SCOTUS, the Fourth Amendment, and the Resistance (Half the Answer #63, with Chris Geidner)

Trent and Caitlin talk to Chris Geidner of Law Dork about the absolute deluge of legal news that seems to be crashing over us like a tsunami. What are the current assaults on our constitutional rights? What are judges and lawmakers doing to defend those rights? Why is Mike Johnson pretending the Fourth Amendment doesn’t exist?

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources:

Law Dork

Law Dork on Bluesky

Chris Geidner on Bluesky

Mike Johnson being wrong about the 4th amendment

Perdomo decision

Bondi demands voter rolls

MN US attorneys resigning

Mark Zaid security clearance case

Tulsi Gabbard at Georgia elections office raid

Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:03]**
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, why is he on a boat? Because they didn't -- they had to be secret. Yeah, the only place where you can have a secret is on a boat. On a boat.

**Bumper [00:00:19]**
Liberal Currents presents Half the Answer with your hosts, Caitlin M. Green and Trent R. Nelson.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:30]**
Well, you know, that understanding of questions is half of an answer, and happy days? Well, they are not yet here. We're working on it, but generally speaking, they should be here. Happy days should be here again, again. That is a work in progress. This is Half the Answer. And this is your host, Trent R. Nelson, but only your co-host, because we have Caitlin M. Green as well. And well, you know, I'm a writer and an editor, and I yell about stuff on the camera all the time, as does Caitlin. She is a mom, editor, writer, linguist --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:07]**
Headband wearer, darkness Rachel. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good deal.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:15]**
Well, Caitlin, we just speak to the most interesting of people, like that old Looney Tunes cartoon. Well, who are we doing that with today and what are we talking about?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:22]**
Okay, yet again, I have to control my fan freak-out energy and just be cool. Be cool, Caitlin, because who we have here is the Law Dork himself, Chris Geidner -- a journalist, a blogger, a law expert -- and he's here to help us kind of understand the stuff that neither you nor I have the expertise for, despite having done super well in mock trial in high school. That's about the limits of it for me. So Chris, how are you?

**Chris Geidner [00:02:03]**
Hello. I think the how I'm doing on any day is summed up by what I have read and written so far that day. And so we're recording at noon on Tuesday. So I'm doing okay so far. But who's to say where we'll be by time people are listening to this or watching it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:02:27]**
Yes, yes. Every day is literally a winding road in post-2025 America. And well, we've seen across Minneapolis, it's not too good in terms of the violence there, but we have a whole bunch of fronts to cover as well. We've got some immigration stuff that we can talk about and how that all relates to the Supreme Court of the United States, something that Chris covers pretty frequently and regularly.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:58]**
The Supreme Court, you know, they're doing so good. We're so proud. Every day that we see a headline that says SCOTUS on it, we just grin and we smile and we think, oh, what a wonderful story I'm about to read about this venerable institution, right?

**Chris Geidner [00:03:17]**
You get out a nice cup of tea and ready to dig in.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:21]**
What did they do this time? I bet it was so good. What did Sam Alito have to say today? I bet he protected my rights. I bet he did.

**Chris Geidner [00:03:32]**
It's dark. It is, it is dark. And I mean, just yesterday, on top of it all, we had this report in The New York Times that since -- I'm sure, coincidentally -- two weeks after Trump won reelection, John Roberts has been making everybody at the court -- they didn't say down to cafeteria workers, but they said employees. So I don't know if it's the entire courthouse or just people in the justices' chambers -- sign NDAs to work at the court because they are so nervous about leaks in the aftermath of the Dobbs leak.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:14]**
Oh, so the Supreme Court is CBS News. They're the same thing, basically.

**Chris Geidner [00:04:28]**
I mean, it's -- I've been covering the court in person now since 2010, and have watched essentially, sort of on two fronts, as what John Roberts -- if you remember, and you may not, and it's fine if you don't, and probably better for your health if you don't. But back when John Roberts was announced as the nominee, and was at the White House with his kids pulling at his pants -- he was the nice DC guy, law firm partner, institutionalist, he was gonna protect the institutions. And at the same time, Democrats fighting back against John Roberts' nomination at the time said, wait, he was in the Reagan Justice Department proposing some of the craziest things that you've heard, specifically about the Voting Rights Act.

But in the early iteration of John Roberts, what we got was somebody who could do both -- the GIF meme, "why not both?" John Roberts thought he could do both. He could be the institutionalist, while day to day he could chip away at people's rights and implement his vision for the law and then the court. He got a better court than he wanted. He got six Republican appointees, and as we most notably saw with Dobbs, the five who are more conservative than him said, no, no, we're not gonna do this incrementally, we're just gonna go whole hog. And back in that case, if you remember, he said, couldn't we do a half step here? We don't need to overrule Roe in order to strike down this law, or in order to uphold this Mississippi law. And the other five said, no, no, no, we can. We can overturn Roe.

And that's kind of the best understanding of the John Roberts that we've had for the past four years that led us up to this 2024 NDA -- he's kind of a man who wanted to be known as a conservative institutionalist whose conservatism has just taken by far the front page.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:07:42]**
He's -- I don't know, he's the dog that caught the car, I guess. Like, oh no. It turns out this thing's really big.

**Chris Geidner [00:07:50]**
And we still see, and there are times when we see in opinions, when I see it in arguments, he's still trying to pull back at times. But they let it be known with Dobbs that if the five of us want something, we're not going to wait for you. And they don't have -- to be clear, there are times when he's leading the charge, when it is all six. Or there have even been times when it's five-four, and it's Barrett who is joining the Democratic appointees dissenting. And so it's not even that he's the next to the left. It's just that there are these institutional moments where he would rather the court move slowly.

And I think, honestly, I think that Alito and Thomas in particular, and Gorsuch to a lesser degree, they watched Justice Ginsburg die, and they know that this six-vote majority is a bad night's sleep away from not being a six-vote majority. Now at this point, obviously Trump is president, Republicans control the Senate, so it would be a little different. But I mean, they saw in real time, both -- honestly, both with Scalia's death, although it didn't turn out the way that Obama wanted at that time. But with both Scalia's death and Ginsburg's death, I think that all of the justices there, even maybe particularly so Barrett, they understand that, and Gorsuch, they understand that -- as much as political scientists might be writing about, oh, this could be a conservative majority for 50 years, or whatever -- they understand the reality that people die, that the majority could change.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:10:22]**
They've forgotten an important medical fact about these complete right-wing monsters, which is that their bodies are not being propelled by normal biological means, right? They're just held together by, you know, spite and Big Macs. So I guess we just have them forever.

**Chris Geidner [00:10:39]**
I mean, we've got Donald Trump walking around.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:10:45]**
How is this still -- I don't think his hands can get any scarier, right? I think that it is truly not blood that is pumping through his body at this point.

**Chris Geidner [00:10:49]**
I mean, I think when you think about the way that people look at the stories that came out of the Kennedy White House decades later, I think those are gonna pale in comparison to what we find out, what they're doing. I mean, just by virtue of what we're seeing on his arms, I mean, he's hooked up to things, probably for an hour every night, for sure.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:11:20]**
And like, or Reagan, right, where it was, oh, ages later you're like, oh, actually, he was truly a puppet for his wife and her astrologer. That's all it was. That was operating.

**Chris Geidner [00:11:44]**
Yeah, no, I've written -- I mean, I wrote a lot about the 25th Amendment back during the first Trump administration. And there is this story when James Baker came in as Chief of Staff for Reagan -- that there was discussion. They sent this guy, I'm forgetting his first name, James Cannon, I think, who was a longtime aide to Baker, who went into the White House before Baker came in, and Cannon came back and was like, we may need to invoke the 25th Amendment. People in the White House are saying this is something we should think about.

There's a memo that was written that I've never been able to find. It's my white whale. I've literally had people -- James Baker's papers are at the University of Tennessee, where my brother is a professor. And I've actually had people look through his papers. I looked, I talked to Cannon's son or daughter about his papers. But the story is, it came out of, actually, Jane Mayer's book about the Reagan White House. I think it's -- I forget the name of it. I don't want to make it up.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:13:07]**
Is it -- what's it called?

**Chris Geidner [00:13:09]**
It's right there on my shelf.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:13:11]**
Dark Money?

**Chris Geidner [00:13:13]**
No, no, the other one -- one of her early books. And what happened is they basically had a meeting in the Roosevelt Room, or something, the East Room, something where Baker, Cannon, somebody else sat down with Reagan, and it was basically a few white guys sat for a half hour and decided if the President could keep being president. And Reagan was having an on day, and they were like, no, 25th Amendment. And it was never brought up again.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:13:48]**
Yeah, that doesn't feel like how it should go.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:13:55]**
Yeah, he definitely needed to be 25th Amendmented. That's the history of America. That's what happens.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:05]**
Right? So, okay, let's imagine for a moment that democracy is functioning and that things go the way they're supposed to go. How does the 25th Amendment -- how do we 25-A that guy, the one who's in there now?

**Chris Geidner [00:14:20]**
Well, the problem is, the 25th Amendment is really awful. I mean, it's really good, but it's really awful, because nobody wanted to do it for the longest time. There's all these stories. Well, yeah, I mean, there were discussions back in Philadelphia about what to do. There were discussions as early as those early guys who died -- what was it? William Henry Harrison, who was the one who died at his inauguration? Was that --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:55]**
Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:15:00]**
William Harrison died a little bit after his inauguration because he got sick at the inauguration, and then he died after.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:15:04]**
Yeah, and it was pouring rain, and he was like, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna finish my speech.

**Chris Geidner [00:15:09]**
And then there were questions about, is the vice president president? Is he acting president?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:15:22]**
Right? This man is in and out of consciousness.

**Chris Geidner [00:15:25]**
No, no, when he's dead. No, no, when he's dead, even -- literally, even though we called him the Vice President, there was literally a question about, because, I mean, the reason was, if he's the acting president, you don't get a new vice president. And so there was literally -- we had to decide on the spot. It was, well, so if the president dies, does he become president?

The other question, before you had the 25th Amendment, is: when is there such a thing as the acting president? The Constitution says nothing about an acting president. And so if a president is sick and the Vice President becomes acting president, is the Vice President just president, and did we kick the President out? How does the president come back if he gets better? And so that's why, until we have the 25th Amendment, there were all these wild things. That's why you get the stuff about Woodrow Wilson and his wife basically taking care of the country and moving his hand along things to sign it, because we literally didn't have anything.

And it wasn't until you had all of these things -- there was, who was it? Was it Garfield? There was somebody who had cancer of the mouth.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:17:06]**
That's Grover Cleveland.

**Chris Geidner [00:17:09]**
Grover Cleveland, they literally sent him out on a boat with a dentist to do the surgery for cancer.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:25]**
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, why is he on a boat?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:17:29]**
Because it had to be secret.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:33]**
And the only place where you can have a secret is on a boat.

**Chris Geidner [00:17:39]**
And what was it? Who was it? Maybe it was Cleveland. Maybe it was Garfield. After -- I think it was Garfield -- after he was shot, he didn't die right away, and they sent him -- they decided that the water would be good. And so they were sending him up to a place by the water.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:18:10]**
Yeah, my name is RFK Jr. and I endorse this message.

**Chris Geidner [00:18:14]**
They literally built a railroad to get him there.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:18:18]**
That was as he was dying, yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:18:22]**
Let's just urgently build a railroad.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:18:24]**
Yeah, to move him because they couldn't move him in a car. And famously, the people ended up pushing his train car to the finish of the railway, which is at the cabin. Yeah, like, really beautiful, actually.

**Chris Geidner [00:18:35]**
And so we finally got around to: we should do something in writing, since we've been messing around with this for 150 years. And so the part of the 25th Amendment that we have implemented, that people know about, is the President writes a letter before he goes under anesthesia and the vice president takes over until he signs a second letter. That's the normal part. But Part Two, the part that's never been implemented, is the part that we keep talking about. That's the one that every writer of every presidential TV show does at some point, and they all do it so wrong, and it makes me mad.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:19:31]**
Well, here's your chance. Here's your chance, Chris.

**Chris Geidner [00:19:36]**
I mean, the Vice President has -- whenever they talk about it, the Vice President has to be for it. The Vice President has to call the cabinet together.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:43]**
Okay, well, talk to me then, I guess.

**Chris Geidner [00:19:48]**
So yeah, basically, and then a majority of the cabinet has to vote for it, and they can temporarily remove him. Effectively, they're doing a letter. But because that is such an extreme step, because it is essentially a constitutional coup, there is a provision that the President can go to Congress and say they're wrong, I'm fine.

And if that happens, and this is really the answer of why it's never been implemented -- if the President does that, which in all times except for when we'd all agree it has to happen, the president's going to challenge it. It then takes a two-thirds vote of both chambers in order to confirm the cabinet's vote. And so it's essentially more difficult to invoke the 25th Amendment against the president's will than it is to impeach and remove a president and bar him from ever holding office again, because that only takes a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:20:38]**
Yeah. A thing we also haven't achieved. Yeah, great.

**Chris Geidner [00:20:45]**
And so the 25th Amendment -- it's literally more difficult than impeaching and removing a president. So that's why we've never seen it. It is a very good threat. It's also the timing -- the best time in American history when it should have been implemented was on January 6, because you get five days. If nothing else, you get him out of office immediately. Mike Pence could have gotten a majority of the cabinet on January 6 and gotten Trump out of office before the end of the day, and that, I think, would have then enabled Pelosi and McConnell to handle impeachment on a quick timeline before January 20. We would live in a different world.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:58]**
That's Chris's little fanfic. That's flying cars, robot dogs.

**Chris Geidner [00:22:05]**
But that is, I think, the best example in American history for when we should have implemented Section Four of the 25th Amendment, because, by the time Trump would have been able to force Congress to vote on letting him back in, they could have impeached him, removed him.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:22:39]**
Ah, let's time travel. Just live in that world for a minute and see what it does to your system. I know that here at Half the Answer, the official line is, if we had a time machine, we would go back and force them to do Reconstruction properly.

**Chris Geidner [00:22:57]**
That would have helped. We probably wouldn't --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:01]**
But if we can't go back that far, January 6 would be acceptable, right?

**Chris Geidner [00:23:06]**
Yeah, depending on the time limit of how far you can go back. I'm not familiar with the science of our time machine at Liberal Currents, but --

**Trent R. Nelson [00:23:16]**
We're working on it. We're working on it.

**Chris Geidner [00:23:19]**
Yeah, sorry, that's the -- you can never, you can never not get me going deep when the 25th Amendment is brought up.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:27]**
No, that's good. I meant, okay, so what's the worst show that's bungled it the worst?

**Chris Geidner [00:23:32]**
They all -- they all just do. I mean, none of them get the Vice President's role right. Almost none of them. They all are like, well, you get a vote. This was with your vote. I'm like, calm down. I do think the West Wing probably got it the best, because they never actually did that part. They always just did the letter.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:03]**
They were like, let's keep to what --

**Chris Geidner [00:24:05]**
No, I acknowledge that I'm not -- let's just keep to the ones that they've actually implemented. Let's -- because that was the one where his daughter was kidnapped, he gave over the power to John Goodman.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:24]**
That was a wild time. We could try that. We could just give John Goodman -- I think it couldn't be worse.

**Chris Geidner [00:24:32]**
But that was a situation where there was no vice president. And so when he had to, when he executed the 25th Amendment, he was giving it over to the Speaker of the House, and then they got it. This is why I do remember that I thought it was good. They made the speaker resign. They said he had to resign from the House because he couldn't work for two branches of government.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:24:57]**
See, John Goodman is definitely a Speaker. I'm glad they cast him in that role, because you can't see him as vice president.

**Chris Geidner [00:25:02]**
He was the speaker, and he had a dog that shed.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:07]**
I forgot he was on that show. I feel bad. I think I watched the whole thing. Maybe I didn't.

**Chris Geidner [00:25:15]**
It was a short time, but it was very good. The worst part is, I think he was modeled after a pre-scandal Denny Hastert.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:25:31]**
Damn.

**Chris Geidner [00:25:33]**
Because he was sort of this gruff, big, "I'm just a real-talking, real-talking speaker" who's become the president.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:43]**
A thing you can always trust in a politician, when they're really posturing really hard about what a straight shooter they are -- that always turns out to be right and true.

**Chris Geidner [00:25:53]**
Never, never bad. I mean, speaking of speakers, let's go to today. Since we've been talking about past -- let's talk about this. Am I allowed to swear here?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:26:05]**
Fuck yeah.

**Chris Geidner [00:26:06]**
This Mike Johnson bullshit today. Mike Johnson got up and was asked about all of this stuff about immigration officers going into houses. And he talked about the fact that all you need is administrative warrants signed by immigration judges who are "so good" and that's sufficient. And you, you the Democrats, want to add this new process of a judicial warrant in order to enter a house -- if they go in their house and lock the door, that's unworkable. Who do they think they are for this new standard?

It was honestly the most insane two and a half minutes I've seen on video. I mean, I don't want to be too crazy, because obviously January was insane. But we'll say for February so far. But administrative warrants don't even need to be signed by immigration judges, who aren't even real judges. They're just executive branch employees. Administrative immigration warrants can be signed by immigration officers. They don't even need to be signed by the executive branch's own faux judges.

And so he was wrong times two on that front, on the administrative warrant front. And then it was offensive on part two, as Trent even was starting to react as I was just recounting it, because the whole reason he was being asked the question is because acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, in conjunction with somebody in DHS General Counsel's Office last spring, decided unilaterally, in a secret memo, that they could change the Fourth Amendment and that we no longer needed a judicial warrant for immigration agents to effectuate removal orders in a person's private property, private dwelling. That was the change. It was just revealed, what, two weeks ago? And Mike Johnson was like -- it took gaslighting to a new level. It was gaslighting the Constitution.

If nothing else, since the 1980s, whatever argument you may have, even the Lyons memo essentially says we're going in a different direction from this 1980 Supreme Court decision. Actually, I would argue that even the Lyons memo would require an immigration judge to sign it -- that an immigration agent couldn't sign it. Even the Lyons memo, I think, tries to argue that because they report to different officials, DOJ versus DHS, that somehow -- I mean, it's all bullshit under the unitary executive theory, if they all report to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is the final decider. It's not an independent officer if somebody in DOJ okays something in DHS. But at least if you have an immigration judge, that's kind of the way that the Lyons memo sort of suggests that it could be proper. But if it's literally just an immigration officer signing a 205 administrative warrant, there's no way that that is in fitting with any understanding for the past 45 years.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:30:36]**
Because that's literally just, "I checked with myself and I said it's okay for me to break down your door."

**Chris Geidner [00:30:41]**
Literally.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:30:46]**
And again, I want to go back to a term that you used -- gaslighting the Constitution. I mean, this is literally basic stuff. This is one of the reasons we wanted, we didn't want to be part of the United Kingdom anymore.

**Chris Geidner [00:31:00]**
I mean, who's been doing the fanfic legal scholarship on birthright citizenship? Elon, whatever. I mean, you can't just make up what the Fourth or 14th Amendment mean. It is what it is. You can argue that -- I mean, you can make an argument, and I think it's a losing argument, under their own unitary executive theory, that immigration judges are sufficiently independent of immigration officials that it counts as an independent officer reviewing the warrant. But to suggest that any administrative warrant is sufficient is just false.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:32:04]**
So yeah, that's what we're dealing with. I mean, that's the Speaker of the House, and that's why we're in the problem that we're in today. I mean, one of 20 reasons.

**Chris Geidner [00:32:16]**
But it's something that -- it's really hard. Somebody -- I forget who wrote it. It was probably Jamelle Bouie, because everything he says is great. But somebody over the weekend noted, and I do think it is key, that so many members of the House have only come of age essentially since 2016, in a Trump world. And they don't understand, fundamentally, what the point of our constitutional structure is. They do not understand that they have a different role than the President, that the House has a different role than the Senate, that the Congress has a different role than the President, that all three of them have different roles than the Supreme Court. They just do not understand that they are not supposed to be helping each other. They can agree on things, but -- I've written about it -- I think the thing that would most surprise the founders is, and I hate talking this way, but is truly how unbelievably unmanly these men are. They just would not understand how -- they thought, we've got these separated powers. The great thing is, men want to be in charge. They are going to jealously guard their fiefdom. They aren't going to let other branches encroach on their area.

And this whole debate we've had over the past year with impoundment -- that shouldn't have been nonprofit healthcare organizations trying to enforce foreign aid. That should have been Mike Johnson saying, we are going to shut you down if you don't carry out the spending bills that we passed.

It's truly -- Mike Johnson is, I mean, and to a lesser extent, Thune, but Mike Johnson is absolutely a top-five reason why we have gotten so quickly, so far out of control over the past less than 13 months.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:35:25]**
Yeah, well, I think it's so inspiring how these modern men are challenging patriarchy by being cooperative, the way that they always thought women should be. Yeah, they're cooperative and they're collaborative, and that's really sweet. And they're really emotional. Oh my gosh.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:35:44]**
Well, the thing is that anger isn't an emotion, so that's why men are allowed to have it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:35:51]**
Damn. Yeah, anger is best expressed in all-caps posts on Truth Social after midnight.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:35:58]**
Well, if you can just turn whatever feeling you're feeling into anger, then it becomes acceptable as a man to have it. And so whatever it is that you're feeling, just make it an angry feeling, and you're good to go.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:36:13]**
There you go. Well, you know, Chris, speaking of angry feelings, we've spoken a lot about the Supreme Court and how they're doing, which, as Caitlin noted, not great. As Chris noted, not great. But tell us how some of these federal judges have been responding to what the Justice Department has been giving them. It hasn't been fantastic for them, has it?

**Chris Geidner [00:36:42]**
No. I mean, I think that the true heroes of the past year are threefold. It's people standing up, it's lawyers who have been pushing back, and it's district court judges. And in a handful of occasions, appeals court judges, and in a couple of really special moments that are special episodes, the Supreme Court.

I mean, I feel like I got a sneak peek at what we were going to go through in Trump 2.0 when we started hearing these cases about the bans on gender-affirming care for trans minors, when those started to be heard. Remember, back in 2020 there were no laws banning gender-affirming care for trans minors. None. Six years ago, none. And when Arkansas and Alabama had the first two in 2021 and 2022, you started to have this litigation. Then 2023 was the big deluge.

The initial round of litigation -- six or seven opinions, including from two Trump appointees -- were all unanimous from district courts that those bans were unconstitutional under US Supreme Court precedent, under the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause, either or both based on sex discrimination or transgender status discrimination.

That then went up to the appeals courts, and we got an opinion from Judge Jeff Sutton in July of that year that put one of those rulings on hold, a stay, until they could decide the case. And that was sort of the tide shifting. The 11th Circuit then, which is a very conservative court down in Florida and some other southern states, issued a ruling blocking a lower court ruling. Then the Sixth Circuit issued it. Then it went up to the Supreme Court, and we got last year's Skrmetti ruling saying that those bans just aren't sex discrimination or transgender status discrimination, by some little magic trick from John Roberts.

But what we -- that is essentially what we then saw in 2025, as to a lot of Trump actions. Looking at the case law that had been in place, sometimes for decades, regarding how the federal government worked with one another, how branches interacted, how agencies had to act -- the decisions were fairly obvious. And then you went up to the appeals courts, and a lot of times the appeals courts actually went along with it, because so much of this stuff, especially when you got to things like the Alien Enemies Act, when you got to, really, Stephen Miller trying out the toolbox -- even appeals courts were like, we're not -- what are we doing here?

But as we saw with the immunity case, then it gets up to the Supreme Court, and they're like, well, we haven't thought about it before, really. And if you really think about it, maybe we should do this a little differently, and it will just happen to be in a way that Donald Trump likes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:22]**
So how does the nation reconcile, Chris, having a federal system of judges in which there is still seeming reasonability and functionality, right? And then you get to the top tier, and it's Funkytown. It's crazy, it's nuts. It's unhinged from what we're used to. How does that -- what are we going to see in terms of reconciliation?

**Chris Geidner [00:41:52]**
I mean, there are two things. One, a lot of the decisions from the Supreme Court thus far have still been preliminary, whether they're on the shadow docket, whether they're -- in the case of the way that they handled the birthright citizenship challenges, they first had those arguments over the scope, and we got that decision last year over nationwide injunctions, universal injunctions. Then it went back down, and everybody was like, even under your new restricted standards, this is still blocked nationwide, either because of states having their interests involved or by way of class actions. And that's now going back up to the Supreme Court on the class action front.

And then on some other ones, you had rulings that are mixed. You had sort of the slow roll to increasing the President's firing powers that led to -- well, we're gonna -- I mean, doing, really, a sign that they don't know what they're up against. They were, back last May, around Memorial Day, they were like, okay, so Donnie, we're gonna let you fire basically anyone you want, except the Fed. Don't mess with the Fed. And like a five-year-old child being told not to touch the stove, Trump was like, well, obviously I'm gonna mess with the Fed. You told me I couldn't do it.

And now the Supreme Court had to separate it into these two separate arguments -- one over the Federal Trade Commission firing of Slaughter, and that will probably have effect on a lot of those other cases. And then the separate arguments that we had in January over Lisa Cook's attempted firing from the Fed -- that one didn't go as well. The tariffs arguments didn't go well for the administration, although we don't have an opinion. I don't think the birthright citizenship arguments are going to go well for the Trump administration.

And I think what we're seeing is, again, to go back to the beginning discussion of John Roberts, we're seeing sort of this, well, I thought I could half-ass this and things would work themselves out. But now he's needing to draw lines, and we're gonna see some of those lines need to be drawn this term.

In those three cases we're going to see: are there any limits to Congress's ability? Let's reframe this. This isn't about the President's ability to fire people. It's about Congress's ability. When they are creating an agency that didn't exist -- agencies don't exist in the wild -- when they create an agency that didn't exist, they give authorization to do things under law by that agency. If they could eliminate the agency altogether, shouldn't they be able to limit how the president can treat the person that is put in charge of that agency? And so we're going to get that answer this term.

Between those two cases, we're gonna get the answer with the tariffs case, essentially of: are statutes whatever the President says they mean? Because this is a statute -- this would essentially be upending the major questions doctrine and saying the major questions doctrine only exists when a Democrat is president, because the word "tariff" isn't in the statute that he's using to justify these tariffs.

And then if they would go his way on -- I mean, the whole ball of wax is the birthright citizenship case. If they would go the administration's way on that, they're essentially saying that the Constitution is what the President says it is.

And so I do think, in increasing order of alarming, we have three cases that they're going to have to take a stand. And that is why I do think what the district court judges are doing is so important, because when they act, it lets the Supreme Court know where they're at. It lets them know, in a very real sense, will district court judges back them up when they tell Trump no?

And I mean, when you watch Judge Schiltz out in Minnesota -- this is a conservative judge who, I guarantee, never thought that he was going to be doing what he's had to do over the past month. And yet he has. I know that there are people on the left who are like, why aren't people in jail? Why aren't there contempt proceedings?

I think Judge Schiltz, Judge Xinis, Judge Boasberg -- in the two judges who dealt with the Alien Enemies Act and Kilmar Abrego Garcia -- Judge Ellis in Chicago, who was the one who was calling Bovino to account -- I think it's really important to understand that those judges, some of the judges who dealt with the early Alien Enemies Act cases, the judges who dealt with the initial birthright citizenship challenge cases -- they did a very good job of not only letting the higher courts know that they were there to do their job, but letting the administration know that they were there to do their job, and bluntly, letting the public know that they would do their job regardless of what the Supreme Court did.

After one of the shadow docket rulings allowing mass firings, there was an injunction, or TRO -- I forget which -- issued by Judge Susan Elston in San Francisco. And she basically went back to the drawing board, looked at that shadow docket ruling, went no further than the justices were willing to put on the record, willing to give justification for, and said, here's what they allowed me to still consider in your challenge. They only addressed the mass firing. They didn't address any individual RIF plans from agencies, and so I am still going to allow you to bring challenges to me for any individual RIF that you can find or get turned over in discovery that's been issued.

And I think that is judges learning. The things that we've seen with judges making DOJ, DHS state, submit status reports within 24 hours, 48 hours of a ruling. The responding to show-cause orders by saying, you need to provide evidence within two days of this, or I'm going to hold you in contempt.

When people say -- when Judge Schiltz issued that ruling that listed the 70 cases that he had seen potential claims from judges that there might have been orders being violated, people got very upset that part of his order said that he was calling Todd Lyons to come to court on Friday, unless the person at the center of this case was released per the order. And then they were all mad that he had that exception, and then that they released the guy, and so the contempt hearing was canceled.

That honestly makes me want to cry, because you're kind of missing the point. That was a habeas case that was filed to get a man out of detention who -- his lawyers argued -- was being improperly detained, and Judge Schiltz got him out of detention.

**Chris Geidner [00:51:42]**
And if you're mad at that, go home, do a meditation and come back. Because that's the point. That is a district court judge doing their job. And literally, having that list of cases was a little present for reporters. Here are the cases that I found that you should look into. And I work alone. I don't have a whole team. I figured, and I'm a little upset that I haven't seen it -- I thought the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or Post or somebody was going to have, "here's what happened in the 70 cases" with one of their fancy New York Times scrolling --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:52:08]**
The ones that you can move, yeah.

**Chris Geidner [00:52:12]**
Yeah, we haven't seen it. I looked through a handful of them, and what I saw in a bunch of them -- and some of them were before, good for him for listing as many as he did -- but a bunch of them, after the order that he issued, after the orders that he cited that said that there might be non-compliance, in almost all of them that I looked at, two days later there was a status report that's sealed or not available on PACER, by the Department of Justice. And I presume that in almost all of them, since there were no filings after it, that those were: this person has been released.

And so what that tells me -- the reason it's a weird -- there's a, on PACER, remote court access. Habeas cases are by default not sealed, but they're not available remotely, because there can be private information in them. You can get them if it's a normal time, and the only people who would care about a habeas case in Minnesota are people in Minnesota. You can go to the courthouse and a reporter can look at all the documents, but they're not put online for mass distribution. And so we didn't see them.

But that's what I presume. And so I do think that's been the example that's been floating around over the past week of, "they're in non-compliance, blah, blah, blah." Well, that's the way the court system works. If you think that there's non-compliance, you file a motion as a lawyer for show cause where you're saying, we think they should be held in contempt. And the judge then issues an order to show cause, where he says, respond by a certain time, and then they respond.

Now, far be it for me to defend DOJ, DHS, ICE -- but I think the reality is that there are hundreds, if not more, of these cases that have been brought in Minnesota because of the lawless way that Kavanaugh stops have allowed them to arrest anybody. And so there are a lot of habeas cases that are resulting in habeas grants, much more than you would have had in the past. And you've got a combination of poorly trained ICE and CBP people who are filling out forms wrong, don't know how to fill them out, or are doing bad things and potentially filling out forms incorrectly on purpose, whatever. There are both good and bad -- incompetent, the level between incompetence and --

**Trent R. Nelson [00:55:34]**
Yeah.

**Chris Geidner [00:55:36]**
And then you have this Minnesota US Attorney's Office losing employees every day. And so those 70 cases -- let's point to them. This administration is bad. They need to be in control. It's a reason for the Democrats to not fund any DHS bill that does anything like what the Republicans want. But I think if you actually go case by case through those 70 cases, what you're going to see is very bad situations of arrests that shouldn't have happened in the first place, in a lot of these cases that were authorized by the Supreme Court with the Perdomo decision, and then poorly handled cases, slash illegally handled cases, by DHS and ICE, followed by overwhelmed DOJ having to defend all these cases.

My understanding is that essentially one lawyer who is now leaving the office was leading all of those -- Anna Voss. And there was a report in the Star Tribune yesterday that she's one of the newest lawyers leaving. And there was a report in Mother Jones on Friday that went into more detail about the office being debilitated that didn't name Anna, but did mention the civil -- she's the civil chief, and said that she's leaving.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:57:29]**
And it's not just here. It's not just in Minnesota. Obviously, we know what's happening there, in the violence and lawlessness from Border Patrol and ICE continuously unfurling. It is beyond, beyond comprehension for some folks, but prosecutors are leaving.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:57:48]**
People out there, absolutely, absolutely, be safe out there. Loons together strong.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:57:58]**
It is worth though, considering that it's not just in Minnesota. I mean, we've seen federal prosecutors leave in Tennessee and other places. What does that --

**Chris Geidner [00:58:09]**
Well, Tennessee -- I mean Tennessee, because of Abrego Garcia. Eastern District of Virginia, because of the James Comey stuff. And probably wherever they're doing the Schiff stuff, in Southern District of New York when they did the Eric Adams stuff. I mean, almost all of these situations that we know about are when there were specific efforts to either end prosecutions or bring prosecutions that people who had been longtime employees felt were improper.

We've also seen -- I mean, obviously these questions are raised anytime that they send either CBP, National Guard, Marines into a city, because then there's litigation. We learned a lot early on, when they did the original LA deployment, some of the first cases. We learned a lot in Portland. We learned a ton.

And I think again, Judge Sarah Ellis, she had the press and protesters case in Chicago, and she's the one who got the deposition of Bovino, multi-day deposition. People focus on the fact that the Seventh Circuit -- again, this is another one of those -- people focused on the fact that the Seventh Circuit stayed her order for Bovino to report to court daily. But she got that deposition on the record, that two-day deposition. I think truly it very much undermined him when they tried to go to Charlotte and New Orleans immediately afterwards. And I think it did put him in a precarious position that ultimately led to his ouster in Minnesota.

These -- I think it's very easy to get mad that any one step doesn't succeed. I get it, and every one step should succeed. But if we actually want to win, I think it is important to understand that process. If you focused on the loss in LA originally, we'd be done. Why didn't we just let the National Guard go everywhere? No, they learned from what happened in LA, and when the Portland case was brought, they made sure they had a crisp, clear case. They brought it when there was basically no protest going on. They brought it when there was no violence. They brought it -- they literally waited until everything at the facility was relatively calm.

And Judge Immergut --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:03:52]**
Yeah, let me make sure the facts are right on Karin Immergut, which is that she was appointed District Court for Oregon by Trump, and was US Attorney for Oregon by Bush.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:04:00]**
Right, yeah, so she's been around a long time. And I mean, she just really slammed them, and that then did lay out the blueprint that was used in Chicago, even though you then had a bad Ninth Circuit panel that initially had some issues with the way that things were going to run in Portland.

I mean, it is a step-by-step learning, and that's actually one of the things that I've most been impressed with -- advocates over the past year, both activist ground and lawyer ground -- is that there is this iterative learning, city to city. People keep focusing on, "ICE is getting more aggressive." I think the activists know that's not true. Yeah, there are obviously some things that are more aggressive, but the tactics were being used, and people knew it as they went in.

I saw this reporting out of Maine that they were going to people's houses. And I'm like, well, no, they've been going to people's houses. That has absolutely been happening. The fact that people knew to immediately be recording and to have everything on -- that might have been new, but that was the iterative learning.

And I think that eventually -- and this is the good note, and I talked about those small, golden moments -- that is what led to what we eventually got in the end of December from the Supreme Court, where they did say, no, we're not going along with you.

And I think we've seen no new National Guard deployment since then. And I think that even though they're still fighting it, they let it be known that, hey buddy, you not only didn't do it, but you didn't do it carefully.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:03:52]**
So, okay, let me make sure the facts are right on Karin Immergut.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:04:15]**
I do think there's an interesting -- I'm really just thinking about it now, but I'm giving away this content for free. This might become something in the future. But I do think there's an element to the fact that so many -- I mean, until Biden, really, so many judges are former US attorneys, or at least former AUSAs. And they know. I mean, especially when it comes to the Republican appointees -- basically all Republican appointees either were big law firm partners or were prosecutors. And they know how these offices should be operating.

And I do think they get -- it's that, the way -- I mean, I haven't lived in Ohio since 2009, but do I get irrationally mad at anything that JD Vance does because he was Ohio senator for two minutes?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:05:12]**
Oh, listen, yeah, I get mad about stuff that happens in Oklahoma, and I moved away from there when I was six. I get it, you know?

**Chris Geidner [00:01:05:42]**
And so I do think there is that element of -- these judges, who probably have an incorrectly idealized view of the US Attorney's Office. But in this situation, it's working in our favor, because they're like, what are you doing to our golden -- I mean, when you look at some of those opinions that were written in the Eastern District of Virginia, they're mad.

When you look at -- I mean, you do have some -- people were pointing to Judge Reyes's opinion in DC last night blocking TPS from Haiti, the Haiti TPS ending. That was fire. But I've been in Judge Reyes's courtroom. She also overheard the challenge to ending the trans military service in DC, the DC case. And I mean, she's a firecracker. Let's be clear, she's going to not hide how she's feeling about a case.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:07:04]**
Right? I mean, how do we feel about these decisions that are being written, knowing that they're gonna get posted on social media and people are gonna post the fire emoji under it?

**Chris Geidner [00:01:07:15]**
Yeah, the case about Liam Ramos where he put the picture -- I mean, you know what, good. Do I want every opinion to be that? No. And I do think -- I mean, when you look at, over the weekend you had -- too many judges -- Judge -- the Minnesota 10th Amendment decision rejecting Minnesota's 10th Amendment case that Operation Metro Surge is infringing on their sovereignty. That was a Biden appointee, but it was a very careful decision. It was a decision that talked about what it wasn't deciding, talked about the fact that it wasn't ruling on the lawfulness of any actions, that it was ruling on whether or not this argument to stop it is successful, which is something very different.

And she kept pointing to, speaking of the press and protesters case, she kept pointing to the fact that another decision had been blocked by the Eighth Circuit, which is a very conservative federal appeals court. There are 11 active judges, 10 of them are Republican appointees. She kept it out of the decision, but everybody reporting on it knew it was her decision that was stayed.

So literally, the Eighth Circuit had just said, in a case that only addressed the implications of the treatment of protesters and observers, First and Fourth Amendment rights, that she had gone too far. She had gone overbroad. She had swept in too many people. She had done too much. And then she was being asked to rule that the 10th Amendment should be implemented, should be enforced in a way that it had never been enforced, in a more broad way than had ever been enforced, to stop the entirety of Operation Metro Surge.

Could she have done it? There are arguments. I think there was one area of her argument about coercion, after Pam Bondi's weekend letter that basically said, turn over voter rolls, your TANF data or whatever, and get rid of sanctuary cities, and we'll stop Operation Metro Surge -- I think her likelihood of success on the merits analysis was a little off there. But as to the rest of her decision, I definitely don't think she got the Eighth Circuit's analysis wrong. And we got this well-reasoned decision, and I think that was important.

Over the weekend, the same day -- do I think it was important for the judge to say, essentially, what the hell are you doing? What is law? How is there a five-year-old bringing a habeas case to my court in Texas who was in school in Minnesota a week and a half ago? What are you possibly doing?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:11:19]**
Yeah, so, okay, I have more questions about the Liam Ramos case in terms of how do we get more kids out of there? You know, so I am in the Portland area. We are concerned about Diana Crespo. She's seven years old. She's from Venezuela. She survived a trip on foot through the jungle to get here, and she was supposed to be -- she's supposed to be at elementary school right now, right? She's supposed to be in her second-grade classroom. She's in Dilley, where there's a measles outbreak now. What do we do about all these families?

**Chris Geidner [00:01:11:51]**
Yeah, there's this combination of things that the administration is doing. What they keep doing is basically, if we put several steps on top of each other, we can take this action legally. And so what they do is, essentially, they do things like -- we interpret -- the big dispute in Minnesota is over which law applies to whether people can be detained after arrest.

And essentially, a lot of this comes down to an argument that people detained with asylum claims that haven't been adjudicated should be processed under this law instead of this law. And this one law allows detention pending adjudication, the other law requires, at least requires, a bond hearing.

And the first argument is they shouldn't be detained like that. The agreement that they had reached with the government is that they are not a flight risk. They are not a danger to their community, etc., all of the standards. And while their application is pending, they're allowed out. They report to ICE regularly. They do their check-ins. They are fine.

They first say, well, that was a voluntary agreement. That's not a legally binding agreement. We can change that at any time. So first they change that. Then they say, we think the second law applies here, not the first. And so under that, we do that, and we think that our timing on the bond hearing can be after we resolve your claim. And because the bond hearing can be up to any reasonable time, and we say a reasonable time is two months, because we're overwhelmed at Dilley with people coming in.

But then, separate, on another track, they've decided that they can fast-track decisions on asylum claims and essentially rule quickly on asylum claims. And they're -- because they fired all of the immigration judges who were going to rule against them, and because any decision against them can be appealed to the BIA, which reports directly to the Attorney General, and any decision of the BIA can be overturned at will by the Attorney General. Which is the whole reason why the whole thing of calling them "courts" is -- one of Chris Geidner's long-term goals is to change those names. To the extent we keep those bodies, they are not immigration judges, and the Board of Immigration Appeals should not be thought of as a court by anyone. And a reporter who says that is -- gone.

But because of that, you get rulings on asylum that then can only be appealed through that process, which is a totally separate process from the bond hearing. And then you get in a situation that's similar to -- slightly different, because different laws are involved -- but the sort of Russian-novelist-style maze that Mahmoud Khalil is in, that Oz Turk is in, where you have, "we're gonna make them go through multi-step process on multiple sides," and all of them have different standards and require different legal analysis. And all of the ones on this side, until you get to a federal appeals court, are going to be ruled on by essentially members of the Trump administration.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:16:33]**
I feel like we're stuck in this hacky universe where we have to talk about Kafka and Orwell and stuff like we're eighth graders.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:16:43]**
Yeah, the first answer is, and this is the reason why the Saturday quick, harsh, aggressive, slightly performative --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:17:00]**
But you know what? Performativity? As a linguist --

**Chris Geidner [00:01:17:03]**
No, yeah, no, no. Why it was needed is that he knew that attention would be paid to this order. And you didn't even see an appeal. This administration didn't appeal.

And that's something that I've written a lot about. It's, I mean, on two fronts. One, people don't know how many times the Trump administration is losing, because when the Trump administration loses, and this is actually a funny reality -- another horrible way in which we lose -- because the lawyers and agencies don't want Trump to know about their losses. They literally, when they lose and they know they lost, and it's not a case that a lot of attention is going to be paid to regardless, they won't appeal.

Or, what they've done in a lot of cases where they know Trump won't allow them to lose -- they will literally slow-walk the case. The federal government has 60 days to appeal a district court loss. They will literally file their notice of appeal on day 59.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:18:25]**
Which isn't even the appeal, it's just preserving their right.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:18:28]**
Right. They get up to the appeals court. This, most notably, I've enjoyed mocking -- it happened in the law firm cases, those EOs that he issued, attacking Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey and WilmerHale, the four firms that challenged. All won, a mixture again -- two and two, Democratic appointee, Republican appointee. They waited till day 59 on all of them to notice appeal. They never filed for a stay pending appeal. They never went to the Supreme Court on the shadow docket.

They got up to the DC Circuit. They literally waited -- this is hilarious, in light of what they do in everything else -- they waited for the DC Circuit to note that all four of these cases had been filed. The DC Circuit issued a sua sponte order saying, hey guys, how are we going to treat these four cases? Are they going to be consolidated? What's the timeline going to be? How are we going to do it?

Then, even with that deadline, DOJ twice filed notices to extend the deadline to file the agreement for what the timeline would be for those cases. We're now in a situation where we're not even going to get an oral argument on those cases until maybe the summer. I think the earliest would be May.

At this point, there's now a secondary fight over whether an appeal -- Mark Zaid, who's a lawyer who does whistleblower complaints, he also had his security clearance taken individually, and he sued as a one-off just about that one security clearance being taken. I understand DOJ thinks that's a better case. It's not -- it doesn't look as obviously retributive and First Amendment violating when you say the entire law firm is going to lose their security clearances. And so they probably think that's their best case.

And so they tried to pull this sneaky move where they went to the DC Circuit -- after pulling all this bullshit with the law firm cases -- they filed a motion to expedite the appeal of Zaid's appeal. Ironically, in a situation of things happening that just wouldn't have happened in the past, the DC Circuit -- they didn't issue an order denying it, but they issued a ruling for the timeline for that case that is virtually the same as what the rules set out. I think they cut off three days. DOJ was literally asking for 10-day, 10-day, 3-day turnaround. And the normal turnaround is like 45, 30, 20. And they gave a timeline of 30, 30, 20. And so they basically denied the request.

DOJ got a request to expedite an appeal denied because it was so -- I mean, it was almost -- I don't know if something can be bad faith on its face when it's technically an unrelated case -- it was just so bad. But you get that sort of stuff, and so when you see them -- I think the dog that didn't bark is really important to notice in this administration. When they don't appeal something, when they don't challenge something, when they do slow-walk something -- the joke, some lawyer on Blue Sky was like, the DOJ lawyers' goal is to not have to file a cert petition in the law firm cases until sometime after January 20, 2029.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:23:18]**
Well, that tracks, that tracks. Again, very Death of Stalin. We were just talking about this over the holiday season -- anything to placate the benevolent, wonderful leader of the state.

Well, Chris Geidner, we could literally sit here with you for hours upon hours upon hours. You are the Law Dork and it is absolutely brilliant. I have a question. I mean, we're not done quite yet, but I do have a question. Harking back to the beginning of our chat, we spoke about the Supreme Court and Justice John Roberts, and you mentioned that the courts are just one bad evening from not being such a majority as we have right now. But the midterms are also coming up, and I wonder -- I wonder how that is playing. And of course, I'm asking you to be prognosticator and a bit of a seer. How do you think that's playing in the minds of folks who remember the Scalia episode and how that was handled by Mitch the Grim Reaper McConnell, as he loves to refer to himself, like he's some type of biker?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:24:34]**
He's so tough. The thing about him is that he's both cool and tough. Yeah, just a badass, you know.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:24:42]**
So many adjectives that I think of when I think about him. Those are the two first.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:24:52]**
Yeah, he would prefer that you not do that.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:24:55]**
I think of a turtle, to be honest.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:24:58]**
There's two things. I mean, there's the very serious, very real -- what the hell is Tulsi Gabbard doing? What happened in Georgia? Why were voting machines taken? How were they taken?

The New York Times follow-up reporting that Trump was literally on the phone with the agents who carried out the raid the next day, via a call from Tulsi Gabbard to him via cell phone. That is 10 stories in and of itself. In any other era -- why is the Director of National Intelligence there? Why was there a raid? Why were ballots taken? Why was there not a complete uproar the next day from every official in the state? Why are we not marching into court that day?

Now, I will say it is entirely possible that there is some behind-the-scenes court fight going on, because a lot of times these fights over warrants happen secretly, until we know. As we saw with the warrant being served on the Washington Post reporter -- we knew about that day, but and we presumed it was being challenged, but I don't think we knew where the challenge was, and what some of the documents that were filed in it were, until that was unsealed, I think yesterday or the day before.

But so you've got that. You've got the very real questions about what is going on in their mind. You've got this crazy interview with Trump about federalizing elections. I think that it is notable that Judge Xinis's permanent injunction barring portions of Trump's original executive order relating to elections did come out on Friday night, right after the Georgia raid.

She had already issued a preliminary injunction. So it wasn't like she changed the facts by issuing the permanent injunction. But I do think it's notable. I mean, she is a judge who has overseen -- go check her Wikipedia. She's had many high-profile cases. She knows what she's doing. And I don't think it's chance that she issued a lengthy ruling, reminding people -- literally one of the first -- if it wasn't the first page, it was the second page of a ruling literally had a sentence that was, "the President has no role in federal elections." Not chance.

So you've got that legal side that, I think, is alarming, because none of it should be happening. But I do think that there are limits to it, and I do think that people have mostly been in control of that. But I do think even Rick Hasen, election law lawyer, UCLA, very smart, very calm, relatively speaking, probably to all three of us here --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:28:50]**
Well, okay, fine.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:28:52]**
He saw that as a very alarming sign. So I think we don't want to ignore any of that. We need to pay attention to that. We need to make sure all those protections are in place. We need to make sure any court action related to that is happening, is being done, is established well ahead of the elections.

On the other side, the not-rare good news, because there is a lot of good news out there. But there's a reality. We're now too far removed from the quote, so I'm not even going to pretend it, but we exist in the context of all that existed before us.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:29:35]**
Yeah, coconut trees.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:29:39]**
Thank you, Vice President Harris. And the latest coconut tree that we fell out of was Texas State Senate District 9. And a 30-point swing in Texas is not made up.

I'm an elections person because, in a former life, I worked on a few elections. I'm an elections person because I have a poli-sci degree. I'm an elections person because I covered politics for a decade. But I'm mainly a legal person now. I don't even know some of the -- I definitely don't know many of the House people at this point. There are senators sometimes that I'm like, you're fucking with me. That's not a senator. What are you talking about? There's the junior senator in Kansas. I was like, no, come on.

But where we're at, some of the actual people who do know what's going on, they were saying those results were not a sign of a wave. They were a sign of an FDR-era wave. They were not a midterm wave that we've come to learn of it. They were not even a Newt Gingrich revolution wave. We're talking all of the apple carts are upset, not just shifting majorities.

And I think it's important to understand, and I think it's important for Democrats in office, but I think it's important for people out of office, and I think it's important for potential candidates, and I think it's important for activists, and I think it's important for judges who operate in this political system to understand what the reality is -- and that you're not out on a ledge or out on a weak branch when you do what Judge Furey, I think is his name, out in Texas did over the weekend. You are actually both correctly interpreting the law and constitution and doing what people expect a judge to be doing right now.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:31:25]**
So, are we potentially, in your esteemed view, are we potentially nearing a sort of precipice where, if somebody like Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, if they don't decide to step down, that there may not be a safe time for their political majority?

**Chris Geidner [00:01:32:54]**
I absolutely think that. I mean, I don't know that Alito and Thomas's clerks watch this, and I don't know --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:33:17]**
I would have to guess no.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:33:20]**
If Ginni and Martha-Ann are watching it --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:33:24]**
It's late, go to bed.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:33:27]**
I don't want them to, so turn it off. This is bad. I'm gonna say stupid things that you shouldn't listen to.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:33:36]**
I think they're gone.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:33:38]**
They're gone? Okay, they're gone. Yeah, if they don't retire, they're stupid. If at least one of them doesn't retire this year, it would be dumb. D-U-M dumb.

I mean, I know -- what happens, I get it. What happens is partially true. If you have been on the Supreme Court for more than a decade, you are the only one who can do your job, because what your job is, over time, becomes more than just being a justice. You literally become the person in America who is responsible for what happens to the law in two or three areas.

This is the thing that we don't -- I mean, sometimes lawyers will talk about it, but basically, over time, justices get a few paths that, this is their area. And I mean, to his credit, Justice Scalia -- one of those, in addition to all of the crazy ones, was reinvigorating the jury process in America and making clear that the jury right is not just dead-letter law. It's not just hypothetical. And he put in place protections that really made it so that the jury right was more clearly protected, and he just wrote all of them.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:34:42]**
Yeah, they kind of specialize, right?

**Chris Geidner [00:01:35:00]**
We've seen that, and I think it's very interesting when it comes to things like the four-four split over the Oklahoma religious schools, the religious charter schools case, that split because Barrett recused. Those, all of those earlier decisions, were Roberts's decisions. He has been sort of crafting the way the law is moving on that. And so he, really, assuming that another case comes up where she's not recused, he's almost certainly going to be writing the decision and has controlled that.

And so I do think there is this element that gets in once justices have been on the court. And obviously Roberts, Thomas, and Alito have been on the court much longer than 10 years. Thomas since the 90s, and Alito now for almost 20 years. They really do have an element of thinking, there is no one else who can do my job. But, again, they both watched their colleagues die in office, not at a time of their own choosing. It wasn't even like they knew they were going to die and stayed. I think it was much more like it just happened. I mean, obviously Justice Ginsburg had had the cancer recurrence and knew that she had problems. But it was obviously not of her choosing, and she wanted to make it through.

And so I think that they have seen that. And I mean, now, especially as to Alito, he certainly has the ego that would allow him to say, I'm different than them, I'm younger, I'm healthier. I'll make it.

I mean, in some ways, I think it is interesting, because I think Thomas is more happy continuing to be on the bench until death. I think Alito would like to retire. I think there have been a handful of stories from people who are much more likely to get access to Alito's thinking than me, who have suggested as much.

And so I do think that, in some ways, Alito is the most likely to retire. And I think that that would lead to an all-out -- I mean, it's the free-for-all that we've been seeing. I mean, there are so many appeals court judges who are just blatantly auditioning to be the nominee. They're trying to out-crazy each other, out-deference-to-Trump each other.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:37:41]**
Well, because we're not the first people to think that it might be important for him to get out now.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:38:50]**
Yeah, and so, I mean, they've been trying. They've been trying. I mean, James Ho in the Fifth Circuit, Kyle Duncan in the Fifth Circuit, Van Dyke in the Ninth Circuit. They've all been trying to make it clear that they're the winner.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:39:02]**
Judge Kyle would be such a lame judge.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:39:16]**
Kyle -- I mean, in some way, the funny thing is, James Ho is horrible and horrific, but Kyle Duncan actually comes purely, fully from utter, far-right, religious crazy, in a way that truly frightens me. And he's young. I mean, Ho is too, but Duncan is young. And so yeah, I think I would be shocked if we don't see a retirement this year.

I also think, in a way, it does do some weird things, because this is an unusual environment where it actually could, especially depending on who the nominee is and presuming they will be confirmed, it could be a way to truly -- one, radicalize the Democratic position on the courts even further than it has been since Dobbs. And two, just utterly radicalize turnout.

Because in some ways, it works backwards. Because if they actually get a nominee through, what are they voting for? For the eventual retirement of Thomas? Okay, but at that point they've got four young justices and two other Republican appointees. Yeah, I get -- somebody in a spin room is gonna make the argument, "we keep the Republican majority so that Thomas can retire and we can have a five-Trump-appointee court." Yeah, that's what they'll do. That would be the ads, but it's just a lot harder to amp up, as opposed to, "this is what the Senate majority just did." Because they'll all be needed. I mean, if Collins and Murkowski vote no, all of the other Republicans would be needed. And so that means everybody up for reelection would be needed, and so they're all going to have voted yes.

And so, yeah, I do think -- could that make the difference in a Texas Senate race? Yeah. Could that make a difference in Florida? Yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:42:03]**
Chris Geidner, you are the person that we call upon when we need all of the information, and what a treasure trove of information you have provided us with today, sir. We appreciate you so much. Won't you come back on and endure again with us sometime?

**Chris Geidner [00:01:42:30]**
Yes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:42:32]**
That's fantastic. We love that, but before we let you go, well, we need you to plug all of your information. Where can people read your stuff, and where can they give you money, and where can they know more things than they knew before they got to hear from you?

**Chris Geidner [00:01:42:41]**
Yeah, just Law Dork. www.lawdork.com. And I am mainly on Blue Sky -- Chris Geidner there -- but also have Law Dork News there. If you just want my -- I pretty much just repost all of the just legal things, whereas I'm an actual person at Chris Geidner, which I occasionally need to remind people of.

And yeah, I have free and paid subscriptions at Law Dork. Virtually all of my content is available to everybody at Law Dork. I do a few paid-only content things that are really, as everybody who's paid knows, more of just a tip of my hat, thank you, than something something big. Because I really do think, especially right now, that virtually everything that I'm writing about is news that everybody needs to have access to.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:43:48]**
It's news you can use. It really is.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:43:53]**
It's as little as $6 a month, $60 a year. If you can afford it, you're helping independent legal journalism at a time when, I mean, by the day, we're getting news about the Washington Post and its additional layoffs coming, in addition to everything else that they've already had, in addition to just everything else that's going on to harm media. And in addition to just wanting somebody who is both very knowledgeable about what the Supreme Court does, is a lawyer by training, and yet doesn't hold back and doesn't sort of play any sort of "both sides" bullshit in what I'm writing.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:44:48]**
Yeah, we just really like -- with the way that our country has all these different jurisdictions and circuits and different methods of implementing law. And all of that stuff, for me, is really hard to keep straight. So having somebody who can explain that is super crucial, because I'm not going to learn it. I'm simply not. That's why I have you.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:45:14]**
Perfect. I couldn't ask for more. I mean, but I will say, the one thing I would add is that something that I am known for is that, although that's one fundamental part of what I want -- I want people to be able to just read what I'm doing and have an idea of what's going on without needing to know all the background. But also, an essential part of what I do is make sure that all of the documents are there, are linked to -- all of the filings, all of the opinions, all of the orders are there. For one, for people who want to essentially check my work. You think I'm too crazy liberal, or you think I'm not liberal enough, because I get both. Go read the opinion yourself. Decide where I'm right or wrong. Go for it. I'm all for that.

But also, I have a lot of people who are state and federal lawmakers, lawyers at organizations on cases, activists who are worried about what's happening, who need to see these filings. And I want to be a part of educating people and providing them with all of that information so that when ICE comes to their town, they do know what has happened. They do know what the successful lawsuits filed by the ACLU have looked like. They do know who the lawyers are, who they can email.

And I just think it is important for all of that information to be out there, both as an accountability for me and as a tool for other people.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:46:57]**
Yeah, that is so important. And you know, in this last year and a half, I've learned so many new words. I've learned sua sponte, I've learned TRO, I've learned TPS. I've learned so many things. So, yeah, feeling so enriched.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:47:24]**
It is quite a world. Back in the first Trump administration, when I was at BuzzFeed, my editor, Catherine Miller, and I had -- we called it the series, "Here's a Part of the Constitution You Never Knew About and Never Thought You Would Need to Know."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:47:49]**
We love that. We love that.

**Chris Geidner [00:01:47:52]**
That has now definitely continued. Yeah, but thank you so much for having me.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:48:00]**
Absolutely. Thank you for helping us learn a little bit more about the system and how we can navigate it, to try to bring those happy days back. Because, as we said at the beginning, they are coming, but they're not going to come on their own. We have to make it happen. So here we go, everybody go.

So this has been Half the Answer, where understanding a question is half the answer. Thank you so much, everybody. We will see you next time.

**Bumper [00:01:48:29]**
Thanks for listening to Half the Answer, presented by Liberal Currents. You can find Half the Answer anywhere you get your podcasts. Liberal Currents is an entirely listener- and subscriber-funded publication, which includes programs like Half the Answer and Neon Liberalism. So if you like what you've heard and wish to contribute, you may do so at liberalcurrents.com and through Patreon. And remember, understanding a question is half the answer.