Podbit · The Bulwark Podcast
The Slaughter ruling didn't just affect agency heads — it gutted the oversight architecture built after Watergate. Inspectors general, independent counsels, the whole structure was built with an expectation of independence that the Court has now withdrawn. A Congress that won't exercise its own power made this much worse.
Where this was said
At 22:40 · chapter starts 17:48
French has read Cook twice and is 'kind of where you are' with Miller's layman's read: the Fed gets a carve-out that the FTC and SEC don't, essentially because it's always been there. The majority invokes Hamilton and Madison — getting dealt two aces in Texas Hold'em for any originalist argument — to argue the Fed-like structure would have been recognizable and permissible at the founding. [1] — David French "The Supreme Court preserved Federal Reserve independence in Cook not through airtight constitutional logic but through 'reliance interests'…" 17:48 But French finds that argument less than fully persuasive and pushes for intellectual honesty: just own the reliance interests argument. Kavanaugh's concurrence essentially says the quiet part loudly — we cannot introduce uncertainty into world markets. An entire global economic system has been ordered around Fed independence, and that's as strong a reliance interest as exists in law. The Chesterton's Fence principle applies: before tearing down the fence, figure out why it's there. French's critique is that the majority didn't run the same traps it ran in Slaughter — if the Fed has real governmental rulemaking power, which elected official is it accountable to? The opinion doesn't fully answer that. It just says the Fed is different. Own it.
The Supreme Court preserved Federal Reserve independence in Cook not through airtight constitutional logic but through 'reliance interests' — an entire global economy is built around the Fed's structure. Kavanaugh's concurrence essentially said: we cannot introduce uncertainty into world markets. That's the real argument, and it's time to own it.
David French argued the Cook ruling essentially grandfathers in the Federal Reserve's independence because the reliance interests underpinning the global economy are too vast to unwind.
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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