repudiate executive action by majority vote. what's significant about this, first of all, is there not a lot of rights provisions about stuff people disagree with. they're mostly structural, but isn't heartening and significant in this polarized time that we are so over policy. but there's this core agreement both about the vitality of the constitution none of the teams wanted to throw it out, but they just wanted to refine and preserve it. and they were actually able to agree on ways of doing that. gives how well, that gives me hope, too. let's give them a big round of applause. thank you. thank you so much. yeah, absolutely. ijudge tatel is an old friend, one of america's most distinguished judges, and is so

well suited to help us cast light on the state of democracy in the judiciary today. neal katyal, one of america's most distinguished supreme court advocates and scholars who also happens to be my brother in law, and now i have to do this. the follow up line, which is we now have a roadshow going around the country called brothers in law. so this is part of that installment, and we're much, very much looking forward to we've enjoyed milking this for all it's worth for a while. a judge, this is a perilous time for the judiciary. mount vernon has just commissioned a poll about americans attitude toward democracy in the judiciary. we may be able to call it up a little bit later, but it suggests a tremendous polarization about the way americans see the courts with at the moment. republicans tending to favorite and democrats less so. also, division about the way americans think the constitution should be interpreted with democrats more than republicans

favoring a living constitution and republicans favoring an originalist approach. can you put this perilous moment in historical perspective? there's certainly been shifts in the judiciary's view of national power versus states rights throughout american history, from the founding to reconstruction to the new deal to today. but what at the moment, we're going to deregulate tery moment on the court, a kind of states rights skepticism of federal power. are we more polarized than we've ever been when it comes to the judiciary, or is this part of a normal historical pattern? well, i'm not a historian, jeff. i'm a federal judge, have been around a long time. and my perspective is based pretty much on my own experience. but i don't have any doubt that that in terms of how the courts function, we're much more the country and the courts

themselves are far more polarized than they were 25 years ago. and you see that in our in our courts. in terms of the increasing large number of ideologically divided, not just supreme court decisions, but decisions of the lower federal courts, where i sit, there's a huge debate going on in the supreme court about some pretty fundamental constitutional questions. you mentioned several of them, the role of the federal administrative state, voting rights, affirmative action, abortion. all of these issues are being debated at the same time. i'm not aware of a time in american history where that's happened at least not in in current american history. and i, i, i, i as a as a as a judge on an even as a as a judge, even on an inferior court. i live with these debates virtually every day.

neal, you've experienced this polarization as an advocate and as a scholar. is this part of a normal pattern or are we unusually polarized at this moment? yeah, no, i think we're in a very abnormal moment right now. if you think back to alexander, because great book, the least dangerous branch to argument of that book, which is in my view, the greatest book in the last century of constitutional law. the argument is that the court husbands its power by not deciding by using what he called the passive virtues, by not doing too much. and here we now have a supreme court that is best described as the yolo court. i mean, you live only once and like you're there doing everything, all the things the judge mentioned, abortion, affirmative action, voting rights, getting rid of chevron guns, you know, the religion. you know, lgbt issues. i mean, they are deciding everything and so one thing is just the scope of what they're

deciding. and the other is some of the substance. i mean, and this is just a descriptive point. people can have different views on roe versus wade. but remember, roe versus wade decided in 1973 by a court that is majority republican appointees, 7 to 2 and written by harry blackman, a republican appointee. and when it looked like roe was under question three justices in 1992, all appointed by republican presidents kennedy, souter and o'connor said, look, you can have disagreements about roe, but if you overrule roe, if we were to overrule roe, it would really damage the legitimacy of the court that roe was woven into the fabric of our society and social expectations have crystallized around it. and so it's no surprise to see the courts, you know, kind of polls and stuff really drop in the wake of the dobbs decision. that's, after all, what justices o'connor, kennedy and souter warned us would happen, that it would make constitutional law look like it's about the

personnel of the court rather than principle. let's talk about some of the areas that you've each identified, beginning with voting rights. judge, you wrote of the shelby county decision involving the constitutionality of the voting rights act, which the supreme court later decided. tell us what you held and what the court held and why you think the court was wrong. so the issue in actually, jeff, i got reversed twice. it was it was it was northwest. austin was the first one. and then shelby county. wow. but we'll just talk of condolences. yeah. so the issue in shelby county was the constitutionality of what are called the pre-clearance provisions of the voting rights act of 1965. the voting rights act of 1965 is generally viewed as probably the most effective civil rights bill ever passed.

and one of its provisions required that certain states, most of them in the south, with histories of discriminating on the basis of race pre-clear all of their voting changes, either with the justice department or a special three judge district court in washington. every note those states could not change their voting procedures without without convincing the justice department or the court that those changes would not have the effect of discriminating against black voters or were not intentionally discriminatory. very powerful statute and its impact on the south was dramatic in terms of the number of by people voting and the number of black elected officials. and this law was sustained by the supreme court in a case called katzenbach south carolina versus katzenbach in that in the late sixties as a as what as

quote, appropriate legislation. that's the language of section two of the 15th amendment section. the 15th amendment, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of voting, gives in section two congress the power to enforce it through appropriate legislation. supreme court ruled in katzenbach that this was appropriate legislation and four or five times since then, the voting rights act has been reenacted by congress. four or five times each time. the supreme court sustained its constitutionality. that is, until shelby county in shelby county. the case came to my court. you know, this this this this section is about interpreting the constitution where i sit on an inferior court. i have a copy of the constitution on my desk, and i use it all the time, but mostly in states with my law clerks and my grandchild.

and when i when i have a constitutional case, i'm interpreting supreme court decisions that interpret the constitution. that's that's what i do at my level. all i have to go on is appropriate. what is appropriate? well, you have to read the supreme court's five or six decisions to understand what it is. i did that in shelby county, and i actually thought the case was quite easy. in the 15th amendment. this is what the supreme court has said about about the 15th amendment. what what the court has said is that when congress we added the 15th amendment to the constitution, we dramatically changed the relationship between the federal government and the states. and congress gave the congress new authority over the states to prevent it. no states from discriminating on the basis of race. and it used a very general term like appropriate legislation. and what the supreme court had said about that for decades is it's up to congress.

the courts have to respect congress judgment about this. the courts have to respect congress's assessment of the problem and its about what kind of legislation is appropriate. and even something as dramatic as pre-clearance, something that requires the states, as one of my colleagues once said, to come to washington bureaucrats with hat in hand to change their procedures, even that is constitutional. supreme court, in a 5 to 4 decision, disagreed and held and held that the voting rights act interfered with state sovereignty and also treated the states differently, which it could not do. it was 5 to 4 strictly ideological, a decision, and was the first of several supreme court decisions chipping away at the voting rights act in in shelby county. the court assured us not to

worry because there's still section two, which is the provision of the statute that limits it prohibits discrimination based on voting. but several years after that, in a case called brnovich versus arizona, the court weakened section two. also. thank you for describing that so well and so clearly, neal, just last term you argued and won what many have described as among the most significant cases that affect democracy in voting, you know, of all time and the more and milligan case judge luke called it the most important supreme court decision since marbury versus madison. tell us what the stakes were, how you won it and what the decision tells us about how to interpret the constitution and the different approaches the different justices take. so before talking about more versus harper, the recent case, i do want to just pick up a little bit on judge tatel discussion of the voting rights act, because i had the privilege

of defending his opinion in northwest austin, the predecessor case that was like my fourth argument at the supreme court. i was like 46 arguments ago. but i remember when i looked at the case and i looked at the opinion, which was brilliant. i found it really easy to defend on two basic points. one, congress had repeatedly reauthorized the voting rights act by huge margins five different times. so a democratic mandate for it and i thought it would be hard for the supreme to strike down that democratic. and two, there was a lot of history behind this. and caleb assigned section of the 14th amendment section to the enforcement provision that would, i thought, compel the court, particularly the originalist minded members of the court, to support it. so i'm arguing the case on behalf of the government, and i'm my co-counsel is from the naacp legal defense. i go first and i basically look at justice thomas the entire 30 minutes of my oral argument

because i wanted him to. he was the originalist on the court, the self-proclaimed originalist. i had all this originalist evidence and the history behind this i thought was so compelling. my co-counsel got up and argued and he got the question from justice scalia. this act was reauthorized by the senate 98 to 0 four years ago. what law passes what what act of congress passes 98 to 0? it must have been signed. bolick legislation. and i am sitting there in my chair thinking, if i could just be up at the podium, i would just say, justice scalia, your confirmation vote was 98 to 0. drop the mike and be done with this whole supreme court litigation thing. but what the court did in in northwest austin as it did basically uphold the voting rights act, only to reverse it four years later. so that's an illustration and just of how much even before this modern court with the new justices on it, you saw changes

as pretty dramatic changes in. the 2009 to 2013 period of which shelby county, i think was the most significant. now, i argued to get two more versus harper when our get when i'm arguing a constitutional case, i am willing to use any method of constitutional interpretation to try and appeal to the different camps on the court. but if i have an original last argument, that's where i want to be, because that is where right now the gravity of the court is about the original understanding of the constitution. so more versus harper was a case about elections clause of the constitution. and you know state legislatures and may and state courts make all sorts of rules for voting and they have for four decades in these centuries. what the theory of this was by the republicans was that state legislatures and only state legislatures can make rules for federal elections. that includes gerrymandering, redrawing maps that includes extending the polling places like if there's a hurricane, you

know, extending polling hours, you know, extending absentee ballot rules. state courts have been doing all of this because legislative action, particularly in kind of fast moving crisis situations, is very difficult. so more versus harper is a case that came from north carolina. north carolina is a very politically evenly divided state. it's roughly 5050. there's 14 seat congressional seats in north carolina. that that is 14 seats. the us house of representatives, the state legislature controlled by republicans, drew the map in a way that was 11 republicans seats, three democratic seats. and that is possible now with the advent of statistics and modern modern computing power. and it's not something only republicans do in the democratic legislatures states, they do it to, but state legislatures tend to be controlled by republicans. so they draw this map 11 to 3 voters of north carolina, to a nonpartisan group, common cause.

that's my client challenged this and this violates our state constitution. and they go to the state supreme court and they say this and the state supreme court agrees with them. so then the, losers, the republican committee brings it to the u.s. supreme court and they say, and i'm sorry, this story is long, but i think it's a helpful one for understand interpretation. and they say that state courts like the north supreme court have no business in federal elections. and the claim they make is based on the elections clause, which says the times places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives. shall be proscribed in each state by the legislature thereof. so the rules for federal elections shall be proscribed in each state by the legislature thereof. and so the republicans say this says the legislature thereof doesn't say state court. so therefore, it only means state legislatures. now, those of you with legal

training know that or those of you who've dabbled in this know that sometimes texts have to be understood with reference to context. a rule that says, you know, no vehicles in the park doesn't exclude babies, strollers. you know, so sometimes you have to look to the background understanding of what a word means here when you look to the background under our standing, the original understanding of what the word legislature meant, it was overwhelmingly in our favor. that is, the articles of confederation. in 12 of the 13 states had in 12 during the articles of confederation. 12 of 13 states had state constitutions. tions that regulated voting to the committee to the continental congress. and so you had states and state courts participating in the business of federal elections from 1781 to 1787. it's the exact same provision from the articles of that is transplanted over to the united states constitution.

and in addition, there's just all this original list evidence that basically the founders believed in checks and balances. they would have never let just state legislatures have carte blanche over something as important as elections and the like. okay. all that is to say, i had my like golden ticket for the supreme court in terms of the original understanding of the document. then the question was and a 30 minute supreme court argument, they actually had me up for more than an hour. but the rules are 30 minutes. how do you actually get out? and in a way that's persuasive to the court. supreme court advocacy has changed a lot just in the last two years because for my first, like 45 arguments before covid covered, i would stand up. i'd have a line, my legal pad that i'd hoped to say, and then i'd get a question and then another question. and i averaged about 50 questions in a 30 minute oral argument, and they could come from anywhere on the bench. during covid, they moved to speaker phones because they were afraid, of course, of cameras in

the courtroom. that's a whole nother story. and and so we they took turns going one by one and asking questions in order of seniority. and justice thomas was the first justice on the speakerphone and nobody was sure in the first day was he going to ask questions because he generally doesn't. but he asked questions. they were great questions. and so from the speaker phone era on, justice thomas has been asking the first question. so i knew that going into the argument, i knew that justice thomas was going to ask the first question. so i developed a set play, which is justice. i stood up, gave my spiel. justice thomas asked the first question. i don't remember what it was. and then i said to justice. i said, and justice thomas, if i may. and more than two decades of arguing before you, i've been waiting for this case because it speaks to your method of constitutional interpretation. the original understanding of the document and here are the four things you need to know. articles of confederation, madison, this and that.

and that got me several minutes to talk about that. and i think that's how we won the case is by focusing on the original understanding. it was a 6 to 2 decision on that question. justice thomas dissent dissent. i mean, i. judge let us now take up the second of the big categories of cases you identified, and that is the future of the administrative state. just this term, the court is going to decide whether or not to overturn a decision called the chevron case. you gave a really powerful talk to the american philosophical society where you said that this decision about whether to overturn chevron could fundamentally transform the relationship between the judiciary and its evaluation of executive regulations. and if the court does overturn chevron, as expected, you suggested that it would transfer power from executor of officials who are ultimately democratic accountable to unelected judges.

this is a really tough topic to explain, and i know you did it so beautifully in that speech. help our audience understand the stakes in this decision about chevron and why you think it's so important. trump so this sounds like a very wonky issue. and actually it is, but it's a fundamental importance. so for it, the question is how do courts review decisions of administrative agencies interpreting federal law? there are hundreds of administrative agencies in our system, you know, from big important ones like epa and the faa and the fcc to hundreds of smaller ones. and almost all of them have the authority to interpret to issue regulations, take actions that rest on agency interpretation of federal law. so for the past 40 years, under a case called chevron that jeff mentioned, we've been following a very simple rule in chevron,

by the way, it was, i believe, unanimous, right? was that. yes. simple two step rule when we're reviewing the agency's interpretation of the statute, we asked two questions. this question. one is, is a statute clear? is the statute clear? we decide the case. that is. the court if the statutes ambiguous, which is the case in most federal statute, it's then the courts defer to the agency, is reasonable interpretation of the statute and that's the way it's been going on. this is what i do for a living. you know, we have these you know, i sit on the u.s. court of appeals for the d.c. circuit. we get dozens of these cases every year. i've probably heard hundreds of them in my career on the court and we always ask same two questions and. the theory behind this is that when there's ambiguity in a

statute, it reflects a congressional decision. i used decision loosely, but a congressional determination to delegate the interpret section of the statute to the agency, which makes sense if you think about because these are complicated questions. congress can't resolve every question. so it creates expert agencies designed to deal with future problems and allow it interpret the statute. and as long as it's reasonable. the supreme court has said that's fine and congress has been happy with that also for all these years. well. a majority of the current court is deeply skeptical that it believes that as a result of chevron on, we have unelected bureaucrats interpreting federal law, people who are on interpreting law and to deal with this, the court developed a

few years ago a principle called uh, called the called the in a in a major environmental case, the court developed announced what it calls the major question doctrine. and under that, if the agency regulates or interpretation of the statute, the interpretation statute has major national implications such as impact on the economy or many other aspects of our country, then there's no assumption that congress delegated to the agency. the court says congress wouldn't. the cases came up in the obama administration actions clean power plan, which required coal fired power plants to shift from coal to natural gas to renewables over a period of about 20 years. huge impact on the economy. supreme court said there's no way that congress would have

delegated that authority to an unelected administrative agency and under those circumstances, we're not going to defer to its interpretation. we're going to decide case. they did the same thing when they rejected or when they vacated president biden's student loan forgiveness program. they said under that case, the agency had interpreted a statute which allowed it to, quote, waive or modify close quote. uh, student loans in in national emergencies. and the court said this case, this is so big, this is such a big impact on the national budget and the debt no way would congress have given it that authority. and so the court interpreted it. now, the court in both of these cases neither of these cases did it say a peep about chevron. however, in the fall, in a couple of months, the supreme court is hearing a case which

directly presents the question of whether to overrule chevron. from where i sit, they've already done it. chevron's a dead letter. the merit question, the major question in a case now control now. why is this important. well, i could give you one reason. i gather from the previous panel it's okay to plug your book. so i have i have a memoir coming out in june. it's called vision. it's published by little brown and i describe in there what my concerns are about this. and it's available now for advance purchase. but for purposes of today, if you don't mind, i would like to just read you a quote from justice elena kagan, because she captures what this is about better than anybody. but you still need to read my book. here's her dissent in in the student loan case. and i'm sorry, it's seven or

eight sentences, but trust me, it's worth listening to. it is hard to identify and enumerate every possible application of a statute to every possible condition in the future. so congress delegates broadly accept that this court now won't let it reap the benefits of that choice. and that is a major problem not just for governance, but for democracy, too. congress is, of course, a democratic institution. it responds, even if imperfect, to the preferences of american voters. an agency officials, though not themselves elected, serve the president with the broadest of all political constituencies. but this court, by design, is as detached as possible from the body politic.

that is why the court is supposed to stick to its own business to decide only cases and controversies and to stay away from making this nation's policy about subjects like student loan relief, power judgments. under our separation of powers, there is a separation of powers are supposed to come from congress and the president. but they don't. when the court refuses to respect the full scope of the delegation that congress makes to the executive branch. when that happens, the court becomes the arbiter. indeed, the maker of national policy. that is no proper for the court and. it is a danger to a democratic society. so that's justice kagan. i couldn't put it better than that in terms of identifying what's at stake in this seemingly wonky question, how

you interpret the statute. wow, that's extraordinary extraordinary. we have some great questions from the audience. and this is a big one, neal. and that is tell us about the role of precedent on the supreme court and what does the top decision say about this court's attitude toward precedent? it says that they can overrule any precedent any time, anywhere. that is, if you can overrule roe, which is what think every justice at their confirmation hearing called a super precedent. and what justice o'connor, kennedy and souter said was a super precedent. and you can overrule anything. and let's just take, for example, the judge's discussion of chevron. i think chevron is the most cited case by the u.s. supreme court ever. and so this is woven very much into the fabric of the law. congress, when it's been passing

statutes since 1984, has passed them in the shadow of chevron. so they understand they don't have to so resolve every ambiguity because the agencies can do it for themselves. well, it now looks like the supreme court is poised to overrule chevron. and i guess i disagree a little bit with the judge. obviously, he does this for a living. i just dabble in it. but i don't think the major questions doctrine by itself has overrule chevron or in a practical way, because it is only applied in the big cases. you know something that is a major question. take the case that's pending before the supreme court. now it's about fishery management and who has to pay for, you know, if you're a fishery, do you have to pay for a monitor to be on the boat that that monitors how many fish or cow are caught on any given day? that is not a major question, but it's the kinds of things that chevron has been used for so well in the past, but is now very much under danger. so i do really worry there's

different ways of interpreting the constitution. we've talked about originalism or textualism, but precedent is an important way of understanding it. particular to just maintain the fabric of legitimacy around the court and. this court, i really do worry it is going overboard. judge, i'm so glad you told your book, and i thank you. i would love to hear more because i can't wait to read it. you had an extraordinary background as a pathbreaking civil rights fighting for education rights and against segregation. tell us and i'm sure you talk about this in your book about the relation between your experiences growing up that that formed your philosophy and your approach as a judge, where you've generally been in favor of deferring to congress and the political branches and making public policy just give us some flavor of of the narrative of the book and how it influenced your jurisprudence.

i, i am very much very much a product of the 1960s. i, i was in college and law school in the sixties and i had summer jobs with thousands of other students in in in the kennedy administration in very low level jobs. but the kennedy administration cared about young people and inspiring them to work for government. and they brought thousands of us here every summer and we heard from, you know, every member of the cabinet about the nobility of public service. and also during that time, i was entranced by the civil rights movement in the south, and especially by the role of the justice department and in responding to it, and in particular the role of lawyers and i wanted to do that when i grew up. jeff, i wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. i wanted i wanted to use the use of law the way john dore and

bert marshall and the others in the civil rights division were using it in alabama and mississippi. and i was also shaped by my law school. i went to the chicago law school where i had great professors. my constitute and a law professor was philip kurland. and he taught us he taught us two things. he taught us the importance of the principles of judicial restraint that judicial restraint is really the only that keeps the federal courts, which are unelected from stepping into the lane of the other branches of government. and he also taught us that the most fundamental purpose of the courts is to protect the individual from the abuse of government power. that's what shaped my thinking about this. and then when i got appointed to the court i came directly from law practice. you know, i was not a district judge and i didn't have a judicial philosophy other than what i brought from law school and what i learned as a litigator. but i read lots of books of

judicial biographies, and i read lots of cases and they are the concept of judicial restraint just resonated with me. it made sense. it was a way of disciplining the way i think about the cases and what i talk about in the book is, is just that i talk about the role judicial. my book is about process not about results. i talk the importance of judicial restraint in the way i decide cases and and i and i use those same principles to set forth my deep concerns about this supreme court's abandonment of this principle. so interesting. you have, you know, inspiring, heroic story. and it's also so striking that this principle of judicial restraint, which sometimes associated with conservatives and philip curlin, the great scholar, i think was a conservative, resonated with you and you found it necessary for defending the great achievements of the civil rights movement. let me just say one more thing. i don't know how many of you were here yesterday, but we had this panel of these three extraordinary generals who

talked about how built into the military dna is the notion that their decisions, their role is military not policy. i, i was so impressed with what i heard yesterday and what i heard was that's us. that's the way the courts are supposed to function. judicial restraint is embedded in our dna also. and it's embedded for the reasons that justice kagan says in that marvelous quote. i read you. it's a way of confine the courts to the law and preventing them from intruding and meddling into the affairs of the politically elected branches of government. wow. so powerful. neal, i'm going to ask you the same question i asked the judge, and i've never actually asked it, so i'm interested in the answer. what do you think is the connection between your background in growing up and in law school and in your and your remarkable career and your judicial philosophy, and then reflect on this shift of the

judges that identified how judicial restraint, which was a, you know, traditionally associated with conservatives, is being invoked by the other side. yeah, i think well, i became a lawyer mostly. my dad had lost his job in a pretty unfortunate set of circumstances back when i was 13. and i on the debate team and he asked me for help. and, you know, i was like 13. so i tried to help him, but i couldn't really help them. and i saw how difficult it was for him to get a lawyer. and ultimately the court appointed him a lawyer, which almost never happens in civil cases. and then that that that lawyer fought for my dad and gave him his dignity back. and so that taught me about the power of what lawyers can do that said, my parents hated lawyers almost south asians do you know, they cried when i went to law school, but for me, i always had this vision of the courts very similar to the

judges as a thing that could stand up and protect the individual. at the same time, starting in law school, i started writing papers about the importance judicial restraint and scholarship around that. and and so it's it's very funny. you're hearing people from somewhat different generations, but who have a very similar origins story, because i've always been worried about the idea that nine unelected judges could be deciding national policy on a big level. obviously, if their fundamental guarantees, individual guarantees. absolutely. but i always worried it would metastasize into something else. and i think we're starting to see this, see some signs of that. so i'm very worried about that. i'm also worried. you know, i grew up in a time when i went to law school at a time when judicial confirmation hearings were a very different animal than they are now. you know, as i said, justice scalia, 98 to 0. justice ginsburg something close to that, maybe 96 to 3, something like that.

and that was always the philosophy i brought to when i thought about confirmation and so on. elena kagan i was her deputy solicitor general when she was nominated. i was aghast at senate republicans who said she wasn't qualified. i mean, first woman solicitor general, first woman d.a. and of harvard law school, brilliant scholar, just, you know, just phenomenal on every level to say she wasn't qualified. it hurt me. so to hear that and then i saw the games played justice scalia's unfortunate passing with the merrick garland nomination. and that, you know, broke my heart. and when president trump, in his first week or two, nominated neil gorsuch to the court, i looked into my heart and i said, look, you know, he's not the person i would recommend by any stretch. you know, he's not going vote on things that i would. but if i apply the yardstick of is this person qualified, that

person was qualified to be on the supreme court much as i disagree. but trump won the election. and so that's why i supported his confirmation again. and that was, i thought, an era in which we still maybe had a hope of bipartisanship in these nominations. i was strive ing and praying that it would be that way. it hasn't obviously turned out that way. and and i think the nomination process is broken. and and it's unfortunately impacting the work of the court. we have a question from our friend lindsay chervinsky of the has to adhere to an ethics code. i wonder if he'd like to see his colleagues on the supreme court adhere to similar standards who've i'm not going to touch that high on. i will say that let me just say let me just tell you what my rule is. well, first of all, it's never been tested with an offer of private planes or luxury yachts.

no, nobody's nobody's offered me that. i did i did in a amateur acting experi. it's get $500 and i put it on my financial disclosure form. i did that. but my own personal rule for recusals is simple. if i have to think about it for more than about 5 minutes, i recuse myself. it's that simple. if it isn't clear, i think the integrity of the courts, at least for my perspective, depend on being not sitting on the case. now it's easier for me to say that than a supreme court justice because we sit in panels. and so if i don't sit someone else can sit. and so i take the argument that that that that recusals on the supreme court are different. but there is no difference when it comes to financial disclosure forms. they're the same. they operate under the same rules. i operate under.

and i put everything on my financial disclosure form, even though it isn't very much, but it's 100% of what it is. we're we're nearly out of time. and like the court, we we end on time. so, neal, it's a this is a perilous time for american to macro. see, we are more polarized than at any time since the civil war. according to politico. scientists and citizens faith in the courts and in the rule of law is urgently important for maintaining the rule of law. this is something that the chief justices, especially concerned about. how can the court maintain its legitimacy and restore that legitimacy in this polarized time? well, i mean, the first thing is i'm so glad that we have this chief here at this particular moment, because i think he really does care about exactly the questions. jeff, that you're posing and it's obviously hard to steer his other eight colleagues toward a solution.

but i think he's doing everything possible that everything humanly possible to do it. so, you know, one way we could talk about and we have been talking about all the things that i think are undermining the court's legitimacy, like dobbs and the like. but remember, at the same time, this is the same supreme court in 2020 ruled against trump repeatedly, including the trump nominees to the supreme court, ruling against him repeatedly and all those election questions. it's the same supreme court that decided more versus harper, you know, six justices, including justices barrett, kavanaugh and the chief justice in favor of democracy and against you know if you wanted to view that case in political terms against the republican national committee, this is the same supreme court that 8 to 1 said that president trump has no claim of executive privilege over congress for the january six documents, including all of the trump appointees to the supreme court. so there is a there is an important counter-narrative of

that. i think we shouldn't lose sight, particularly as we go into 2024. we still need courts and they're still capable of rendering you know impartial judgments. and so, you know, we will see after 24 where things lie. but, you know, it's not all the some of this is on congress to thank you for leaving us on a note of hope. please join me in thanking our great panelists. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome margaret hoover and trevor potter.