Advisory Opinions - Queso Burro

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Supreme Court opinions, the president's immigration executive order, homeschooling controversies, and the longterm cultural effects of coronavirus. David and Sarah have thoughts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find it all here with more ways to save at Real Canadian Superstore. Ready? I was born ready. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. As always, this is David French with Sarah Isger. We've got multiple things to cover. We're going to have a fast Sarah update on Supreme Court opinions today. We're going to talk about the Trump executive order on immigration, what it is, what it is not, and then wax eloquent as you all have been demanding about 8 U.S.C. section 1182F. Number three, we're going to talk about homeschooling

controversies with an emphasis on the law. And then we're going to wind up with a question about what if the coronavirus pandemic persists among the cultural effects, what will be the impact on cities? We weren't going to talk about that, but as we started to record, we got into this really interesting conversation and our producer Caleb said, save it for the pod. So that's what we're going to do. Well, let's just launch right into the Supreme Court. I've been jammed all morning, so I have not been able to read the orders, but I did read them enough to know nothing there was super interesting, but there were orders released. And Sarah, you've got an update.

super interesting, but there were orders released and Sarah, you've got an update. Sure. So three opinions got released today. Two of which are like, I don't know, they're not very sexy. They're like, you know, fifth grade sexy. No ankle? Not even really some ankle, I would say. Some maybe like nice painted toenails. Okay. Okay. So one is County of Maui versus Hawaii Wildlife Fund. That was a Clean Water Act case. Breyer wrote for the majority and it's like another seven part Breyer balancing test. I have a friend who does the best impression of Justice Breyer, by the way, like it's almost worth having him on the pod just for the impression.

This was 6-3 with the chief and Kavanaugh joining the liberal four and then the other three, quote unquote, conservatives dissenting. It's, you know, navigable waters and all of that. It was a win for the environmentalist side, if that's how you frame it. The other case was an immigration case. Barton v. Barr, Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. This was on when you can remove a lawful permanent resident for committing a crime. and basically you can't remove a lawful permanent resident if they've been in the country seven years before they commit the crime. And, you know, this person committed the crime like just a couple months before his seven years, and it was a big statutory interpretation case. You know, unless you are huge into immigration law, probably not your cup of tea. But here's the big news coming out of today. We have now cleared all of the cases from the November sitting in terms of oral arguments that they heard in November, except one.

And which one is that? Drum roll. It's DACA. And which one is that? Drum roll, it's DACA. That'll be a big hit parade case, as one of my law professors used to say. And the other thing that we know after today is that the chief justice is the only justice without an opinion from that November sitting. So most likely we are going to see DACA fairly soon. And most likely the chief justice is writing the opinion. Dare you venture an official advisory opinions guess as to outcome of DACA and

voting total? I dare not an opinion except to say that what this will show, I think, is that all of the prognostication over who the new swing vote is, et cetera, is absolutely right. It's going to be the chief from this point forward. Yeah, I think that that's right, too. I'm sniffing in the air because 5-4 decision with the chief striking down DACA in the most benign way possible. And I don't even know how that – what that would look like. I'm not even quite sure. But I just – it's hard for me to see how DACA met – the implementation of DACA met the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act.

It was just a memorandum. There wasn't even a rulemaking. And it struck me as a little bit interesting that lower courts were holding that a memorandum, a rule issued by memorandum could not be revoked by memorandum. It had to be revoked by rulemaking, which struck me as a little bit inconsistent with the APA and that the Trump administration's worries about the legality of the original order were arbitrary and capricious, again, preventing their revocation. I just am so unconvinced by the legal merits of the argument. But at the same time, revocation. I just am so unconvinced by the legal merits of the argument. But at the same time, you know, you've got that Roberts institutionalist doesn't like to really, really rock the political boat all that much. And an immediate ruling removing all DACA protections from hundreds

of thousands of dreamers. Does he cross that Rubicon? That that's why I said I think he'll rule, but he'll figure out a way to make it less or more benign. I don't even know what that looks like. The other thing that we've seen, Roberts as the institutionalist, he is not going to want to have any five-four opinions if he can avoid them, if they fall down the traditional lines. And so what you also should look for is, can he convince anyone else to come along with him if he narrows the scope of it even further? Can he get to 6-3? And I think the other part of this is we have a lot of very politically charged cases this term. And so can he – where is this one going to fall along the politically charged thing? Is he going to save the 5-4 for Title VII?

Right. Yeah, that's a good question. And correct me if I'm wrong, but he did do 5-4 with the Democratic nominee for – on the census. So he'll do a 5-4 on a politically charged. And it wasn't – he was also, of bring down the hammer of Thor on the Dreamers. Mjolnir will not be wielded against the Dreamers by Justice Roberts. That's just what I'm smelling. That's no legal analysis. That's just like sniffing the prevailing winds. I do think there was a problem with the initial revocation letter,

which relied on the legal analysis from the Department of Justice. There's almost no question that if that initial letter had simply said, due to policy considerations, we no longer consider it wise to have the DACA program, it would have been on much more solid ground. And so, you know, if there's wiggle room, you pointed to it, I think that's where the wiggle room is. Interesting. Okay. Next, we're going to talk about the, here's the official title of it. This is the tweet made manifest when Trump tweeted two days ago, he was going to suspend entry into the U.S. Here it is called, Proclamation Suspending Entry of Immigrants Who Present Risk to the U.S. Labor Market During the Economic Recovery Following the COVID-19 Outbreak. Some, you know, a BuzzFeed,

maybe like a BuzzFeed social media director needs to get with the White House on titling their stuff. Nine reasons why. But anyway. So, Sarah, looking at this, essentially what he has done is, and you said this before this started, it has a section one. And here's the section one. It has a Section 1, and here's the Section 1. The entry into the United States of aliens as immigrants is hereby suspended and limited, subject to Section 2 of this proclamation. So it begins with a grand pronouncement and then has a limitation. And then following the limitation, there's Section 2 is a lot of exceptions.

Nine. So, yes. Nine exceptions. Nine. So, yes. Nine exceptions. Yes. With catch-all, like number nine, is any alien whose entry would be in the national interest is determined by the Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security,

or their respective designees. So it's like, and then we can let anyone else in we want. Exceptions like that, though, legally can be quite important, as we saw in Trump v. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

But anyway, the exceptions are not huge. Lawful permanent resident, any alien seeking to enter the United States on an immigrant visa as a physician, nurse or other health care professional for specific purposes. EB-5 investor, immigrant investor program applicants. Now, these are people who are going to invest, what, about $900,000? Is that what their threshold is? Unsure. I think so. Okay. Listeners, fact check that, please. And alien who's a spouse of U.S. citizen, alien who's under 21 and a kid of U.S. citizen, citizen, alien who's under 21 and a kid of U.S. citizen, an alien whose entry would further important U.S. law enforcement objectives, member of the U.S. armed forces, spouse, children.

So anyway, there's a lot of exceptions. So this is not an immigration ban. And it's also limited scope, time-wise. Right. So before all of this happened, we were talking in Slack, and you brought up 1182F. I reaffirmed 1182F. I thought it would be hard for him under 1182F to write a executive order that wouldn't meet its provisions. And I think this is lawful. I think this passes legal muster. What do you think, Sarah? I actually think it's a much easier case than Trump v. Hawaii. And Trump v. Hawaii, to back up for a second, is the travel ban case from 2018. Super fun because I got to sit in for the arguments on that one and was sworn into the

Supreme Court bar that day. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. But that, the argument was he had banned a specific type of immigrant, and that ran afoul of, you know, discrimination laws. And establishment clause. Right. And because of the exceptions and everything else, the court, for a few reasons, said on top of the fact that there were exceptions and this doesn't look like it was motivated by religious animus under rational basis, they have other reasons. Also, we're not sure that matters at all because the president has such enormous authority to do this. It would have to be, you know, really something to limit his powers. As the chief said, 1182F exudes presidential authority. Yes, exudes. That's the exact word

he used. And for those who have not followed the last, did not listen to the Dispatch podcast, shame on you. Here's the relevant wording from 118 USC 1182F. Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens, it's pretty broad, into the U.S. would be detrimental to the U.S., to the interest of the United States, he may by proclamation, I love that word, by proclamation. It sort of has this resonance to our colonial past where kings would proclaim by proclamation and for such period as he shall deem necessary, man, that's a big grant of authority, suspend the entry of all aliens

or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants or impose on the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. I mean, is it possible to say that that's even understatement to say that the statute exudes deference to the precedent? Well, and I went back and read the two dissenting opinions in Trump v. Hawaii to see if anything would be particularly applicable to something like this week's proclamation. And really, no. That the exuding here certainly exudes over, as we've talked about, like you amplify that authority in the time of a national emergency. But what I found interesting is you pointed out the history of this. How did we get to this point of exuding?

Yeah, that's what's fascinating. This dates back to 1952. This is a dangerous part of the early Cold War, the dawn of the nuclear age. And there was a period of time, and it seems so much in the distant past, Sarah, where the level of trust in American institutions and including the American presidency was very high. I mean, you know, we had just had a, you know, how many terms did FDR win in a row? 22 terms. No, four terms. Four terms in a row. The president at the time of this statute being passed was Truman, who had brought the World War II to a successful end. It was the dawn of the nuclear age. And, you know, it's really interesting. We now just take for granted that the president of the

United States has sole launch authority on his discretion of our nuclear weapons. But that launch authority dates back to this era. This is so, you know, we're giving this president who, you know, the presidency giving this president who, you know, the presidency had just shepherded America through this existential threat to its existence. And in the immediate fallout, a lot of power is just formally and informally given to the president in a way that we totally take for granted. Like if you ask people, should a president have sole launch authority of nuclear weapons? It's just kind of been that way. And it's been that way since around this time. And

this is on the scale of launch authority of nuclear weapons versus temporarily closed down alien entry. This is like a low power delegation, but it's still quite a sweeping delegation of power. And this is something that we raised, again, a little bit on the Dispatch podcast. It's interesting to me that the president hasn't used this all that much other than in the travel ban case. But, you know, this is something where he could suspend the entry of all aliens, all aliens. And he has really not touched the statute that much. So fun, fun numbers to throw out for you here. Oh, good. I love numbers. Presidential approval ratings are just super fun to look at. So, uh, for instance, Dwight Eisenhower's average approval

rating was 65%. It's hard to imagine. Kennedy's was 70, by the way. Um, now on the flip side in 1952, Truman's, uh, approval rating. So Truman had the highest approval rating, 87% in June of 1945. That's not super surprising. But he went from 87% to 22% in February of 1952. High to the Korean War. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you know, it's also interesting, Now, you know, it's also interesting. Who was the heir apparent in 1952 to Harry Truman? Dwight D. Eisenhower. So you had the guy who led the war in Europe as sort of the next guy. And he was sort of so non-ideological or non-obviously ideological that there was an open question which party he was going to belong to. So yeah, Truman had problems. I mean, there was a reason why in 1948 that a lot of people thought he was going to lose, that Dewey beats Truman headline. Yeah, he had a lot of problems. But institutionally, I don't think we hadn't reached this partisan point where it's just sort of faith in the institution of the presidency itself had degraded. Correct.

The institution of the presidency, totally different. I just found the approval numbers to be fun, little cul-de-sac for us to go down. What was the lowest point for W? Er, er. Wait. Pause. I thought you might have had the chart like right there. I did, and then I closed it because I thought we were moving on like right then. Lowest, lowest, lowest, lowest, lowest, lowest. Okay, ready? Yes. Lowest for W, 25%. So Truman does edge him out. George W. Bush owns Harry Truman. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I think that, you know, and this is where we might get to, we might should have your friend

Chip Roy back on. Is this wise? Is this wise to continue to delegate this much authority to the president? I mean, this isn't the only area. I mean, area tariffs. You know, we had a trade war with China, which seems sort of quaint in its magnitude, considering what we're going through now. We had a whole trade war with China that Congress basically had no say over at all because the president could impose tariffs at his discretion by invoking national security, among other things.

And is this wise? This strikes me as an unwise, an artifact of a previous extraordinary time that is not wise to maintain in the present era. Interestingly, it's a one-way ratchet, suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions. There's nothing the other way. And in current polling right now, about eight in 10 Americans support restricting immigration right now. So it makes it a politically savvy decision by the president. And it puts Biden in a box in terms of how he can respond. It's one thing to have a conversation about immigration six months ago and another thing in the middle of a national emergency where people bringing in a virus is very hard to detect.

So overall, just an interesting 60 days. We'll see what happens at the end. The president hinted that there could be a phase two of this proclamation. Well, I think that I think this proclamation is wise, like the as I read the proclamation, I think it has the right the right kinds of exceptions to the scope of it. I think that it's a wise proclamation. My question about wisdom was, do we want the president to have that degree of deference? Is this something that he should be able to do all on his own? And I'm dubious about that. But you do raise a really just diverting from the legality to the politics. You raise a really interesting point. And I think Biden has a tiny bit of advantage that other Democrats might not necessarily have on this point. And that is he has proven that he doesn't give a rip about the Twitter left. So he vanquished all the champions of the Twitter left. And so the Twitter left would Twitter left is upset about this. I haven't seen too many

other people being upset about this. And he's done a decent job of just sort of steering clear from that. I think he sort of knows, hey, I've got those guys, where are they going to go? Also, look at all of the polls coming out this week. We had like a slew of swing state polls. He is eight points in Michigan in two different polls. Uh, just as one example, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, he's up in everything. He's up nationally and he's not campaigning, which to me is keep not campaigning. This is going just fine for you. This is a referendum on Donald Trump, and that turns out to be good for Biden. Also, footnote, footnote, footnote, I think that says a lot about where he should go, where they'll think about going on the VP pick, which is first

do no harm. Yeah, right. That's a great point. That's a great point. First, do no harm, which would seem to exclude Stacey Abrams, who just seems to be a real loose cannon in her rhetoric and her sense of entitlement to the VP new, I totally think that's smart. I think it's bizarre that we've for years accepted this like, Oh, Oh no me. Oh, I just couldn't. Oh my. It's so, Oh, how interesting of you even to bring it up. Uh, it's, it's such a ridiculous farce. So I'm all in favor of getting of her chucking that tradition and, uh, making the case, making the case to his team, to the American public, et cetera. I just don't know that, again, if you're, if it's a do no harm pick and you basically want to continue not campaigning so that it's a referendum on Trump, just don't give an inch on that. And you look at someone like Senator Harris and even Senator Warren, who also haven't really been doing

anything at all, that's showing that they can let this continue to be about the president. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it is really interesting to me that, as you said, Biden has just not been campaigning. And to the extent that he has campaigned at all, it has been some really ineffective social media pushes that are swapped by Trump's social media. I mean, Trump's social media just swaps Joe Biden. Now, here would be the fascinating thing. After 2016, there's this sort of in parts of sort of this left and center left, this narrative locked in that sort of said that, hey, Trump figured out the alchemy with Facebook. Like there's this magic formula with social media.

And if you could just press all the right buttons on social media, it's like, you know, you can you can spin lead into gold. And it would be fascinating if not only could Joe Biden not campaign a traditional campaign, that he can't consistently get Facebook Live to work and he wins the presidency. It might sort of puncture the sort of the myth of the the the myth of the omnipotence of social media. But we're way ahead of ourselves. Homeschooling. Yes. Yes. So why would we be talking about homeschooling? Indeed. Well, except for everyone homeschooling. Well, it's true. That's a good point. You were never homeschooled, were you?

I was not homeschooled. So what was your educational journey, K through 12 public? So what was your educational journey, K through 12 public? I grew up in a very rural part outside of Houston, about an hour outside of Houston, which is now pretty ex-urban, actually, but at the time had about 2000 people. So I went to a private school for the first few years that was very small because it was the closest school, really. And then I went to public school from that point forward. It was about a 45-minute bus ride where they played some really great country music on the bus. So all of my George Strait comes from those bus rides. And then public school throughout the rest until I went to college, which Northwestern is the only private school in the Big Ten.

the rest until I went to college, which Northwestern is the only private school in the Big Ten. Yeah, interesting. So I was K-12 public school, kindergarten in Nashville, first grade in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and then two through 12 in Scott County public schools in Scott County, Kentucky. Go Cardinals, class of 87. And then private Christian school. But my kids, I think I've hit every category. My kids have been in a public charter school, public schools, private Christian school, private secular school, and public college. They have just, none of my kids have done private college yet. So I guess that's the only thing I'm missing. Oh, your bingo cards won down. I know.

I know. And so I read with extreme interest this article in Harvard Magazine that just sort of set Twitter afire that featured the opinions of Elizabeth Bartholet, one of my former professors at the law school, still a professor there. Did you take any classes? I did not. Okay. I took child, family, and the state with Elizabeth Bartholet. We did not see eye to eye. And essentially, she makes an argument, and this is from a Law Review article. And again, this is something that really was one of the few days where there was a lot of debates not about coronavirus.

And she says this, the legal claim made in defense of the current homeschooling regime is based on a dangerous idea about parent rights, that those with enormous physical and other power over infants and children should be subject to virtually no check on that power, that parents should have monopoly control over children's lives, development, and experience, that parents who are committed to beliefs and values counter to those of the larger society are entitled to bring their children up in isolation so as to help ensure that they will replicate their parents' views and lifestyle choices. And then she goes on, the legal claim is inconsistent with a child's right to what has been called a, quote, open future, the right to exposure to alternative views and experiences essential for children to grow up, to exercise meaningful

choices about their own future, views, religions, lifestyles, and work. And the actual Harvard Magazine article had this really vivid illustration of a child in a house, a house that was doubling as a jail made of books. And the book said, reading, writing, arithmetic. Arithmetic was originally misspelled in the article and the I can see why people were a little exercised by this. Fortunately, from my perspective as an advocate and practitioner of choice, of educational choice, this is exactly upside down from where the law is. But it is in fact the case that parents take the lead and have taken the lead as recognized by the Supreme Court for a very long time. It's considered part of the liberty interest protected by the happen anytime soon, but created an enormous amount of controversy. Your thoughts, Sarah? So, right, this is a little like the Vermeule thing.

Throw out a big bomb and then get the conversation going and expand that Overton window. and expand that Overton window. Uh, so digging into this a little, I was interested in some of the history, which I didn't really know that homeschooling by and large, uh, modern homeschooling is kind of a modern 20th century American thing. So we have about 2 million homeschoolers now, roughly 4% of, uh, you know, school-aged children in the United States, which I thought was actually pretty high. It is not legal in all 50 states until 1993. Whoa, mind blown. And most of those laws are passed between 82 and 93. Nevada and Utah had legislation before that. Not shocking that it's those two states. Those are in the 50s. And you have this Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Yoder in 1972. It's a Berger opinion, Stewart concurring, White concurring, Douglas dissenting. And that case is about whether the old order Amish religion and the conservative Amish Mennonite church could remove their children from public school after eighth grade, even though school attendance requirement laws, the compulsory school attendance was until 16 years old.

And the court, interestingly, because it's interesting how she phrased it about being the child, the court was very clear this is about the parent, the parent's rights. And it was the parent being prosecuted, therefore we're talking about the parent's interest, not the child's. And so she's phrasing it as a child's interest. And I think it is as silly on her end as it is to say on the other end that the state has no interest in how children are raised in a, in the state. And I mean the state, meaning the polity, the not, uh, not a specific United States. Um, because of course,

inculcating children into our values of government and history is good. We don't want a lot of children being raised to think that Nazism was the correct form of government, for instance. That would be less than ideal. So it's always been a balancing test. I have put homeschooling into three buckets, if you will, David. Okay, let's hear them. The religious bucket is the one that gets the most attention. Understandably so, I get it. But there's two other buckets. And one is the high IQ bucket, like your parents just think you're really smart and special.

iiq bucket like your parents just think you're really smart and special i'll call that the um the glass children bucket from the salinger uh books uh that my cats are named after where they're just they're just special little snowflakes and so you think they're going to be brilliant so you want to give them every opportunity to learn calculus in first grade um they can't win the national spelling bee from public school sarah by the, I make fun of that because my family has, my extended family has had some experience with this. The third bucket, which my family has no experience with, to be clear, is the sports bucket or the specialization bucket. Your child has decided to be a child actor or an Olympian. Olympian, figure skating, and gymnastics in particular for young girls often necessitates homeschooling because the rigorous training schedule is during the day. I think there's a fourth bucket, which is we're just free spirits, man.

The hippie bucket. Yeah, it's kind of the hippie bucket. It's like, look, I mean, there's a way that I want to bring up my kids to live off the land or to do unlearning or to do a very experiential learning. And it's not a majority. It's not a plurality of the homeschooling world, but it's an element of it. But I think all of these cases do not say parents always win over any kind of state intervention. For example, the states are able to protect kids from abuse and neglect. You could be in the hills of Idaho in your handmade cabin and completely off the grid. And if they find out you're abusing your children, homeschooling is not a shield for abuse. Although sometimes people try to use

homeschooling as a shield for abuse. Homeschooling is not a legal shield for abuse. The other thing is there can be curricular, and this might be controversial with some in the homeschooling community, but I do think there's a state interest in saying, hey, we want people before we're going to grant them the title of high school graduate or GED equivalent, that there's a certain baseline set of a baseline amount of knowledge you have to have. But it's still true that as far as the power of the state to sort of step in, to try to – and this is a word from Peirce v. Society of Sisters, which predated Wisconsin v. Yoder. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the creature of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the creature of the state, the mere creature of the state. And this is going all the way back to and also in 1923, the desire of the legislature to foster

a homogenous people with American ideals prepared readily to understand current discussions of civic matters is easy to appreciate. And he talks about World War I, unfortunate experiences during the late war and aversion toward every characteristic of truculent adversaries. I wish we still spoke like that. I mean, seriously. Sarah, many times you're just truculent. So in the current environment where we have everyone, for the most part in the country, having to homeschool their children right now, with the help of Zoom perhaps, but nevertheless, do you think that we're going to see an increase in homeschooling? Or maybe decrease? Get these kids out of my house. You know, I do.

It's very possible. I mean, there's a kind of, and again, and this will connect with what we're going to talk about at the very end of the podcast. There is a sense of which a new normal, when, if something becomes a habit long enough, it gets its own inertia. And there may be a point where some parents say, hey, you know what? And there may be a point where some parents say, hey, you know what out the education policy that maximizes test scores. Because, you know, I'm a parent of three kids. And I can tell you that maximum test score is not the highest priority that I'm trying to achieve when my kids, when I'm trying to select an educational environment for my kids. I want them to thrive academically, yes. Spiritually, yes.

Intellectually, yes. yes, emotionally, like on the whole spectrum in school is a big part of that. And parents look at this holistically. Most parents do. Some parents are just totally focused on test scores. But most parents look at this holistically and realize, you know, one size doesn't really fit all very well. And I've long thought one of the sort of, if we want to use a buzzword like social justice, a good conservative social justice issue is doing what we can to extend to parents at all levels of the socioeconomic ladder, the same kind of choice of places where their kids can go to school and thrive that I've taken for granted as a parent for much of my adult life. So that's my soapbox.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think giving parents more control or a feeling of control over where their kids are going to end up is just a universally good thing. I think I'm watching season four of The Wire, which is the junior high education season of The Wire. And you're just struck by, I don't know, how tough that is in so many places. Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't know how tough that is in so many places. Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, you know, what's amazing to me is when we started our education journey, I would have thought it would have looked one way.

And then when you have different kids who have completely different personalities and different needs, and you just realize all of those preconceived notions, you just have to read and react, man. We don't know the name of your future child. We'll just call him Aragorn for the time being. You don't yet know where Aragorn is going to thrive. No, it's true. I have this like fancy notion that Aragorn will, like if I could just throw him in dirt for like several years and make that school and like, you know, some wood, a hammer, some nails, I don't know, and then a lot of dirt, some worms, some snails.

I feel like that would do through like third grade. What you just heard was the hundreds of unschooling homeschool advocates that listen to this podcast going, you're singing from our songbook, Sarah. I mean, it's true. It's true. So I guess I fall into your hippie category. I went to kindergarten, but when kindergarten was half a day, I think. I mean, maybe not even five days a week. I mean, the first six, seven years of my life, I'm just running around the neighborhood and having a great – well, not when I'm two. But when I'm old enough to sort of run around and go to a neighbor and hang out with a neighbor and play in the backyard, and that was life. That was life. And it was good. I have wonderful memories of building playground equipment for

my snails using like the leftover two by four bits that were in the garage. This, I mean, as you can guess, resulted in, I did get a nail through my foot, tried to hide that from my parents unsuccessfully, as you can imagine. Oh, I still have scars from those days. One of my favorite stories is how I used to make paper airplanes and I would hold them over my head like they were a German bomber. And my friends would try to shoot them down by stabbing at them with pencils. What could go wrong with that plan? Nothing but impaling my hand.

But aside from that, well, let's move on from impaling. We, readers, you ask us for topics. We read your emails. We listen. And someone asked a question that I thought was intriguing. Given that the U.S. Postal Service is – it's constitutionally established. It's a constitutionally established institution. Why is funding it or why is – why are the policies governing it so darn controversial on occasion?

Which was a great question. And Sarah, it led you to do a little bit of research on that. I had so much fun with this. So let's, I mean, you start at the very beginning, right? Article one, section eight, the Congress shall have power to establish post offices and post roads. And from there, all things flow. So currently the post office is asking for $75 billion in federal aid. That includes $25 billion in emergency appropriations to offset coronavirus-specific related losses, $25 billion to bankroll, quote, shovel-ready projects to modernize the Postal Service, and $25 billion in unrestricted borrowing from the Treasury Department. So that's the ask on

the table. The president has said he's against it. And so there's been sort of a flurry of quasi-partisan, maybe not falling directly on partisan lines, discussions over Wither Postal Service. And there's two main, the pro-argument and the anti-argument. So the anti-argument is that this has been a net loss debacle for decades now. So the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, not tax funds for revenue. And so what has happened is that they've been operating at a loss for more than a decade, $9 billion deficit last year since it has $140 billion in unfunded obligations. And it didn't help that in 2006, under President Bush, he passed a law that required the agency to prepay retiree health benefits in an effort to shore up

its retirement system. So basically, financially, the Postal Service is in ruin. I think that ruin is the best term. It's like the most generous term you can come up with for what's happening. However, here's the other argument. The Postal Service delivered 1.9 billion prescriptions in 2019, including close to 100% of the prescriptions for the VA. are mandated to deliver to every American, meaning it doesn't matter whether it makes fiscal sense to service a very rural part of Missouri that doesn't have a CVS for 100 miles. It is one of the largest employers of military veterans, close to 100,000 on the payroll. That's about 20% of postal workers. It's considered a door to the middle class for a lot. And so as I was, oh, and then also lower price. So basically if you're sending under two pounds, it's a lot cheaper usually to send through the postal service than UPS or FedEx where sending the

same package might be close to $10 for the postal service. It might be three to 350, something like that. Um, so I, you know, those are both really important points. I don't want to discount either point, but I guess what I walked away from is there's this move then to privatize the postal service that doesn't look like it's going to work. I mean, this thing isn't made to make money and therefore isn't making money. Why are we considering this something that is supposed to break even versus something that we've decided as a society, it's important to be able to service people who don't live near a CVS for 45 miles. And so we're going to have a postal service for them.

Similar to like, we don't expect the Department of Justice to make money. Yes, they take in money through criminal asset forfeiture and things like that. The antitrust or, you know, some of the divisions do weirdly make money. But we certainly don't expect the Department of Justice to make money and then say it's running a deficit. Right. Well, you know, it's interesting because I remember going all the way back to the 80s, and you do raise a really good point about rural America. You were not a place on the map, really, unless you could land a post office. And so there's all these places,

like, and you go around the rural South, I mean, there's Cullioca, Tennessee. You've never heard of Cullioca, Tennessee. It's a tiny little, it's a tiny, cool little place, maybe about 35, 40 miles South of here, a clump of houses, like a general store, and there's been a little post office, you know, and these are the kinds of things that sort of – it's like the capillaries of a country. Yeah. These post offices. And so there's this thing you can't really quantify with money about it that's part of – you know, and we talked about institutions. It's part of the institution, one of the key institutions of a national government.

And so from that standpoint, it's sort of – not just sort of, it pretty much has to exist. And the other thing, though, that has been fascinating to me, so it's this thing that is different from the DOJ. It charges money for its services. In theory, it can make money. In theory, I mean, FedEx can make piles of money. UPS makes piles of money. Yes, but they get to choose what they do. Right, exactly. We've told the Postal Service they have to make money and they don't get to choose what they do. Exactly, exactly.

But in theory, a lot of people say it. And so what has happened is that it's also become this political football for competing ideas of what good government looks like. And beginning in the 80s, especially there was a sort of notion, you know, the rise of I'm going to run government like a business, which is sort of a perennial conservative appeal. Well, you can't run the DOD like a business, exactly. You can't run the DOJ like a business.

But what about this thing that charges everybody for its services? Yeah, we can run a business. We're in this like a business. And then I think on the left, some people have said, yeah, we can run this like sort of the socially just business where people are paid the living wage and there's unionization, et cetera. And so that's one of the reasons why it's become a football is because it's also become a laboratory for competing visions of good government. And the other issue that is bubbling up is this idea of how much of this mail being delivered is junk mail at this point, what we call junk mail, unsolicited advertisements, magazines, you know, what would you call them catalogs?

Um, by the way, the restoration hardware catalog, how much does that thing cost? Dear Lord, please stop sending it to me. Sarah, your privilege is showing. I know, but I don't want it. I think if you live in Virginia, Northern Virginia just comes with the property. So they're actually making money on things that people don't even want. And the number of actual parcel mail being delivered is even lower. Basically, they would be at more of a deficit if you took out all of these advertisements and stuff that people don't want in the age of email and everything else.

But I guess for me, I don't know, maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic about like, we needed those post roads. That was very important at the time. Uh, and I, as I said, grew up in a rural part of Texas. I remember going to the post office. Uh, that was like where, you know, that was a weekly little adventure to go to the post office. Um, so I get both sides. I think it is a problem that we expect them to make money, expect them to prepay retiree health benefits, but then also mandate the services they have to provide. It's the Jack Nicholson line from A Few Good Men. I've never the time or the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide,

and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd rather you just say thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a postal route and stand a post. That is a stretch, but I like it. But I like it. It's a, well, any, any excuse to use that quote? It's a good segue to our cultural, you know, it's culture. That's culture right there. So, so reader feedback to that, that one reader who asked for the postal service discussion, I mean, reader, listener, did, did we give you, did, did we give you what you need? Let us know. So let's go on to cultural. There's a lot of discussion about what are the long-term effects going to be, cultural effects, political effects, religious effects. I just was at a Christian conference where I heard Tim Keller, who's

pastor at Redeemer Church in New York, talk about the potential long-term religious effects of a pandemic like this. Very fascinating. But one of the questions that I had, given that we have seen it just do horrible things in New York City, be a real problem in built-up urban areas, if this drags on and on, what will this do to America's relentless and accelerating move towards urbanization? And my question was, does this make suburbs cool again? And Sarah, you had some interesting thoughts about like sort of the ownership culture and the ownership and how this might be different from the Great Recession. Yeah. So for my generation, 2008 hit at the exact wrong time. We're starting to just barely, barely, like we might have opened a 401k or maybe our job did it for us and we didn't really know what it was. And then the bottom falls out. And so the ideals of American success and how we defined that,

I think changed for my generation. You know, if you want to go back to the super stereotype of the 1950s and 1960s, owning a home was the achievement of the American dream. And then fast forward to 2008, like my generation couldn't go buy homes. And you see that in the numbers. Home ownership actually in the United States started to drop closer to 2004. It reached its height at 69% or so. By 2008, it was down a couple points to 67%. And then it just, you know, bottomed out. 2015, it was closer to 63%.

And it was already rebounding. So 2019, it was up again to 65%. So below 2008 still, and certainly below the height. But I think that that definition of success permeates a lot of other things. For instance, I remember when you'd go over to someone's house and look at their music collection or their movie collection. Now the idea of ownership of those things, we rent, we rent our apartments. We rent, Netflix is basically a rental. You're renting that service. Spotify, Pandora, that's rental. You're not owning the music. You're borrowing the music briefly. And so has that so changed again, aside from coronavirus before coronavirus, but that this

will accelerate that or will it in fact reverse it? And all of a sudden when you're stuck inside all day, you're like, man, ownership has its draws and ownership, like to own something, whether it's toilet paper or, you know, a mixing aid. I bet KitchenAids are getting so much more use right now. You know, you've got it as a wedding present, you stuck it in the pantry, and now, man, you're using that thing every night. But is ownership going to become cool again? Yeah, that's, to me, that's a really great question. And I think, you know, because I've been, I was just talking to someone who was, who's been sheltering this in place in New York,

and contrasting the difference between sheltering in place in a house and sheltering in place in a high-rise apartment building, it's pretty dramatic. I mean, it's a much greater hardship, a much greater hardship. And if that drags on and on and on, and then it's not as if this pandemic will come and then we'll say, oh, well, we've just finished the period of history in which we deal with pandemics. The much more likely thought will be much like right after 9-11, oh, this could happen again. And we have to react accordingly. And the have to react accordingly. And the other thing is the dynamic, I think, that has existed in a lot of cities. And my wife and I spent our first year of marriage in New York, and we loved it. I mean, I'm a huge fan of New York City. I love New York City. I think it's the greatest city in the world.

And we had this matchbox size apartment. And it's almost as if the rent was like the admission fee into this giant urban amusement park where you're not spending a ton of time in your apartment. You're out at these cool restaurants that – I mean you could spend a lifetime exploring all the sort of out-of-the-way places in Manhattan. You've got access to the best professional sports. You have out of the way places in Manhattan. You've got access to the best professional sports. You have access to the best entertainment in the world. And so it's like this admissions fee into this urban Disney world in a way. And I think that's a way a lot of people have looked at sort of the really big growing cool American cities. Nashville, for crying out loud. There are places in Nashville where these tiny little two-bedroom ranch houses were going for a million dollars before all this. And you're thinking,

what? But people wanted access to the arts. They wanted access to this sort of cool cultural, cool center of Southern American culture that Nashville has really has been and is even becoming more of. And then but you're right on top of everybody. And I just wonder, it just seems to me that my ability to be on my own and independent and not being forced for my food, for my entertainment, for my exercise, to be around a big pile of people, you know, there's going to be a, there might be a real sea change there. And don't forget two other things that are coming online at the same time. One,

this has accelerated telecommuting, like proving which jobs really can be done from home. And I think that there will be some percentage of people who do not go back to a physical work location after this. And two, self-driving cars, which allows you to live further and further away from city centers and get lots of land. So you're not living in cookie cutter suburbia either. You can actually have, you know, my dream, for instance, which is to have goats that I rent out to people to mow their lawns and to have what I call a queso burro rental company where you throw a party and I bring you two donkeys, each with saddles. One saddle has guac and chips and the other saddle has queso

and chips and they just wander around your outside guests and the guests can have some queso and chips, and they just wander around your outside guests, and the guests can have some queso and chips, and I call it a queso burro. Well, Sarah, I have sort of a bittersweet sensation right now, because on the one hand, that's genius. I don't see how that fails. And then on the other hand, I now have this pang of regret as you become a KSO borough billionaire. Will you still want to be at the dispatch? I don't know. I mean, really, like I just I think if that took off, I'm out, you know. But you would have you would have liked where we lived before we moved to Franklin, Tennessee. And we we live at a really great place, but it's a planned community. It's like, you know, I mean, this HOA here, the Homeowners Association here, I mean, I would not want to cross these people. But we used to live out in rural Tennessee, not on a farm, but just in a house off a street, and we had chickens. We could have had goats. I was lobbying hard for a goat before

I wanted a goat before we left. And I will tell you this, when you're out there and you are, you know, when you go out on your front porch and you can hear the coyotes, you just sort of have this feeling of independence. You just feel, there's this sort of feeling of like freedom, you know, that sort of stereotypical hashtag America. You just, there is a sense of independence. There is a sense of that you can weather a storm out there. And I'm not so sure that you quite feel that in these urban city centers, where the very amusement park that was once a source of joy becomes actually an ominous

threat in a way. Yeah. And the one thing I would critique of what you said, by the way, you said the feeling after 9-11 was that this could happen again. And I guess, and again, I was in college. And so I was at a more tender age for 9-11, a more formative age. I would not have said the feeling was that it could happen again. I would say that my feeling was it will happen again. And I think when it comes to this virus for college, you know, for that formative age group, I don't think they see this as a, oh, wow, like this, this can happen. I think they will see it as a, this will continue to happen. Yeah, that's a, that's a fair point. I think that that was my thought after 9-11. This is the first

of many, which by the way, we really, when we talk about the war since 9-11, why do we just take it for granted that our nation has been safe from an attack like that for 19 years almost now? Like we just take that for granted. Like, of course, that was going to happen. And that was actually the main point of the military engagement. And we accomplished the main point. But you're going to get me launched on a tirade. I blame you, Sarah.

But I would love to hear from you guys, the listeners, what are long-term cultural trends that – or political trends. Is this going to change the culture wars? Is this going to change the way we talk about economic policy? Are people, because of the fragility of employer-based health care that we're now seeing with 26 million jobless claims, with the fragility of employer-based health care, does that mean that Bernie Sanders is going to have a renaissance when he runs again? I think on Monday, I want to hear your thoughts on how this accelerates, decelerates, shakes up the lines of the culture war. So maybe that can be our Monday topic. Okay. That sounds like fun. Uh, and before Monday, let's hear from you guys, what you guys think. Yeah. Um, anything else, Sarah? No, I'm just thinking about how I'm going to take care of all my queso burros. I mean, genius. Like, genius. I mean, now the question is, because the demand will be so high.

Right. I'm going to need several queso burros. Thousands. Thousands of queso burros. Within distribution. And imagine they're little saddles. You need special saddles because you need the chip side and the queso side. And then, you know, you need some decoration for the front as well. And you need a certain personality on your burros.

Well, I just can't wait for the environmentalists to come after you when you have these giant queso burro farms stretching across the length and breadth of the United States, which is, and you become like one of the, they become one of the main producers of methane in the United States. I just imagined your last garden party and how much better it would have been with egg guac and queso burro. Just, I leave you with that. And there's nothing, I can think of no better way to end the podcast. So thank you guys for listening. Please rate us on Apple Podcasts and please subscribe and please become a member of the Dispatch. Thank you again for listening.

This is David French and Sarah Isger with Advisory and Payment. Bye.