Get to the Point

General intro to the podcast, and how the U.S. Supreme Court just changed everything.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everybody, this is Anthony Camberiani. It's 2-2-2022, so I figured today was the perfect day to start recording my second podcast. This is a limited series political podcast where I'll have some guests and we're just going to delve into some political issues with a nice free form discussion and see what we have to say. You have a lot of expertise, and we talk about politics quite a bit here and there, so it's generally a good time. So we'll see how it goes. So this is a podcast where I want to have just a limited series of six or eight episodes or thereabouts. And the goal I have here is to concisely cover key issues that are affecting everything in politics. Basically, it's a very big picture-based podcast where I want to really go into things that are most relevant and really at the core of everything. The idea is to lay out what's going on and where things are headed so that you know about it now before it's too late. Now, I'll be talking about some controversial topics. My political position, personally, is just slightly to the left of the center. I'm not inherently allegiant to any given group or party or institution. To me, it's more about being logical and rational and trying to be fair. I'm kind of looking at myself like I'm a judge, and you, the listener, are an appeals court judge. So what I'm doing is laying out a ruling of sorts. It's not final, but my perspective is that it is going to be very well informed. So you, as the appeals court judge, have the opportunity to overturn my ruling if you have a good enough reason and a good enough built-up structure and understanding to do so. Your goal is to find any holes in my arguments and find a better viewpoint than I have. Because my goal is to continually find the holes in my arguments, balance things out, and acknowledge when I've gone too far astray in one direction or another. So I'm laying down the gauntlet for the starting point myself. My goal personally is to become better at this, where I have a better, much more balanced understanding. Obviously, I would like those who I'm talking to in the podcast to gain something from it, to consider some perspectives, and by all means build off of what I have to say rather than building off of less information. I personally spend a lot of time delving into politics nowadays. I listen to a lot of different politics podcasts as my main source of information, but I also talk to various people about them as well. In fact, part of the hope of this podcast is to talk to a couple of my friends who I really enjoy discussing politics with and having some conversations on some of these topics. That's kind of what I'm getting at here with the overall goals for this podcast. So for today's topic, I'm going to start out with something that's extremely controversial, and that is the abortion law ruling in Texas. And some of the thoughts going into this does the end justify the means, and does the fallout, which extends well beyond abortion, justify the means? The way this has played out is very interesting. I'm going to go through the whole process to explain how this all played out to get where we are and how the paradigm has changed and how we're in a situation where the legal system in this country and the way rights work are significantly different than they were before a Supreme Court ruling just within the past few months. So to start out, some stats. What percent of Americans are pro-choice? Uh there are different polls on this, but I was looking at some, and the consensus I seem to get is we're talking about 55 to 60 percent. And the percent of Americans that are pro-life, maybe 40 to 45 percent. That seems to be the consensus there. Then when you look at what percent of Americans want to leave Roe vs. Wade in place, that's about 60%. It tends to be higher than the actual support for pro-choice. The percentage of Americans who actually actively think Roe vs. Wade should be overturned or replaced, therefore, unsurprisingly, is lower than the actual pro-life side, which is about 30%. Now there are a lot of polls on this, and they ask these questions in various ways. So I was trying to get a general feel of it from the polls I was looking at. And it's not an inherently definitive thing, but we're not talking exact numbers, and that's why. And polling is always a little iffy. But I think it's a pretty solid consensus that in the United States at this point in time there are more Democrats than Republicans. That's almost always how we see things. And there are more pro-choice people than there are pro-life people. So given that not every state is comprised of fully like-minded people, obviously, and the abortion matter was highly unresolved in the early 70s, we reached a point on January 22nd, 1973, where the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision where they legalized abortions up to a certain point. So they set a national standard where it was legal across the land. Anyone had a right to an abortion within reason up to quite a ways into the pregnancy. So starting in the late 1970s, some evangelicals and the like build up of a pro-life movement that was in opposition to this. And the political parties pretty solidly consolidated around these pro-life and pro-choice camps. In the 90s, we had another Supreme Court ruling called Planned Parenthood versus Casey. And that one made it so that various states could chip away at abortion rights in various ways. So you get a lot of weird stuff that happened between then and late 2021, where you have states that imposed waiting periods. Like if you say you want to get an abortion, you had to come back later, maybe 24, 48 hours later. Sometimes women were forced to get sonograms before they're allowed to have abortions so that you see what's going on in the womb, and so forth. Also, there were a lot of situations where various restrictions and regulations were placed on abortion clinics in order to make it more difficult for abortions to take place. So the pro-life movement was taking a slow calculated stance where they were making it harder to get an abortion. So, to be fair, we've also had a lot of people on the pro-life side who take a helpful stance. The Catholic Church has has an organization where they support pregnant women who initially wanted to have an abortion, but they had reasons that could be compensated for. Like maybe they couldn't afford to have and raise a baby, and that was the issue, but they certainly would have preferred to have the baby. And the Catholic Church does have organizations that help this. And this is a very positive side of the pro-life movement. There is a point of put your money where your mouth is with this type of thing. If you're going to force women to go through all this, you have to take into account that you're putting a significant burden on them, no matter how much you believe you are morally justified in this. And this is a proactive part on the pro-life side to improve the situation, as opposed to a more punitive point, which is what we often see with a lot of these things on the pro-life side. Let's talk about the United States Supreme Court now, how we got here. So Congress originally and over the years was not especially partisan when it came to passing through Supreme Court nominations from either party. I was looking at the numbers throughout all of the Supreme Court nominations, and there were many occasions when there was a unanimous vote, not a hundred to zero, but perhaps ninety-seven to zero or thereabouts in favor of a Supreme Court justice. And certainly these were ones that were nominated by people from either party. You had in the 1980s, uh Antonin Scalia was nominated to the Supreme Court, a very conservative judge, and he he passed through the Senate with a vote of ninety-eight to zero. So you also had people like Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She passed through the Senate with a vote of ninety-six to three, as partisan as she was, as liberal as she was. She was that highly thought of and that highly regarded that almost everyone in the entire Senate was happy to vote for her and pass her through. So there were many occasions where you had that type of situation where it was very nonpartisan. People were on the same page. One justice that we had that is actually still on the court today is Clarence Thomas. And he, back in the early 90s, when he was nominated and confirmed by the Senate, he actually only got through there 52 to 48. He had a situation where it wasn't looking good for him. But he gave a speech that some would say was playing the race card, and that may have made a bit of a difference. So he got through completely legitimately, but it was a 52-48 vote, and at that point that was highly controversial. For perspective, Justice John Roberts was nominated by George W. Bush in his second term, and he got through 78-22. Samuel Alito, another justice nominated by George W. Bush later in that term, got through 58-42, which is relatively partisan. Then you have people like Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan under Obama, who got through 68-31 and 63-37. So as you can see, it was getting a little bit more partisan by then. But when you get to the three justices that are nominated by Trump, you reach a point where the Senate is so incredibly divided that you you just don't get anything over 60 anymore. In fact, now they did have at one point a rule in place where you had to have 60 votes to nominate a Supreme Court justice to get them through. So with the ones nominated by Trump, things were so bitter by that point in time that that Neil Gorsuch, for example, got through 54 to 45. Then you had Brett Kavanaugh, extremely controversial, who got through 50 to 48, which I believe is the narrowest vote by which a Supreme Court justice has ever gotten through. Amy Coney Barrett, for example, as well, was 52-48. So as you can see, it's extremely biased. So there is a significant advantage that Republicans have had in the Supreme Court and in many other ways, where they punch above their weight class. So let's get back to how we got to the situation we're in today. George W. Bush became president after the 2000 election. We know that. Now there was an extremely controversial situation in Florida. Where the vote was so close that it's possible that it wasn't even possible to decide what the outcome actually was. There were a lot of hanging chads and dimpled chads and things like that. And anyone who lived through that and was old enough to remember will remember these types of things. And you're trying to establish the will of the voter, and there's so much subjectivity to it. And in a rather large state, it was a it was an extremely close vote. But you have a point in the presidential nominating process where by December 14th, you have to have things decided because electors are casting their votes, and that needs to be processed through by that time. So we had a point where the Supreme Court in 2000 had to jump in and make a political decision before December 14th. Basically what they did was they said we're just going to stop counting now, and Bush was ahead at that point. But that said the Supreme Court justices voted along party lines, so to speak. If you don't count Florida, Bush had less electoral votes than Gore. And if you go by the popular vote, which obviously is not inherently relevant because the way the system is set up, and campaigns are not run in order to get the popular vote. Campaigns are run in order to win, which they do by getting the electoral vote. Bush had less votes by the popular vote too. So either way, we end up in a situation where the majority isn't actually well represented. So there was a lot of controversy with that. Not enough for people to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2001, but there was a lot of bitterness and there was a lot of controversy. George W. Bush did not end up putting any new justices in during his first term. But when he was reelected in 2004, that was the only time after 1988 where the Republican has actually won the popular vote in a presidential election all the way through to 2020. So he did win the popular vote in 2004. So he did win that, and that is when he was replacing the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. And of course, Chief Justice Rehnquist died then. He nominated John Roberts to replace O'Connor. Rehnquist died as this was going through. So he then renominated Roberts to be the Chief Justice instead, to replace the Chief Justice Rehnquist. And then after that he brought on Harriet Myers and then, of course, Samuel Alito, and then Samuel Alito got through. Roberts actually is a very reasonable, very fair-minded guy. And one thing he really cares about is the reputation of the Supreme Court. He really wants it to be considered a fair, non-political institution. Justice Anthony Kennedy was a lot like that as well. He was often considered the swing vote. My opinion is that sometimes issues just kind of obviously have to go down a certain way. And nowadays we're in a situation where Chief Justice Roberts votes that way. Because certain things, if you really get down to it, are kind of obvious. And if it was an evenly divided court, Roberts was the swing vote. He would just as readily side with the liberals as the conservatives. So in Obama's term, Obama nominated Lena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. With Sonia Sonamayor, they finally got some Latino representation on the court, and then also balanced out the male-female ratio somewhat. So the court was relatively evenly divided, at least enough that people weren't really complaining or too worried about Roe versus Wade for quite a while in there. Then we get to 2016. Antonin Scalia dies in February 2016. So with Obama in office, we're in a situation where Scalia being a Republican justice and a strong factor on the conservative side of the court. You don't want your justice to die or retire while the other side is in power. Because the other side will nominate someone who they prefer. And originally, like I was saying, people didn't think of justices as being politically biased. But nowadays, we definitely operate that way where people think that way. So with Obama in office, this was an excellent opportunity for Democrats to replace a very conservative justice with the liberal one. So Obama, to his credit, actually said, okay, I'm going to try to go more moderate, be nicer about it, because Mitch McConnell's in charge of the Senate. The Republicans control the Senate. So I'm going to nominate this guy Merrick Garland. When you have a situation like that, with as given as partisan as the country had become even by then, and given how much backlash there was against Obama, it was likely that even Mayor Garland wasn't actually going to get all the way through with fifty votes. If the Republicans had 52, 53, something like that, they very well may have all just voted against him. So they could have progressed with the whole thing for a few months and dragged it out and then just voted against him and not gone anywhere. But uh Mitch McConnell actually did something different. He said, We're not even going to start the process. We're not even going to meet with them. He says, What I'm going to do is let the people decide. I'm going to hold on to this next election and not nominate anybody until then. And then hey, we'll see how it goes with this next election. And whoever wins this gets to pick the next guy. I can see how that's an interesting way to approach things because you can motivate a lot of pro-life activists to say, hey, now's our chance. We definitely get a Supreme Court pick in there, another vote for overturning Roberts' Wade. So let's push that in there, and maybe that'll make the difference with getting our guy in there. Motivate pro-life activists towards voting for the Republican in the election. And by that point, it was pretty well converging towards being Donald Trump. Very controversial, very bombastic. So I guess in some ways he needed all the help he could get. It was such a controversial nominee. Going up against Hillary Clinton made it significantly easier because she was not a very well-liked Democrat. So technically, McConnell could have hurt out and shot down multiple nominees throughout the year, but maybe his perspective was if he just kept shooting everything down, he would look too obstructionist, and that might have hurt more than it helped. Anyway, Trump wins the 2016 election. Again, this was not even close on the popular vote. Hillary Clinton had got about two to three million more votes than he did. But Trump won legitimately because he won the electoral votes. So he nominated Neil Gorsuch and got him in right away. Mitch McConnell actually changed the rule of you need 60 votes for a Supreme Court justice down to 50 for that. And then, as I said, he got Gorsuch in with a little bit over 50 votes. Now, this was ultimately kind of a wash because he was replacing Scalia. So even though it seemed very unfair, it still kept the court at the same balance where it was, with the number of votes on the Republican side and on the Democratic side, and vote versus Wade really wasn't in danger at that point. Then in 2018, Justice Kennedy decided he was going to retire. Like I was saying, Justice Kennedy is a swing vote. He's a justice who kind of votes the way things need to go down when they need to go down a certain way. But he retired and he was nominated by a Republican, so perhaps he did have a little bit of favoritism towards the Republicans. So that's where you reach a point where the math issue starts to become a bit perilous. So even though Roberts is a very fair, reasonable guy who can be the swing vote when you need a swing vote, we were at the point where when you replace Kennedy, given that Kennedy was a reliable swing vote, when Roberts had to become the reliable swing vote, we knew that he was rather conservative going in. So people were skeptical if he was really going to be that reliable of a swing vote. So there was a lot of controversy at this point with whoever Donald Trump decided to nominate. One person he was considering nominating at the time was Amy Coney Barrett, and there wasn't a lot that the Democrats would have been able to bring up against her on a personal basis. But what did happen is Trump run this guy, Brett Kavanaugh. And Brett Kavanaugh was very controversial. He's kind of the entitled frat boy type of guy at your uh elite law school who gets a reputation for you know you don't want to be left alone with him if you're a woman. So it wasn't a big surprise that there was a huge backlash when he was nominated. And it was very much a he said, she said, Do you believe women or not? And the pro-life, pro-choice thing, the Roe vs. Wade, will it be overturned or not thing, very much came onto the table at that point. So we reached a point where after 2016, when Trump won, we were like, oh shoot, elections really matter. A lot of people who didn't vote at all were kind of woken up. They're like, oh, we thought Hillary was going to win, everything was going to be business as usual, and it'd be fine. But Trump won. There was a lot of backlash. A lot of people extremely upset about having a black president. A lot of people just don't like Democrats and needed to balance it out. A lot of moderates just were not excited enough about Hillary Clinton. So we reached a situation where in 2018, the fall of 2018, Kavanaugh, in a very controversial vote, did in fact get through and get onto the Supreme Court. And then the Democratic voters came out in droves in the midterm elections in 2018. The House of Representatives is a generally democratic in nature, democratic with a small D institution. You have to be re-elected every two years there. And the states proportionately allocate representatives after the census every ten years, with the idea being that it's supposed to be a very reasonable representation. So if the electorate were to shift significantly, you would see an immediate effect in the House of Representatives in that next election. Now we do have gerrymandering, which offsets it. So that does tend to hurt the representation for the Democrats more than it hurts the Republicans, and it really screws things up. Gerrymandering is one of the roots of all evil. But that said, it works pretty well. And much like after Richard Nixon had to resign the presidency, and there was a huge swing in the House of Representatives towards the Democrats, that happened again in 2018. It was interesting, it was such a strong swing for the Democrats that Texas, a often very reliable Republican state, had a Senate race. Where Senator Ted Cruz was up against Beta O'Rourke. And Beta O'Rourke almost won that seat. For a Democrat to almost beat an incumbent Republican senator in Texas seemed like it would be unheard of. But that's how strong 2018 was for the Democrats. So that's well worth taking note of. There was a lot of backlash after Trump, and there was a lot of backlash that perhaps Kavanaugh had an effect on as well. Democrats were really upset and they really pushed hard. So the Senate compared to the House, it's not really as much of a democratic institution. With the Senate, you get two senators per state, and a state can have a lot of variants compared to other states. California's a state and has a ton of people. Wyoming's a state barely has anybody. So you get a massive disproportionate thing there where there are two senators in California, there are two senators in Wyoming. So it's extremely unbalanced. And as it works out, the Republicans have a huge advantage there where a smaller percentage of the population is represented by a larger percentage of senators in a way that very much favors the Republicans. So Republicans can have control of the Senate without even winning a popular vote in Senate contests overall. Since senators have six-year terms, only about a third of them are up for re-election every two years. Some seats are much safer than others for one party or the other. So what happened in 2018 is that it was what they call a bad calendar for the Democrats. So the Republicans actually gained a little bit of ground in the Senate, even while the Democrats were doing so well in the House races. So the Republicans had control of the Senate and they retained control of the Senate in 2018. So then we get to the last couple months of 2020. Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, who was nominated by Bill Clinton back in the 90s, and as I said, got through with an almost unanimous vote. She dies right near the end of Donald Trump's term. So we're talking weeks, barely months before the election in 2020. And you have Mitch McConnell still in control of the Senate. So Donald Trump is able to put another Supreme Court justice through. He picks Amy Coney Barrett this time, off front runner of the previous time, but a good one for this one. He's nominating a woman still to replace a woman. And here's a situation where Mitch McConnell, who I, in my personal opinion, think that the dictionary definition of the word hypocrite should have a picture of Mitch McConnell included in it. So we ran into a situation where we're right before the election, and Mitch McConnell's like, we're gonna fill this seat. We're gonna rush it through, we're gonna get it through before the election, we're gonna fill it because we've got a Republican Senate and we've got a Republican president, and there's nothing standing in the way, and we've just got to hurry. We're all on the same page here, we can get this through, and now's our chance. Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have retired at a more convenient time. She was in her upper eighties and had a lot of health problems. So had she made it even a few more months, had she survived even a few more months, that would have made a massive difference. But Republicans strategically set up things so their Supreme Court justices retired at times that worked well for them, and Democrats seemed to often hang in there a little too long, perhaps. And this was just kind of a worst-case scenario for Democrats. So Amy Coney Barrett got pushed through very quickly in late 2020, before the election. They rushed through the confirmation process, but they got her through. And there wasn't a lot to complain about with her. She's generally a pretty good person. There was a lot of handmaidstail protests because she is very conservative and she's very pro-life. So it was a it was a difficult situation for Democrats, very much feeling very non-represented. So we then had a situation with the Supreme Court where it had shifted one more to the Republican side, and now it was five for sure Republican votes, conservative votes. Three for sure Democratic votes, liberal votes, and then you have Justice Roberts. So if Justice Roberts says, well, this has to go the Democrats' way, he's still on the losing side, and it's five four for any vote that applies that way. So November 2020, Biden wins the election. Not everyone believes it, but Biden wins the election. And what actually happens is on election day, Georgia gets to a point where nobody gets over 50% of the votes for Senate in either of the Senate races. There's one that is the normal re-election, and there's one where there is a temporary senator that is being replaced. So you actually end up having two Georgia Senate races that happened in that same time, and they both have that situation where they don't quite hit 50%. So with Georgia, they do a runoff between the top two people in that race for any given Senate seat that's open, as they do with other races. So they had a runoff election in January, and at this point, the Democrats knew that if they won both of these, they'd get the Senate up to 50-50. And then when you have a 50-50 Senate, the vice president will come in and will be the tiebreaker vote for any for any vote that comes out 50-50. So if you have a purely, truly partisan vote, which is increasingly common, you bring in Vice President Kamala Harris, and then you have a 51 to 50 vote for whatever the Democrats are trying to push through if they are 100% united on something. So January 5th, Georgia has its runoff election. Both Democrats win, but it's so close that we don't even find out until January 6th. This is January 6th, 2021. And as I'm sure you know, we had a whole bunch of people storming the Capitol while they were trying to certify the presidential election. So we actually found out that the Democrats had retaken the Senate while they were in hiding from these rioters who would come into the Capitol. So that's what the situation was. So Supreme Court extremely unbalanced, with no hope for any swing vote, and the Senate balanced out, the Republicans having lost power, the Democrats having regained power for the House, the Senate, and the Presidency at this point. But the damage is done. So now we come to fall 2021, September 1st specifically, and some time leading up to that. Texas is in a situation where the Republicans have long held it as a solid stronghold. But like I said with the 2018 Senate race, their grip is weakening. Latinos and whites are each about 40% of the population in Texas. Blacks are most of the remaining 20%. There are actually more blacks in Texas than there are in any other single state because it's such a large state population-wise. And in the 2020 election, when Biden beat Trump, Texas was actually considered a swing state. It wasn't likely to go to Biden, and it did in fact go to Trump, but it was enough of a swing state that they that the Biden campaign did campaign there a little bit and advertise there a little bit, I believe, as well. So the Republicans are in a situation in Texas where they see that the formerly majority whites and the Latinos who have a large contingent of Republicans, they're losing ground. There are less whites, there are more Latinos, but even though whites are relatively reliably Republican in Texas, Latinos are more evenly divided. Blacks are very reliably Democratic. So the Republicans are in charge in Texas at this point after the 2020 election. So they realize they're losing ground and they need to pull out all the stops to do something to fire up their base for 2022. So we had a situation where Mississippi, seeing how everything was going with the Supreme Court and realizing that the opportunity had arisen to finally go out to Roe v. Wade, Mississippi has what one would call a reasonable case that was specifically designed to target Roe v. Wade with attempts to change it where stricter abortion law would be in place where an abortion would only be performed up to the 15-week mark. Texas came up with an innovative approach to circumvent abortion rights. Since you can't actually pass a law banning abortion in your state, what they did was they set it up so that any United States citizen is given the right to sue a woman for having an abortion or anyone for helping that woman get an abortion. And they can sue for $10,000. So what happens is any official institution can't really perform these abortions anymore. And I should note that this is for any abortions after about the six-week mark, extremely early in the pregnancy compared to what the average person would tolerate in terms of when an abortion can be performed. Basically, once you can detect a heartbeat, they decide, oh, that's too late, can't have an abortion anymore. And the legislature doesn't actually have to do anything, but the threat of being sued for $10,000 is there. So it indirectly bans abortions by threat of lawsuits. So the Supreme Court actually, of course, gets the chance to weigh in with these types of things before they take effect. So given the entire series of circumstances that got us to where we were, they ruled five to four basically to just say, eh, we're not gonna do anything. All we have to do for this pro-life thing to happen is to not do anything. We're just not gonna stop it. Just let it go, let it do its thing. And I believe it was September 1st. This all came together, and it went through. Abortions became extremely difficult to get in Texas. 80, 85, 90% abortion reduction, something like that. So there was some backlash for that because you can't just not do anything and expect people to uh I believe Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett kind of quote unquote went on tour after that trying to explain that the Supreme Court is not a political institution. And you get laughed out of the room when you try that after a situation like this. So after some backlash like that, they actually heard arguments about it about a month later. A month later is very fast by Supreme Court standards. So they they heard arguments, but what ended up happening is all they actually did was allow a narrow path for who can sue whom. But the law more or less just stays in place. So abortion is still effectively outlawed in Texas. And this is after an official ruling, this is going through. And of course, Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the Democrats on this, but you still had a five-to-four ruling. So here's the situation. Is this good or bad? And does this end justify the means? That's the first issue for judgment up today. Given what they did with this law, is it good or bad? Is it if you are pro-life and you want pro-life outcomes, does this end justify the means? Is this the right way to go about this? If lawmakers in Texas had just been a little more patient, they could have just waited for that Mississippi law to go through. And then get abortions to the sixteen week mark instead of going all out and getting them to the six-week mark. Because the sixteen week mark, while a lot of people would get really upset, is not nearly as dramatic a shift as a six-week mark. So the first issue up for judgment here is that. The second issue built off of it because this is where things get really interesting. When the Supreme Court put in place that ruling on the Texas case, what they actually had to rule on was the so-called vigilante law. Basically, they allowed states to establish laws where private citizens can sue people for ten thousand dollars, perhaps for more, I don't think the amount amount is necessarily specified for whatever the legislature and power in that state doesn't like, even if this is something that was considered to be a fundamental right in the Constitution or by Supreme Court rulings. So in a sense, this ruling nullifies the Supreme Court's own power to set rights that people have and to set up laws according to that. And this is an all or nothing ruling. That's how it works. So if they were to overturn it, you can't just say, well, it's okay if we apply this to abortions, but it's not okay otherwise. No, it has to be there for all or nothing. So this makes the Supreme Court itself kind of irrelevant. They made themselves irrelevant to some degree by doing this. If the Supreme Court has granted you a given right as a citizen of any state in this country, and then your governor and legislature, if they are very far left, very far right, and they're cohesive, they can set up a bounty for any actions that people take that are tied to exercising that right. Governor Gaffin Newson in California realized this and they said, okay, well, let's set this up so that we can apply this to ghost guns. Yeah, we have the Second Amendment where people are allowed to have guns, whatever guns they want, I guess. But hey, we can do this. We can find people for having ghost guns. So why not? What if Massachusetts wants to just ban gun ownership entirely? You're found in possession of a gun, boom, you had to pay $10,000. You know, are you going to be able to have a gun to Massachusetts? So this cuts both ways. This very much cuts both ways. Whatever right you want to try to go after, if you can find a way to set up your population so that people who don't like people exercising this right can sue for $10,000 or million dollars or whatever, you can effectively stop these things from happening. And the Supreme Court has okayed this. It's also worth noting that several other Republican dominated states are planning to do their own versions of the Texas abortion law. So this is happening. This is happening on the abortion law side, this is happening on the ghost gun side, and very well may apply to other areas as well. I heard that this could be applied to Citizens United, which is an appealing prospect. I don't know enough of the legal information to know how that works, but apparently that is the case. So basically this changes everything, and you're going to see the effects of this in the coming months and years. So how does this play out? How does this affect the 2022 midterms? By default, we expect the Republicans to gain ground then. That's generally how these things work. Democrats aren't really doing too well. Thankfully, we don't have any sort of 9-11 thing where people are rallying around the president because of that. But the way things go, they shift certain ways. After someone gets in power, they have to do the actual business of governing, and it's kind of dirty and messy, and people aren't really big fans of any of it. Either party's actual reality. It's the hopes and dreams and possibilities to get you excited about a party. And once reality sets in, a lot of people who are in the middle shift back. But Roe vs. Wade is no longer effective in Texas. And we also have the Mississippi abortion law, which very well could replace Roe v. Wade. Some people will say it's considered to be overturning Roe vs. Wade, but I think a better way of characterizing it is that it's replacing it. And the question is, most Supreme Court rulings a lot of people don't really care a whole lot about, but this is abortion, and this is a big deal, and a lot of people do care a great deal about this. Is this going to affect what we would expect to happen in the 2022 midterm elections? How are these so-called vigilante laws actually going to affect things? How many of them are going to be in place? There are a lot of questions. There are a lot of things up in the air. But my question to you is how do you feel about this? Here are my thoughts. Here's my perspective. Here's how I think this is a big deal. Why I think this is a big deal. My ruling. What's my ruling on all this? My ruling is that the Supreme Court has gone too far and they've made themselves irrelevant, and they have opened Pandora's box. They've released the Kraken. They've really gone all out with this. And they have changed the entire paradigm of the legal system, and this is going to have a huge effect. And I'm curious to see how it plays out. I don't think they should have done it, but we're in no man's land now where things are hyperpartisan. And even with the Democratic general majority in the population, the Republicans have control of the Supreme Court. Decidedly so. Five of them don't have the restraint to be reasonable overall when it comes to very strict abortion laws. So it's an interesting situation, and everything's different. What's your ruling? What do you think? That's it. And I'm out.