't think Nikki Haley would be an existential threat to American democracy.
I think she would be a bad choice for president.
I think she would implement policy positions that would hurt people.
I think there would be folks that suffered because of her.
So don't, I am not downplaying that.
There's people who are suffering because of Joe Biden.
I know that too.
I don't think that the foundations of, like, our participation in NATO or the UN or our, like, admiration and support for people, like, implicit or explicit for people like Putin, right?
I don't think Nikki Haley's doing all that.
I don't.
So I do think Haley and Trump are like apples and oranges in some sense.
So if it was Haley and Biden, I still think we're like, hey, Biden, maybe you should step aside.
But I think we would do so in the context of, like, we're not facing a tsunami that may overwhelm us to the point that American democracy no longer exists as it does.
So I think independent of Trump, Biden is in a place where he looks overwhelmingly like not the guy.
The problem for us is he's standing there next to someone who, A, should never be there, is not a legitimate candidate for president, and is somebody who is signaled at every turn, Dan,
Project 2025 and Russ Vought, who we talked about Monday, and everything else, his admiration for Putin, that he has no interest in carrying on American democracy as we've known it, at least in whatever fledgling, imperfect, not embodied state that it is.
And that he is a threat to the world order, to so many marginalized and vulnerable people in the country.
So those two things are both true.
And we can hold both at the same time.
We can say that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and Joe Biden is not up for the job, perhaps.
And, you know, so there's people on Twitter that are like, I can't believe there's so many op-eds in The New York Times telling Biden to step aside.
What about Trump?
And it's like, yep.
I'm in the position, Dan, where I'm saying Trump should have never been allowed to speak, run, stand in front of the American public again after January 6th.
Here he is.
His party's not going to get rid of him.
But the other party might make a decision about their candidate.
And that's why we're talking about that.
It's not, you see what I'm saying?
It's that we can have a conversation here that has multiple vectors without reducing it.
And so, anyway, let's take a break and come back and we can get into CNN and some of the Trump stuff.
All right, Dan, so you want to jump in here on what I said about Biden-Trump, or you want to just get into Trump himself, or the CNN moderators, or what do you got?
Just real quick on the Biden-Trump thing.
I agree with what you said, and so here's the thing.
People often will say, you know, well, if you were to vote, because if somebody asked me today, said, wow, did you see that train wreck?
Are you going to vote for Biden?
I'd be like, if the election's tomorrow, yeah, absolutely.
And I'm not sitting it out.
I don't love everything about Biden.
Why?
Because Trump is everything that you've said Trump is, Brad.
Everything that I've said Trump is since, you know, what?
2015?
2014?
I don't know.
If somebody says, well, that's just voting against something.
You're not voting for something.
I'm going to be like, that's fine.
Voting against something can be voting for something.
Sometimes stopping one thing is valuable.
It's necessary.
It's vital.
So yeah, if my two candidate choices were Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, I would vote for Nikki Haley.
Like, if that were a world we lived in where somehow that was a reality and that was my forced choice, I would not sit it out.
I would vote for Haley.
I would vote for almost anybody to keep Trump out of office because I think it's that valuable, it's that significant, it's that serious.
So, just to throw that out there.
I guess I'll lead us just into Trump briefly.
Trump told a bunch of lies.
There's a lot of Trump word salad stuff in there.
He did not commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.
He said that he never had sex with a porn star.
Talk about elevating the discourse of a national debate and so forth.
The reality, though, for me was that we could go through all of that.
We could fact check it.
You can go and you can read all the fact check places and all the falsehoods that Trump said.
The problem is, number one, no kidding, right?
At this point, it's like no kidding.
And I think the fact checking is important.
It is important to be able to show that the things Trump says are not true.
But we've been talking about this for years, too.
We're not going to fact check our way out of Trump.
Right?
Nobody in the GOP and Trump is ever going to be like, oh, gee, you know what?
I got my facts wrong.
I better step back and rethink this thing.
That's not going to happen.
The other piece of it is, again, that's not the storyline today because of Biden, right?
I feel like their roles were reversed.
Where somebody, I think, wants to be with Trump, let him be the one self-destructing on stage.
You got everything you wanted.
Biden got no audience for him to feed off of.
Muted mics.
Give him the rope to string himself along and say terrible things and let himself destruct and then step back and look like the big guy when it was exactly the opposite.
Trump was able to say all kinds of stuff.
That was overshadowed for most people by Biden's performance aided and abetted by arguably CNN.
So I want to throw it to you for your thoughts on the Trump dimension of this and then you can take us into the CNN stuff because I can see you boiling as you think about it.
No, well, so here's the thing.
Trump did what... At this point, we know who he is, okay?
So if you let a man like him back on the stage after everything he did as president, after everything he's done to try to overthrow 2020, after January 6th, There's no surprise here.
Does that justify it?
No.
Now, if Trump becomes president again, and people ask, how did this happen?
And I'm going to make the comparisons, and I don't care.
Email me if you want.
I don't care, because this is where we're at right now.
How did Hitler get into power?
How did people like Stalin get into power?
How did any dictator, autocrat, terrible authoritarian figure from history, Mussolini, you name it, how did they get into power, right?
Well, in this case, what we're going to talk about is we had a press where this man got up after being in American politics front and center for almost a decade, and he lied his way through it.
The moderators did nothing to check it.
The lies just went unchecked.
So we gave this man the biggest stage and we operated on a press paradigm where you have to give everybody equal time and an equal shake and a fair play and all that.
And what did the Trump campaign do ahead of this debate?
They said that Bash and Tapper were too liberal and biased and right?
So now Bash and Tapper have to decide, do we fact check?
And get the ire of the Fox News world?
Or do we not fact check and hopefully they'll think we're fair?
Well, guess what?
For democracy's sake, you cannot have a man who tried to overthrow democracy and who just simply lies every second he is on the stage and just let that go as if it's an alternate reality that is viable.
See, Dan, that is what happens with Trump.
And I want to just stop right now.
Here's what happens with the Trump candidate.
He puts forth an alternate reality that everyone around him, and including CNN, including so many pieces of the American political and cultural infrastructure, let be seen as viable.
I talked about this with Hank Willenbrink right after Trump was convicted.
Willenbrink is a scholar of performance studies and what we talked about in that interview was that Trump is performing for Trump.
He is the actor, he is the director, and he is the audience.
Your only choice when he puts forth his view of reality is to get into that weird self-enclosed loop where you're also part of the audience and he's not performing even for you, he's performing for him.
And that's what happened last night.
Fascist dictators invite you into an alternate reality that promises to solve everything through them.
They think they can solve it all.
They're performing for themselves.
They keep telling lies that they are the answer to everything, the solution to all.
And your only choice, if you're going to get involved with them, is just get involved in that weird, tragic, self-enclosed loop.
That's what we let happen again last night with Trump.
So when they didn't fact check, And I know if they did fact check, oh, we're going to hear from Fox News and everyone, oh, it's unfair.
I don't care.
Fairness is not reduced to like, did you let everyone just speak unimpeded?
Fairness is also giving the American public a chance to know that what one candidate is saying is absolutely false.
That's what's fair to the public who's watching.
Is to say, I'm going to moderate by moderating the content.
I'm literally going to tell you when content that is coming to you, when speech, when ideas that are coming to you are false.
That is my job as a moderator, right?
That's why we get so upset with social media, because you see lie after lie after lie on social media, Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else, and nobody moderates it.
What's the point of having a moderator?
If you're going to let somebody just simply spout stupid lies about their golf game, about sleeping with Stormy Daniels, about January 6th, and not to mention, and I know some of you are wondering about this, how come January 6th didn't get brought up until 41 minutes in?
Andrew Seidel was tweeting about this.
Like, I'll shut up after this, Dan, and I'll throw it back to you and we can wrap up, you know, here.
I have maintained for like two months that the arc and storylines of this election are in place.
And those arcs and storylines are Trump's criminal and other cases, abortion and reproductive rights, Gaza and Palestine.
And these two guys, Biden and Trump, sort of as the protagonists in this saga, that's going to include those storylines and other characters.
So my question for the Joe Biden character in the Netflix series I'm watching is, why was reproductive rights and January 6th not like every other sentence?
Why did we just not keep coming back to that?
Because you know what?
Those undecideds, those mythical persuadables, they care about reproductive rights.
They care.
The polls, at least if we can trust them, show that he's a now convicted felon.
They care that the guy that might lead our country is somebody who has like four open cases.
And Biden didn't do that.
We didn't get to January 6th until 41 minutes into the debate.
I just want everyone to think about that.
A man tried to overthrow democracy almost three and a half years ago.
And when there was a debate between that man and the man who is now president, they didn't bring up the coup attempt until 40 minutes in.
I'll leave it there.
Yeah, so just to reiterate or to clarify, when I talk about the fact checking won't fix it, I'm not talking about moderating.
I agree with everything you said about the moderators.
Because by the time you wait till the day after and do all the fact-checking, those regular people who are inhabiting that alternate reality that you're talking about, they're not reading the fact-check stuff.
They're not going and reading, you know, Politico or CNN or The Atlantic or AP News or The Guardian or whatever.
They're not reading that to see, for both candidates, where they stretched the truth or made things up or whatever.
So I think you're right about that element of the alternate reality.
And other things like, you know, if I was structuring this debate, You know, I'd start it with first question for Trump.
Lots of people say you shouldn't be president because you've been convicted of a bunch of felonies and they would argue that you incited an insurrection on January 6th.
Tell us why you should still be president.
And then you go.
And hey, Joe Biden, lots of people feel like you shouldn't be president because they feel that, very frankly, you're too old.
You're not up to the job.
Convince us otherwise.
Here's your time.
And you set that up, and you push back on those things.
When Trump says, I never had sex with a porn star, you say, with all due respect, Mr. So-called president, because you've got the title forever, that's irrelevant.
You were found guilty by a jury of your peers.
But so even in the way you set that up, Dan, it shows us what we're dealing with here.
So is Joe Biden too old?
Those are legitimate questions.
He last night wasn't great on the like Joe Biden's over.
So the question for one candidate is, are you past your prime and maybe not up for this?
The question for the other candidate is, you tried to overthrow democracy, you've been convicted of 34 felonies.
There it is, friends.
There's the difference, right?
Sorry to interrupt.
And no, you're right.
And you also have, this goes to your point about Biden, for lack of a better term, not counterpunching, right?
We all know in debates, that candidates try to talk about what they want to talk about with every question, right?
They say that like half line that kind of responds maybe to the question that was asked and then they steer into something else.
Set it up that way.
If you're Biden and you're sharp, you're like, hold on, let's talk about that.
Maybe you make some self-effacing jokes.
Yeah, I can't run as far as I used to.
Or, you know, I sure hate stairs now.
Or something.
Fine.
Whatever.
And then you hammer back and just none of that happened.
I can't run as far as I used to, but I've never had to run.
You know, I've never run in a way that incited a mob.
I don't know.
Dan, I'm thinking on the fly here, but yeah, you know, I can't.
I've never run to the riot, you know, or whatever.
You know, there's a lot of ways to like zing them, right?
Real easy.
None of that came.
So yeah.
Anyway, sorry to interrupt again.
Go ahead.
No, it's all right.
I know we need to wind this up, but just some other thoughts, you know, just generally.
Number one, you know, the Democrats purposely placed this debate really, really early.
And I think as it turns out, that was lucky for them.
I'm not saying that anything about this was good, but it's June and we've got over four months till the election.
And I think that that's really, really important to know.
I say this, I know people, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna-ish person about this, but the reality is that for most voters, God, four months is a long time.
So, like, a lot can happen between now and then, and memories fade and all of that stuff.
This happens, like, you know, the week before the 4th of July.
This is not quite the time when, like, most people are really tuning in.
This had happened before Memorial Day, when a lot of people are still sort of more engaged.
They're not sitting in minivans on family trips and things like that.
So, all of which is to say, I think there are some ways in which the damage from this could have been worse than it was.
But if that's your silver lining, that maybe it could have been worse if it had happened in September.
And there is another debate in September.
And if Biden pulls out this kind of performance in September, then he's done.
And I'm assuming that Biden will be the candidate, the nominee in September.
But I do think that there is an element to be said here with the 24-hour news cycle.
All of that sort of stuff that a lot happens between now and then, and as I always say, I'm interested to check in after Labor Day and see where we're at, you know?
Are there big hurricanes that give Biden lots of photo ops with, you know, the DeSantis' of the world having to say nice things about him and showing him helping good Floridians, you know, recover?
Are, you know, and I'm not wishing obviously for natural disasters, but There's a lot to go on.
There's a Trump sentencing to come up.
There are more Supreme Court hearings.
So there's a lot still to come.
As you know, I'm a football fan.
I'll have this last sports analogy.
I'm one of those people who, in the first quarter, can just freak out and be like, oh my God, the game's off.
It's the reason I'm not an NFL coach, because you know what NFL coaches do if they're any good?
They don't freak out in the first quarter, because they're like, yeah, well, that sucked.
We've got three quarters to go.
Let's go.
And I think it's worth keeping that in front of us, Certainly I, and I think I can speak for you when I say we have a tendency to see the cup as half empty, three quarters empty, seven eighths empty sometimes.
And so I think there are reasons to just remember the election is not six weeks from now, it's four months from now.
And I think that that could prove really, really important if there's any hope for the Democrats.
Yeah, so I think what you said too, literally next week we could be sitting here talking about the Trump sentencing.
So that's a black swan event.
Is that going to be probation?
Is that going to be home confinement?
Is that going to be 60 days in jail?
Like honestly, Dan, if the sentencing is 60 days in jail, And he can't campaign.
And that basically takes us to that next debate you're talking about.
We could be talking about violent uprisings around the country.
We could be talking about, I mean, we could talk about all kinds of stuff.
So you're right.
The 24-hour news cycle is real.
We do this as a weekly roundup, meaning we talk about the things that happened this week, which means we are part of talking about what happened that week.
And so it is early.
I'll just say, I don't think it's the end of the first quarter.
I think it's the end of the third quarter, and I think we got one left.
Now, it doesn't mean the game's over, but it does mean we're getting close.
We need a strong fourth quarter.
We're getting close.
We need a really strong fourth quarter.
Yeah, we're getting close.
So, all right, real quick, Dan, let's talk about Oklahoma, and then I'm going to sign off and let you take us into the Supreme Court stuff, but this week, the Oklahoma Supreme The state of Oklahoma basically followed in the footsteps of Louisiana.
Ryan Walters is somebody we've talked about a lot.
If you're not familiar with what's going on with Oklahoma, look at my episode from about six weeks ago with Representative Mickey Dollins from the state of Oklahoma.
He talked all about it.
But they are basically mandating that the Bible be taught in their schools.
Now, the language is Very intentional that they're going to teach about the Bible.
But Ryan Walters, the superintendent, sent out a memo that said, teaching the Bible is compulsory.
Now, Dan, I just, I want to be brief on this segment.
You know, he mentioned teaching the Bible in history and Western Civ and civics and English.
He's basically like, you could teach the Bible anywhere.
Do it.
You can find a place for the Bible in almost any subject except for math and science.
Do it.
It's compulsory.
Like the word I highlighted there, if we still had paper and pens, the word that I would have just like underlined and circled and like drew like all kinds of characters around was compulsory.
He's telling school districts this is compulsory.
Dan, I don't know how many people have alarm bells around religion in this country, but the idea that religion is compulsory, Is the least American thing I've ever heard.
And there is no examples.
And I'm email me, please email me.
There are no examples from history of religion being compulsory that does not result in things like rebellion, violence, state crackdowns, and so on.
Like when the state starts emailing and memoing about compulsory Bible reading, you're in a bad place.
I'll just leave it there.
Yeah, so I think what stood out to me is, as you say, so like, I always use this surface language and it's in the code, but like on the surface, got all the same trappings that Louisiana did.
And it's not coincidental, of course, that this follows as soon as Louisiana does it, you have Oklahoma.
I don't think they'll be the last conservative state to do this.
Who's like, oh, you know, it's, it's an important, it's historically important.
Is that true?
Yes.
Uh, it's an important document in the history of Western civilization.
We could get into the whole Western thing and like, you know, lots of Africans and others in the Bible that we got to now claim as Western, but whatever.
Sure.
It's an important, it's an important text.
Needs to be studied on the same level as other American founding documents.
No, not so much.
And that's a slippery language there.
Other founding documents, as if it is one, as if you're going to find Thomas Jefferson, like, you know, bumping his Bible around.
He might have after he cut and pasted it and kept the bits that he liked and cut out the parts he didn't, right?
What am I trying to get at?
As you said, the same veneer of this is about history, this is about significance in our culture, etc., etc., etc.
And yes, they're right.
You can teach about the Bible or about Christianity as a significant force in the history of the United States, in the history of the quote-unquote Western or European world.
Sure.
Yep.
What stood out to me and gives away the game is when he says it's compulsory to teach from The Bible.
And people tell me if I'm wrong.
I just imported a preposition that wasn't there, but he didn't just say teach about the Bible in the memo, in the thing, in the thing that's not careful legal language, that isn't intended to withstand those lawsuits that are going to come.
So you've got to teach from the Bible.
That's completely different.
That is completely different That's where I think that one preposition is where we shift from teaching about something as a kind of cultural artifact, as a cultural influence, the same way that we could talk about any number of religious texts for lots of different cultures, to where you shift into an endorsement of the teachings of that religious text.
And I think that's the issue.
And again, I think it's the saying, the quiet parts out loud.
Everybody knows that that's what this is about.
But he gives it away when he says that.
We'll see if that matters as this moves forward through courts and public opinion and everywhere else.
All right, welcome back.
As Brad said before signing off, some interesting SCOTUS Supreme Court stuff this week.
If you follow the Supreme Court, you know that they've had a loaded docket and apparently are going to blow through their normal June deadline for rendering decisions, and we've still got some big ones coming.
But they've made, I guess decisions is the wrong word, they have moved on a couple abortion-related issues this cycle that I think are really important and I think important for us to look at.
So last week, like right after we recorded the weekly roundup, The justices addressed the proposed ban on the medical abortion drug methepristone.
I can say it, methepristone.
I've been working on saying that drug name for months now.
I think I finally said it.
I'm going to stop now because I'm afraid I'm going to get it all twisted up.
But as folks will remember, there had been a pretty complicated case against making methepristone available through mail and so forth.
Most abortions that happen in the U.S.
are brought about through medical means or chemical means, right?
And so anti-abortion activists wanted to ban methepristone and not allow it to be sent, and the way they had done this was by attacking the whole FDA process and so forth.
That was the first case, and word came down on where the court was with that last Friday, right after we recorded, as I say.
And then the one that was in the news this week were challenges to an Idaho law, similar to lots of other conservative states, that blocked abortion care but had specifically being brought up because of emergency care and federal statutes that require that if somebody's like in an emergency room in need of care, they have to receive whatever medical care is appropriate and the Biden administration and others
had argued that this includes, in limited cases where it applies, abortion.
And Idaho had not been doing this, had been airlifting people to other hospitals and so forth.
So these are the two cases.
And what I think, and I'm not alone in thinking this, is that the Supreme Court basically punted on both.
So I want to talk about what I think that means.
And then I want to get at least one reason why I think this is the case.
So the interesting thing about the abortion pill case is that the Supreme Court was unanimous.
It was unanimous in not banning mifepristone.
But, but, The decision was based on the lack of plaintiff's standing.
In other words, what they said is that those bringing the suit didn't really have standing, legal standing, to bring the suit, okay?
So Justice Kavanaugh, one of the conservatives, who obviously it was a unanimous decision.
He voted against banning the Thepper Stone.
What he said is that the law currently protects doctors from having to perform abortions, right?
So doctors cannot be forced to perform an abortion if they don't want to.
And that was part of the way that the suit was brought forward, and there were lots of doctors and so forth saying that this essentially sort of forced them somehow to perform abortions.
And Kavanaugh's argument was that they didn't show that Mephistone actually violates this, so they didn't have standing, right?
What does that mean?
Why do I think that's significant?
Why do I call that a punt?
I call that a punt because it means that they left the door open, the Supreme Court did, to other plaintiffs who do have standing bringing similar suits.
And there are states that currently have suits still working through the courts.
There are going to be other people.
We're going to see others signing on to these, right?
We're going to see them trying to create or locate plaintiffs who can have standing.
And so what happened was the Supreme Court basically avoided all the substantive issues and punted the case for later.
They sent it back to lower courts to figure out.
And folks, every observer out there says this will be back before the Supreme Court.
OK, so that's the Mephistopheles Stone case.
What about Idaho?
SCOTUS really punted on this one.
They dismissed the case and they sent it back to lower courts for further adjudication.
And this is one of those that if you're listening, you don't have to be an expert on the Supreme Court.
If you're listening to this and being like, well, if you were going to send it back, why did you agree to hear it?
They essentially said it was a mistake.
They shouldn't have taken it up.
They should have waited until it worked its way through lower courts.
They said it hasn't been worked through enough, etc., etc.
They punted it back down to lower courts.
What does that mean?
It means that in the immediate time frame, Idaho doctors can provide emergency abortion care if needed, right?
Because the Idaho stuff blocking that is on hold.
But it has been sent back down to the courts.
It was a six to three decision, and it was Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented.
They were ready to let this go and to rule in favor of Idaho and say that they could not be required to provide abortion care in emergency situations.
Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, so three other conservative justices, they sided with the liberals in voting or deciding to dismiss this.
Why does that matter?
Well, let's listen to Katonji Brown-Jackson and what she has to say, right?
Because she's one of them who voted to dismiss, but what she said was, today's decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho, it is a delay, right?
She made clear that she likely would have decided in favor of pregnant people in Idaho, and so against the state of Idaho.
Samuel Alito, in his dissent, he's one of those who dissented, said that justices, quote, simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question.
He argued that the federal statute in question essentially places the welfare of the unborn child ahead of the requirement to aid the patient.
So if you have a pregnant patient and the only way to save their life in emergency medical care was to provide an abortion, he basically said that the way the statute is written, you have to save, you can't perform the abortion.
I was going to say save the fetus, but you wouldn't be able to, right?
If the patient passes, the child will pass as well.
In response to that, liberal Justice Elena Kagan took direct shots at Alito.
She wrote that Alito's dissent, quote, requires a brief response.
And this is what she says.
She says, Justice Alito's dissenting opinion requires a brief response.
His primary argument is that although EMTALA, EMTALA are the initials for this federal statute, His primary argument is though EMTALA generally obligates hospitals to provide emergency medical care, it never demands that they perform an abortion, no matter how much that procedure is needed to prevent grave physical harm or even death.
That view has no basis in the statute, she said.
Entala unambiguously requires that a Medicare-funded hospital provide whatever medical treatment is necessary to stabilize a healthy emergency, and an abortion in rare situations is such a treatment.
That's what she had to say.
So why do I bring this up?
I think this is interesting, and we can sit here, we can say, well, okay, so why did three conservatives, Side with the liberal justices here.
And here's my take on this, right?
Are there real things to be worked out?
Do they really think that the people in the Metheprestone case didn't have standing?
Yeah, probably.
That one's unanimous.
OK.
But I could see the conservatives, you know, wanting to ban Metheprestone.
I think people like Alito has made clear that there is no anti-abortion, no level of opposition to abortion that he will not support from the bench.
I think Thomas is the same way.
Some of the others, there's a little bit of leeway there, but the conservatives are pretty united in this.
Why would three of them want to punt on this issue of the Idaho abortion ban?
Here's my take, and I think there are real reasons, there are legal reasons, etc.
I think the biggest reason is that the conservative justices did not want to issue decisions on abortion that they know will be politically unpopular ahead of the 2024 election.
I think this reflects the politicizing, the ongoing politicizing of the court.
I think conservative justices like Alito and Thomas know this.
I think they don't care.
But I think John Roberts cares.
I think Kavanaugh and Barrett care.
And I think what they chose to do is to say, you know what, we're going to punt this down the line because this is going to come back.
This Idaho decision, it's going to go through the courts.
It is not going to be settled in lower courts.
It's going to be right back before SCOTUS.
The Metheprestone case is going to come back before the court when plaintiffs withstanding come along.
And I think what they didn't want to do was issue unpopular rulings that they knew would potentially aid Democrats in the 2024 election.
I think they know full well what the public thinks about their rulings.
And they chose not to do that.
I think there are other things here.
I think there's a failure of nerve.
I think that, you know, we've talked about this before.
I don't know if the Supreme Court, if the conservatives actually thought that they had solved something with the Dobbs decision, that abortion would go away.
It obviously hasn't and won't.
I think there are elements of this.
But that's my take.
And welcome feedback and thoughts from others if I'm off base or if I'm missing something.
I think that that was a real part of it, is that they are playing directly into the 2024 election cycle by not wanting to give further fodder to those on the left who correctly paint Democrats, excuse me, Republicans, the GOP, as extreme on abortion.
So those are my thoughts on two really big cases that came before the court, and really, yes, short-term victories in the immediate future for those who need abortion care.
Long-term, I think much murkier, and we'll see what happens.
But I think that they just didn't want to give Democrats more campaign fodder.
Need to wind this down.
Reason for hope this week.
It's been, I'm not going to lie, it's been a tough week.
We've been talking about the debate and it feels like not a lot of bright spots.
But there was another one also from the Supreme Court last week talked about Amy Coney Barrett having this these statements about the use of historical precedent and originalism, and talked about, lots of people talked about this could show that she was shifting away from justices like Clarence Thomas and people like that.
Well, sure enough, last Friday, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to allow a ban on guns for domestic abusers to stand.
And I think that this surprised a lot of people and surprised a lot of people that it was an 8 to 1 decision.
I took great hope from that because what I think it does show is it shows at least some of the conservatives, most of the conservatives on the court.
Stepping back from the edge that seems to say that there can be no legal limitation on gun ownership.
But I thought it was interesting and hopeful that you had a strong majority of the court that decided that, yeah, domestic abusers It's a bad idea if they have access to firearms, and we're going to let that law stand.
So I took hope from that.
I don't know what that portends about gun rights in the future.
I don't know what that portends about Amy Coney Barrett and maybe a fracturing in some elements of the conservative bloc in the court, but I took hope from that.
As always, thank you to all of you who listen, all of you who support us in so many ways.
If you are a subscriber, thank you.
If you're not a subscriber and you like what you hear, I invite you to please consider doing that.
As always, we'll be back next week with the Weekly Roundup and the interviews and things that Brad does, and it's in the code that I do, and I always look forward to hearing from you.
You know how to reach us.
You can also reach me directly, danielmillerswage, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Until then, please be well, and yeah, let us know what you think.
