The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1042: Leah Litman and Andrew Egger: Grievance All the Way Down
Wed, 14 May 2025
The five men on the Supreme Court are so easily triggered and seem to be making law based on their emotional needs. Meanwhile, they also see discrimination in some of the best things about America—like equality or the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. And at the White House, the press office got totally bored with the worshipful questions from MAGA media and invited The Bulwark's Andrew Egger over—so Karoline Leavitt could mix it up with a reporter who'd definitely ask tough questions. Plus, Trump's crypto grift reaches new heights, Gorsuch is oddly obsessed with the EPA, and the toadies are getting whipsawed by the constant tariff adjustments. Leah Litman and Andrew Egger join Tim Miller. show notes Leah's book, "Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes" Leah's "Strict Scrutiny" podcast Tuesday's "Morning Shots" newsletter
Chapter 1: Who are the guests on this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a doubleheader today in segment two. My colleague, Andrew Egger, fresh off his star turn in the Trump White House briefing room, comes in to tell us how weird that was. But first, she's a professor of law at the University of Michigan, second straight University of Michigan guest. Hail to the victors.
She's also co-
Go Blue. She's also co-host of the podcast Strict Scrutiny. She clerked for Anthony Kennedy, and she's the author of a brand new book, Lawless, How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. It's Leah Lippman. What's going on, girl?
You know, same old, same old. Everything is amazing. World is looking great.
Yeah. Who's got it better than us?
Right. Exactly. Thanks, Jim Harbaugh. No.
That's my sport reference for the day for you. Okay, I want to do book stuff and refresh my old Federalist Society originalist muscles from my Republican days on the back half of this. But first, just because there is so much going on, I've had several people pitching me about wanting to have me come on the pod to talk about upcoming Supreme Court cases. And I'm just like, y'all.
Talk to me at the end of May. There's too much shit going on daily, day to day, until I get into what's coming on the Supreme Court docket. But I figured this would be a good chance to just get a little overview with you of the big cases coming up that we'll obviously be digging into deeper as the rulings are coming down. So, I mean, I just glanced at this morning.
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Chapter 2: What Supreme Court cases are currently significant?
We got gender care for minors, gay kids, books ban, Alien Enemies Act, Abrego Garcia. What jumps out to you?
Chapter 3: How does the Supreme Court view gender-affirming care and LGBTQ issues?
Yeah, so I definitely think the Trump administration is doing the Supreme Court a real solid just by drowning out coverage of what they might be up to because the court has a bunch of big cases on their docket. So there's the gender-affirming care ban that you noted, United States v. Scrimeti. That's about whether laws that ban gender-affirming care trigger violence.
heightened scrutiny, whether courts have to look closely at them or whether courts are just going to basically sign off on them. That could obviously have a ton of implications for a Republican-controlled Congress adopting a federal ban on gender-affirming care or on the constitutionality.
For minors? Just for minors?
No, even for adults. Because if the Supreme Court says laws that ban gender-affirming care don't discriminate on the basis of sex... and don't discriminate on the basis of gender identity, then laws that restrict that care for adults would also get super deferential review. So yeah, that case could be hugely significant. And then they have the religion in schools cases.
So, there's the LGBTQ book case that you mentioned about whether parents can challenge a school district's decision to have storybooks with LGBT characters in them because that apparently triggers Sam Alito as well as other religious and social conservatives.
Mrs. Alito, for sure. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. And also apparently Neil Gorsuch, who read Pride Puppy and had an utter fucking meltdown. So he looked at this book, which is a puppy at a- Okay. Okay.
I'm glancing at some of the pictures now. Oh, there is. The puppy has a little neckerchief. The neckerchiefs are popular with the gays, so that's not surprising. Yeah, I'm not seeing any bondage here, but I'm just kind of glancing. So, wow. Okay.
Yeah. So there's that one. There's also a case about whether states have to create religious public charter schools. You heard that right? Whether states are required to create- Required to? Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How do federal policies impact Supreme Court decisions?
Like, what do you make of what we've seen so far this year as far as these kind of shadow docket cases?
Yeah, I think thus far, honestly, the Supreme Court has tried to avoid any big rulings and tried to defer saying anything that big about the Trump administration. Yes, Justice Barrett has occasionally joined with the Democratic appointees and Chief Justice Roberts on some matters. But even when the court has ruled against the Trump administration, they've given the administration authority.
some wins and some wiggle room to work with, like in the Abrego-Garcia order, or even in the United States Agency for International Development case. They waited to release their ruling until after the government was under obligations to actually pay out the funds. So they have ruled against the Trump administration sometimes, but avoided doing so in pretty pointed or harsh ways.
The other big kind of policy legal cases that are coming up as far as active Trump policies is the trade case. I guess yesterday, this is outside of the Supreme Court wheelhouse. There was a three-judge panel in the Court of International Trade that held the first some oral arguments on the cases challenging the legal basis for Trump's administration's tariff framework.
I guess there are at least seven of these cases out there trying to nullify Trump's tariffs. What do you make of that? Like whether that is... something that like might possibly happen or, you know, what, what do you think of the merits of the trade cases?
Yeah, so it's a tough case because presidents have been granted, you know, substantial powers under the Economic Emergency Powers Act, as well as over foreign trade and tariffs more generally.
And so I think the courts at that hearing were very nervous about trying to second guess the president's determinations about whether there was an unusual and extraordinary threat, even though Donald Trump's claims for why there is are just insane. Like the trade deficit has existed for a really long time. That's neither unusual nor extraordinary.
But the court didn't seem to be comfortable with any kind of rule that the lawyers challenging the tariffs had offered for when courts could say something wasn't actually unusual or extraordinary. And then there are the host of doctrines and rules that the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have come up with, like the major questions doctrine, the idea that
agencies can't do anything that big, you know, under statutes that are generally worded or the non-delegation doctrine, which is supposed to limit the extent to which Congress can confer authority to make regulations on non-legislative entities. The problem is the Republican justices have basically created these rules that gerrymandered in exceptions for the things Republicans wanted to do.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of the Federalist Society in judicial appointments?
All right, I want to get into the substance of the crypto conversation in a second. But like, that was weird. That was pretty weird, huh? Like, what's it like in there? Did it feel culty? What was the vibe like?
To be honest, I had no idea what to expect when they reached out to me. They were like, just kind of called me out of the blue. Hey, you know, come be in the new media seat at the White House. I was like, are they, is this going to be some kind of shaming ritual?
Is this like they've been kind of mad that the bulwark's been getting some attention and they're going to bring me up here and shove me into a van? You know, these are the kind of the paranoid thoughts going through my brain. They played it very strange.
She's going to swirl you. They're going to bring out a toilet and swirl you. Exactly.
Put video testimonials from ex-girlfriends up on the screen in the briefing room. I don't know. They played it extremely straight. They asked me for a bio. They read it. They said nice things about our subscriber numbers, which thanks to all of you subscribers for giving us nice subscriber numbers to read. They gave me the first two questions at the briefing. It's been a weird assortment of people.
It's one of these initiatives. Obviously, the things that have made headlines have been, The just unbelievably mealy mouthed and sort of worshipful questions that they've gotten from some of the more like influencer types that they've let into that seat. But it's been a weird spread.
You know, it's been been guys like Tim Pool, but it's also been, you know, a number of just sort of newer media companies like Notice and Semaphore that just asked kind of. probing good questions about the White House. And that's what I tried to do as well. Like I said, they played it perfectly straight. They brought me out there and let me ask my questions. And it was just kind of a sort of
Bizarre experience because it's not super clear what the White House gets out of it. But I guess that it is basically just this. It really is ultimately kind of an FU to the White House Correspondents Association and to the Associated Press, which used to get the first questions at the briefings.
And so, you know, sometimes they're going to give the question that used to be the Associated Presses to to Tim Pool. Sometimes I guess they're going to give it to me. And ultimately, I guess what matters to them is that they aren't actually letting the journalists pick. They're the ones who are who are making the decision.
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Chapter 6: How did historical appointments shape the current court?
So I think the fact that you laid the groundwork on that is important. We have this new story out of the Times this morning I want to read to you. A struggling technology company that has ties to China and relies on TikTok made an unusual announcement this week. It had secured funding to buy as much as 300 million of Trump. The meme coin marketed by Trump...
GD Culture Group is a publicly traded firm with a Chinese subsidiary. It has only eight employees, and it recorded zero revenue last year from an e-commerce business that operates on TikTok. So that feels like that's on the up and up, that they got 300 mil and just decided to put it straight into the coin, a Chinese company with zero revenue. I don't think there's much to see there.
The through line with all of these stories is just how much of a black box it all is, right? I mean, we know just openly that these are things that Donald Trump profits from. He and his associates own 80% of the supply of this coin. Whenever people put more money into it, it pushes up the price and they make money.
And beyond that, you know, there's all kinds of opacity based around, you know, we know this because there's been reporting on this, but a lot of the reporting only serves to highlight how completely untraceable and oblique a lot of this is.
The only reason that we know, for instance, that like the bulk of the major purchases of this coin have come from overseas is because Bloomberg did an investigation to the trading platforms that those purchases were made on, many of which, you know, bar US users from trading on them. And so based on that, they know that they're not here But that's kind of all the further that we know.
These wallets are largely anonymous. Your point about the Qatari plane is a good one. I feel like it's a little bit like what we just saw happen with the China tariffs, where the tariffs were at like 10,000% for a month. And so now that they've come back down to only 30, we're all kind of like, oh, thank God, now they're only 30. Right. But 30% tariffs are still kind of alarmingly large.
And like, yeah, the the Qatari plane does does sort of wash out some of these other financial scandals and some of this other open corruption, because a $400 million plane is just one of those kind of eye poppingly large numbers that like, of course, yeah, it's, you know, nothing really holds a candle to that.
But at the same time, I mean, the Trumps do stand to make millions of dollars off of these various crypto grifts. They get a cut of all these transactions that are happening and they own massive supplies of these coins themselves, these various coins themselves. So it's all very open. It's all very naked.
And as you heard in that clip, I mean, Carolyn Levitt essentially doesn't even try to offer any kind of halfway plausible alternate explanation other than the one that we all know, is the case, which is that he just wants to make a bunch of money and this is an easy way to do it. He thinks it's a deal. He thinks it's a good deal for him.
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Chapter 7: What are the conservative grievances regarding court rulings?
Like, when the tariffs were at 10,000%, you know, two minutes ago, there was a cadre of, let's say, China hawks as well as, like, social media influencers who just want to, like, be mega alpha dogs to overcompensate for their dick size. And so, like, those two groups together, like, were really pushing about how...
This trade war showed that Trump was finally the man that would stand up to China, unlike these other weak establishment politicians. And then he backs off from 10,000% down to 30%. And now the message is not that we're not actually at war with China. We're just trying to get a good deal for us. And how they process that has been kind of interesting.
So how do you kind of divine what is what is happening there? Do any of these people actually have any serious policy beliefs?
Obviously, China hawks exist, right? I mean, there are people out there who have for a long time been clanging a bell about various unfair trade practices from the People's Republic of China, various national security concerns that may be implicated with letting them to do a whole lot of our critical manufacturing, things like that. Those are not like fake concerns.
But the thing that we have seen over the last month is a lot of people kind of putting on those concerns sort of as a skin suit, just as kind of momentary MAGA messaging at the moment when Trump very improvisationally in early April, decided to narrow his tariff focus from the whole world to China, right?
Like April 9, April 10, he pulls down all of the quote-unquote retaliatory tariffs on most of the world that he had slapped into place a week before. And he says, now we're just doing China. Now we're going after China, 135% tariffs on China. And again, from a certain kind of subset of the MAGA world, the response to this is finally, absolutely,
At long last, we are getting serious about this gaping wound that we've been bleeding out from, which is our previous trade relationship with China, this thing where they sell us cheap goods and we economically prosper in the short term. But in the long term, we're destroying our domestic manufacturing base and we're selling our future overseas and all these sorts of things.
And finally, finally, someone's willing to do something about that. Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. He had a clip on CNN that went very viral. He was like, I want 400% tariffs on China.
I love how you just deadpan that. Like, this is the world we're in. Just like, you know, Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, like a key influencer now in our society. If you're a MAGA reality show star, you really do have quite outsized influence now versus, I don't know, 2014. Yeah.
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