Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Can the Courts Stop Trump’s Power Grab? (Feat. Marc Elias)
Fri, 14 Mar 2025
Attorney Marc Elias joins Jessica to break down the biggest legal battles shaping democracy today. From taking on restrictive voting laws to clashing with Elon Musk, Marc has been at the center of the fight for fair elections. We get his take on Trump’s latest power grabs, the Supreme Court’s role in checking executive overreach, and the future of campaign finance. Plus, what happens if a president just ignores a court ruling. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Marc Elias, @marceelias. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Marc Elias and why is he significant in the fight for democracy?
Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlow, and I have a great guest today, attorney Mark Elias. If you care about voting rights, you probably know his name. With his firm Elias Law Group and his platform, Democracy Docket, which I visit constantly, Mark has been at the forefront of legal battles in campaign finance, voting rights, and redistricting law.
Just recently, his firm helped strike down an Arizona law that would have forced voters to show documentary proof of citizenship in presidential elections. And let's not forget, Mark has also been making headlines for his open letter to Elon Musk, firing back after Musk took a swing at him on X. We'll get into all of that, but first, Mark, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan.
I'm a big fan, too. Yay. I wanted to start... With a general question, we're, I don't know what the actual count is, 44 days or something into Trump 2.0.
However many days it is, it feels long.
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Chapter 2: How is Trump attempting to expand executive power and what are the legal implications?
Yeah, I'm very proud of the fact that I don't have any gray hairs yet. And my husband is bracing for impact because he's like, if anything is going to do it, it is going to be Trump again. So what do you think of the first couple of months of the new Trump administration, you know, writ large, but also from the legal perspective, what's been going on and what's really standing out to you?
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, let's go back to last summer when everyone was focused on Project 2025 and Donald Trump said he didn't know anything about Project 2025. Totally ignorant of Project 2025. I believed him at the time when he said he never read it because I don't think he's read 900 pages in his entire life cumulatively.
But it turned out that that was just another in a litany of lies because what we've seen over the course of the first few weeks of the Trump administration has been, frankly, the implementation of much of what was in Project 2025. All the things that Republicans said they were not going to do, he is now doing, right?
Chapter 3: What is Project 2025 and how is it affecting the Trump administration's actions?
And he's trying to do it through decree, through executive order, through bullying, through posting on social media. Interestingly, Jessica, not going to Congress, you know, you wouldn't know that his party actually controls Congress because he's doing it all.
And it's, you know, it is in some sense worse than we expected, but it's more or less, you know, kind of what an aspiring authoritarian would do.
Yeah, it's... I mean, you went right for one of the sore points from an electoral strategist point of view because Project 2025 was resonating with the American electorate. Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaCivita have even talked about it in the aftermath of the election where they said basically we were scared because Project 2025 was permeating. the ether.
People knew about it and it had something like an 83% disapproval rate. I want to talk to you about legal matters, but do you feel like that was a place that Democrats really dropped the ball and we should have continued to hammer away at that? or it was kind of a lost cause.
Look, I think Democrats did hammer away at it. I think the problem is with Donald Trump is that he is able to spew complete and utter lies, which he did, about it. And it sort of put much of the mainstream media in this, on the one hand, on the other hand side. I mean, I'm not saying any individual journalist was in that place, but as a collective, it
It was like, well, there's this terrible thing called Project 2025 and Democrats say this is what's coming. On the other hand, the campaign says they are distancing themselves and, you know, and having nothing to do with it. And so I think it became a hard thing for Democrats to puncture through that wall. But I do think Democrats tried.
I like this more optimistic view or positive view, I guess, of what happened than I might have. I want to get there. So many current events that are relevant to your work. The Trump administration has recently suspended security clearances for Perkins Coie employees, citing the firm's past involvement in commissioning the Steele dossier, despite the fact that you left the firm in 2021.
What do you make of that executive order? Is it purely political retaliation? Is it something that should have a chilling effect on the legal community? How do you see it?
Yeah. So it shouldn't have a chilling effect on the legal community, but it is having a chilling effect on the legal community. And I think that's what Donald Trump had in mind. You point out I was a partner at Perkins Coie for many, many years. I was the general counsel of the Clinton campaign in 2016.
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Chapter 4: Why are large law firms hesitant to oppose Trump's legal maneuvers?
And we know that he targeted other lawyers for removing their security clearances on an individual basis for activity they did. And the question I ask is, you know, I mean, Jessica, you and I, and probably everyone listening to this, we grew up in school reading
the poem by the minister in Nazi Germany who said, they came for the communists and I didn't worry because I wasn't a communist and I didn't speak out. They came for the socialists and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. They came for the Jews and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one. That's roughly it. And we all dutifully condemned
the people who didn't speak out and said, we will never do that again. Never again, right, was the phrase. We all listened and studied the words of Martin Luther King Jr. when he talked about not the terribleness of the white Southern racists, but that the worst... that were being done was by the moderates who were the supposed good people who stayed silent.
So here we are, it's 2025, and I ask, you know, the lawyers out there, why are you staying silent? You know, why aren't you saying, don't come for another law firm without coming for us first?
Well, they're scared, right? And is there no basis to be afraid?
Yeah, but courage doesn't come from not being scared. I'm scared. I'm afraid. I'm sure you're scared. You're afraid. Like, it's okay to be afraid. The question is, what do you do next, right? Do you then cower in fear? Or... Do you do you stand by your convictions? And that's where courage comes from. If you don't have if you don't have fear, you're not courageous.
You're only courageous if you have fear and you're able to act notwithstanding it. And, you know, and let's be honest, a lot of these large law firms, they're not being asked to do a whole lot. I mean, they're making a lot of money. They're quite successful in life. They're not living hand to mouth. Right.
So asking them to stand up for other law firms is not exactly asking them to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
It's a very fair point. I just I see so much less courage as Trump has been in our orbit, you know, year after year. It gets whittled down. I think the confirmation hearings were a big lesson, right, for where the GOP is. And there's been some reporting about the kinds of threats. that senators were suffering from. I'm sure lawyers are getting similar threats in all of this.
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Chapter 5: Can the courts effectively check Trump's power and what challenges do they face?
And that's that little kernel where they say, oh, well, maybe he's got a point.
Yeah. And look, that is, you know, I built a website called Democracy Document.
It's an incredible resource, by the way. I just so appreciative because it keeps a lot of us who are not experts up to date on what's going on. So big thank you.
Yeah. And, you know, the original reason I started it in March of 2020 and the original reason, Jessica, was that I felt like you had the truth of what was happening in voting and in court. And then you had what Donald Trump was saying was happening in voting and in court.
And so one of the features of that site from the very first day of its launch to today is we post all of the court pleadings, the underlying filings, both by the Democratic Party, by the Republican Party, by the states, the AGs, Republican, Democratic, and as well as the outcomes, the decisions by the courts, again, whether they are favorable or unfavorable to voting.
We put it all there because my hope was that even if people didn't trust me, even if Republicans would say, well, Mark Elias is just going to put in his favorable light, I could say, look, here, you can go read what the Republican Party said, right?
When Rudy Giuliani stood up in a federal courtroom in December of 2020 and said he is not claiming there was fraud in Pennsylvania, okay, when he said that in courtroom, I could tell people he said that, but I thought, well, maybe if we just put the transcripts the documents, it would help combat that kind of misinformation.
So I think it is really important to speak not just to people who agree with you, but to try to find ways to provide access to information, even if they don't trust the messenger. At least, you know, here is the information and you can read it for yourself and form your own conclusion.
Yeah, the receipts are incredibly important. The amount of times that I'm reading quotes Of other people like don't take it from me. Right. I'm a partisan messenger. But hear it from a judge or hear it from Rudy Giuliani himself. And I mean, that was obviously the turning point. What happened in the courts that you could give a press conference and say, you know, the sky is blue.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential outcomes if the Trump administration ignores court rulings?
Everyone can see it's a big storm out. Right. And that they're losing. That brings me to what I want to talk about next, which is the courts as a backstop for what the Trump administration is starting to do or attempting to do in these early stages. It seems like they've pretty much held, right, and have been pushing back strongly along these lines.
I've even heard, you know, Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire now. So can you give your assessment of what's going on in terms of the courts being the backstop? And do you think that's really all that we have to depend on for the next four years?
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, our system of government relies on checks and balances. The check that the founders envisioned holding the president in, you know, under the Constitution was Congress. But we have not seen Speaker Johnson or Leader Thune do anything other than You know, hand their power over to the White House.
So so there is no check coming from Republicans who control the gavels in Congress. So it has fallen really to the courts. And, you know, I think you deliver a really important message. I hope people in the audience hear this. The courts are holding, you know, it doesn't feel that way to people in day to day life because it. Judges don't hold press conferences, right? Judges don't.
The federal courts, unfortunately, are not televised. I think it would feel better for two people if they did have televised hearings. But if you read the opinions, if you go to sites like Democracy Talk, but if you read the opinions of what judges are saying, the judges are saying that what Donald Trump is doing is illegal. They are saying that what he's doing is unconstitutional. And they are
Using words that don't sound extraordinary to people who watch politics where vitriol is common, but for judges are quite unusually sharp. I mean, you have federal judges saying things like the president is not a king. I mean, could you imagine a federal judge saying that about Joe Biden or Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Washington? or Bill Clinton or Bush or Reagan. No, no, no.
Like, like this is, this is an extraordinary language that you see out of these courts. So they are holding, I think what we're all waiting on is at some point, one of these judges is going to issue an order and the Trump administration is just going to say, you know what, we can't, we won't comply with that. And then you will have what people refer to as a constitutional crisis.
Oh, something to look forward to. It's only been the first few weeks. We have years left.
Isn't that crazy? Again, I go back to the impending gray hair. It's really going to be the end of my life. We'll take a quick break. Stay with us.
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