Podbit · The Rest Is Politics: US
The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, but the vote was closer than expected. Had it gone the other way, 255,000 children a year would have been stateless — and Trump's own children would have lost their citizenship too.
Where this was said
At 27:45 · chapter starts 27:40
The conversation pivots to the week's other major legal story: the Supreme Court's decision on birthright citizenship [1] — Anthony Scaramucci "The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, but the vote was closer than expected. Had it gone the other way, 255,000 children a year …" 27:45 . Swisher's first reaction is that she expected a cleaner result — the constitutional text is not ambiguous — and the closeness of the vote was disturbing. Kavanaugh voted with the majority but wrote separately to suggest Congress could simply seek a constitutional amendment to change the result, which both hosts find troubling as a roadmap for future attacks. Swisher takes a historical sweep: America has always cycled through immigrant hatred, from the anti-Italian sentiment that greeted her grandparents' generation to the current moment. She notes the World Cup goal-scorer whose mother couldn't fly back to London while pregnant — the quintessential example of how birthright citizenship works in practice, not as a conspiracy but as a fact of life. Swisher singles out Stephen Miller as the ideological engine of the anti-immigration push, comparing him to the bureaucrat who engineered Japanese-American internment — one person's hatred, she argues, can ruin millions of lives.
The Dred Scott decision declared Black Americans could never be citizens. The 14th Amendment was the direct response, codifying citizenship to repair that wound. Attacking birthright citizenship isn't originalism — it's undoing one of the Constitution's most important acts of moral repair.
Fei-Fei Li went back to Stanford from Google in 2018 specifically to build a multi-stakeholder governance framework for AI. Her argument: market forces are not societal norms. Just as biology uses IRBs and cars have safety laws, AI needs layered oversight from educators, governments, and the public — not just a few industry titans.
Andrew Santino's personal MCU of political villains is collapsing. He and Bobby speculated that a circulating photo of Mitch McConnell with a Chinese official was AI-generated compositing two separate images.
Mass surveillance is here to stay. The real battle isn't stopping cameras — it's ensuring judges and laws keep that data out of family court and civil disputes, admitting it only for violent crimes and national security. The surveillance economy currently yields more upside than downside, but only if we build the legal guardrails now.
When people cite Scandinavia as proof socialism works, Galloway says they've got it backwards. Northern Europe runs highly competitive free-market economies with more competition in many sectors than the US — they just make sure taxes are actually paid and redistributed. Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist.
Two percent adjustments to income tax and stamp duty tweaks are deck-chair rearrangements. The UK's competitiveness hinges on four structural levers: currency valuation, energy costs, regulatory burden, and tax rates. Devalue the pound, build 56 nuclear plants, slash red tape, introduce a flat tax — and the country transforms.
Lisbon had one of Europe's worst heroin crises. Then Portugal legalised drugs and redirected all enforcement money into rehabilitation and housing. Crime collapsed. Addiction fell. Then politics moved the money elsewhere, and the problem started creeping back. Chesterton's Fence: you forget why you were spending that money.
Congress passed the Boland Amendment 411 to 0, explicitly banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras. Reagan signed it — then immediately moved the operation deeper underground, essentially responding to a bipartisan prohibition by going more illegal.
The CIA planted mines in Nicaraguan commercial harbors, wrote the Contras' press releases taking credit, and promptly blew up ships from four allied nations. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress erupted, and the Boland Amendments multiplied.
Oliver North was a decorated Marine and devout Catholic with zero covert operations experience. He ran the entire shadow war against Congress — planes, airstrips, arms shipments, shell companies — learning on the job. And by every operational measure, he crushed it.
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