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Kate, Melissa, and Leah are joined by Professor Rebecca Ingber of Cardozo Law to break down the blatant illegality of the administration’s murders of alleged “narcoterrorists” in the waters off South America. Then they dive into last week’s oral arguments, which featured cases involving “crisis pregnancy centers,” asylum claims, and whether internet providers are responsible for their users’ copyright violations.

Favorite things:

 

• Kate: This wild deposition; Disappeared to a Foreign Prison, Sarah Stillman (New Yorker), Olivia Dean, Sabrina Carpenter’s White House slapdown
• Leah: Dunking on this nonsensical op-ed; Republican Anger Erupts at Johnson as Party Frets About Future, Annie Karni (NYT); Hands Off Chicago
• Melissa: WaySoft Cashmere Beanie; Ziwe interviews Eric Adams; Prince Harry on Colbert; Troublemaker; The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, Carla Kaplan; Victoria (Netflix) 

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• 3/6/26 – San Francisco
• 3/7/26 – Los Angeles

Learn more: http://crooked.com/events

Buy Leah’s book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes

Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky

 

TRANSCRIPT

Leah Litman [AD]

 

Show Intro Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It’s an old joke, but when an argued man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they’re going to have the last word. She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

 

Leah Litman Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We’re your hosts, I’m Leah Litman.

 

Melissa Murray I’m Melissa Murray.

 

Kate Shaw And I’m Kate Shaw. And we’re halfway through the court’s December sitting. So we’ve got some argument recaps for you, but we’re gonna start with some legal news. So news, then recaps, and we will end with some court culture.

 

Leah Litman We are not going to cover last Thursday’s outrageous Supreme Court Shadow Docket Order green lighting Texas’s racially gerrymandered maps. We couldn’t wait until Monday to rage cast that one. So we dropped an emergency episode last week. It’s in your feed if you haven’t had a chance to listen just yet.

 

Melissa Murray Instead, we are going to start with another enormously important story. As you may know, listeners, Pete Hegseth, although we are now increasingly referring to the Secretary of War as Hague Seth because he seems to have no idea how things work at The Hague. And we are going to be covering Hague Seth’s murder strikes. And the story, of course, involves the increasingly urgent set of questions that have been raised by the administration’s bombing campaign against boats in the Caribbean and now the Pacific. And we have discussed this issue before, but now we have new reporting that raises new legal questions about one specific event and underscores the serious legal questions that surround all of these boat strikes.

 

Kate Shaw And to help us break it down for you, we brought in an expert. So we are joined by returning guest and friend of the show, Rebecca Ingber. Beck is a law professor at Cardozo Law School, a former State Department lawyer, and a real expert on all things international law and the law of war. Beck, welcome back to the show.

 

Rebecca Ingber Thanks for having me on.

 

Kate Shaw So, Beck, just to start us off, can you remind us of what we know about this bombing campaign and the legal questions that it raises before we plunge into this kind of latest round of Washington Post reporting about the September 2nd strikes?

 

Rebecca Ingber Yeah, so since September of this year, the Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign of what are essentially summary executions of suspected drug traffickers at sea. This started in the Caribbean Sea and then spread beyond to the Pacific as well. And the administration announced that the first strike on September 2nd killed 11 people on board that vessel. And at the time and many times since, the president said he was going to keep going. And in fact, he and members of his cabinet have joked that no one is going to want to go fishing anymore. Since that time, there have been, and I looked up the latest count before getting on the show, 87 people killed in 22 strikes. And you might wonder, what’s the legal authority for all this? Can the president just kill people he suspects of crimes at will? And if so, then what would be the point of our entire criminal justice system? And we can get into this in much greater detail. But the very brief answer is that this entire killing campaign is not only just unauthorized. Some people have talked about it as unauthorized as if a congressional authorization to use military force would somehow solve all the issues, but it’s actually quite specifically murder.

 

Leah Litman So that’s the state of play with basically all of the strikes. And then we got new reporting, originally in the Washington Post, now matched elsewhere. And the new reporting suggests that during a September attack on a fishing boat, the initial strike did not kill everyone on board, but instead left two survivors in the water. And then a second strike killed the two individuals who survived the first strike. Subsequent reporting has suggested these individuals were waving their hands. There was also apparently like a 40 minute gap between the first and second strike when they are deciding about what to do. Beck, what new legal questions does this new reporting raise?

 

Rebecca Ingber Yeah, these are really horrifying facts when you lay them out, aren’t they? So this second strike that has been reported, and this is the strike on the survivors clinging to the debris on that first boat after it had been blown up, this has been breaking through to the public and on the hill in a way that the rest of the killing spree somehow was not. And given that I just said the entire campaign is murder, you might wonder, well, okay, well, what’s different about the second strike? Can you have anything worse than murder? And so there’s a risk that this focus, I think, on the second strike clouds the illegality of the rest of the strikes, generally in the minds of the public. But one reason that it’s breaking through, I think, is that even if, even if you accept every single one of the manufactured facts and legal characterizations for these killings, and to do that, you have to accept that the transporting of drugs is an armed attack on the United States. You have to assume that there are a bunch of organized armed groups out there that the administration won’t even name, who are the equivalent of state military forces engaged in an armed conflict with the United States that we somehow didn’t know about until now. And you’d have to accept that the men on these boats are somehow themselves actual fighters in those groups, either akin to combatants or directly participating in hostility somehow by transporting the drugs. Now, all of that is false and twisting beyond recognition, the laws governing the use of force and hostilities. But even if you assume all that, you still can’t shoot them when they are what we call order to combat. Which means they’re incapacitated in some way. And sometimes it can be complicated to determine if someone is incapacitated, but shipwreck is actually a paradigmatic example. So if we are in an armed conflict, as the president claims, then this would be a classic war crime. It’s not, it’s murder because we’re not in an armed conflict. But one reason that might be it might be breaking through is because it is so recognizably wrong. You know, we’re not used to having to find language to talk about the president going on a killing spree, but the law of armed conflict, the military trains on this, these are classic examples. These could have been PowerPoints in an ops law course. And I think it’s also built into the public subconscious.

 

Melissa Murray Can we talk a little bit about what the actual law does say? Because this isn’t just magical thinking. There is actual law on this issue. There is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, for example, which applies to individuals who are in the armed forces. What does it have to say about the prospect of military personnel following a legal order? So if this is in fact illegal and it was ordered by the Secretary of War or someone who is an underling to him, what do enlisted people have an obligation to do under the UCMJ?

 

Rebecca Ingber So under the US law governing the armed forces, soldiers have to, they must obey lawful orders, and they can be punished for disobeying lawful orders. But lawful is an important caveat there. And in fact, soldiers have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. And of course, they can be held accountable for crimes, they can be held accountable for war crimes, they can be held accountable for the other. I think I saw video about that. Yeah. It’s not a defense to say, as I think we’re all more than aware, having seen, you know, just one movie, that it’s not a defense to say, I was just following orders. So if it sounds like this can put soldiers in a pretty tough position when they’re given orders they find questionable, I think that’s right. And I think one of the horrors of all of this is the position that the administration has been putting soldiers and sailors in. And it’s presumably for this exact reason that the rules for prosecuting soldiers for following unlawful orders, and this is US domestic rules as well as international law, they tend to clarify that this applies to clearly unlawful orders or manifestly unlawful orders. Now, an order to, for example, give no quarter, an order to say that there shall be no survivors, that’s an example of a manifestly unlawful order. And so too is an order to fire on the shipwrecked. And in fact, it is so textbook an example that it’s actually used in the DOD Law of War manual as its example for a clearly illegal order. And for those who are interested in a deeper dive on this, I highly recommend an excellent explainer that happens to be on just security on this precise issue by my Good friends, Tess Bridgman, Ryan Goodman, and Michael Schmidt.

 

Leah Litman I couldn’ Go on about all of the horrors about this, but I just want to kind of acknowledge a few. One is that after reporting about the survivors, you know, being bombed and murdered, Secretary Hegseth retweeted a turning points USA spokesperson and indicated your wish is our command, Andrew. That’s a spokesperson just sunk another narco boat, as if they are doing these kind of like murders on demand. There’s also been reporting that maybe Hegseth suggested the final call was made by another military officer. So he’s like foisting blame on another officer at the same time he is posting images of Franklin the Turtle murdering people. You know, for.

 

Melissa Murray Justice for Franklin he did not deserve this.

 

Rebecca Ingber Yeah theres an element of, I’ve got your back, and yet I’ve never heard of the guy with respect to the.

 

Leah Litman Like I’m a big tough man, but also it’s all his fault.

 

Rebecca Ingber Exactly.

 

Kate Shaw In terms of additional developments, so the post initially broke this story, that reporting has been matched elsewhere. And then last week, senators were both briefed and shown video of the strike or strikes. And the video evidently showed that after smoke from this original strike cleared, it revealed that there were two survivors in the water. They were clinging to wreckage, as the Times reporting just Friday suggested, they were waving for help. And then the follow up strike killed them. So, you know, some of these lawmakers were clearly deeply shaken by what they saw. It led several senators, including at least one GOP senator, to actually call for public release of the video. So that I think has not in any way like tamped down congressional interest in continuing to pursue this. But not every senator had the same reaction.

 

Melissa Murray Others like Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who was inexplicably engaging in what seemed to be Gen Z cosplay by wearing a quarter zip, he emerged to claim that the videos didn’t capture anything illegal, but rather the conduct that was being targeted was quote unquote highly lawful and lethal. He’s also clearly trying to test out some kind of legal justification for these strikes. He said the video showed two survivors trying to flip a boat that he said was quote loaded with drugs bound for the United States. Question about all of this back you have these two various versions on both sides of the aisle. What is it that Congress can do, what Congress should do, and what are the available avenues of accountability here?

 

Rebecca Ingber So Congress has a lot of control over the use of force, over decisions to use force. And it has a lot of tools at its disposal if it is ready to start flexing its muscles, which sadly have been, I think, atrophying. I mean, it can hold hearings, it can subpoena documents, it can subpoena officials for interviews, it can pass legislation prohibiting force, which it also doesn’t need to do because it it’s only lawful if it is authorized force in the first place. But nevertheless, it could set up a commission to investigate crimes. They could even hold withhold money. And of course, they can impeach the Secretary of Defense, they could impeach the president. And individual members can keep using their platforms to keep talking about this. And some of them have started to do. And so I think that while there’s a risk that this second strike obscures the illegality of the campaign as a whole, I think it’s also an opportunity to start laying bare for the public the absurdity of the administration’s legal claims here, that that transporting drugs is somehow hostilities against the United States. And so, in a, you know, in a way, drilling down into it and actually showing people, demonstrating what is out there, getting that video out there if they are able to do so is going to only further highlight the gross illegality of the entire campaign. And, you know, if they can get the video out, I you know, I’m reminded of the political C shift following the publication of photographs of American soldiers torturing prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison back in the Early war on terror years. This of course states me a bit. And there, as here, the specific criminal acts that were taken by those soldiers weren’t necessarily part of the approved official policy under the Bush administration’s torture program, but they did grow out of quite clearly that permissive atmosphere where abuse of detainees was being justified. And so, and in that case, those individuals were court-martialed. And perhaps more importantly, I think it fueled an a political uproar that may well have spelled the beginning of the end for the administration’s torture program.

 

Kate Shaw All right, well I guess we can hope that some kind of similar public reckoning is at least beginning to be set in motion by these revelations. Beck Ingber, always great to have you with us. Thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Rebecca Ingber Thank you so much for having me.

 

Leah Litman [AD]

 

Melissa Murray One more piece of news before we dive into those recaps. Last week there was reporting that Pamela Joe Bondi’s DOJ was making preparations to seek a reindictment of New York Attorney General Tish James, evidently by trying to bring in an assistant U.S. Attorney from another district. This district apparently was Missouri. Well, guess what? The Show Me State showed her. MS Now reported on Thursday that the grand jury refused to indict. This is both great news on its own, but if the administration keeps trying and manages to get an indictment, it will provide additional support for Tish James’s already strong case that this is really a malicious and vindictive prosecution. So interesting turn of events, as it were. A bench slap, if it were, as it were, to Pamela Jo.

 

Leah Litman So let’s move on to argument recaps. The first case we’re going to recap is First Choice versus Platkin. This is the case we previewed with New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin.

 

Kate Shaw Okay, I’m gonna sort of sound conspiratorial for a minute, but weirdly I have to ask you guys something so I

 

Leah Litman The tin hats were right, we know.

 

Kate Shaw I, at least on this little point, and who knows, maybe on all of it, but basically I could not get the document that is referred to as a day call on the court’s website to load before the argument. So I actually didn’t know who would be arguing. Usually, like a day or two before you see exactly who’s arguing in what position for what case. So I actually didn’t know who’d be doing the first choice argument. And as it turned out, up first for first choice was one Erin Hawley, who we have mentioned before, as the attorney who led the challenge to mifepristone, was a key member of the Dobbs team, and is allegedly on the Trump administration short lists for an appellate judgeship. So she argued for first choice, and we actually got a dispatch from inside the courtroom from Mark Walsh, who is the Supreme Court correspondent for the ABA. And he let us know that one senator, Josh Hawley, who is married to First Choice’s attorney Erin Hawley, was also in the House. Mark shared with us.

 

Melissa Murray Did he run there, from Capitol Hill?

 

Kate Shaw I didn’t get any intel about his mode of transportation, but it’s not far. So very possible, could have jogged over.

 

Melissa Murray Probably could sprint.

 

Kate Shaw Could have sprinted. Wouldn’t even necessarily have broken a sweat. But however he got there, he was in the courtroom. He stayed for the entire argument, which is pretty long. And interestingly, also, in addition to the Hawley’s in the courtroom for bar admissions, that is people who are sworn into the Supreme Court bar, typically before the oral arguments, was a group of trans lawyers who are part of the National Trans Bar Association. The group announced this admission ceremony on its website, noting that swearing in a new cohort of trans attorneys is a testament to the community’s quote, unwavering presence and resilience. So Sounds like a great ceremony and really glad that Mark brought it to our attention. I love resisting in any way possible. Yes. And making John Roberts say a group of attorneys from the Trans Bar Association, which John Roberts would have had to say to call them up, is honestly an act of resistance.

 

Melissa Murray Can you imagine if Sam Alito was saying it and he had that Arthur the Ardvark fist at the side just like clenched? That’d be even better. All right. Let’s break down this argument. As we discussed with Attorney General Platkin, this is a case about a procedural question. When can the recipient of a state subpoena go to federal court to raise a First Amendment objection to that subpoena? Recall that First Choice received a subpoena from the New Jersey Attorney General’s office, and the attorney general says that is because the office was engaging in routine enforcement of the state’s consumer protection laws. First Choice clearly thinks that that’s not the reason. Instead, they argue that the Attorney General is hostile to the fact that First Choice is a crisis pregnancy center, which is a pro-life organization that, among other things, seeks to dissuade women from seeking abortions. As we also noted in our conversation with General Platkin, the case is indirectly about access to reproductive care. But as we’ll discuss, it wasn’t really on the table until Justice Barrett raised the prospect of reproductive care quite late in the argument. Although Aaron Hawley in her remarks did refer to pregnancy centers and suggests that the attorney general had, quote, assembled a strike force against them, end quote. I wonder if it was an elite legal strike force.

 

Leah Litman Release the Kraken.

 

Melissa Murray Sydney Powell.

 

Leah Litman Right. That was that was quite the pull. So.

 

Melissa Murray Only five years ago, folks.

 

Leah Litman I know, I know. If we characterize this case as a procedural case that’s also on some level about abortion, Hawley mostly wanted to characterize this as a major civil rights case about nonprofit donor privacy, akin to cases such as NAACP versus Patterson, an important Supreme Court case that held that the NAACP could not be compelled to release its donor lists in Alabama in the 1950s. Yes, the crisis pregnancy centers are likening themselves today to the NAACP in the 1950s. This is Erin Hawley’s contribution to critical race theory. Hawley took a very broad position on how her client should be able to get into federal court to make its First Amendment argument about donor privacy. The lower courts have said, of course, you can raise First Amendment arguments, but right now all you have is a subpoena, which New Jersey represents isn’t even self-executing without additional state court action. So for now, you have to await further state court developments before you can go to federal court.

 

Kate Shaw First Choice has two arguments for why they should be in federal court now, now, now. So the first one is that there is a credible threat of enforcement. And the second is that the subpoena itself violates the First Amendment, and in particular the First Amendment right to associate, because a reasonable donor would be chilled in, you know, giving and associating with the organization by the existence of a subpoena like this without any further action necessary. So there is an important question of New Jersey state law here. It’s kind of an antecedent question, and that is whether the subpoena is self-executing. So despite New Jersey’s representations about its own subpoenas, Hawley kind of resisted that, including by repeatedly invoking the Latin meaning of subpoena as if that like somehow resolved the question. Latin folks. Yeah, Latin. That means it’s important. But despite my finding that pretty unconvincing, at least a couple of the justices seem to be kind of rearing to but actually this question of obviously state law. So here is one Neil Gorsuch on this.

 

Clip I don’t know how to read that other than it’s it’s pretty s pretty self executing to me, counsel.

 

Leah Litman This is the new face of federalism. Blue states don’t even know their own laws.

 

Melissa Murray And the attorney arguing for New Jersey, Cindy Bayer, conceded that if these subpoenas are in fact self-executing, then first choice can immediately go to federal court to challenge the subpoena. So if this court, in its infinite wisdom, decides that these are self-executing subpoenas, first choice would win. But other justices, like Justice Barrett, seem to accept that these subpoenas are not self-executing subjects. Do you find that so demure?

 

Leah Litman So mindful. Yeah. Sh.

 

Melissa Murray Again, so not be fooled. She does this.

 

Leah Litman They can decide what it means and she will invalidate them, right?

 

Melissa Murray She does this.

 

Leah Litman Based on their own understanding of their laws.

 

Melissa Murray She lures you in, Kate. She lures you in with a reasonable prospect.

 

Kate Shaw Even the federal governments here even the federal government here was like, No, Neil, this is not up to you Jersey says there’s some executing. We should treat them that way. But to your point, Melissa, like, yeah, Amy may find another way to side with first choice.

 

Leah Litman She’s definitely gonna find another way to side with first choice. There are billions of possibilities for first choice as we will Unveil. Yeah. So there weren’t a lot of questions for Hawley, which a little unclear how to read that. You know, often, at least sometimes, that’s because a side is doing well. And the justices did seem sympathetic, but I also got the feeling they were a little distracted, maybe totally consumed with Texas redistricting and maybe the National Guard case. But the question.

 

Melissa Murray Or emotional support billionaires.

 

Leah Litman Who is to say? Who is to say? The questions there were for Holly were pretty friendly. So Justice Kagan asked, How would you prefer to win type question? Justice She knows her call. Right, exactly. We gotta win. How would you like us to do that? Yeah. Justice Jackson was a little mixed. Justice Sotomayor seemed more skeptical.

 

Melissa Murray The federal government also argued here, of course, on the side of first choice, and it at least had the decency to note that there was some tension between First Choice’s chill theory and some of the court’s standing jurisprudence, like Clapper, for example, and of course the SB eight case, whole women’s health versus Jackson. So it asked the court to side with first choice under the threat of enforcement theory.

 

Kate Shaw And arguing for New Jersey, as Melissa already mentioned, was Sundeep Iyer, who I thought was really good in a way that was both understated and pointed. And it came out in a couple of places. So one, I thought, I’m sorry to harp on this, but I was so enraged by Gorsuch on this like self-executing point. He had, I thought, a nice response to Gorsuch contemplating declaring himself the ultimate authority on New Jersey state law as well as everything else. So let’s play that clip.

 

Clip I will say that if again the question that this court has is about the meaning of state law, I think there are entirely appropriate ways to resolve those questions, for example, by remanding the case to the Third Circuit with instructions to certify the question to the New Jersey Supreme Court as is consistent with typical practice and

 

Clip And what and the question.

 

Melissa Murray Shorter Iyer. Sir, you are no Bruce Springsteen. The stone pony would never accept you anyway. Iyer also made very deft use of Lyons and Clapper. These are two awful decisions in which the court denied standing to plaintiffs. It was not sympathetic to. Lyons is a case in which the court denied standing to an individual challenging the Los Angeles police department’s policy of putting suspects in chokeholds. And the logic of the case was that even though Mr. Lyons had been put in a chokehold already by the LA police department, because he wasn’t able to show that he was going to be put in a chokehold again in the future imminently, he had no standing. And Clapper is a case where the court denied standing to lawyers and NGOs representing Guantanamo detainees because they had not established that it was sufficiently likely that the government would listen in on their conversations. So here’s an exchange between Ayer and Justice Gorsuch talking about the prospect of donor declarations.

 

Clip Really? I mean that I mean we’re gonna now pick over the tense of the verb that they chose. I mean they’re saying if we had known that this was gonna happen, we wouldn’t have given. Perforce if it’s going to be disclosed, we won’t give. I mean doesn’t that just follow night from day? We don’t.

 

Clip Think so for a couple of reasons. First, this court’s decision in Lions makes perfectly clear that a backward facing allegation of harm isn’t sufficient. I understand that all

 

Kate Shaw So Iyer also I thought made very clever use of the whole woman’s health decision. So let’s play that clip here.

 

Clip For one thing, this court has always made clear that you don’t bend the rules of Article three standing based on potential fears of preclusion. And in cases like whole women’s health, for instance, this court noted that there may not always be available a federal forum for a federal constitutional claim challenging statement.

 

Leah Litman So you’re not saying they wouldn’t be precluded. And while we’re going through, you know, the greatest hits of the Supreme Court, Justice Jackson also referenced the ICE case, the immigration and customs enforcement case, the one that blessed the Kavanaugh stops, Vasquez Perdomo.

 

Clip Isn’t it interesting that we don’t have credible threat in other areas? I mean I’m thinking about, for example, Perdomo and you know the this situation I’m looking for it in my notes, in which people are saying we’re fearing that we’re gonna have these adverse interactions with ice, we have sure evidence of this happening, and the court seems to say not enough. We don’t employ some sort of a credible threat analysis in that context. No, no.

 

Leah Litman As we said, Holly didn’t say much about pregnancy and nothing about abortion, mostly referring to first choice as just a nonprofit, but Justice Barrett definitely did in an exchange with Iyer that was a little bit spicy.

 

Clip I mean y you had this project strike on the pregnancy centers, you know, the attorney general had essentially, you know, w what your friends on the other side would say, declared war on pregnancy centers. So if it is true that the non self executing subpoena is enough if it’s in the context of other government statements, why wouldn’t that be satisfied here?

 

Clip Yeah, my friends on the other side don’t let the actual factual allegations get in the way of telling a story about hostility here, but I think that s story is just not borne out by the record evidence that’s been offered here.

 

Leah Litman And I did go on to say if there were a record of state hostility and targeting, that might be enough to get into federal court, but here there just isn’t that kind of record. But as in the Texas redistricting case, facts we hardly knew ye.

 

Melissa Murray Well, it it’s not just the absence of facts, it’s that she like this is sort of the Fox media orbit in which they’re all existing, where anything that has to do with the crisis pregnancy center is obviously going to be the target of some blue state sinister plot. Like the NAAC.

 

Kate Shaw Right. In this cynical. It’s the I think it’s the first sentence of Hawley’s brief. It’s like it is all over the brief.

 

Melissa Murray It was the first sentence of her opening argument.

 

Leah Litman This is not the first time these right-leaning organizations have done this. You know, this was Americans for Prosperity versus Bonda, right? Like they also, you know, invoked NAACP cases from the 1950s when they were arguing you cannot compel us to release information to the state.

 

Melissa Murray I just wanna point out that NAACP members in the nineteen fifties were in danger of literally being lynched if their identities were known. Like these folks are just basically giving money to crisis pregnancy centers.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah. It’s an insane comparison.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, but but but you know, when you think about it, like there’s no discrimination against transgender people today or ever, which is why the court can uphold bans on gender affirming care. But there is massive discrimination against crisis pregnancy centers.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah. So and it’s not just Barrett who seemed receptive to this account. Roberts kind of seemed sympathetic to this account of sort of targeting pregnancy centers, as Hawley called them in this clip.

 

Clip Council, you referred to the fact that you’ve addressed these subpoenas to car dealerships and things like that. Your friends on the other side don’t represent a car dealership.

 

Kate Shaw This is not a car dealership, madam, right? This is something very, very different.

 

Melissa Murray Very different. Justice Kavanaugh also asked about a brief he described as the brief of the ACLU siding with First Choice. This was a bit of a misstatement. It was actually the brief from FIRE, that is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. But the ACLU was on it, and it just seemed like a very kind of cynical move to suggest that there was some sort of broad cross-ideological consensus that first choice was being targeted and should win. Yeah. I did read the transcript.

 

Leah Litman To suggest that the justices are going to rule for the Crisis Pregnancy Center, quite possibly, likely, with some Democratic appointees joining them. And it really made me wonder whether some of the justices, including specifically the Democratic appointees, might be influenced by, you know, the larger context in which this case is being decided, which includes very abusive targeting investigations of, for example, Media Matters by the Texas Attorney General and potentially abusive investigations by the Trump administration as well. And, you know, they wonder, like, well, should those entities be able to go to federal court immediately? And I don’t think those concerns mean they have to rule for the petitioners’ crisis pregnancy centers here in order to protect the interests of targets of investigations that are truly pretextual and abusive and baseless, but I did wonder if that was influencing their perspective.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah.

 

Melissa Murray I mean, is this an appeasement strategy? I mean, just I don’t mean appeasement in that sense, but like if the idea is to put on the books law that would help those who are truly the targets of investigations that are pretextual and abusive, why wouldn’t you entertain the prospect that maybe your colleagues would just come up with a different line of reasoning to avoid all of that precedent when it truly was some blue state group?

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, this is yeah, I mean, but but there was there’s a lot of the kind of Vullo versus NRA energy, right? So that’s the case in which the Democratic appointees all joined the Republican colleagues. So Domaio even wrote the opinion, right? Finding that the NRA was targeted by blue state officials right here in New York, and that there too the ACLU was on the side of the NRA as it was, you know, on the side of first choice in this case. So yeah, I think if we could be assured that the justices will neutrally and fairly treat future targets, like this is a strategy that makes a lot of sense. But obviously that’s.

 

Melissa Murray It’s like bringing principles to a gun fight.

 

Leah Litman Ha ha

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, one other one other observation that is, I think, similar to the one that Leah was just offering, but like a slightly different cut, is just kind of how thoroughly the politicization of law enforcement under the Trump administration has poisoned all of our assumptions about the enforcement of the law, right? Like so just even the kind of discussion that we’re having suggests that the Democratic appointees might be nervous about red state targeting of unpopular left leaning causes. And that is just like the world we live in. This is not.

 

Leah Litman Donald Trump literally announced that in an executive order.

 

Kate Shaw Yes.

 

Leah Litman Right? Like he is going to be targeting like left leaning NGOs and whatnot.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, and that is just where we are. And so yeah, maybe it would be better for nonprofits to be able to get to federal court to raise First Amendment challenges if law enforcement is gonna proceed that way, like at the state as well as the federal level.

 

Leah Litman [AD]

 

Melissa Murray We have some other recaps to get into. We will go shorter on some of these. The next case that we want to talk about is called Cox Communications versus Sony. This case is the latest to ask the justices to grapple with what sorts of upstream liability might attach to the misconduct of internet users. So earlier cases on related questions have involved the liability of platforms like Twitter and Google for terrorist attacks. At issue here is a jury award against an internet service provider for user copyright infringement. The petitioner in this case, Cox Communications, is among other things one of the country’s largest internet service providers. And the respondents, Sony, and other record labels and publishers say that Cox users infringe their copyrights by doing things like file sharing, and that Cox is secondarily and vicariously liable for that copyright infringement. A jury cited with Sony, awarding over $1 billion in damages, an award that was affirmed in part by the Fourth Circuit, though the Fourth Circuit did order a new trial on the question of damages. Cox says that letting the Fourth Circuit opinion stand would fundamentally change ISP’s relationships to its users, requiring them to engage in massive evictions of alleged infringers and possibly result in service being pulled from entire universities, towns, and communities. Sony says that Cox was told again and again about all of this copyright infringement, and yet, The company took no action in response.

 

Kate Shaw Complicated procedural history, as Melissa was just alluding to. It also involves a number of intersecting bodies of law. So there’s tort doctrine, including contributory and accessory liability, there’s substantive copyright law. You have the federal statute, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Folks who know both platform regulation and copyright law seemed pretty unimpressed with the performances in this case. And by that I mean both the justices and to a degree the attorneys in the case, who are Supreme Court practitioners, but not really experts in either kind of platform governance or copyright. So maybe the justices in this case, recognizing that they are not in the immortal words of Elena Kagan, the nine greatest experts on the internet, will try to go small in a similar way to their approach to kind of other cases on related topics like Twitter versus Tomna, like Gonzalez versus Google.

 

Leah Litman Yeah. It did seem as though they are likely to side with Cox and reverse. They seemed troubled by the notion of this sort of broad imposition of liability here, in particular in the context of some of the consequences they were told would flow from letting the lower court opinions stand, you know, the idea that ISPs would be forced to cut off service to entire communities, universities, military bases, in order to guard against the prospect of crushing liability like this. But they also seemed a little troubled by the just trust us attitude of both Joss Rosencrantz for Cox and Paul Clement for Sony. So it’s not clear to me how they are going to get there.

 

Melissa Murray I think Brett Kavanaugh will light the way.

 

Leah Litman Ha!

 

Kate Shaw Honestly, there was a lot the invocation of like cutting off service to military bases was so obviously pandering to Brett Kavanaugh.

 

Leah Litman Be like, Will you throw a temper tantrum for me too?

 

Kate Shaw Exactly.

 

Melissa Murray The court also heard oral argument in Urias-Orellana versus Pamela Jo Bondi. At issue in this case is the relationship of the federal appeals courts to the Board of Immigration Appeals. That is the agency tribunal that individual immigration judges’ decisions get appeal to. And in this case, the question is about whether an individual who had requested asylum experienced persecution. Under federal law, to obtain asylum, the non citizen must establish either past persecution or a well founded fear of future persecution.

 

Kate Shaw And the question here specifically is about how federal courts review a Board of Immigration Appeals determination that a set of undisputed facts does not rise to the level of persecution. So the individual in this case, or actually an individual in his family, requested asylum on the basis that he and his family had been targeted by a hitman working for a drug lord in their home country of El Salvador. The immigration judge, and that ruling was affirmed by the Board of Immigration Appeals or BIA, held that these events, which did occur, did not rise to the level of past persecution that would qualify these individuals for asylum.

 

Melissa Murray So federal immigration law structures judicial review differently for questions of law versus questions of fact. So the statutes require courts to defer on the BIA’s findings of facts, but not on questions of law. So the question here is how a court should treat a determination that a set of undisputed facts doesn’t rise to the level of persecution. Is that a legal determination that the federal court gets to review, exercising its own independent judgment? Or is it a factual determination which requires courts to give significant deference to the Board of Immigration Appeals?

 

Kate Shaw And in this case, the court seemed inclined to think that this kind of determination just had too much kind of factiness in it, too much factual content for the federal courts to be second guessing administrative judges’ determinations. Which I have to say, yeah, I know it’s a little different after the court’s decision, which we talked about in our emergency episode, to entirely second guess the lower court’s determination in the Texas redistricting case. It does feel to me like there’s this like chasm opening between the rules and the law sort of mattering in some places. Like they will take seriously this question of some kind of review, yes. But it’s like so i there’s all these different ways that there is this chasm. So, like between the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal courts. Like the lower federal courts are still acting like the law and the constitution matter, Supreme Court, not so much, and even on the Supreme Court across different categories of cases. So we’re just gonna jettison all of it if we want to give the Republicans a few extra seats in the House of Representatives. And we’re gonna take very seriously these questions about the exact relationship between the federal courts and an administrative agency on some questions versus other questions in a case like this. It is pretty hard to keep the faith, you guys.

 

Melissa Murray I can think of a unifying principle. Tell us. So when we’re trying to deport people of color and the BIA said we should do it, we defer to their fact finding. When we want to disenfranchise people of color and the lower federal court said we can’t do that, we don’t defer to their fact finding.

 

Leah Litman That’s called colorblind constitutionalism, right?

 

Melissa Murray Yeah.

 

Kate Shaw It all makes sense now.

 

You see the you see it.

 

Kate Shaw I see it.

 

Melissa Murray Yeah.

 

Kate Shaw Yup.

 

Leah Litman But back to this particular oral argument. You know, my read of the argument was similar to yours. It seemed like they were going to say this particular question at least, whether the facts give rise to a claim of persecution is subject to substantial evidence review, even though, as Justice Kagan acknowledged, you, that is the government, quote, have some good arguments in this case, but honestly, none of them come from the text. End quote. Womp womp.

 

Melissa Murray Okay. The court also heard oral argument in Olivier versus Brandon. This is a case about a significant federal courts doctrine, sometimes called Prizer Heck, which was set down in part in a case called Heck versus Humphrey. That case established the set of rules for when you can raise certain kinds of challenges under section 1983 rather than under habeas law. And this matters because it is much easier to proceed under section 1983 than it is under habeas review. And the decision in Heck, which is a Scalia decision from 1994, makes clear that the court doesn’t want section 1983 to be used as an end run around limitations on habeas, which would invite what are essentially challenges to sentences, using something that’s not really supposed to be used for assessing challenges to sentences.

 

Leah Litman So the petitioner here, Olivier, was arrested and fined for violating an ordinance targeting protests outside a public amphitheater. He argues this limitation violates his religious freedom because he is a Christian who feels called to share the gospel. And so he filed this Section 1983 claim, seeking an injunction against enforcement of the state law in the future. And the question is whether his prior conviction under the law precludes his Section 1983 suit because it is a challenge to a criminal process that belongs in habeas.

 

Kate Shaw So his lawyer, Alison Ho, had to do a pretty delicate dance to try to represent her client and maintain that his claim was not barred by this heck decision, while remaining appropriately deferential toward the great man himself, because as Melissa said, this was a scalia opinion. So that was kind of a tightrope. I will say I am not sure I’ve ever heard Justice Thomas be friendlier to an advocate. I don’t know if you felt the same way. So Ho is married to Judge Jim Ho, who we don’t even talk about that much on this pod anymore because he has been so overtaken by some of his colleagues on the Fifth Circuit and some of the writings that they have issued.

 

Melissa Murray Just wait for birthright citizenship. The resuscitation of Jim Ho.

 

Kate Shaw Well, what else is he gonna have to say about it? It’s gonna be it’s it’s SCOTUS.

 

Melissa Murray No, but the logic of it, and like he’s gonna get props, I think, for how some people start thinking about it.

 

Kate Shaw Its entirely possible. In any event, I have no idea if she and Thomas know each other, I assume so because Judge Ho and Justice Thomas are very close. But I think.

 

Melissa Murray You sweet summer child.

 

Kate Shaw I just don’t I don’t think she’d clerk for him, but he’s not usually this friendly even toward his own for former clerks when they are arguing there was one, you know, takeaway from this argument.

 

Melissa Murray All right, I’m gonna let that drop. On the substance, this is a genuinely tricky case. The claim that Olivier is raising necessarily implicates legality of his prior conviction, even if he is not technically trying to challenge or reopen it. And there will be other cases like Olivier’s where someone does remain under some sort of sentence of supervision. And so their claim really would seem to be more squarely barred by Heck. A lot of the justices questions in this case seem to circle around what the implications of ruling for Olivier would be for cases like that.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, so my take on the argument was that a majority of justices understand intuitively that this particular challenge can’t be barred and isn’t barred, and a problem that they are running into is that Justice Scalia wrote some, in my view, pretty sloppy opinions in this area with way overly broad language, but it seems like a majority of justices see some ways of limiting it and distinguishing the prior cases. Justice Salito might be a holdout, but who knows? He might say that at least this particular petitioner gets to challenge the prospective enforcement of a statute.

 

Kate Shaw I actually thought they were more skeptical of him than I expected given that he was a Christian plaintiff raising a religious liberty claim, even if that’s not exactly what was before the court. Because they are very cross pressured, right? Like they have to treat as gospel everything that Justice Scalia wrote.

 

Leah Litman Exactly. You can’t question the great man.

 

Kate Shaw But, you know, he wrote some stuff that I think might mean Olivier loses and they don’t want that either. So I truly don’t know which is their major preference and which is their minor preference. We will see how it shakes out.

 

Leah Litman [AD]

 

Kate Shaw Let’s move on to some court culture. First, we have an a unanimous 11th circuit opinion. This is now like a week and a half ago, but we recorded our Thanksgiving episode a bit early, so we have some things to kind of catch you up on. This was an opinion authored by another noted liberal squish, Judge Pryor, upholding sanctions against Alina Habba and others. Pretty interesting.

 

Melissa Murray So, in addition to that 11th circuit opinion bench slapping Alina Habba for frivolous lawsuits, we also got a third circuit opinion, this time on Trump’s efforts to install hacks as the temporary U.S. Attorneys in various districts. And this one again involved Alina Habba, who had been appointed the interim U.S. Attorney in New Jersey. This opinion had a different rationale than the opinion bench slapping Lindsay Halligan from the Fourth Circuit. Here the court said that because Pamela Jo Bondi relied on other authority to appoint Haba, the appointment was unlawful. But nevertheless, the opinion strongly cast doubt on Halligan’s appointment as well. And just a reminder that next week, going into all of this, it’s going to be a big one at SCOTUS. We have lots of cases that are on the docket to be argued. And a lot of them relate to some of these opinions in that they are big questions about the authority of the executive branch, in particular about the future of the interaction between the executive branch and independent agencies and the administrative state. Also questions about the global economy are at stake in at least some of the cases tangentially. So we are flagging all of those because again, what could go wrong? But we did get these glimmers of hope from the Intermediate courts of appeal.

 

Kate Shaw In terms of the slaughter case that’s going to be argued on Monday, if you’re listening on Monday, it’s like the arguments are too early in the day for drinking games, at least in most time zones. I do sort of feel like we should be coming up with slaughter arguments.

 

Melissa Murray It’s wine o’clock somewhere, Kate.

 

Kate Shaw So here are my quick suggestions. What are you actually opening, Melissa? Is it a seltzer? Or is it something spicier?

 

Melissa Murray It’s a seltzer.

 

Kate Shaw All right, but it is we are recording on a Friday afternoon. That would be fine if it was something stronger. Okay, so here are our if we were gonna do a slaughter drinking game, here are my ideas. One, we could just also do place over under bets, but like how many mentions of Scalia’s descent and Morrison are we likely to get? How many mentions of the executive power, all of it, which they have like tried to redline into the constitution, but is in fact not there, not in Article Two, not anywhere. Wonder about every derisive reference to bureaucrats. Every tendentious comparison of Trump to FDR.

 

Leah Litman If you adopted all of these, you would honestly be.

 

Melissa Murray You’d be drunk.

 

Leah Litman Exactly. You would be falling out of your chair.

 

Melissa Murray You’d be that racoon in the liquor store bathroom.

 

Leah Litman Exactly. By ten thirty in the morning. Yeah.

 

Kate Shaw Right.

 

Melissa Murray I think there are also gonna be some references to Alexander Hamilton.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, for sure. Energy dispatch, etcetera. Yeah. The the vigor of the supermanly presidency that is being held by this super old guy who falls asleep all the time and is being manipulated by some real psychopaths. But is very unitary. So that’s all how it works. Some other court news. The Supreme Court granted Sir Surari in the birthright citizenship case. So it will now decide whether the president’s executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to some people born in the United States is legal. And a part of me thinks that Sam Alito is like frantically preparing a list of people he thinks aren’t actually American and should be deported. That he will include as an appendix to whatever he writes in the case.

 

Melissa Murray I’m just did I just speak Jim Ho into existence?

 

Leah Litman Yes, you did.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, because when we started recording this episode.

 

Melissa Murray I’m a witch.

 

Kate Shaw We did not yet have a grant in the birthright citizenship case. And because Leah monitors breaking news like a hawk during our recording sessions, we now have had a grant. I didn’t even see it come across the transom, but there it is.

 

Melissa Murray I didn’t mean to manifest that. Sorry.

 

Kate Shaw But you did that.

 

Leah Litman Yep. You know, another kind of piece of news that happened, the Chief Justice granted an administrative stay in another request for emergency relief brought by the Trump administration as against a lower court ruling. This is in a challenge to the limitations on what immigration judges are allowed to say publicly. So shadow docket season really seems to be heating up just in time for the holidays.

 

Melissa Murray Just just so I understand the nature of that case clearly, the president who vowed to make the First Amendment great again and to allow people to express themselves freely and fully, wants to crack down on what immigration judges say publicly.

 

Leah Litman Yes. This is not cancel culture or censorship. This is some third thing.

 

Melissa Murray To be determined.

 

Leah Litman Right. Exactly.

 

Melissa Murray All right. Cool. All right. Since those are our least favorite things, let’s turn to our real favorite things. Things that we did, saw, bought, or read in the last week that we really like and think that you might like too. So Kate, why don’t you get us started?

 

Kate Shaw All right. So this is again like a week or two old at this point, but I’m not sure how exactly these came into the public domain. But Chris Geidner posted a bunch of the transcripts from the depositions in the Chicago case challenging the use of force by C B P and other DHS officials, led right my remember by Greg Bovino. And the transcripts I I’ve just never read a deposition like this.

 

Leah Litman Oh yes, you you read the Laura Loomer Arby’s in her pants one. C’mon.

 

Kate Shaw Okay, okay, there are no Arby’s in this is okay, these are hundreds of pages, and so I cannot guarantee there is no Arby’s in the pants type exchange.

 

Melissa Murray What a defamation of Arby’s.

 

Kate Shaw Anywhere. But it was, if anything, substantively more insane. So Bovino, the like sort of legendary Chicago civil rights lawyer Locke Bowman, and this DOJ lawyer. It truly somebody should just set it on the stage because it is that dramatic a set of exchanges. So that’s all I’ll say about that. That case, we should say, which we’ve now mentioned a bunch of times, was voluntarily dismissed. It had been pending on appeal in the Seventh Circuit. Couple of other things to mention. Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker has an incredibly difficult but really amazingly reported and horrifying piece about the third country removals, which we have talked about. My one critique of the piece is that there is not enough focus on the Supreme Court’s culpability in allowing this outrageous campaign of sending people to just unspeakable horrors in our name. But she really did very difficult reporting to even get in touch with folks who kind of by design have been rendered almost unreachable. And many of these people who lived decades and raised families and held jobs in various parts of the United States, have been sent to places that they have no relationship to, sometimes incarcerated. It’s just like unbelievable horror show. So definitely recommend that. Lighter note, I have been listening to a lot of Olivia Dean. Maybe you guys knew Olivia Dean. I did not. She’s amazing. And also, I guess, bridging those two, both music and, I don’t know, immigration horrors. Sabrina Carpenter, whose c politics I didn’t really know, delivering this just like furious slap to the administration when it tried to use one of her songs in a vile propaganda video depicting brutal ice tactics really gave me a lot of joy this week. Go Sabrina Carpenter. Didn’t know she had politics. She has good politics, and I’m so happy.

 

Melissa Murray She’s petty as fuck

 

Leah Litman I yeah. I really like Sabrina.

 

Kate Shaw So you think it’s more that than politics? It’s more just like you took my song?

 

Leah Litman No, I think it’s both.

 

Melissa Murray It can be both. It can be both. Do you remember that guy? What’s that guy? Barry, what’s his face?

 

Leah Litman Keoghan?

 

Melissa Murray Yeah. Like she dated him and he cheated on her. She literally did a concert. Like he’s Irish, so that’s the backstory. He cheated on her. She did a concert where she had everyone dress up in the Union Jack. Like, I was like, wow, that’s some petty shit. Like nothing Irish people love more than being reminded of the British Empire.

 

Leah Litman Yeah. Okay. My things are also probably in the petty register. So the dunks on Sarah Isgur’s New York Times op-ed in defense of the Supreme Court. I lived for those on Friday morning. Like the gist of this op-ed, which I don’t think this is an exaggeration, is that the court’s steady stream of decisions empowering the executive branch to be a dictator is actually a big master plan. If you squint enough and look closely enough to empower, wait for it. Wait for it. Congress, real howler, gotta hand it to her. You know, we do try to make this podcast lighthearted and inject some humor and levity into it. I just don’t think I can come up with a funnier bit than that. Like, yes, the Supreme Court might be massively expanding executive power, but what if maybe they weren’t? Yeah, okay. So

 

Melissa Murray What if it was all a ploy to make Congress great again?

 

Leah Litman Right, exactly. Um number two. Seeing slash reading Republican women coming to the realization that the patriarchy is never going to be totally cool with them. Ugh enjoyed some of this so here I’m talking about the reporting about Nancy Mace, Elise Stephonic and others being unhappy with speaker of the house, Mike Johnson. Um and I’m just going to read a quote from a New York Times story about this. Quote some of them said privately the speaker failed to engage with them and was a cultural challenge for Mr. Johnson and he has often voiced firm views about the distinct roles men and women should play in society. End quote.

 

Melissa Murray Ladies, it was in his name.

 

Leah Litman Right?

 

Melissa Murray His mama tried to tell you.

 

Leah Litman Exactly. Exactly. So that’s my number two. Number three, I am wearing my hands-off Chicago t-shirt. You probably can’t see it in the video, but I am wearing it. Was in Chicago for Thanksgiving. Absolutely loved it. You know, there were protests all over the holiday, which was very cold, you know, against ICE’s presence in the city. A great way to spend the holiday. Also, in other Chicago-ish news, this is unrelated. I scored a touchdown in Turkey Bowl, and it may or may not have involved me pushing over a 13-year-old, but I still won.

 

Melissa Murray Oh okay. Um. I don’t know what to say.

 

Kate Shaw This is I need to I need to tell you. I need to tell you. So my son David takes the bus to middle school every day. And the one lesson that I’ve really imparted is, you know, you have to like really shove sometimes to get on the bus in New York City because it’s crowded in the morning. And I’m like, you cannot step on anyone smaller than you. Like that is the lesson. You cannot do that.

 

Leah Litman In my defense, it’s unclear if I actually like caused this person to tip over, right? I did tag them and then they fell over. But, you know.

 

Kate Shaw Uhhuh. All right. Well David also doesn’t always heed me, so so it’s it it’s fine.

 

Melissa Murray Okay. I’m just gonna note we are recording this on Friday. Friday was the morning where the temperature in New York was unseasonably fucked up cold. 18 degrees when I got up this morning. And I typically don’t wear a hat because I feel like hats mess up my hair, like it just like smushes it down. But my friend gave me this way soft cashmere beanie, and it was so fucking cold that I’m like, let me put this hat on. And I loved it because it was like big enough and oversized that it didn’t actually smush my hair, but it kept me very warm. So I may be getting on the hat train. So there it is. But my other favorite things this week are something that you all can get into right now. So I am loving the mayor emeritus, outgoing mayor Eric Adams lame duck interview with Z-Way. And sh this is absolutely, I don’t know if it’s performance art or what, but it’s my favorite thing ever. She asks him a question about whether or not someone of his age should be out in the club. And his response is basically let your haters be your waiters when you are seated at the club night of success. And I want someone for the holidays to gift me a lingua franca sweater that just says club night of success, because that is where I am going to be in perpetuity for the rest of this administration. He also discusses being 64 years old and getting out of the shower and noting his glistening six packs plural. So he has more than one of them. I don’t know how that is physiologically possible, but respect, sir. It is absolutely hilarious. And whoever did the editing on this clip, you, ma’am, are a top-tier editor. It’s just excellent the way it ends. It’s fantastic. Also on YouTube, Prince Harry on Colbert, A plus content. Loved it. And I am also very much enjoying the biography of Jessica Mitford. She is one of the famous Mitford sisters, the communist Jessica Mitford. It’s called Troublemaker: The Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Christina Delane and Carla Kaplan, and it’s fantastic. And again, because I’m an Anglophile, I just got into all of the Victoria episodes that just dropped on Netflix. And this is a very good salve for people who just cannot keep watching The Crown over and over and over again, although I have been. So this is nice. I’m enjoying it.

 

Kate Shaw All right, some housekeeping before we go.

 

Kate Shaw [AD]

 

Kate Shaw Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked Media production, hosted and executive produced by Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and me, Kate Shaw, produced and edited by Melody Rowell, Michael Goldsmith is our associate producer, Jordan Thomas is our intern, audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landes, music by Eddie Cooper, production support from Katie Long and Adriene Hill. Matt DeGroot is our head of production, and thanks to our digital team, Ben Hethcoat, Joe Matoski, and Johanna Case. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny on YouTube to catch full episodes. Find us at YouTube.com slash at Strict Scrutiny Podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Strict Scrutiny in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. And if you want to help other people find the show, please rate and review us. It really helps.