HOSTS

PETER SHAMSHIRI

MICHAEL LIROFF

RHIANNON HAMAM

Leon Neyfakh: Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. In this episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon and Michael are talking about the Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. This is a recent case about the Trump administration's efforts to block foreign aid that has already been funded by Congress. At the beginning of his term, Trump signed an executive order to halt all foreign aid that did not align with the administration's goals. In response, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, along with other nonprofits, sued the government and said that the president cannot unilaterally block foreign aid funding.

[NEWS CLIP: The Trump administration is announcing more steep cuts, this time for an AIDS relief program.]

[NEWS CLIP: This South African lab may be close to a breakthrough in the fight against HIV, but its researchers have had to stop work after US President Donald Trump hit pause on foreign aid.]

Leon: The Supreme Court, in yet another shadow docket decision, ruled in favor of President Trump, stating that, at least for now, the nonprofits do not appear to have standing to sue. This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Peter Shamshiri: Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have revised our nation's trajectory downwards like the latest jobs numbers. I'm Peter.

Michael Liroff: Yes.

Peter: I'm here with Rhiannon.

Rhiannon Hamam: Hey.

Peter: And Michael.

Michael: So are we in a recession yet, or are we pre-recession?

Peter: No.

Rhiannon: I don't know. We need to revise the numbers, Michael. Okay?

Peter: Yeah.

Rhiannon: There's no conclusions yet. We're revising.

Peter: What continuously happens now, usually, like, there are jobs reports, and then they will occasionally be revised upwards or downwards once we have a little more information. And we've just seen a series of downward revisions.

Rhiannon: That's what's going on.

Michael: But to negative numbers sometimes. I think it's like, revised from adding 55,000 jobs to—revised to adding negative 3,000 jobs. It's like, okay.

Rhiannon: Awesome.

Peter: As a whole, the nation needs to work harder, and I think it's obvious.

Michael: Yeah, that's right. Nobody wants to work anymore.

Peter: Three years ago, I had one job, okay? Now I have three. Two podcasts. Newsletter.

Rhiannon: Eating avocado toast.

Peter: Hmm. That's four jobs.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Peter: Yeah. Keep up. Keep up, folks. Ooh, I was laid off. Start a podcast.

Michael: Going well? Start another. Not going well?

Peter: Yeah. You take your podcast, you roll it into more podcasts.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Michael: Yes. Maybe get a job at Syracuse teaching about how to make a podcast.

Rhiannon: Oh, yeah. Michael is referring to a new department.

Michael: That's right.

Rhiannon: A whole department that Syracuse University is open about podcasting and influencing.

Michael: That's right. Getting a degree in influencing.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: Yeah. You want a professor who's got two podcasts in the Patreon top 15 right now.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Peter: Whoever they're hiring, I bet he doesn't.

Michael: [laughs]

Peter: All right, folks. As you can hear, Michael's still in the process of moving and recording from a tin can, but we are marching onward.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: This week's case: Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. This is a case about the Trump administration's efforts to block foreign assistance, USAID, et cetera. One possible point of confusion here. We'll be talking about the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the plaintiffs here, and also foreign aid, AIDS aid. Everyone was yelling at me, saying that this was confusing. I don't personally think it is, but I'm just gonna clarify those are different things.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Now early in his term, Donald Trump issued an executive order stating, quote, "No further United States foreign assistance shall be dispersed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States." Now this is interesting because foreign aid, generally speaking, determined by Congress, right? Nonetheless, Secretary of State Marco Rubio froze all foreign aid funding through the State Department and the US Agency for International Development, USAID, while the government carried out a review of the foreign aid to make sure that it was fully aligned with the policy of the President of the United States.

Peter: This is all what's called impoundment. Impoundment is the process whereby the president does not spend money that has been appropriated by Congress, historically considered a no-no, as are many things that Donald Trump does. So the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and some other nonprofits sued. They said, "Hey, this is illegal. The President cannot unilaterally halt foreign aid funding." But the Supreme Court, in a six to three decision, said that they don't think those nonprofits have standing to challenge the claim. This should sound relatively familiar. Donald Trump does something that is patently illegal, just it's so obvious that it's illegal that there shouldn't be any discussion of it. It's challenged in court. The Supreme Court takes it on the shadow docket and they find some ...

Rhiannon: Yay! Yay! Yay! Yay! [claps]

Peter: I mean, you have to admit it's good for us that they do it.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Peter: We haven't had to come up with a new case to do from, like, 20 years ago all year.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: Because the Supreme Court keeps doing this.

Rhiannon: Because they are firing off three-paragraph little memos to us.

Peter: Yeah. And—yeah, and they're all so short. It's kind of sick. Then the Supreme Court finds some technicality to allow Trump to keep doing what he's doing, at least for now, right? This has been the court's MO all year, and here they are doing it once again. Rhi, I'll hand it off to you for background.

Rhiannon: Okay. Lots of shenanigans going on. I think it makes sense actually to reverse a little bit. Let's back up. Let's go back in time to the 1970s, to another crank crony, corrupt fucking loser President, Richard Nixon. Because right now, 2025, this isn't the first time that impoundment has been an issue where the president withholds the disbursement of funds that have been allocated by statute by Congress, right? So after getting re-elected in 1972, President Nixon declared he's gonna reduce government spending, he's gonna reel in big government. Sound familiar?

Rhiannon: And how's he going to do that? In part, he's going to impound funds. Now over the course of history, various presidents have used impoundment to varying degrees, but Nixon really put the impoundment thing on steroids. And what this puts a magnifying glass on, what the tension is here if we're backing up a little bit, is the relationship between Congress and the executive. Congress passes laws that create federal agencies, directs them to use public monies, and then what is the power of the executive when the executive branches over those federal agencies is over that amount of money that has been appropriated by Congress.

Rhiannon: So I'll give an example. Congress passed amendments to the Clean Water Act in the early 1970s, directing the Nixon administration through the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, to disperse funds to states to help them address water pollution. This is cleaning up sewage systems, you name it, right? And President Nixon refused to disperse those funds as well as tons of other categories of funds, like subsidized housing, federal transportation stuff, roads, construction, disaster relief. Nixon's just saying, like, "I oppose these programs. I'm in control of the budget here. I'm not dispersing those funds."

Rhiannon: So the City of New York and other cities across the US sued the Nixon Administration. And they're saying, like, "We're due these funds under federal law, and Nixon can't just withhold like this. Congress passed these laws allocating for us to get these funds." And so there's a Supreme Court case. The Supreme Court ruled in a case called City of New York v. Train, that under those Clean Water Act amendments, the president could not impound those funds. The statute, the Clean Water Act, says sums of money need to go to XYZ grantees, so the president needs to make sure those sums of money go where they need to go.

Rhiannon: So you literally have a Supreme Court case addressing this controversy of impoundment. Now that was just narrowly decided, like, just under what the Clean Water Act says, but you see where the court at least was leaning in terms of this balance between congressional and executive power. Then right after the Supreme Court case comes down, Congress itself responds to President Nixon and his fuck-shit by passing a law literally about impoundment. The next year, in 1973, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act, and it basically says that the president can't just withhold funds completely up to the administration's discretion. The power of the purse lies with Congress, the statute says, and if the president doesn't want to disperse funds that are mandated by federal law, well, there's a process for requesting that basically he be allowed not to.

Rhiannon: So let's fast forward to 2024. Congress appropriates more than $30 billion for foreign assistance, and on Trump's first day in office in January 2025, he froze all of that funding. Like, we all remember, right? The firing and closing down of USAID offices all around the world, all of that. And also there are organizations in foreign countries that are recipients of this aid, and in fact, rely on this aid quite heavily. And so some grants and disbursements have happened out of this $30 billion, but at issue in this case that we have here decided on the shadow docket is a remaining $4 billion of foreign aid appropriations. Trump recently requested that Congress rescind. Trump making the request to Congress that he be allowed to impound, that he doesn't have to allocate this $4 billion. But Congress hasn't acted on that request, so the appropriation of those funds by statute is still active, right? This is still live. And many, many of these intended recipients, including the named plaintiff, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, are—we're gonna talk about the impact of this later—literally at risk of, like, not just having to close down, but you have to think about the impact of all of the services that they provide all over the world, not being able to do any of that. So some of these organizations sued, and that's how we get to the Supreme Court.

Peter: Yeah. So the big picture legal issue here is that Congress passed legislation appropriating these foreign assistance funds. The president cannot unilaterally nullify an act of Congress, right? At least under, shall we say, more traditional understandings of our Constitution. That would violate the basic separation of constitutional powers. It would probably violate the Impoundment Control Act, right?

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: But as usual, as we've seen a lot this year, the Trump administration does not argue before this court that what they're doing is legal. They argue instead that the plaintiffs here, these nonprofits, do not have standing to sue. Their argument is a little bit technical. It's based on what's called "preclusion." Sometimes Congress will pass a law about something or other, and in the law, it will say, "Here are the people who can sue about this." Sometimes it will also say, "No one else can sue about this," right? But sometimes it just says, "Here are the people who can sue about this," and then courts infer that no one else can sue. So basically, what happens is that Congress is identifying an area of concern, and they're saying, "Here is the vessel for addressing that concern. There's this one law, and only certain people can sue. Everyone else is precluded."

Rhiannon: Right.

Peter: So that's what's happening here. There's the Impoundment Control Act, like Rhi mentioned, passed after Nixon. And it says that the comptroller general—I'm hitting the "comp." Don't yell at me. But I want people to hear it. The comptroller general ...

Rhiannon: CPAs, leave us alone.

Peter: Yeah. The comptroller general can sue when the executive branch illegally impounds congressionally-appropriated funds. So the court doesn't provide much reasoning, but the argument is basically, look, Congress passed a law about impoundment that allows the comptroller general to sue over this, and that implicitly precludes anyone else from suing about it, basically arguing that when Congress created the Impoundment Control Act, they meant for that to be the exclusive method for challenging illegal impoundments. Now the obvious counterargument is that if Congress wanted to make the Impoundment Control Act the exclusive method for challenging illegal impoundments, they could have just said so in the law, right? But they did not. The even better counterargument is that in the law itself, the Impoundment Control Act, says that it is not the exclusive method for challenging impoundments. The law says, quote, "Nothing contained in this act shall be construed as affecting in any way the claims or defenses of any party to litigation concerning any impoundment." That's just a clear statement that other people besides the comptroller general can sue.

Michael: Right.

Rhiannon: It's just a sentence that says other people can sue.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Right. It's a sentence that says this does not preclude anything for anyone. [laughs]

Peter: It's basically what you would describe as a non-preclusion provision, right? And yet the justices are saying that preclusion applies. Six justices of the Supreme Court are arguing that this law precludes the lawsuit, when the law itself expressly says that it does not.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: A level of shamelessness that you rarely see, except now all the time you see it, actually. But before recently, I wasn't that used to it. I'll put it that way. This is another situation where it's interesting that the court doesn't provide a full opinion, and they expressly say this is a preliminary finding, this is shadow docket. It's procedural, it is technically not a final decision about this law. All they're doing is ruling on whether or not, like, a lower court ruling will stay in place and keep the funds flowing, or halt the funds for now. And technical, procedural shit, right? So they're like, "Look, this is just a preliminary finding. We're kind of guessing here." So it's sort of like they're making room for themselves to change their mind later and be like, "Hmm, maybe you're right." Or maybe not. Maybe they're just doing the same thing that they've been doing all year, which is you say you won't reach the merits, but you make a preliminary finding that benefits Donald Trump, a preliminary finding that allows him to continue doing whatever he's doing. And I don't know, I guess in this case, it's just sort of extra obscene because they are sort of interpreting the statute a little bit. In other cases, they have basically been like, "We're not even gonna touch the law. We're not gonna talk about what we think the law says. We're just making this, like, procedural finding." Or whatever. But here they seem to be at least implicitly interpreting the statute, and that's just an extra layer of absurdity because one, the statute is very clear that preclusion does not apply. And then also two, it's just like, well, if we're gonna go this far, then, like ...

Michael: You're looking at the statute. Just rule on the merits.

Peter: Right. Can't we talk about the fact that, like, this is obviously illegal? Like, can that at least be mentioned in the opinion? It's just one of those things where you're reading it just being like, "Are you fucking kidding me, dude?" How long are we gonna have to keep doing this? How many times do I have to read a shadow docket opinion where Donald Trump has, like, just out and out, cut and dry violated the law, shot a dog in the middle of the street, and then the Supreme Court is like, "Hmm, I don't know. We've sort of—we need to hold off on this for another six months."

Rhiannon: Yeah. "We need to hold off on this for another six months, but I will say that I don't think shooting a dog in the street is illegal."

Peter: Yeah.

Rhiannon: That's the bullshit dance.

Peter: "We can't say for sure what happened here, but I've heard that was a piece of shit dog."

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Michael: I mean, to Peter's point about shamelessness, I feel like they've pulled this move so many times, they can't really think people are buying this, right? Like, they can't be that delusional. Who's that stupid? Who's that gullible, who's like, yeah, on the 70th time they do this being like, "Yeah, I guess it's just the procedural." It's so weird how every time the procedure gets in the way of ruling on the merits, and Trump gets to do whatever he wants.

Peter: Right. Like, there's only so many times you can pretend to be flipping a coin and land on Donald Trump. You know what I mean?

Rhiannon: [laughs] Yeah.

Peter: And, like, we're working on, like, 25 times in a row, and it's sort of like, "Okay, come on. Like, can you—can you please just stop this?"

Michael: Yeah.

Rhiannon: Yeah. It's like—it's so frustrating, it's so shameless. And to your point, Michael, it's like they can't think everybody is this stupid, like, really believing what they're doing. But I think it's like the delusion of victory and power. This is just a wild victory lap that they're taking on top of all of our heads, you know? Like, I don't think they care if, like, anybody is, like, quote-unquote, "falling for it."

Michael: Right.

Peter: Well, they're very close to a political orgasm, right. And their head's fuzzy. They're politically coming, and they're very close and they're—they've lost their ability to reason. That's the—I think, the most accurate metaphor for what's going on here.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Peter: And then maybe after the political orgasm, they'll be like, "Oh."

Rhiannon: They regret it a little bit. Yeah.

Peter: That—that was very shameful. But for now, they are furiously jacking.

Michael: Right now they're just pumping wildly.

Rhiannon: They're not having intercourse. Let's be real. Because they don't. The justices don't fuck. But yeah.

Peter: The porn is right wing legal ideas, right wing legal theory.

Michael: [laughs]

Peter: And let's make this metaphor robust.

Michael: [laughs] Really dig into it. Okay. Well, I think that's a good time to change topics, actually.

Peter: I would say. I would say. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. There is a dissent. It's by Kagan. It's joined by the other two liberals. It's good. It is, I would say, appropriately condescending, which I quite liked. I don't find Kagan to be particularly prone to things like italics for emphasis, but she does use them here in a way that makes you think ...

Peter: She's mad.

Michael: She thinks she's talking to, like, a three year old.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah.

Rhiannon: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. "I'm going to say this very slowly." Like that.

Michael: Right.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Michael: So that sentence that Peter read, "Nothing contained in this act shall be construed as affecting in any way," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, she rewrites it with emphasis, you know, in italics. Nothing in the ICA.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Michael: And then parentheses, (Neither its processes for considering proposed rescissions nor its creation of a comptroller general suit affects—in italics—in any way the claims of any party to litigation about any impoundment.)"

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Like, okay. You know, like, assholes. [laughs]

Peter: It's one of those things where it's like, I don't know what you're supposed to argue when there's like, a single sentence in the law that's just, like, very clear you're wrong.

Michael: Right.

Peter: What are you supposed to do beyond just, like, throwing it in their face with italics?

Michael: Right. It's just like, "This is it." And so a good portion of her opinion is just dedicated to this and how that—that answers everything. You know, it's like the long and short of it. But she does talk about, like, why the president is not likely to win on the merits, since that's part of the stay considerations. She talks about some of Trump's arguments. She makes the point that, like, essentially his complaint that, "Well, I'll be harmed by having to negotiate with countries and give foreign aid that I don't want to give, and engage in negotiations I don't want to engage in." She's like, "Well, yeah, tough shit. That's part of being in a divided government. Like, Congress, did it, said it. Like, that's it, it's over. Like, that's just—that's just the division of power."

Peter: The majority has set a precedent this year where if the Trump administration claims that something will make their lives more difficult in any way, then, like, they win. Then they're just like, "Ugh, I don't want to negotiate. I don't want to have to, like, do the job of president. That would be a lot."

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: And the court's like, "You're right. That's right. Anything that gets between you and manifesting your will in its perfect formulation, that is an undue burden on the president."

Rhiannon: Yeah. Nothing should be hard for you, King, you know?

Peter: Yeah.

Rhiannon: King, literally.

Peter: Little kisses.

Michael: Unless it's firing someone at the Fed, which might affect our 401ks.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah, except for—except for our beautiful children at the Federal Reserve.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Michael: So that's pretty much it for Kagan's dissent. That's—I mean, it's short, much like the opinion itself. It's just a few pages.

Peter: Yeah, it's typical Kagan. Very sharp on the law. And I would have liked a couple paragraphs that's just like, "We all see what you're doing, you little piggies. You're a bunch of little disgusting rats, and one day we will smoke you out of your holes.

Michael: And there'll be a big mallet waiting for you when you do pop your head out of that hole. [laughs]

Peter: You're gonna get bonked. If a Kagan clerk is listening, if you could send her the politically jerking metaphor, I think that that would be really helpful for her understanding. And then maybe she could drop in a footnote.

Michael: Yeah, Much like 5-4.

Peter: Yeah, some—some observers have called this.

Michael: [laughs]

Peter: Let's pivot from this to talking about the material consequences of cutting foreign aid.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: Because we have talked about a lot of these cases, right? These shadow docket cases that have come up under the Trump administration where, like, Trump is flagrantly violating the law and the court aids and abets. That is true here, too. This is like an egregious violation of the constitutional order where Trump is just unilaterally halting foreign assistance and, you know, doubly so, where the court is just ignoring the words of the controlling statute. But we should pause for a second here because this isn't, like, about some abstract notion of constitutionality, right?

Rhiannon: Mm-hmm.

Peter: This isn't about, like, the firing of a department head where Trump ignored procedure, like he was supposed to give notice and wait 90 days or whatever, right? The human cost of the cuts to foreign aid are, like, unbelievably vast.

Rhiannon: Yeah. Massive.

Peter: There is a peer-reviewed paper published this summer finding that if USAID were to be defunded, the result would be 14 million deaths globally, including 4.5 million children, through 2030. So just five years.

Rhiannon: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Think about—think about the scale of that, right? The sheer volume of human suffering being perpetuated by these Ivy League nerds talking about a preliminary finding of the Impoundment Control Act, like, you know, of their analysis of the Impoundment Control Act. It's just—it's hard to, like, speak about this stuff appropriately because, like, how do you talk about someone who facilitates in suffering that vast, right?

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: What's the appropriate response to someone who kills 14 million people? How do you even conceive of that from a moral perspective? What's the appropriate punishment for someone who does this? Those are questions I genuinely don't know the answer to, because it's like it's human suffering on a scale that the mind cannot comprehend.

Michael: Like the Hague exists for crimes like this, essentially.

Rhiannon: Yeah, it is really hard to conceive of the scale. Really, really kind of like incalculable. And it's so disgusting the way the Supreme Court here, like, is completely ignoring that. And ignoring that, I think on purpose to just, you know, on the shadow docket, whitewash this as some procedural decision.

Rhiannon: You know, it's so vast that—the problem, the injustice is so vast that I do think it's worth mentioning then one example of an organization that now is defunded because of this decision. And we can talk about the plaintiff here, AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. The executive director of AVAC said about this shadow docket ruling, quote, "With this ruling, the Supreme Court has given the administration a free pass to run out the clock on the disbursement of foreign aid that Congress appropriated. Since foreign aid was frozen on the first day of this administration, we have seen—" we, he's talking about at AVAC, "we have seen thousands of clinics close, hundreds of thousands of communities lose access to essential services and medications, and thousands of lives lost." This is Mitchell Warren over at AVAC talking about, obviously all over the globe what this organization does for AIDS prevention, AIDS research, birth control, testing, the provision of, you know, actually literally giving services to people who have AIDS and HIV. These are life-saving services. This is how many organizations all over the world are funded. This is how they carry out the services that they provide. And they are now defunded by the Trump administration's actions. And that has been, you know, rubber stamped here by the Supreme Court.

Rhiannon: I think this question of, like, what you're hitting on, Peter, of, like, the scale of this is important, and because it's related to a frustration that I have a lot of the times with Supreme Court cases across the board, but especially I have this reaction when it's a Supreme Court case around a foreign policy issue, which is that the Supreme Court in these decisions, it's so narrow, it's so specific, it's so, like, granular in its scope that you miss constantly the massive impact of actually what they're deciding and what they're allowing here, the Trump administration to do.

Rhiannon: You know, actually, like, if we're backing up totally, and I'm not recording a podcast right now about the Supreme Court and this decision, you actually are not gonna catch me, like, politically defending the system that is created by USAID. This is actually a system and a structure, I would argue, and many people do, of American imperialism, of American control and hegemony around the world. This is part of America's role right now on the globe, that USAID in so many countries creates economic and social dependency on US foreign aid. And who has the power to control that US foreign aid? Well, it's officials in the United States, right? And those control levers and mechanisms are exercised in the way that serves US interests.

Peter: Yeah, it's used—it's frequently used as leverage in foreign policy.

Rhiannon: Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, the countries in the global south that receive the most US foreign aid are the countries that have to say "how high" when Trump says jump, right? And so, like, we can get into the details of this. However—however, you have a Supreme Court case like this, and what it has everybody focused on, which is so enraging to me, is little tiny procedures, little tiny procedures and "Well, Congress said this, not this. And who can sue, anyway?" Right? And it's so narrowing, I think, to all of us politically just in terms of, like, conceptualizing what actually we are talking about on these big, big, big issues of federal law, federal policy, and the power—literally the power of the United States, not just domestically, around the world. And you don't get an understanding or, like, any nuance or any complication here. You get a fucking ridiculous, harmful—like, this is harmful, right? I don't agree with it. A fucking ridiculous, harmful, stupid case in three paragraphs that Justice Alito, I'm sure, shit out, right? In five minutes.

Peter: Yeah, the foreign aid stuff is very interesting because there are all these really nuanced arguments about what our foreign aid regime should look like.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: There are a lot of liberals who basically say—and I'm actually relatively compelled by this argument—like, it's true that foreign aid is used as leverage in American foreign policy, but that trade off is worth it because of the good that is done. And, like, trying to undo that is so difficult that, like, this regime is sort of like the—a reasonable compromise, where we—you pay out foreign aid, but the State Department is using it to manipulate other countries that, like, you know, it's not the ideal situation, but it's a workable one. There's, like, an argument between that and people that think that we should be sort of working towards a different style of regime in foreign aid, right?

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: None of that argument is taking place here. Instead it's like, this is like just like a baby at the control panel, you know what I mean? Just, like, pressing buttons, like these absolute morons tinkering with this shit on, like, these really weird, narrow legal grounds. And you get the worst of every world, and you have the aid that has the fewest strings attached is what's getting yanked first. You know what I mean? When we talk about the cutting of foreign assistance, aid to Israel still going out, right? That's not what we're talking about. We're still funding warlords across the globe. Like, I assure you, that stuff is untouched, you know?

Rhiannon: Exactly.

Peter: It's so frustrating to have to engage with these issues through these lenses.

Rhiannon: Yeah. Yeah. No conception at all of, like, why is there a system in which, you know, the appropriation and the withholding of billions of dollars leads to 14 million people dying? We're not even thinking on the scale of the injustice here, you know? We can't. Not with a fucking decision like this. Not with the level of the debate being where it's at. Like, this is a problem of American politics, you know? And it's a problem that is greatly, greatly contributed to by the Supreme Court.

Peter: Yeah. We're talking about the big picture stuff. To return to some of the narrower questions, slightly narrower questions, whenever the court was, like, disciplining the Biden administration, it'd be like, "You know, the court has weighed in on this, Congress has weighed in on this. The Biden administration needs to operate within those confines." Right? And then you have Trump, and suddenly, like, the constitutional order is like this very fluid thing to them, where it's like, "Yeah, I don't know. Maybe Congress doesn't appropriate funds." Right? "Maybe—maybe all these, like, really fundamental principles of our constitutional order don't really exist." Right?

Rhiannon: Maybe we just have a king.

Peter: Yeah, they're all legal realists now, right? They're like, "You know, isn't—isn't power sort of what we will it to be? Like, aren't we sitting on all the guns right now?" You know, you have a situation where Nixon tried to do something. Both Congress and the Supreme Court stepped in to restrain him. And then 50 years later, Trump comes along. And, like, you know, in many ways, Trump is just sort of like the omega to Nixon's alpha. Right?

Rhiannon: Yeah. A real grotesque ...

Peter: We always talk about the modern conservative political movement as something that didn't start with Nixon exactly, but, like, Nixon was their ascendance into power. And Trump represents this just sort of preposterous end result of it.

Rhiannon: Mm-hmm.

Peter: And the conservative legal project was always like the rejection of the resistance to that political movement, right? The rejection of the anti-Nixon political order, a lot of the things that they temporarily conceded after Nixon, right? The idea that Nixon committed a crime, that he should have been punished for that crime. Those were concessions that were politically convenient for them at the time, and are no longer politically convenient for them. And so they have rescinded all of those concessions. They have rescinded their apologies for Richard Nixon and all that he wrought. Now you have Trump the—like, the avatar of, like, unapologetic Nixonian politics.

Rhiannon: Yeah. Yeah. An AI creation if you put it into ChatGPT, you know?

Peter: Right. Right, and it's just like, more asshole.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: More asshole.

Rhiannon: More disgusting. More asshole, more loser.

Peter: Yeah. Weirder looking.

Rhiannon: [laughs] Even weirder looking.

Peter: Less natural.

Rhiannon: Yeah. Even weirder voice.

Peter: Yeah. Make the—make the skin unusual.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

Peter: Next week, INS v. Lopez-Mendoza. A case from the '80s that basically said that in deportation proceedings there are fewer constitutional rights, a little bit less constitution in the deportation context. Helping pave the way for the modern ICE hellscape. Yeah, we're gonna be returning to our roots, talking about how cases from 40 years ago have set the table for the disgusting tyrants of the modern day.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: Classic stuff.

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Peter: Follow us on social media @FiveFourPod. Subscribe to our Patreon, Patreon.com/fivefourpod—all spelled out—for access to premium and ad-free episodes, special events, our Slack, all sorts of shit. Our merch, on sale now. FiveFourPod.com/merch. It rules.

Rhiannon: Check it out.

Peter: It's high-brow shit. You won't believe it. You won't believe that a bunch of weirdos like us came up with merch this beautiful about the Supreme Court.

Rhiannon: Shut up!

Peter: This is how you sell shit, Rhi. You don't understand.

Rhiannon: You're so stupid.

Peter: You don't understand that I'm always hustling.

Rhiannon: [laughs] His fifth job is saying, "Go to the website and buy merch."

Peter: I feel like the—what you want me to say is "We have merch on our website. Peter, signing off." No one's gonna go, Rhi. You have to entice them. All right, we'll see you next week.

Rhiannon: Bye, y'all.

Michael: Bye, everybody.

Michael: 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at CHIPS.NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. If you're not a Patreon member, you're not hearing every episode. To get exclusive Patreon-only episodes, discounts on merch, access to our Slack community and more, join at Patreon.com/fivefourpod.

Peter: I'm gonna go write down my thoughts on that politically jerking metaphor before I forget it.

Rhiannon: "Dear Diary, I'm thinking about six conservative justices jacking off right now."

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Gotta journal that one.

Peter: Yeah.