[Rush Lindell] You know what nobody wants to say?
[Rush Lindell] June at the Supreme Court is more consequential than any session of Congress this decade.
[Rush Lindell] The 14th Amendment,
[Rush Lindell] the Second Amendment,
[Rush Lindell] Title IX,
[Rush Lindell] presidential firing power,
[Rush Lindell] all of it dropping before summer recess.
[Reagan] CBS News has been tracking the term's remaining cases,
[Reagan] and the scope is genuinely striking:
[Reagan] birthright citizenship,
[Reagan] transgender athlete bans,
[Reagan] gun rights for drug users,
[Reagan] the independence of federal agencies.
[Rush Lindell] Twenty-three cases,
[Rush Lindell] all of it due before these nine people pack up and go on vacation.
[Reagan] And the term was already a blockbuster before today:
[Reagan] the court struck down Trump's tariffs,
[Reagan] weakened the Voting Rights Act.
[Reagan] This is the encore.
[Rush Lindell] And here's what gets me:
[Rush Lindell] the rulings still on the table aren't procedural housekeeping; they're the ones that reshape the country.
[Rush Lindell] Trump versus Barbara on birthright citizenship.
[Rush Lindell] The trans athlete.
[Rush Lindell] Fleet bands out of West Virginia and Idaho.
[Rush Lindell] A Second Amendment case the NRA and the ACLU somehow ended up on the same side of.
[Reagan] That last one deserves more than a sentence.
[Rush Lindell] Oh,
[Rush Lindell] it's getting a whole segment,
[Rush Lindell] trust me.
[Reagan] And on the executive power side,
[Reagan] Trump v.
[Reagan] Slaughter goes after a 1935 precedent that's protected independent agency heads from getting fired by the president.
[Reagan] If the court guts it,
[Reagan] that touches the FTC,
[Reagan] the NLRB,
[Reagan] the FCC.
[Rush Lindell] And possibly the Fed,
[Rush Lindell] which is where it gets genuinely interesting.
[Reagan] That's the fault line we'll walk through.
[Rush Lindell] Plus,
[Rush Lindell] and I'm not going to oversell this,
[Rush Lindell] we close with a mock nickname draft for all nine justices based on their oral argument performances this term.
[Reagan] You'll oversell it.
[Rush Lindell] Probably.
[Rush Lindell] First up,
[Rush Lindell] the Fourteenth Amendment and what a hundred and twenty eight years of precedent may or may not survive.
[Rush Lindell] Before we dive in, a quick reminder.
[Rush Lindell] We love hearing from you. If you have questions or topics you'd like us to cover,
[Rush Lindell] head to the link in the description and submit your question.
[Rush Lindell] We read every single one.
[Rush Lindell] All right,
[Rush Lindell] here's what's going on right now,
[Rush Lindell] and I want you to listen closely.
[Rush Lindell] Twenty-three cases,
[Rush Lindell] that's what's sitting on the Supreme Court's docket before these justices pack up for the summer.
[Rush Lindell] Twenty-three,
[Rush Lindell] and they've got to get through all of them by late June, maybe early July.
[Reagan] And these aren't routine cases.
[Reagan] CBS News ran through the list.
[Reagan] Birthright citizenship,
[Reagan] transgender athlete bans,
[Reagan] gun rights,
[Reagan] presidential firing power.
[Reagan] The 14th Amendment,
[Reagan] the Second Amendment,
[Reagan] Title IX,
[Reagan] all in the same month.
[Rush Lindell] Just a light docket,
[Rush Lindell] nothing major.
[Rush Lindell] NPR confirmed 23 cases left out of 58 argued this term.
[Rush Lindell] The court already took down Trump's tariffs.
[Rush Lindell] already weakened the Voting Rights Act,
[Rush Lindell] and they're not done.
[Reagan] That's the part people aren't fully tracking — the blockbusters that already landed,
[Reagan] those are the warm-up.
[Rush Lindell] Right — and here's what gets me.
[Rush Lindell] This isn't a normal end-of-term sprint.
[Rush Lindell] Every major case left has Trump's fingerprints on it.
[Rush Lindell] Every.
[Rush Lindell] Single.
[Rush Lindell] One.
[Reagan] Mm-hmm.
[Rush Lindell] You've got the president's ability to fire Fed governors.
[Rush Lindell] You've got his executive order rewriting...
[Rush Lindell] Hitting birthright citizenship,
[Rush Lindell] you've got state trans-athlete bans his administration is backing.
[Reagan] U.S. news pointed out several of these decisions could upend election processes heading into the midterms, so the stakes aren't just constitutional,
[Reagan] they're immediate.
[Rush Lindell] And whatever comes down stays down.
[Rush Lindell] That's the thing about Supreme Court rulings.
[Rush Lindell] There's no press conference,
[Rush Lindell] no walk back,
[Rush Lindell] no,
[Rush Lindell] the president didn't mean it that way.
[Reagan] Right.
[Rush Lindell] Five votes and it's settled law.
[Reagan] Which is why conservatives either bank a generational win in the next few weeks or they watch this court punt on the things that matter most.
[Rush Lindell] Yeah,
[Rush Lindell] and punting has consequences,
[Rush Lindell] too.
[Rush Lindell] The culture war conversation heading into summer gets rewritten either way.
[Reagan] Either way,
[Reagan] the country gets an answer.
[Rush Lindell] So here's the question I want you sitting with when the Court takes up a century old understanding of who gets to be an American.
[Rush Lindell] American, how far are five justices willing to go?
[Rush Lindell] All right.
[Rush Lindell] Birthright citizenship.
[Rush Lindell] Executive Order 14160,
[Rush Lindell] Day 1 of Trump's second term.
[Rush Lindell] The order says children born here to parents who were in the country illegally or on temporary visas no longer get automatic citizenship.
[Rush Lindell] Every court that's seen it has blocked it. Every single one.
[Speaker 3] And the Library of Congress analysis makes clear why:
[Speaker 3] the government is fighting a one hundred twenty eight year old Supreme Court precedent,
[Speaker 3] United States v.
[Speaker 3] Wong Kim Ark (eighteen ninety eight), born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who couldn't naturalize.
[Speaker 3] Court said he was a citizen,
[Speaker 3] full stop.
[Rush Lindell] That case is the wall; and you know what nobody wants to say out loud:
[Rush Lindell] the government has to convince five justices to read Wong Kim Ark differently than nearly every court has for over a century.
[Rush Lindell] That's the ask.
[Speaker 3] The hinge is "subject to the jurisdiction thereof."
[Speaker 3] The Government's argument is that parental immigration status determines whether a child falls under that phrase.
[Speaker 3] It's a narrow,
[Speaker 3] originalist reading,
[Speaker 3] but the oral argument signals did not go their way.
[Rush Lindell] Trump flew up and sat in that court room on April first for over an hour.
[Speaker 3] Wow!
[Rush Lindell] April Fool's Day!
[Rush Lindell] I'm not editorializing—that's just the date.
[Speaker 3] The skepticism from the justices,
[Speaker 3] including Trump appointees,
[Speaker 3] was pretty hard to miss.
[Speaker 3] A ruling is expected by late June or early July.
[Rush Lindell] Here's my read:
[Rush Lindell] If the court upholds this order,
[Rush Lindell] even on narrow statutory grounds,
[Rush Lindell] it's the biggest immigration ruling in a century.
[Rush Lindell] Two hundred fifty thousand U.S.-born children a year are affected by this question.
[Rush Lindell] Now,
[Speaker 3]
[Speaker 3] here's where I push back,
[Speaker 3] not on the policy debate,
[Speaker 3] but on the mechanism:
[Speaker 3] an executive order rewriting a constitutional clause is a significant ask; if Congress wants to define subject to the jurisdiction differently,
[Speaker 3] that's a legitimate fight,
[Speaker 3] but five justices doing it through an EO feels like a shortcut that creates its own problems.
[Rush Lindell] I hear that; the legal path is messy,
[Rush Lindell] and the ruling hasn't dropped yet.
[Rush Lindell] We're waiting.
[Rush Lindell] But the Fourteenth Amendment is the thread running through this whole term.
[Rush Lindell] Citizenship clause here,
[Rush Lindell] Equal Protection clause next,
[Rush Lindell] because the trans athlete cases rest
[Speaker 4] on it.
[Rush Lindell] Just on that same amendment.
[Rush Lindell] Same amendment,
[Rush Lindell] different battle ground.
[Rush Lindell] These two cases,
[Rush Lindell] West Virginia vs. BPJ and Little vs. Hecox,
[Rush Lindell] hit the court January thirteenth,
[Rush Lindell] trans athlete bans,
[Rush Lindell] and SCOTUSblog reported the conservative majority looked ready to uphold them.
[Reagan] That reading is pretty well supported.
[Reagan] The question at oral arguments wasn't really whether the bans survive,
[Reagan] it's how broadly the court writes the ruling.
[Rush Lindell] And that is where I want my victory lap,
[Rush Lindell] Reagan.
[Rush Lindell] Nearly 30 states have these laws on the books.
[Rush Lindell] A clean ruling validates all of them at once.
[Reagan] Okay, hold on, because the Idaho case has a wrinkle worth flagging. Lindsey Hecox's actually tried to voluntarily dismiss her case.
[Reagan] The district court said no,
[Reagan] but that mootness question doesn't just disappear.
[Rush Lindell] So the court might sidestep Idaho entirely?
[Reagan] Possibly. West Virginia may be the only ruling we actually get.
[Reagan] Yet which matters because the two laws are written differently.
[Rush Lindell] They couldn't just let us have the clean sweep.
[Reagan] Rush.
[Rush Lindell] I know,
[Rush Lindell] the law is complicated-fine.
[Reagan] But here's what conservatives should actually want precision on:
[Reagan] both cases hinge on equal protection under the Fourteenth,
[Reagan] the same clause we just finished unpacking on birthright,
[Reagan] a sweeping ruling that defines sex categorically.
[Reagan] could generate precedent that travels well beyond athletics.
[Rush Lindell] You're saying win the battle,
[Rush Lindell] lose the
[Reagan] The broader equal protection war,
[Reagan] potentially,
[Reagan] yes.
[Reagan] The justices who seemed skeptical of a sweeping decision weren't all on the left; even Gorsuch questioned where the line is.
[Rush Lindell] Gorsuch?
[Reagan] Right.
[Reagan] CBS News flagged this,
[Reagan] too.
[Reagan] The term isn't just about one culture war headline,
[Reagan] the structural implications of how the court writes this opinion
[Reagan] And matter as much as the outcome.
[Rush Lindell] So Reagan says win,
[Rush Lindell] but read the fine print.
[Reagan] I'd take the W. I just want to understand what we actually won.
[Rush Lindell] Fair enough,
[Rush Lindell] and speaking of coalitions that make zero sense,
[Rush Lindell] wait until you hear who's on the same side in the next case,
[Rush Lindell] the NRA,
[Rush Lindell] the ACLU,
[Rush Lindell] together.
[Rush Lindell] I am not making that up.
[Rush Lindell] Okay,
[Rush Lindell] weed,
[Rush Lindell] guns,
[Rush Lindell] and the most unlikely coalition in Washington
[Reagan] I genuinely love this one.
[Rush Lindell] So here's the setup.
[Rush Lindell] A Texas man,
[Rush Lindell] Ali Hemani,
[Rush Lindell] FBI searches his home.
[Rush Lindell] They find a Glock 19,
[Rush Lindell] roughly 60 grams of marijuana,
[Rush Lindell] and some cocaine.
[Reagan] Wow.
[Rush Lindell] Federal law says drug users can't own guns.
[Rush Lindell] Felony charge.
[Rush Lindell] The Fifth Circuit throws the whole thing out.
[Rush Lindell] Unconstitutional.
[Reagan] And that law,
[Reagan] 18 U.S.C. 922(g).
[Reagan] (g) is the same statute that got Hunter Biden convicted.
[Rush Lindell] Same exact law.
[Rush Lindell] And you know who's now defending it before the Supreme Court?
[Rush Lindell] The Trump DOJ.
[Rush Lindell] You cannot make this up.
[Reagan] Seriously.
[Rush Lindell] The NRA hates this law.
[Rush Lindell] The ACLU hates this law.
[Rush Lindell] And the Trump administration is standing up there arguing to keep it.
[Reagan] To be fair, the Second Amendment principle here is real.
[Reagan] Still,
[Reagan] separate from the comedy,
[Reagan] the ACLU's argument is that unlawful user is so vague it invites discriminatory enforcement,
[Reagan] and they're right about that.
[Rush Lindell] Oh, I agree,
[Rush Lindell] the principle is solid; I just enjoy the image of the NRA and ACLU filing briefs on the same side.
[Rush Lindell] That doesn't happen.
[Reagan] According to reporting from the Trace,
[Reagan] several justices at oral arguments in March seemed skeptical the ban even clears constitutional review.
[Reagan] you, especially for marijuana users.
[Rush Lindell] So the court appears ready to side with Hemani,
[Rush Lindell] maybe on narrow grounds.
[Rush Lindell] Maybe they rule he wasn't proven dangerous.
[Rush Lindell] But the bigger question is how far they go.
[Reagan] Right, because if they strike it down broadly,
[Reagan] you're talking about millions of Americans in legal weed states who currently can't own firearms under federal law.
[Rush Lindell] And here's the kicker. Hunter Biden was pardoned before...
[Rush Lindell] For any of this mattered for him; so he skated; the guy who started the conversation walks free and the court might fix the law anyway.
[Reagan] The legal system doing its job just slower than the pardon.
[Rush Lindell] Much slower.
[Rush Lindell] All right,
[Rush Lindell] from one man's Glock to the President's power over an entire bureaucracy,
[Rush Lindell] that's a different kind of firepower.
[Speaker 3] Now from there,
[Speaker 3] presidential power over the bureaucracy.
[Speaker 3] This one doesn't get the headlines, but it might be the most consequential ruling of the entire term.
[Reagan] I'd argue it absolutely is.
[Reagan] So the case is Trump versus Slaughter.
[Reagan] Trump fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Humphreys,
[Reagan] no cause given,
[Reagan] and she sued.
[Reagan] The statute says you can only remove an FTC commissioner for inefficiency,
[Reagan] neglect,
[Reagan] neglect of duty,
[Reagan] or malfeasance,
[Reagan] that protection has been law since nineteen thirty five.
[Speaker 3] Humphrey's Executor, ninety one years old!
[Reagan] Ninety one years,
[Reagan] and the court is now being asked to overrule it outright.
[Reagan] If it does,
[Reagan] the president gains at-will removal power over the FTC,
[Reagan] the NLRB,
[Reagan] the FCC,
[Reagan] the alphabet soup of agencies that have operated independently since the New Deal.
[Speaker 3] Agencies that answer to nobody elected.
[Speaker 3] Nobody voted for the FTC.
[Speaker 3] Nobody chose these commissioners. That's exactly the problem.
[Reagan] Now, here's where I push back slightly.
[Reagan] The independence was the point.
[Reagan] Congress designed it that way deliberately to insulate regulatory decisions from election cycle politics.
[Speaker 3] Sure,
[Speaker 3] and Franklin Roosevelt didn't like it either.
[Speaker 3] The 1935 court slapped him down.
[Speaker 3] But Roberts,
[Speaker 3] Roberts at oral argument.
[Speaker 3] Called Humphrey's Executor, a dry husk of whatever people used to think it was. That's the Chief Justice.
[Reagan] Yeah, that's not subtle signaling.
[Speaker 3] Right.
[Reagan] The court signaled in Slaughter it's likely going Trump's way.
[Reagan] Then comes the harder case,
[Reagan] Trump v.
[Reagan] Cook.
[Speaker 3] The Fed Reserve angle.
[Reagan] Lisa Cook,
[Reagan] Fed governor,
[Reagan] Trump fired her over mortgage fraud allegations,
[Reagan] by the way, via Truth Social,
[Reagan] and the court went cold.
[Reagan] And cold.
[Reagan] Conservative justices who were ready to torch Humphreys and slaughter suddenly got very cautious when the Fed was on the table.
[Speaker 3] Because the Fed is different.
[Speaker 3] The court has already signaled it sees the Fed as uniquely structured.
[Speaker 3] You break Fed independence,
[Speaker 3] markets don't wait for an appeal.
[Reagan] Exactly.
[Reagan] So the court may split the ruling.
[Reagan] Gut Humphreys for the FTC and the NLRB.
[Rush Lindell] I'll be-but carve out the Fed.
[Reagan] Which means we could get one ruling that reshapes eighty years of administrative law and leaves the most consequential question half answered.
[Rush Lindell] The most consequential case of the term,
[Rush Lindell] and half the country has never heard either name in it?
[Reagan] And speaking of names,
[Reagan] we've got nine justices who've been asking questions all term long.
[Reagan] I've been taking notes.
[Reagan] I have thoughts.
[Rush Lindell] Oh no
[Reagan] Oh, yes,
[Reagan] we'll get into those next.
[Reagan] All right-I've been taking notes all term,
[Reagan] nine justices,
[Reagan] every argument,
[Reagan] and I've got nicknames for all of them.
[Rush Lindell] This is going to go well.
[Reagan] All right,
[Reagan] Roberts first-Chief Justice John Roberts-I'm calling him Serenity now,
[Reagan] because he makes that face every time a colleague goes three minutes over on a question nobody asked.
[Rush Lindell] So does SCOTUSblog actually described that face.
[Rush Lindell] That's real.
[Reagan] It's documented.
[Reagan] Next,
[Reagan] Clarence Thomas barely speaks during argument-maybe seven thousand words all term,
[Reagan] seven thousand-I'm calling him Silent but Deadly.
[Rush Lindell] Mmm,
[Rush Lindell] accurate.
[Reagan] Gorsuch:
[Reagan] He raised his voice at a veteran appellate attorney this term for mischaracterizing the other side:
[Reagan] "I'm calling him 'the Referee.'
[Rush Lindell] He does have that energy.
[Reagan] Kavanaugh:
[Reagan] chatty,
[Reagan] friendly,
[Reagan] always checking on the lawyers.
[Reagan] Flight Attendant:
[Reagan] Is there anything else I can get you?
[Rush Lindell] Stop!
[Reagan] Barrett:
[Reagan] Sharp,
[Reagan] fast,
[Reagan] does not wait for you to finish The Guillotine.
[Rush Lindell] That one I'll allow.
[Reagan] Now the liberal side—Sotomayor,
[Reagan] Kagan and Jackson—the three of them spend oral argument trying to minimize losses—they're not winning cases this term,
[Reagan] they're negotiating the size of the defeat—I'm calling them,
[Reagan] and I'm proud of this,
[Reagan] the Loss Mitigation Team.
[Rush Lindell] That's actually not wrong.
[Reagan] Jackson talks the most out of any justice on the bench,
[Rush Lindell] Wow.
[Reagan] by a mile,
[Reagan] so she's Overtime.
[Reagan] Sotomayor is the Dissent Factory.
[Reagan] Kagan is the... I
[Rush Lindell] The smart one.
[Reagan] was going to say the strategist, but...
[Rush Lindell] She's the one the other two are waiting on to write the dissent that'll age well.
[Rush Lindell] That's not a nickname.
[Rush Lindell] That's actually her job.
[Reagan] Yeah,
[Reagan] that one landed.
[Rush Lindell] You had eight good ones.
[Rush Lindell] I'll take it.
[Reagan] All right,
[Reagan] Reagan's taken the wheel,
[Reagan] so here's the cheat sheet:
[Reagan] the Court drops rulings any day between now and the end of June.
[Reagan] No announcements in advance; you wake up Thursday morning and it's there or it isn't, and then maybe it's early July.
[Reagan] U.S. news reported the justices have pushed major rulings into July in recent years.
[Rush Lindell] So what does a conservative win actually look like when these land?
[Reagan] Great question.
[Reagan] Let me tell you what it does not look like.
[Reagan] It does not look like a five-word headline that says,
[Reagan] Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship. That tells you nothing.
[Reagan] You need to know, did they rule on the merits of the Fourteenth Amendment,
[Reagan] or did they just block the executive order on procedural grounds?
[Reagan] Those are completely different outcomes with completely different consequences two years from now.
[Rush Lindell] That's the honest caveat here,
[Rush Lindell] Rush: a narrow ruling?
[Rush Lindell] one that dodges the constitutional question can actually create more legal uncertainty than a clean loss would.
[Rush Lindell] If the Court punts on Birthright Citizenship,
[Rush Lindell] that fight doesn't end,
[Rush Lindell] it just migrates back down to the lower courts and takes another decade to resolve.
[Reagan] Same with the trans athlete cases.
[Reagan] If Idaho gets tossed on mootness, which we talked about,
[Reagan] West Virginia controls.
[Reagan] But how broadly did they write it?
[Reagan] Did it,
[Reagan] did they touch Equal Protection or did they keep it narrow to Title IX?
[Reagan] That's the sentence in the ruling that actually matters.
[Rush Lindell] And the Humphreys Executor case-if Roberts writes a carve out for the Fed and torches everything else,
[Rush Lindell] the headline will say "Court Expands Presidential Power." But the real question is where the carve out ends.
[Rush Lindell] That line gets litigated for the next twenty years.
[Reagan] So here's what I want you to do.
[Reagan] When these rulings drop,
[Reagan] skip the chyron,
[Reagan] find the actual holding,
[Reagan] ask did the majority rule on the constitutional question,
[Reagan] or did they find a narrower exit that one sentence tells you everything.
[Rush Lindell] Read past page one.
[Reagan] Read past page one.
[Reagan] That's it.
[Reagan] The Court doesn't owe you a clean answer,
[Reagan] but you owe the real one.
[Reagan] Go find it.
[Reagan] All right,
[Reagan] that's the show—Twenty-three cases,
[Reagan] four constitutional battlegrounds, and one very uncomfortable nickname draft.
[Rush Lindell] For the record,
[Rush Lindell] the nickname draft was entirely Rush's idea.
[Reagan] Guilty.
[Reagan] Look,
[Reagan] the bottom line today is this.
[Reagan] The rulings dropping out of this court in the next few weeks aren't abstract.
[Reagan] They land on real people,
[Reagan] real policy,
[Reagan] and real elections.
[Rush Lindell] That's the frame I'd carry out of this episode.
[Rush Lindell] Whether it's birthright citizenship,
[Rush Lindell] the trans athlete bans, or what happens to independent agency heads,
[Rush Lindell] you've got the tools now to read those opinions when they drop.
[Rush Lindell] Procedural punt versus constitutional decision.
[Rush Lindell] Narrow versus sweeping:
[Reagan] Right.
[Rush Lindell] that distinction matters.
[Reagan] Five votes and it's settled law.
[Reagan] That's not dramatic,
[Reagan] that's just how it works.
[Reagan] So pay attention.
[Rush Lindell] Pay attention and subscribe,
[Rush Lindell] so you don't miss the episode where we actually have answers.
[Reagan] New episodes every weekday.
[Reagan] If you got something out of today,
[Reagan] leave us a five star review,
[Reagan] hit subscribe,
[Reagan] tell a friend.
[Reagan] Reagan,
[Reagan] always a pleasure.
[Rush Lindell] Thanks, Rush.
[Rush Lindell] We'll see you next time.
[Speaker 3] Mm-hmm.