Hot Swap growing, donors revolt, President Kamala? SCOTUS breakdown Immunity, Chevron, Censorship

🔥 Hot Swap Summer is here! Dive into the madness, laughs, and the hottest topics from politics to business! 🌞📈🗣️

Welcome back! It's hot swap summer here at the Allin podcast, episode 1086 of the world's number one podcast. Calling in from the home office in Italy, Chth Poopaa, how are you doing, sir?

I replied, "Great, how are you? You look so relaxed, look at you! But it's only been two days that I'm working. I mean, I'm not that relaxed yet, but this place does put you in the right mood."

Saxs chimed in, "I'm sure it's been an uneventful week for you. How are you doing in the great state of California from our headquarters at the All-In Tower in San Francisco?"

I couldn't help but joke, "Why are you doxing me? What's going on here? CU, you live in San Francisco. Everybody knows that. All you have to do is look for the protests. Follow the protest, and you'll find Saxs."

From the Ohal headquarters, "Is that Backdraft? The house is on fire! The house is on fire! But which house are you referring to? Which house? America, Democrats, or Biden's house?"

We laughed as the conversation continued, "There's a political party there. I mean, you can interpret it as you wish. Your butt is on fire. Did you have some bad Indian food? Did you hit the taco truck? What happened? There's a heat wave in the west right now. He stopped at the taco truck. The West is on fire. The West is on fire!"

Shifting gears, I pointed out, "Just, uh, usually when we do the docket, I pursue a mullet docket: business first and the party in the back. But man, we got to start with Washington."

My colleague disagreed, "I've never supported the mullet strategy."

I acknowledged, "I know that. I know that you've been anti-mullet from the beginning."

He clarified, "You want this to be a political show."

I quickly corrected him, "No, no, no, no, no. I never said it should be a political show. I always said we start with the biggest, most topical issues first. It could be business, or it could be politics."

He accused, "You were discriminating against politics. You insisted that it be a business issue, even if the business issue wasn't relevant, topical, or interesting."

I responded, "Here we go. No, I was not. I think you're talking about Freedberg. Freedberg was the one who brought the ratings of this pod to a whole new level."

He added, "Free who brought the Maga lunatic who built this thing. Who built me? Vad from Robin Hood, he is the guy who did."

I interjected, "By the way, I mean, the ratings of this pod hit some sort of new stratospheric level, not just with the President Trump interview but last week, whatever."

Concluding our chat, "I mean, the point is, last week was, I think, the most crazy week in the history of politics, and it's only going to get crazier. So let's start off with hot swap summer. You heard it here first, or maybe not. Hot swap summer continues."

🚀 Biden's interview could make or break his presidency. Stay tuned! 📺🔍

Stephanopoulos is showing it in two parts on Saturday and Sunday, so it's going to be edited. We don't know what they're going to edit in or edit out. I don't think that ABC is going to cover for Biden, so I suspect it'll probably be a pretty fair representation of the actual recorded interview. I think the Biden presidency basically hinges on this interview. If Biden can show that he's sharp and responsive and not senile, it could go well for him. If it goes poorly, then I think he's done. So, this is the last chance again; it's like the third last chance.

The accusation is that he's senile. That's not a hard thing to disprove if you're not actually senile, right? You just need to go in there. He's not going to be fed hardball questions; they'll probably be pretty softball questions. He just has to prove that he's not senile. If he can do that, it'll calm things down. Stephanopoulos generally does a good job; he's not a sycophant. I think he considers himself a legit journalist.

If Stephanopoulos wants to go into the Hall of Fame, this is his opportunity. If he absolutely throws the high heater to Biden and basically is the one that delivers the coup de grâce, then his name will be in history alongside Biden for that reason. You have to double down on Biden because if you are neutral to negative on Biden or passive, it's immediately interpreted as he's being swapped out, and then you don't have time to pick the right candidate. What's actually going on is a little bit more of a structured strategy around finding the right candidate, setting up the right program to get them elected, and figuring out how we're going to move the $120 million that we raised from Biden over to whoever this new candidate is.

The best way to buy time is to throw Biden forward and be like, "Hey look, this guy's good to go do media; he's still our guy." They're going to do a Democratic primary speedrun. Here's what's going to happen: they're going to do five debates in 10 weeks, and then whoever wins, wins. Kamala is going to resign; Kamala becomes president. Kamala gets to run, doesn't speedrun; she gets to speedrun like everybody else. Dean Phillips gets to come in, everybody speedruns it. The media will go crazy over the summer; massive ratings boom, and we have a winner come in and they demolish Trump. That's not going to happen.

The party needs to select a leader and they need to say, "This is our candidate." Because if they do this, it's too diffuse; it weakens whoever ends up winning. It strengthens the party because they say, "Listen, he decided to resign; we wanted to do the most democratic thing possible." What's the most democratic thing possible? We put all our candidates out there and you, the people, choose.

I think this is one of the dumbest predictions you've made, and you've made some real doozies in your day. The hot swap is gonna happen. The problem with your hot swap theory has always been that not only would Biden step down, but that magically they would choose the best candidate. Somehow we would get someone who represented all of Trump's policies without being Trump, but you would get some magical moderate to emerge in the Democratic party. That's not going to happen.

Thanks to your incessant demands for the hot swap, we are going to get President Kamala Harris. She's the only alternative. They realize they can't sidestep Kamala Harris without offending a major constituency in the Democratic party. Equally important, maybe even more important, they would lose roughly a billion dollars of contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign. If neither Biden nor Harris is running at the top of the ticket, they'd have to refund all of that money back to the donors who contributed it. There's no way they're going to start over from zero in terms of fundraising. If Joe steps aside, there is only one feasible candidate for them, which is Kamala Harris.

If Jamie Dimon declared that he would be happy to take on the candidacy for the Democratic party, he would call his friend Warren Buffett, he would call his friend Jeff Bezos, he would call up his own personal banker and say, "We've got half a billion, let's go and let's have a run at this." There are certain folks that are outside of the typical political spectrum that might actually have a shot at doing the extraordinary here and stepping up. Doing exactly what Trump and others that support Trump don't want to see happen, which is a candidate that can actually challenge Trump on the merits of their experience, on their values, on their capabilities as leaders, as executives, and on their past performance.

I think that someone like that might be the strategist's kind of move to say this is the one thing we can do that can defeat Trump. Because we all know from the polling that Harris doesn't stand a shot; we tried that four years ago. You're missing the history, which is Mike Bloomberg tried that exact same thing and there was one word that was said to Mike Bloomberg and his candidacy imploded, and it was the word billionaire. The idea that you're going to get some other billionaire that all of a sudden is less hated? I mean, Mike Bloomberg has done so, so much good, quite honestly, and so if he can't kind of escape the scarlet letter of that, of the B-word, I don't know how anybody can.

Bloomberg ran against other Democrats; this is a person that is running against another billionaire, which is Trump. And so if you have two people who are now on equal footing and it is the Trump versus whoever this person is, a lot of people in this country, I suspect, would support them. You're operating under the charming delusion that the Democratic party cares about democracy. This is basically a party that's run by political insiders that hates billionaires. People like Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon, they pay the Democrats protection money, okay? That's how Democrats see them. We're going to go shake them down to get money from them. They're not going to hand over the reins of the party. I don't disagree.

🤔 If Biden can't run, should he finish his term? Big questions ahead! 🗳️👀

Bloomberg ran against other Democrats. This is a person that is running against another billionaire, which is Trump. Trump came in there and appealed directly to Republican primary voters. He called the forever wars a mistake, said he was going to build the wall, and promised to reset things with China. He took over the Republican Party the way you're supposed to—through democracy, through voting.

That opportunity is gone here because the Democratic primaries happened last year. The Biden team ensured that he would basically win the primaries handily, so they control all the delegates. They're never going to hand the reins of the party to a total outsider. The Democratic Party is the ultimate insider party—it's insiders picking insiders. They cannot sidestep around Kamala Harris both because it would be a slap in the face to her constituency and due to the money issue. So, it's Kamala or bust for them.

It will be very revealing about how the leaders of the Democratic Party think based on the decision they make and their donors. There's a rift between the donor class and the Democratic Party leadership. I think the donor class doesn't want to lose. What the prediction markets are showing is that it's not going to be a free-for-all; it's either going to be Harris or Biden. If Biden's not fit to run again, how is he fit to serve out the rest of his term? He's got to resign. If he resigns, that's probably the thing that helps Harris the most, right? Because now she gets sworn in as commander-in-chief; she's the President of the United States.

Next go around, to realize a leadership change in the Democratic Party... look, what the prediction markets are showing is that it's not going to be a free-for-all; it's either going to be Harris or Biden. I think there's real danger here to the country because what a lot of people are saying, and I guess it makes sense, is that if Biden's not fit to run again, how is he fit to serve out the rest of his term? He’s got to resign. So, if he resigns, that's probably the thing that helps Harris the most, right? Because now she gets sworn in as commander-in-chief; she's the President of the United States. It's a major glow-up for her and it imbues her with all of this gravitas and credibility that she's now the President of the United States.

They can send her to G7 meetings and deal with other world leaders. Now they have basically made her seem much more significant by giving her the presidency. We're in the middle of a war with Russia. American cluster bombs were used to kill Russian civilians sunbathing on the beach in Crimea. Our weapons are targeting and killing Russian civilians. The Russians, in response to that, said we are no longer in a state of peace with the United States. They did not say we're in a state of war, but they said we're no longer in a state of peace.

The Russians have indicated that they may escalate horizontally by giving advanced weapons to our enemies. So all of this is happening right now in real-time on the world stage. I would still rather have Biden as commander-in-chief for the next six months than take the risk of putting Harris in there. She's inexperienced, she's a lightweight, and she might want to prove how tough she is.

Make your prediction between now and September. I honestly don't know, but I think that we are in a precarious place where things are going to get worse. Biden actually approved private contractors now going into Ukraine and starting to fight. Americans will be on the battlefield as of, I think, just a few days ago. People will want to create major distractions to try to keep the evidence and the attention away from this core issue.

If any of you were accused of being mentally incapacitated, what you would probably do is go on every single talk show, every single news show, go on every single podcast, and hold press conferences. You would just do so much public-facing work to completely dispel this idea. I think we're still getting only a controlled dribble of information and access to the President of the United States. A lot of people think he's not in a position not just to run but, let alone, to run the country.

You said last week the Democratic Party will have a meaningful reset. The issue that the Democrats will have to face is that the person they probably want to run is someone different than Kamala Harris. The problem that they're going to have to confront is there's a part of it which is fundraising.

🌪️ Dems stuck: Run Kamala or rethink Biden? Decisions needed ASAP! 🗳️💭

The issue that the Democrats will have to face is the person that they probably want to run is someone different than Kamala Harris. They're in this sort of identity politics trap because they will have to run her no matter what. If there was somebody that could take the Democratic mantle who could completely self-fund their campaign but happened to be just a white man, what would the Democrats do relative to Kamala Harris? You have to get all of this wrapped up and cinched up by the middle of August at the latest.

By having him appear 24x7 in real-time in front of hundreds of millions of people as often as possible, and they're just not doing that. There are three people that have cordoned off access to the president. Has he been diagnosed? She said no, and the reason she said no is that it's very credible for her to say because he hasn't taken the tests. The media has been engaged in a gigantic cover-up of this, and as a result, the country is in really bad shape.

Take George Stephanopoulos as a straight shooter, but when Nikki Haley was on his show a few months ago—and I'm not a fan of Nikki Haley at all—she started making this point, and Stephanopoulos wouldn't let her finish. He basically shouted her down; the media was actively suppressing the story. You take Morning Joe, Scarborough; he was saying that this version of Biden is the best he's ever been. They were describing true videos showing Biden being out of it as being fakes—clean fakes. The media has been engaged in a gigantic cover-up of this, and as a result, the country is in really bad shape.

We have to go through the next six months either with a senescent president who has limited cognition, or we could end up with a new president who is untested, inexperienced, and based on every interview she's given in the last four years, appears to be completely clueless. The media bears a lot of the responsibility. What should have happened is we should have had a robust Democratic primary a year ago. Concerns about Biden's cognitive abilities should have been reported by an honest media, but we never had that.

There's a clip on Twitter where somebody put together a six-minute compilation of 100 different spokespeople and proxies all saying the same thing about President Biden: that he is sharp as a tack. You have this funny situation where a hundred different people were basically saying the exact same talking point. Both sides say the real issue is that you don't really have an honest media here, so there is no check and balance on power right now.

With President Biden, it's so constrained and controlled. You have to understand and appreciate that decline; it only gets worse from here and compounds over time. Not only do you have to wonder what the next five months are like, but what does it look like in 18, 24, and 36 months? Clearly, Biden can't serve a second term, but the question is, what do we do now? It's amazing to me that the Democrats are not considering the one option that is kind of obvious: You let the man run the most dignified campaign he can; he's the candidate you chose.

The real problem here is the Democrats refuse to lose; they want to cling to power however they can, and they refuse to let democracy just work. In 1996, Bob Dole was the Republican candidate for president, and quite frankly, he was too old. He was seen as a relic; Clinton was fairly popular, and it was pretty obvious that Dole was just a loser and was going to lose. Did the Republicans engage in shenanigans to try and fix the situation? No, they just accepted the inevitable that Dole was going to lose and pulled financing from his campaign, at least in the final month.

🌀 Dems' dilemma: Stick with Biden or bring in a game-changer? Time's ticking! ⏳🗳️

The real problem here is the Democrats refuse to lose. They want to cling to power however they can, and they refuse to let democracy just work. Democracy working would be to do the speedrun. In 1996, Bob Dole was the Republican candidate for president, and quite frankly, he was too old. He was seen as a relic. Clinton was fairly popular, and it was pretty obvious that Dole was just a loser and he was going to lose. Did the Republicans engage in shenanigans to try and fix the situation? No, they just accepted the inevitable that Dole was going to lose. What they did is they pulled financing from his campaign at least in the final month and redistributed it to House and Senate candidates. They held on to the House and Senate. Frankly, they let Bob Dole run a dignified campaign.

My advice to the Democrats would be to not have Biden sign doing a shakeup. Let Biden run a dignified campaign and lose. My advice to the Democrats is to embrace an outsider. Give the people what they want: freedom of choice, freedom to elect a leader. Bring someone in that falls outside of the traditional political spectrum. They can bring money to the table, they can bring credibility to the table, and they can win votes and compete effectively against Trump. If your goal is to retain the White House, Kamala, give us two names: Jamie Dimon, Bob Iger. It's called wishcasting; I'm not speaking about realism. I'm speaking about what it would take to win. If they actually want to have a shot at winning, you can't introduce someone like Whitmer or Moore this late in the season when no one in the United States knows who the heck this person is.

Someone with credibility with economic and business success, with capital and connections into the Democratic party, but isn't part of the political machine that you and many others in the Democratic party are now starting to hate. You have an opportunity to actually win. If they were smart and they got their act together, they would say, "You know what, it's time for a change," just like the Republicans had to do. Use the Republican Playbook. Brilliant, Freeberg, brilliant. You guys better have a magic lamp with a Genie in it because that's the only way this is going to happen. I'm just trying to keep the show fresh.

There were seven rulings in a bunch of SCOTUS activity over the last week, but these are really important consequential decisions. We are going to talk about three of them. The first one I want to talk about is NetChoice. This is the content moderation cases that you may have heard of. There were two very controversial laws passed in Florida and Texas in 2021.

The Florida law would cover platforms with over 100 million monthly active users or 100 million in annual revenue. The Texas law was very similar; platforms over 50 million monthly active users, and it would require them to notify users whose posts were removed and provide an explanation of why. Both of these laws were challenged in court in 2021. NetChoice is a tech industry group that includes Facebook and YouTube and the parent companies of those, and they sued to block these two laws. Justice Kagan, a liberal, wrote the unanimous decision. The majority held that editorial judgment and the curation of other people's speech is a unique expressive product of its own, which entitles it to First Amendment protection.

If you wanted to create a social network where you can't be anonymous, like LinkedIn, you can do that. If you want to do something like Twitter (X) and have anonymous accounts, you can do that as well. If you want to create a social network with adult content, you can do it. Other platforms amplify political content. The end of all this, in terms of how the court handled it, is that they offered some guidance and sent the cases back to the lower courts to clarify a bunch of stuff. I think the overwhelming majority of users would like to have that, but is this the government's role?

When the entire court goes in one direction, it's probably because this never should have been brought to the court in the first place. They're giving a very clear message; it wasn't even ideologically strained to figure out what the right answer should be. I think their heart was in the right place; they were motivated by the right things, which was to reduce censorship on the social media platforms, specifically censorship of conservatives. Those laws probably were overly broad, and they infringed on the free speech of corporations because, I guess, corporations get free speech too. Basically, what the ruling says is that content moderation receives the same First Amendment protections as any other kind of speech. The decisions of what content you're going to keep up or take down on your own property is itself a speech decision, and the government has to respect that.

I wish the Supreme Court, however, had coupled this with a better decision in the Missouri versus Biden case. Basically, what that case was about was the Biden Administration was engaged in attempts to influence or pressure social media companies to take down speech. It's a practice known as jawboning. I wish they had coupled this decision with a better decision in Missouri versus Biden, saying the government's not allowed to coerce social networks to take down speech either. I wouldn't say these are like the greatest set of decisions with regard to free speech that the Court's ever done. Hope that they will come back in the future once they find a plaintiff with the right standing.

🚫 Gov't hands off! Let social media decide what's right or wrong. 🖥️💬

The plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their case, so the court didn't necessarily give a dispositive ruling. Instead, they threw it out. Essentially, what the case was about was the Biden Administration's attempts to influence or pressure social media companies to take down speech—a practice known as jawboning. I wish they had coupled this decision with a better one in Missouri versus Biden, saying the government isn't allowed to coerce social networks to remove speech either. Unfortunately, they refused to do that.

We've had numerous conversations about Twitter and Shadow Banning and the activities on what are typically called social media platforms. To me, these are all content companies. They have a choice, as executives and editors, to decide how to editorialize the content on their platforms. They can create content with paid writers like a newspaper or make content creation available to third parties who don't get paid, like users. It's up to them to decide what to do with that content and how to display it.

I don't believe that user-generated content platforms are a right for consumers to share their thoughts. They have the internet for that. I don't see social media platforms as utilities, and I don't think the government should decide what is or isn't on those platforms. Companies should decide what kind of platforms they want to have—whether they allow free speech that includes inappropriate or offensive content or highly moderated platforms to appeal to a broader audience. It's entirely their decision.

I genuinely appreciate the ruling because I think the government should have less of a role in intervening and deciding how companies create and editorialize content. This whole situation feels like a battle of snowflakes. Liberals were canceling people on these platforms, and now the MAGA folks want the government to regulate it. The marketplace should determine the winners. You can't force a newspaper to allow one candidate to reply and give him space; it's their newspaper, and they decide what they publish.

Texas and Florida are being insular and protectionist. It's not just with this law but also with lab-grown or cultivated meat laws. Other states are passing similar laws, which limit innovation and freedom to operate to protect existing interests. These states are trying to protect the interests of individuals and businesses within the state at the expense of broader liberties.

This ruling might have been necessary from a constitutional standpoint because corporations have free speech rights. The laws of Texas and Florida were coming from a good place, trying to protect their citizens' rights to free speech. It's just unfortunate that in this case, it's a zero-sum game, and those laws were invalidated. The platforms have too much power, but you don't want the government running a newsroom or Twitter (X). Having the government more involved is bad.

There's a lot of fear-mongering about the Supreme Court. People think it's become an ideological, rigid, activist place, but it's quite the opposite. The data shows many decisions are split along non-ideological lines. For example, U.S. versus Rahimi was an 8-1 decision on a federal law prohibiting people with domestic violence restraining orders from having a firearm. Racial gerrymandering, Trump v. Anderson, Trump getting back on the Colorado ballot, FDA versus The Alliance for Hypocrisy, Idaho's strict abortion law conflicting with federal law—all these cases show nuance.

People are thoughtfully pushing the responsibility to the states. The Court's decisions are relatively unpredictable; it's not just a conservative block versus a liberal block. These are nuanced decisions addressing key issues across non-ideological lines.

📜 Supreme Court rulings are unpredictable and not just conservative vs. liberal! 🤔⚖️

I had initially thought the situation wasn't as it seemed. I believed that with Trump stacking the Supreme Court, we were suddenly dismantling long-standing doctrines and laws. However, upon closer examination, I realized that the reality is quite different. People are actually thoughtfully shifting responsibilities to the states. The Court's decisions are relatively unpredictable and aren't simply a conservative versus liberal block. These decisions are nuanced and address key issues across non-ideological lines.

Take the Jan 6 case, for example. Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, supported a ruling that could potentially throw out over 200 convictions related to the January 6 incident. On the other side, Amy Coney Barrett opposed it. This indicates that the Supreme Court is unpredictable. I believe the justices are thinking independently and coming to their own conclusions.

The Court recently overruled a landmark 1984 decision in the Chevron case. This original ruling created the Chevron Doctrine, where federal courts generally deferred to the stances of federal agencies unless Congress had written specific laws on an issue. The Chevron Doctrine has been cited by federal courts over 18,000 times in the past 40 years. The recent 6-3 decision to overrule it saw the justices voting along party lines. Roberts, a conservative, argued that the Chevron Doctrine violates the Administrative Procedures Act, a federal law that directs courts to review actions taken by federal agencies.

In contrast, Kagan, a liberal, wrote a critical dissent. She argued that agency staff, comprising scientists and experts, are more likely to have the expertise to make these decisions rather than judges. She also pointed out that the system had been functioning for 40 years and that this ruling would create a massive "jolt" to the legal system.

Do you remember when President Biden tried to pass the budget two years ago? He was one vote short, and Joe Manchin ended up putting it over the top after negotiating a redo of a bunch of regulations. Manchin was promised a regulatory overhaul, which ultimately didn't happen. Now, thanks to the courts, companies that believe regulations are either overwrought or misguided for today's market landscape can bring their cases to an independent judiciary.

This new mechanism allows companies to explain their cases to someone independent who can make a judgment. I think this is a good check and balance. Folks can pass laws, and if those laws cause undue harm, there's now a way to challenge them effectively. I don't know how much experience you guys have had dealing with federal regulators, but I have a fair amount. I've worked across numerous federal agencies in various businesses. As expected, there's a lot of bureaucratic morass in these agencies.

Under the Chevron Doctrine, these agencies were essentially given unlimited authority to create rules and regulations. They had the power to determine what laws passed by Congress meant. Agencies had an incentive to create more rules and regulations because they could then ask Congress for more budget, hire more people, and grow the importance and scale of their agency.

I'm optimistic that this ruling will limit agencies' authorities and their ability to create more bureaucratic overhead. There are important regulatory roles that agencies have come to play, such as environmental protection, which were never passed as bills. There will be negative consequences to some degree with respect to the health of the environment and people.

Congress needs to step up and do its job. It needs to clearly define what is and isn't legal going forward, and then agencies should operate strictly within those bounds. The system has become super bloated over the last 40 years. When the Chevron decision came down in 1984, during the Reagan Revolution, conservatives actually liked it. We were coming off a period of an activist court.

The Chevron Doctrine led to an orgy of rule-making by federal agencies. Now, most of our laws are effectively being made by unelected bureaucrats who are part of this three-letter alphabet soup of government agencies.

🧐 Unelected bureaucrats are making most of our laws, not Congress! 📜⚠️

Chevron basically says that as long as the agency's interpretation is reasonable, or you could say not unreasonable, then the agency can basically promulgate the rule. What this has led to is an orgy of rule-making by all these federal agencies. Most of our laws now effectively are being made by unelected bureaucrats who are part of this three-letter alphabet soup of government agencies. It's not the Congress, it's not the court, it's not the president; it's this fourth branch of government that's not in the Constitution, which is the administrative state.

By reversing it, you actually give a chance for the restoration of democracy. The agencies are not empowered to essentially make whatever rules they want as long as they superficially appear reasonable. The Supreme Court is doing a great job, all nine of them. What we have right now is a balanced court, and I think on the whole they've done a good job. I think the court right now is one of the last highly functional institutions in American public life, and for elected leaders to be calling for its destruction is just sad.

I don't trust this chart; I think this chart is worthless. This is meaningless; a child could have drawn this; it means nothing. The truth is, though, if they are just one standard deviation here, as you can see in this Axios chart which is based on some data—I don't trust this chart, I think this chart is worthless, Jason. My point is this is meaningless; a child could have drawn this; it means nothing.

No, no, a child didn't draw it, Chamath. This was... how do you know, Reed? Because I'm reading the source. Because I'm reading the source of the data. This is based on something called The Martin-Quinn Score. A lower score indicates a more liberal justice, whereas a higher score indicates a more conservative justice. I think it's an interesting way; it's an interesting chart to discuss. What I would encourage anybody to do is to look at the actual substance of the decisions and the votes. People are not as easily predictable as that chart would show.

I think that chart supports exactly what you just said, Sachs, right? Yeah, I mean, not exactly. Again, I view it as a 3-3-3 court. I think it's a court, like I said, in equipoise. I don't think it's partisan; I think it's being reasonably fair. It really should be a scandal that you've got powerful lawmakers explicitly calling for the court to be packed. Pretty soon we're going to have 100 justices on the court; you'll ruin it. Nine justices should be a constitutional requirement; we should just fix it at nine and not mess with that.

SCOTUS agreed to hear a case on the limits of online porn in its next term, which starts in October. The law in question was passed by the Texas Legislature in 2023 and requires porn sites to verify the age of their users and restrict access for minors. If upheld, users would have to submit personal info that verifies they're over 18 to watch porn. The law is opposed by the ACLU and the Free Speech Coalition, which is a trade group representing adult entertainers and companies.

Rick's Cabaret is a collection of public strip clubs. It has pre-aged the last two recessions, and whenever the stock dives, people have said it actually predicts an upcoming recession.

🔞 New law: Verify age to watch porn. Privacy vs. Protection debate! 🛡️💻

Submitting personal info that verifies you are over 18 to watch porn is now a requirement under the new law. The law is opposed by the ACLU and the Free Speech Coalition. They argue it places an undue burden on adults wishing to access constitutionally protected free expression.

Rick's Cabaret is a collection of public strip clubs. Interestingly, it has pre-aged the last two recessions. Whenever the stock dives, people say it actually predicts an upcoming recession. And recently, the stock just puked up like 25 or 30% in the last week. The strip club industry has been decimated by OnlyFans. Why? Because OnlyFans took all the entertainers out of the strip club industry as they make more money online. The quality of the product at the Cabaret business has declined, and as a result, revenue has declined. The elite Cabaret artists can make more money on OnlyFans, so they go there, leaving the less refined artists behind.

So far, 16 red states have passed or agreed to pass age verification laws. Switching gears, we've had a huge victory for Trump in the immunity case. Trump sued based on special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of him for alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in January 6. SCOTUS ruled 6-3 along party lines that former presidents can't face prosecution for actions related to the core powers of their office and that all official acts receive at least the broad presumption of immunity. Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential Power entitles former presidents to absolute immunity for criminal prosecution for actions within their conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. They are entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all their official acts.

This case was based on several controversial actions, such as Trump pressuring Mike Pence to not certify the election, his phone call to get the 11,780 votes that were missing in Georgia, or Giuliani and the "wackpack" trying to fake electorates to overturn the election. Trump argued that he should be immune from prosecution for acts committed while he was president. SCOTUS ruled 6-3 along party lines that former presidents can't face prosecution for actions related to the core powers of their office and that all official acts receive at least a broad presumption of immunity. Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential Power entitles former presidents to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within their conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. They are entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all their official acts.

However, there is no immunity for unofficial acts that would be outside the duty of the President. Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that the decision doesn't necessarily mean presidents are above the law. Under the new ruling, criminal law can't be applied to presidents even if they misuse their office for personal gain. For instance, if the president orders the Navy SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, he is now insulated from criminal prosecution. The president is now a king above the law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

The question now is, whether Trump's conduct was private or related to his official duty. When Trump pressured Pence to not certify the election, was that official business of being president or not? Or when he called Georgia and said, "Hey, can you find me 11,000 votes?" Was that an official duty or was it outside his duty?

Trump has already cited the immunity ruling in requesting a New York judge throw out his conviction in the hush money case. I do think the president needs immunity, obviously, for conducting business; however, if they step outside the lines, they should not have immunity. When he told Mike Pence to not certify the election, he was obviously not doing that as part of his duty as president. When he called Georgia to get the 11,000 votes, he was not doing that.

What do you think of SCOTUS' hypothetical of using SEAL Team 6 to kill a political rival? Do you think that he would be immune from prosecution for that? No, that seems a little bit hysterical. The example that I gave you guys in the group chat is, like, look at the whole Iran-Contra affair. How complicated was that? Can any of us really understand what all of the interplay was? When Ronald Reagan decides to work around a weapons embargo, sell weapons to Iran, take money, funnel it, and fund the Contras— in the middle of all of that, there was a huge cocaine trade that was kind of enabled or supported.

Presidents get broad immunity for official acts, but personal acts? No way! ⚖️👔

I think there's just so much we don't know about what it takes to be the president of the United States. For example, look at the whole Iran-Contra affair. How complicated was that? Can any of us really understand what all of the interplay was when Ronald Reagan decided to work around a weapons embargo, sell weapons to Iran, take money, funnel it, and fund the Contras? And in the middle of all that, there was a huge cocaine trade that was kind of enabled or supported. I think there's just a lot of latitude that you give to the one person you elect to be president. After all, we are electing one person; we cannot be electing five or six people. We're not electing a shadow cabinet, we're electing one person.

I think this was an easy decision. Basically, all the majority did was codify explicitly what has long been presumed: that presidents enjoy broad immunity for official acts that they undertake in the exercise of their constitutional authority and the duties of their office. It was established decades ago that presidents enjoy broad immunity from civil lawsuits. The Supreme Court, I think, had never ruled on criminal immunity because they never had to—no former president had ever been subjected to the type of lawfare that's been deployed against Trump.

In his ruling, Roberts said that the key thing is that the dissent's position in the end boils down to ignoring the Constitution's separation of powers and the Court's precedent, and instead fearmongers on the basis of extreme hypotheticals. If you don't give presidents immunity, then the next president is going to prosecute the old president, and future presidents will be hamstrung in doing this very important job.

The steel man on the other side would be Trump doing things like calling Georgia and asking to find votes or pressuring the vice president to overturn the election results after 60 failed legal cases. Here, the distinction between acting in their executive capacity as President of the United States versus their personal capacity as an individual candidate or an individual that could benefit through some other means is a really good distinction. How the courts ultimately adjudicate that distinction is what's still ahead. Does interfering in the election constitute one's role as an executive overseeing the federal election process, or does it constitute one's personal benefits that may arise if one is individually elected? That’s the key determinant that the lower court will likely have to make.

To be clear, how the courts ultimately adjudicate that distinction is what's still ahead. I do think that the clarity of that distinction is critical. Does interfering in the election constitute one's role as an executive overseeing the federal election process, or does it constitute one's personal benefits that may arise if one is individually elected? That the lower court will likely have to make. I think that what you just described there is what's known as a question of fact in the legal system.

The Supreme Court has given us a doctrine. They've said that when the president acts within his exclusive constitutional authority, he gets broad immunity. When he does an official duty, he gets presumptive immunity, meaning that the prosecutor can still go after him—they just have to rebut the presumption. When he engages in a personal act, there's no immunity. If Jack Smith wants to continue this prosecution of Trump, he's going to have to make the argument that Trump's acts were either personal or were part of his duties, but he's going to have to rebut the presumption. This is a useful doctrine that the presidency now needs in light of the reality of lawfare.

I could see President Trump and his lawyers saying, "Hey, very simple. We think there was election interference, so yeah, we called Georgia to make sure that those 11,000 votes were there. And hey, we thought this was not a fair election, so I was acting in my duty when I told Pence not to certify the election." This forces a prosecutor to have a really strong point of view and have evidence and then go after somebody. You have to look past the exigencies of the current moment. This ruling is about past presidents and future presidents. This is for forever—the most powerful person in the world. We need to make sure we're picking one person, and that person is capable of doing the job, competent and capable of doing the job.

We'll determine in the coming months or years with this case whether he was acting in his duty or not. Between this ruling and another case called Fiser v. US, which is the January 6 obstruction case, where the Supreme Court in a 6-3 majority found that Sarbanes-Oxley was being misused to create a new crime called obstructing an official proceeding. Jack Smith should just resign. It's pretty clear that the Supreme Court has kicked the legs out from under his case. By the way, Ketanji Brown Jackson supported that decision. This is not a hyper-partisan Court; they just ruled that Sarbanes-Oxley was being misused.

Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=kOeARghNIaY