"Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof"

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gabfest. April 2nd, 2026, the subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof Edition. I'm David Plotts of CityCast here in Washington, D.C. from New Haven, Connecticut, always representing Yale Law School, always representing the New York Times Magazine, New York Times generally. Emily Gosling, hello Emily. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. And from Providence, Rhode Island, where he is touring group houses of various sorts. John Dickerson, Lego just released the first of John's new Lego kits of presidential libraries. I think it's a great idea. I mean, other people say maybe people aren't that interested in the architecture of presidential libraries, but I trust John's vision about any petty critic. Which library did you start with, John? This is my new favorite thing on the planet. The only problem is that it has to do with me, which is the only thing that makes it... The Obama Library, of course, because it was actually out my window when I was at the University of Chicago. It's a fascinating piece of architecture and it looms above the landscape and really arrests the eye. And it is sort of as if it's almost Lego-esque, in fact, in its kind of blockiness. Well, the kit is $24.95 and it's available in stores everywhere and wherever you shop online. At an imaginary store near you. I'm going to start so many businesses for John. I'm going to discover that John actually is running all these businesses one day. I'm getting nothing off of it. This is very much what my life is right now. You know, it's like, we've got a great podcast on Lint. We'd like you to host. Presidential Lint. This week on the GapFest, the Supreme Court seems skeptical of President Trump's plan to abolish birthright citizenship. When Trump seems to want to wind down the Iran War and to prevent the economy from cratering, can he do it? Does he actually have the will, the means, the ideas to do that? Then we're going to check in on the two most fascinating Senate primaries that are a little bit mirror images of each other in Maine where Democrats are battling and in Texas where Republicans are battling. Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter. Hey Sainsbury's, I'm cooking for everyone this Easter, but I don't want to break the bank. Got any tasty offers? Well, with nectar, there's half price on selected sides of salmon and selected beef joints and whole legs of lamb are better than half price. Ooh, they'll be as happy as my wallet. Sainsbury's, good food for all of us. 18 plus nectar required excludes locals end 7th of April subject to availability, teas and seas apply. Humans, it is I, HypnoCat. Never bin batteries or electricals. They cause fires when crushed in bin buries. Always recycle them separately from your regular rubbish and recycling. Search, recycle your electricals to find shops and recycling banks where you can drop them off. The Trump administration in 2025 issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented people in America. The order prompted legal challenges immediately and the substantive legal challenge to the order finally reached the Supreme Court this week as some pregnant women presumably undocumented, although I don't even know, where plaintiffs' final lawsuit challenging the order and the ACLU represented them, took their case before the justices. The case seems to turn, or maybe it does, or maybe it doesn't, on the meaning of five words in the 14th Amendment subject to the jurisdiction thereof. So put another log on the fire, top off your whiskey, get ready for an Emily Bazalon special. Explain the issues in this case, Emily, get us started. No, wait, I have some thoughts first. Just kidding. That would be great if you did. Look, the 14th Amendment says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the states wherein they reside. That passage is from 1868. It is repeated in a 1952 statute. There's also an important Supreme Court precedent from 1898, which read this clause to mean that someone whose parents were Chinese, who were in the country, and then left the country, that he could come back into the country. And subject to the jurisdiction thereof has always been read very narrowly in terms of the exceptions to this rule we have of birthright citizenship. So one exception is the children of diplomats who have diplomatic immunity. And so they're really not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Another exception is a hostile invading army. And a third, at the time of the 14th Amendment, were what were called Indians, non-taxed Indians, because they were seen as having their own tribal sovereignty and not as being citizens. And Congress passed the statute in 1924 to address that and change that. We have the text of the 14th Amendment and the statute. And we've always read these words, I think, based on their plain meaning, in this very broad way to create this broad right of birthright citizenship. We're one of about three dozen countries in the world that does it this way. Most of the countries like us, it's like Canada and Mexico and a whole bunch of countries in Latin America and a few in Africa. Europe and Asia and the Middle East don't have birthright citizenship. They do it differently. They do it based on the citizenship of the parents. But the word parents does not appear in the 14th Amendment. And so a really big challenge for the Trump administration in defending Trump's executive order, which purports to change all of the history I just described with the stroke of the pen, is that subject to the jurisdiction thereof appears to refer to the people born and naturalized, not to the parents, which could create this broader right. And so that was a big issue, among other things, at the argument this week. And just explain why that would be important. If it refers to the person, the child, it's pretty clear that that child is subject to the jurisdiction. And if the parents are implicit in the argument that the parents, because they are citizens of Guatemala and are living undocumented, they might be less subject, although even the parents are subject to. Right. Well, if you read subject to the jurisdiction thereof to mean that if you're in this country, you're subject to our laws, right? If you run a stoplight, someone can give you a traffic ticket or arrest you, then that would apply to everybody undocumented people, adults, the parents. But if you remember that there is no mention of the parents in the 14th Amendment, then you would think, well, what about this baby that's just been born? This baby is only in the United States. And these questions about whether parents have to have more permanent status in order to be really rooted here. The word that got talked about a lot at the argument was domicile. This is a word that the government, the Solicitor General was claiming in the 19th century, had some kind of permanency about it. In other words, people who were domiciled in the United States, well, their children had birthright citizenship. But if you were what the Solicitor General, John Sauer, was calling a temporary sojourner, and we might say in our modern words, like, your presence here was not lawful, then maybe you're not subject to American law. And there's some theory of this, right? Maybe you have allegiance, another word that came up a lot, to another country. And you can have a system that accords citizenship on that basis, right? Lots of other countries do it this way. It is not how America, the United States, has done citizenship since 1868. And that is like all of the history that the administration is up against. And Emily, we've talked about this before where, you know, if there's one word used once and no other time, then you can have a debate about what that word means. But in this case, as you've all just outlined so nicely, repeatedly the interpretation of that, you know, of that phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof has been interpreted in an extremely specific way, repeatedly throughout the history of the United States. So is there a term for, I mean, maybe bulletproof is one, but I mean, is there a term for that kind of thing where you, where somebody's trying to start a, you know, semantic debate, but there's extended proof throughout the history of American life that the semantic debate actually doesn't exist? Yeah. I mean, I think in legal terms, it's like a canon of construction. That's like a fancy term for just like how you read laws and the Constitution. A canon of construction that just respects precedent, right? We have always done it this way. And here it's not as if like we're reading it in some weird way that doesn't match with the words. It's the most natural reading anyway. I would say that the biggest challenge to what I, what you and I were just talking about came from Justice Alito. So Justice Alito was the only justice at the argument who seemed clearly on the side of the government. It doesn't mean the Trump administration won't get another vote or two. I couldn't really tell what Clarence Thomas thought. But Justice Alito was saying, well, that's fine for 1868, but they didn't really have illegal immigration in 1868. And so those words meant something then that now they can't mean anymore. Oh my God, the originalists. Oh God, come on guys. Yeah, it was tough. And right. And so I think one of the memorable lines in the argument when John Sauer, the Solicitor General was making a kind of similar set of points, Chief Justice Roberts said, well, the world has changed, but the Constitution is the same. And that is supposed to be how conservatives interpret text, indeed how a lot of the, you know, liberal interpretations have moved closer to this respect for history as well. And Justice Kagan had another moment that I thought was really memorable where she said, look, to the Solicitor General, this Trump executive order is challenging the whole story that the United States had told itself about immigration and citizenship. If you're going to challenge our whole kind of foundational narrative, she kept using the word story. She was being really good about using just plain words. If you're going to challenge that whole story, what kind of, what level of evidence do you think you should have to be able to overturn and toss the whole thing? It's a major story questions doctrine. Yes. It was, I don't know, I found it quite moving in an argument that I otherwise... What is Sauer saying in response to that? I mean, he just sort of dribbled on, right? Because one thing that has happened in the last, I would say like year or two is that a bunch of conservative scholars who previously accepted the standard reading of birthright citizenship in all its breadth have gone back and they've like looked at the record and they can find particular members of Congress in 1868 who said things that are maybe at odds with our general understanding. You can kind of cherry pick and put together some evidence and then you can try to upset the whole apple card. And so, you know, he wasn't going to concede like, I don't have enough evidence, but that's what we're talking about. Do you think with a case like this, we talk about the Overton window. Everyone listeners probably know about this. The idea of the kind of bounds of acceptable debate. And it is definitely true that 20 years ago, more or less, had you raised this idea, had a president, had President George W. Bush proposed this idea, it would have been, people would have been appalled. Everyone would have been appalled. It would not have been taken seriously. It wouldn't have gotten anywhere. But President Trump has, because he's been so effective and because he's got the Republican party in his pocket in the way that he does, has been able to push this issue. Does the Supreme Court, can the Supreme Court close the Overton window? Like, I guess what I'm asking is, it seems pretty clear they are going to not accept this argument that Trump is making. They're not going to uphold this executive order. But does that mean that birthright citizenship is now more stable or less stable than it was before this happened? I think they can make it much more stable. They can say, this is the plain reading of this text in the Constitution. And if you want to change the law, you have to change the Constitution. There's another option, which is that they can say, I don't think they're going to do this, but it seems possible. If you were going to try to get to 9-0, maybe you could say, well, we're going to start with the 1952 statute. Because there is a rule of construction that if you can decide that something on the basis of a plain old law, you don't go all the way to the kind of deeper, weightier matter of the constitutional text. So they could just say, this statute is extremely clear. We did have illegal immigration in 1952. People understood what it was. All of this fussing over domicile and allegiance and temporary sojourners in the 19th century is not necessary. We don't have to resolve those questions. If they went in that direction, then Congress could pass another law. And then there would be another challenge about whether that law was at odds with the 14th Amendment. So that would be a way to kind of kick the can down the road and not close this Overtune window. You're so right about the Overtune window, though, David, because in 2018 when, I think I've got the history right here, when 2018 when Trump first brought up the idea of birthright citizenship and getting rid of it, he was totally ridiculed, including by Paul Ryan, not exactly a flimthroar, who said, it's not that you can't do it by executive order. And it was sort of dismissed for the moment as a midterm ploy, which, by the way, his visit to the Supreme Court and this whole business is still in keeping with that tradition. And the visit, particularly to the Supreme Court, is obviously theatrics in the context of a midterm campaign. What I wonder, though, is if another Overtune window is open, which is, and Emily, this is a legal question, which is just like no downside for fringe provocations at the Supreme Court. Okay, let's take it to the Supreme Court. And like, even if we lose, there's a bunch of attention to the issue we want, and that's good for us. And hey, we may not lose. We might get this weird immunity nobody thought we would ever have. Like is that a new thing that is now a part of our life that is an opening of an Overtune window? I am so glad you brought this up because I was finding myself just feeling despondent, listening to the arguments. And it wasn't that they were going badly for birthright citizenship. It was this feeling that no matter what, the court is just more and more dragged into Trump's boxing arena and into his mud. And that the whole point of him showing up was just, as you're saying, like a performance, a distraction, let's make it all about him. He loves doing things where it's like, oh, no president has ever done this before. But we can't exactly say what's wrong with it. I just feel like in the wake of the president, you know, calling members of the court who he appointed sick and embarrassing and treasonous, like all of this in the wake of the tariff ruling that went against Trump's tariff policy, it's all about turning the court into a political prop. And then the fact that he left midway through when the ACLU attorney, Cecilia Wang, was well, and also she herself is a birthright citizen. So there was a kind of like a dramatic irony that no director would let a scriptwriter get away with. She rocked it too. She really did a great job. I want to end just, and I don't know whether they got to this, Emily. Did they discuss how hard it would be to enforce this ruling? Like I do think because you're born, you get a birth certificate no matter who you are, get a birth certificate. Like how are you going to, like the process of denying citizenship to thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of people seems like really, really complicated. And just before you answer it, like one of the things that has always made me shudder and when I think about things that ways the world could turn against you and you could end up in a really bad way is the idea of statelessness, the idea that you belong nowhere, that you are a citizen of nowhere. It's just an awful thought. It's an awful thought. Yeah, I totally agree. There was attention to practicalities. Barrett is very good on practicalities. She likes to think those things through. I mean, she also made this good point that was like, okay, there were two kinds of citizenship in the 19th century. There was British common law, place you're born, you're subject to the rules of the king and the place you're born. And then there was lineage of the parents, right? They're called Juicili and Juicanguinis in Latin. And she said, well, it sounds like you're talking about like some sort of third in between kind in which like sometimes it's one and sometimes the other. And don't you think if they were creating a whole new kind of citizenship, someone would have said that and like hung a bell on it. No juice. Yes. And then another good moment was, you know, there's this specter out there and it is not a made up thing of birth tourism. The idea that people come here to have their anchor babies and they leave and these are all kind of derogatory terms. But sometimes it's about like very wealthy people from China coming, right? This like idea. And so Roberts asked John Sauer, okay, well, how much does this happen? And Sauer said, oh, we really don't know. He made it sound like it could be some huge problem, but like who knew? And then Robert said, but all of this is legally irrelevant, right? And of course that is the answer. Not to mention the fact that like the State Department could presumably deny visas to wealthy pregnant women if they wanted to. Like, I don't know. There's just something about the way in which that particular, like there are other ways to stop that if it's really bothering America than ending birthright citizenship. Hey guys, it's Afeera and Tiencia from the Girls' Bathroom Podcast and this message is brought to you by L'Oreal Paris. Now, we like to think we're the experts, to be honest, on green and red flags and dating, but really it comes down to the basics. Someone who's reliable and who actually shows up when you need them most. So why aren't we expecting the same from our makeup? With 46 shades and skin matching technology, True Match Foundation is the one. And to lock it in, the L'Oreal Paris infallible three second setting mist. It commits in three seconds and locks in your makeup for 36 hours. No stickiness or transfer, just total unfiltered loyalty. Shop, True Match Foundation and infallible setting mist that ultimate duo online or in-store. Hello, it's Giovanna here from Happy Mum, Happy Baby and we're currently sponsored by Volvo and the fully electric EX90. The Volvo EX90 is a large, fully electric, luxury SUV, perfect for the family. With seven seats, there's plenty of room for everyone and up to 378 miles range, which is great to keep the journey going. It's also reassuring to know that the EX90 is designed to be the safest Volvo car ever made. And the fast infotainment system is perfect for seamless connectivity so you can keep the music playing for the whole time. What more could you want? Search Volvo EX90 to find out more. Electric range may vary based on driving behaviour and conditions. Hey Sainsbury's, I'm cooking for everyone this Easter, but I don't want to break the bank. Got any tasty offers? Well with Nectar, there's half price on selected sides of salmon and selected beef joints and whole legs of lamb are better than half price. Oh, don't be as happy as my wallet. Sainsbury's, good food for all of us. 18-plus Nectar required excludes locals end 7th of April subject to availability, teas and seas apply. The president really has this tendency of giving these kind of pointless speeches. He demands network airtime, interrupting. I think there was a survival finale or one of the other big reality show season finales and he's like, I need time at nine o'clock to give a big speech. And so then he teased up this big speech last night on Wednesday night and it's going to be about Iran, not clear what it's going to be, but you think, oh, he's declaring victory and the war is over. I don't know what he was declaring. We're invading with 100,000 ground troops. Who knows? But it's a nothing. He takes all this time for nothing. It's a metaphor for, or not even a metaphor, it's an example of how the president seizes attention for his pointless charades of performance and really pointless, really odd. But he finds himself in this kind of no win situation where he has a war that was never announced, never approved by Congress that he says it is not a war in fact at all, a war with no stated goals or perhaps actually more truly a war with every goal stated, but none actually appearing to be a strategic goal of any sort. And a war where we're not even clear who we're fighting at the moment. We're not even clear who the opponent we're negotiating with, if we're negotiating, and not even clear if we're having negotiations. And where we have an ally in Israel that is fighting apparently totally independently of us. So whatever we do might not even end or change the conflict that we want. And where we appear to have achieved little of value, and yet the president is in a position where he absolutely wants to end this and declare victory, but he doesn't know how to do it in part because the Iran has squeezed the Strait of Hormuz such that the world economy has held hostage to it. And because he hasn't achieved any of the obvious strategic goals that he said he wanted, like preventing them from ever having a nuclear program, for example. So John, what did you make of that speech last night? And is there a way for the president to get out of this box? Well, it's a very tough box to get out of because people, according to polling, consistently don't think that this was a good idea. And they've got other concerns. This was not their major concern. And so every time he's talking about it, it's kind of the opposite of, say, you know, what we were discussing with birthright citizenship. There was a period where when the president talked about immigration during the campaign, even before he was elected, when he talked about immigration, that was always good for him because it was such a bad issue for Democrats. In this case, nobody said start a war in Iran. And to the extent that it is attaching to the thing they care the most about, which is affordability in their lives, it's making everything more expensive. It's extraordinary, the global ripples. I mean, everything from the diminution of helium that's used to cool down silicon in chips that are being made in Taiwan, Korean air has gone into emergency processes because of the price of fuel. Obviously, the fertilizer crunch for the United States is a big one because the price of fertilizer is increasing and farmers have to make planting decisions and the costs, like they don't have huge margins to absorb these costs on fertilizer. So I think the problem also, David, is that rhetorically within its own terms, there's a disconnect with what he says, which is on the one hand, he says he obliterated the nuclear program, but then he said we had to go fight this war because of the nuclear program. And there is a way to square that circle. You can say, well, we obliterated it, but there are vestiges that remain that we really have to take care of because they can never have a bomb. Okay, fine. It takes a little bit of back bending to do that, but you can do it. But then the question is, okay, so have you done it now? This is now the second time. Are we done? Is it over? And he can't say that and isn't willing to say that and isn't willing to say we're not going to stop until there is no way, no how that they can ever have a military nuclear program. There's a disconnect there is you can blow up a bunch of buildings, but obviously the brains and the portion of your enriched uranium and the other component parts of a nuclear program survive the blowing up of all of those buildings, which is a larger match to the problem he has, which is militarily there. The United States is winning like crazy, but are they going to be victorious? And victorious means no nuclear program, no stockpile of ballistic missiles they can use, and a regime in power who is going to be pliable in some fashion, whether the US is doing the plying or Gulf States are doing the plying. And those three things are super hard to achieve. And if you wait for them to be achieved, this is going to be a very long war indeed and that doesn't seem to be what he wants. I was struck during this speech by how he was kept job owning everyone into how great things were and how the gas prices were not a problem and anything else they were worried about was not a problem and it was all going to be great. And maybe there had been a day or two in which the stock market wasn't perfect, but it was all worth it and long over. And I don't think it works to tell people that they're supposed to be jolly and happy about gas prices when they can see the gas prices rising every time they look at a gas station. Those are some big signs. I mean, Joe Biden tried this for three years. I'm telling you, the economy is great. Don't worry. And it just, I don't know. It just seems super unconvincing. I saw this wonderful statistic, which is right now the U.S. is paying Americans, overall are paying $300 million today more for gasoline because of the higher gas prices. So $300 million is going directly towards gasoline that wasn't a month ago. And what that comes out to when you start to do the math is about more or less a dollar per person per day. That is, if you think about that for a family of four, that's $1,500 a year in extra cost or nothing. For nothing. Effective. $1,500. Yeah. Most people in this country do not have $1,500 a year of spare cash every year. Like that $1,500 has to come out of something else. That is a massive percentage of most people's kind of available disposable income. You just cannot have that continuing for a long period indefinitely. And I just don't think the president has a credible plan to stop it from happening. Because also you also cannot jawbone the 100,000 gas station owners in the United States to be like, sell your gas for less than you're paying for it. They're going to sell their gas for what they need to sell it for to survive. As you note, that marginal increase in costs hurts people at the bottom end of the economic scale the most. The people who are least likely to get very much, if anything at all, from the tax cuts that were overly weighted to those at the higher end of the income scale. So to the extent that there is a K-shaped economy with those at the top doing better and those at the bottom doing worse, this exacerbates the portion of the people who are already suffering from the current economic situation, which wasn't so rosy for them before this war started. John, do you have any sense about what the actual options are for getting the Strait of Hormuz open? Are there any short of Iran just saying we've got what we want, so now we'll open it fully? I think there aren't because if you're making decisions about whether to send your ships through there and you're an insurance company and you're making the calculation, you can't be half certain it's going to work out for you. You have to be pretty sure it's going to be. So if it's line bristling with ships from all the countries in the world, which by the way it isn't and probably won't be, and we should note as a side matter that this week has also, in terms of just totalling up whether those basic questions about the war was the threat as grave as the president said, was military action the only response to it, and is the cost of the engagement worth what you prevented? One of the things that is a cost now is that the president is now openly essentially saying, yeah, I'm not so sure about NATO and Article 5 and whether we're still a participant. Who knows if he's bluffing? He has, we may note, bluffed many times before. But it is another cost, which is the further damaging of the US relationship with its allies. So that's a cost. So even if you line the strait with lots of ships, and it's A, costly, super costly, it's a commitment where all kinds of weird things can happen. Those drones and the Iranian attacks are difficult and so is the shipping traffic going to go through with that kind of high risk? Probably not. It does require some kind of announcement or decision by the Iranian government, and that means you have to have, that's where they have their leverage. So in these negotiations, that's what has to be worked out. And who knows what the nature of those negotiations are? I mean, it's extraordinary reading, and Secretary Rubio saying, well, we're negotiating with this guy and this guy. So for the moment, we've taken them off the kill list. Well, first of all, if you read that extraordinary Washington Post reporting this week about the sophistication of the Israeli AI assisted a decapitation regime that's killed over 250 Iranian leaders. If I was an Iranian paper boy, I would be worried about engaging with any technology that might tell you where I am because the Israelis can drop a missile on your head. So if the US is negotiating with some people at a table, they're not certain that the Israelis might not target them, even if the US says we're not going to kill you today. So it makes it a very difficult environment in which to negotiate these questions. And the Strait of Hormuz is the one huge piece of leverage. So I don't imagine they're going to just solve that quickly without some kind of assurances from the US or something. So in other words, it doesn't feel like this is going to get solved too quickly. What about Trump's threats to bomb all the power plants? You know, he keeps raising this. He raised it again last night. He's been setting deadlines, which then he blows through. I should say that this would be a war crime if he actually went ahead because targeting the whole power supply of a country in a way that would massively affect civilians is not something that counts as legitimate in the rules of engagement internationally. I mean, when he said it again last night, like it is a big saber to rattle. And I guess he thinks it's I don't know. I can't tell if he thinks it's an effective threat, no matter how many times he blows through the deadline or if he just doesn't have another thing to say right now. He doesn't have another thing to say because I think he recognizes that it's that the blowback would be so much worse. First, because it would be immoral. And second, because it would probably prompt the Iranians to target our Gulf allies with similar things, attacking desalination plants and energy facilities. And that would be devastating for our allies and devastating for the world economy. And it just seems it seems like a completely empty threat. Although with Trump, who the fuck knows? Who knows? I know every time he makes it, I get nervous because who knows? Right. Well, and and you know, that's one of the cards in his pocket, which is the sort of a version of the crazy man strategy, which is like, you never know what he might do. But the problem is it looks like the Iranians are out crazy, not out crazy him, but like matching crazy for crazy there. They'll be they'll hit the Kuwaitis. They'll hit, you know, Dubai ports and when you go after the Dubai chocolate, that's when people rise up. You know, you guys, you're not Dubai chocolate people. I don't know Dubai chocolate. It's this famous new, new luxury chocolate that people are, which has like a kind of pistachio filling to it. It's really good. Hey, it's probably too expensive for me to Dubai it. If this war wraps up in, I don't know, a month, say, John, and the region stays relatively quiet. Do you think this is likely to have any persistent impact on the Republicans and Trump? I mean, I'm not saying that it's going to help them, but is it going to kind of push them down even further than they seem to be as the election approaches? Oh, I think as the election approaches, it's I think it's a big problem for a couple of reasons. I mean, the big reason is people care about, you know, affordability, and this is making affordability worse. So like it's just a simple, it falls into an existing problem for the Republican Party and it's simple and the president's approval ratings are dropping as a result of this. To the extent that Emily, you know, just exactly what Emily was saying before, you can't convince people that their wallets are better off than they are. You also can't convince people that you're winning a war, that they don't think you're winning. And in that there is like, there is a case to be made for what the president has said, but he doesn't make it as well as it can be made. But it's Iran was a threat. I said I would deny them a nuclear weapon and I went ahead and did what I was supposed to do. And that's what leadership requires. We've taken out their their defenses in such measure that we're now flying B 52s, these slow lumbering elephants over Iran. And the reason we can do that is we've so thoroughly decimated their military and we're going to finish the job by getting rid of their nuclear program. And so we took a once in a generation threat off the board. And as the secretary of treasury says, we're going to have peace in the Middle East for 50 years. Now, the reason they're not saying that, even though the treasury secretary did say that, is that that is a huge claim. And like you got to do a lot of work to actually lock that all in. And I'm not sure the president wants to do all that work. And by the way, all that work is really hard to do. So if you're not going to do that, it's going to be kind of shambolic. I mean, there's going to be the economist this week was blistering in making the case that Trump basically failed his own negotiating techniques and that it's just obvious in everything he says that he's desperate to finish, to come up with some kind of way to back out of this. So that is that's more motivation for the other side and more that weakens you as a Republican candidate in terms of the enthusiasm that you have and that your base has. So I think that's not good in the midterm that was already not trending well for Republicans. Hello, this is Jane and Fee from Offair. We're currently sponsored by SpecsAvers, the seeing and hearing experts. Eyes and ears. That's right, Fee. SpecsAvers might be the nation's favorite optician, but did you know they also care a lot about your hearing and they have done for over 20 years? Well, I'm not being funny, Jane, but maybe they should change their name. Then what about Specs and Hearing Savers? Yeah. SpecsAvers. Look, I see what you're doing, but I think we'll all stick to SpecsAvers. It is undeniable, though, that the world is getting noisier and our ears are having to work even harder to hear what's important above the din of daily life. So put your ears in good hands with SpecsAvers. Book a free hearing check today. Hey, guys, it's Afeera and Tiencia from the Girls' Bathroom Podcast, and this message is brought to you by L'Oreal Paris. Now, we like to think we're the experts, to be honest, on green and red flags and dating, but really it comes down to the basics. Someone who's reliable and who actually shows up when you need them most. So why aren't we expecting the same from our makeup? With 46 shades and skin matching technology, True Match Foundation is the one. And to lock it in, the L'Oreal Paris Infallible 3-Second Setting Mist. It commits in 3 seconds and locks in your makeup for 36 hours. No stickiness or transfer, just total unfiltered loyalty. Shop True Match Foundation and Infallible Setting Mist, the ultimate duo online or in-store. There are two wonderfully contrasting Senate primaries in wonderfully contrasting states. In Maine, Democratic Governor Janet Mills is running in the primary, Senate primary, against the upstart oyster farmer, dubiously tattooed veteran Graham Platner. That's a June Democratic primary in the race to run against Susan Collins, the lone Senate Republican who's held onto a seat in a state that Trump has lost repeatedly. And in Texas, John Cornyn, incumbent Senator, is in a May runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton for the right to be the Republican candidate against Democrat James Talerico in that Senate race. And there are fascinating strategic questions for voters in both parties about which candidate you want to win, that primary which candidate is the candidate who is likely to accomplish most and likely to win in an election that really matters for Democrats to take back the Senate. They absolutely have to win Collins' seat. They might even have to win the seat in Texas. They certainly would love to win that seat in Texas. It would be a huge deal for them to win the seat in Texas. So let us start in Maine, Emily Bazlon, around the corner from you. Janet Mills, Governor, has a Biden problem, which is that she is 79 years old. And like just, I mean, I think a popular, effective governor and well liked, but she's very, very old and has already said she would not run for a second term. So she's already, what should we call it, herself, named Dr. So named Dr. So yes, Platner. So she has a Biden problem. Platner has a Nazi problem. He has not. All right. Little over the top. He has a like, oh, you know, women ask for it. The women ask for it problem. Yeah, he said, he said some things about women that, you know, you wish he hadn't said if you're his buddy, he has a DUI charge against him. But if you're just me, you wish that he had said those things. He's got, so he has the energy. He's leading in polls. I think it's going to be very hard for him to lose this at this point. I mean, it's a couple of months out, but he's, he's got a pretty strong lead, according to the polls. And but she has oldster support in the oldest state in the union. Maine has the oldest population going. And and she would be, she would be credible for a lot of the women who, older women who are very, very important in the Maine electorate and the general election. So, you know, what do you make of Platner's rise? And is it, is it good news broadly for Democrats in Maine? Well, I feel like I have been kind of pickled in the brine of like the national media's love affair with Grand Platner, which has been significant, right? He draws crowds. He's more interesting. He has this oyster farmer thing going for him, though I should also say that he like comes from multi generations of privilege, including like prep school and etc. But anyway, I was like, OK, everyone seems like they're super into Grand Platner and we're and there's a lot of interesting. I note that he has a lot of progressive support in the progressives are kind of saying pay no attention to those super obnoxious things he said about women, etc. Years ago on the Internet, we're just all moving along from that and from his tattoo. It does seem like he's probably going to win. But then I was reading Ron Brownstein's analysis of the electorate and Janet Mills strengths with the older women you were talking about, David, the people who the Democrats need to peel off from Susan Collins. And I thought to myself, oh, no, I have just like drunk this Kool-Aid kind of lazily. But actually, you know, if you were being strategic and mean, you probably would stick with Janet Mills and doesn't really matter whether she's like electrifying and drawing crowds and exciting journalists from New York. What matters is her appeal with this important constituency in this election. It's why these races are so fascinating. And I was at first, I wasn't sure, David, why you were like, no, we should talk about these two. And you would think that I would immediately get what you were talking about. But it took me a minute. But it's what's so fascinating about this, obviously, is the way in which it maps onto the big debates in both parties and also basically just all political debates that we've had in the last several cycles in the presidential cycles. But, you know, the question is really whether Brownstein's analysis, which is totally real and super smart, sort of whether there is a there is some percentage of politics that is just passion and vibes. And like a voter who, yes, a voter might think, oh, you know, Janet is a good possible alternative to Susan Collins. But any older female voter that Mills would take from Collins is also a person who might have voted for Collins for four terms, you know, and and not be a raging. We with her fury that Collins is, you know, basically in the post row world, Collins can be blamed by progressives for, you know, having backed Supreme Court nominees who helped overturn row or a number of other sins that Collins is guilty of. Presumably, those people have already left Collins and therefore Mills is not going to like pull them over in the general election. And and the back to the sort of vibes versus strategy that like essentially, yes, you can pencil out on paper away in which Mills can take older female voters from Collins, but that there's no substitute for just like energy. And Platner is in the noisy part of the room. And that's where you want to be in politics and stop trying to micromanage everything down to the micrometer with strategy. You need candidates who are going to make, you know, be enthusiastic and maybe they're rough, you know, and maybe they've got lots of problems, but enthusiasm trumps strategy. I'm sort of exaggerating for effect. But I mean, that's essentially the argument across both parties. And that's why these two races are so fascinating. And I think this is shaping up to be an anti incumbent year. An incumbent in this case is Trump. It is the kind of chaotic incompetence of Trump. It is the the lies of Trump. It is the way in which people like Collins have been duped and dragged along with Trump and given him cover. And I think there's a lot of huge amount of rage about that in the electorate. And and that aligns to Platner much better than aligns to Mills. Like, I don't think Mills can Mills cannot credibly offer that. Offer that. On the other hand, you would say like, I mean, this you say, well, that is there in the electorate, it is going to go to the anti Trump candidate, no matter what. And therefore, the historic advantage that Collins has had where people vote for her, even though they're voting for Democrats for other offices has vanished and it will vanish for everyone. And so let's go with the safe pair of hands and the safe pair of hands obviously Mills, because you're not going to alienate these other people. And I just don't I mean, I don't even know. I mean, I tend to be with you, John, that the energy argument is the more compelling one that when you have a candidate who's creating energy and a sense of fun, that that is that's winning and worth extra. Yeah, that's a that's a bonus. And I wonder the extent to which when you line up all of the planets and the gravitational pull of each argument on whatever the ultimate outcome will be, how big the Donald Trump planet plays a role. And what I mean is this, in the back of everyone's mind is the idea that if you looked at strategically in 2015 and 2016, whether Donald Trump would be able to get the nomination of his party, forget about dismissing him as like a buffoon, take him seriously. As some of us did, and then try to do the strategic math of the way that Ron did with this race. And you never you would have been like, no, it's a party made up of social conservatives. He unchecks every behavioral characterological box with social conservatives, they're not going to vote for somebody who is multiply married, credibly accused of sexual assault, treats the lesser in the in American culture with derision and as objects of scorn. Oops, well, maybe they are right. So to the extent that everybody's view of how the math works has been changed. This is a question. I wonder how much Trump kind of explicitly or implicitly changes the way people think about the way politics works. Since we've been experiencing it now for more than 10 years. Is that an argument for either Platinum or Mills will win and so it doesn't matter that much and then also like, maybe imagine a world in which the Democrats do well in November and there's a kind of blue, maybe not like wipe out but like a blue tide and Platinum imagine it's because as seems likely Platinum's the nominee and he wins. Then is it important not to over read that victory as like totally vindicating that strategy because I feel like that's part of the fight here, right? It's like a proxy fight, especially because I think one of his advisors is Mom Donnie's guy Morris Katz who's been making an argument that the Democrats just need to change how they message and they just need to challenge and have energy like we were talking about and then they don't have to moderate on substantive policy questions. And so if Platinum follows that path and then he wins, there's going to be this like, aha moment. But maybe it's just going to be about the electorate is just mad at Trump has had enough and like any old Democrat would win. Yeah, right. And your point being like, okay, so and this is why this is worth talking about how does this map on the battleground states in the presidential campaign and the argument that like, okay, you need strategic candidates who can win in those battlegrounds, not the ones that get everybody excited, you know, in Massachusetts and Vermont. No, Maine is different from Massachusetts and Vermont, right? Like it's Maine is more. Yeah, it was the only state that gave Perot any love. So yes, it's a different state. Yeah, but I think you're still right. Like how does it map on to Nebraska, you know, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, these purple states like we don't. I mean, I strongly tend to think that this 2026 is going to be an anomalous year no matter what. It is an anomalous year because there is just so much of it is tied up right now on the Democratic side with this disillusion with Trump who will in the 2028 presidential election, he'll still play a role and that will also be an interesting year too. But I just don't think that whatever happens in 2026, I would be if I were a Democratic strategist, I would be very loath to be like, oh, now we only need oyster farmers. That's all we've got. Just oyster farmers here on out. Although I do love like separately from that to sort of back out on that point, I love the these blue collar candidates who are running. I think it is so overdue. This this woman, Kayla Berg, who's a flight attendant in Minnesota who's running. There's a Dan Osborne in Nebraska not running as a Democrat, but it's an independent. There's a firefighter running in Pennsylvania, an electrician just won a state Senate seat in Florida. It is that feels really, really good. And I hope that that's a trend that continues because we've had such a rain of plutocrats running and to have to have to have basically regular people seems good. Yeah, especially if they're actually like bringing being in touch with regular people. Right. I mean, I'm struck by this when I listened to Ruben Gallego that he just seems to talk in a way that seems like he is actually surrounded by or at least like in close touch with not with people who are not like us, which seems super important. Do you think that's why he didn't come on our Gaffa shows because he doesn't want to be in touch with people like us? Didn't we invite you? He doesn't even want to be guest. It's so good. And what and you know, the general so what that then what then happens is anybody who makes a strategic argument, which might have merit. Nevertheless, it sounds and smells like the kind of argument that the that the non, you know, Gallego type candidates would have made even though like plenty of those candidates who won the sort of what you've called the blue collar candidates, David. There's a strategy behind that, right? Like, but it's just it this is getting a little meta. But what I find so fascinating as people extrapolate the events of individual states and individual races is the way in which even language becomes fraught and freighted with meaning in in this kind of larger debate over do we want authentic candidates who are who are going to speak to regular people or do we want candidates who can fit the template of the electorate as it's going to be in these states and just and win. Can we turn to Texas because Texas is this fascinating mirror image so the Texas Republicans have like a similar kind of choice to main Democrats. They have an incumbent senator, John Cornyn, who is running to be reelected to that Senate seat in a very historically red state. And then this extremely corrupt, adulterous, very annoying candidate and Ken Paxson, who has all the MAGA energy, who is beloved by Trump people, who is totally red meat, super aggro. And and they are in this runoff and everyone, I think for a moment after that, it was clear that we're going to be in a runoff thought, oh, Trump is going to endorse Cornyn and nudge Paxson out of the race so that because Cornyn seems clearly to be the better general election candidate against James Talerico, the charismatic Democrat who won the Democratic primary a few weeks ago. But now, for reasons that John's going to explain, Trump did not do that. Paxson seems at least according to the betting markets, Paxson is slightly favored to win that election against Cornyn and then it sets up a really fascinating general election contest in Texas where there may be this is this is a chance for a Texas Democrat to steal a Senate seat in in weird circumstances. The betting markets also say that Paxson is going to wear brown shoes on Friday. So place your wagers now. John, you're somebody who like you're somebody who like looks at polls, you cited poll. I mean, betting markets, they they're not perfect, but they're another proxy. No, no, no, no, no. That was a joke about. Okay. That was joke about proxy betting. It's not it was not to undermine your point about betting markets. It's just that it was I was remembering our conversation with McKay last week and the fact that betting markets will bet on anything. It looks like Paxson is ahead, which is one reason Trump may not have endorsed him because the energy of the magabase, which Trump doesn't want to. Trump doesn't want to go pick a rhino over a true believer because he is the ultimate true believer. And so I'm such not a rhino corn is super conservative. He's just like not an asshole. Corny is like a very gentlemanly person. Well, he's not. He's he's like, you know, is kind of that now is you may have to take it you may have unintentionally or maybe intentionally come up with a definition to distinguish the different parts of the party. I mean, if being aggressive and publicly cruel and breaking norms and moral boundaries that used to be, you know, inviolate, if breaking them gets the wrong piece gets gets you yelled at. By the people everybody doesn't like, which is to say commentators or liberals, then like that that elevates you. Corny doesn't do any of that stuff. So it's almost, you know, it's behavioral, not not not position not determined by positions. And I think so the polling is the polling is not the way Donald Trump would like it. I think also Corny. Paxton did this sort of maybe clever if it worked, but also sort of too clever by half. But again, it may have worked when he basically said I'll drop out if the SAVE Act goes through Congress, which puts some pressure on Corny, which he seems to have embraced by changing his position on on the filibuster. So it's now too late, right? I mean, you can't they're on the ballot. So Trump like, and also Trump's not going to pay any penalty for not. I mean, for backing out on claiming that he was going to make an endorsement. I mean, he's backed out on plenty of things. So he's not like it's going to be the downside was I guess what I'm circling around here is the downside to an to a improper endorsement is greater than the upside of doing it. I think also the Republicans got more confident that either one of their candidates can beat Talerico, right? Seems like. Why do they think that Emily do you think I did did new comments of his from the past appear? Is that yeah, there's there's very you know, they think they can use comments of his in the past about trans rights and other things will be in Texas. Deadly for him. I think that is such a great point, Emily. It just like you. It caused everybody to hit the snooze bar and now it's too late. I do wonder extent to which so let's whoever it is against Talerico. I mean, usually these races like all the money that was spent trying to beat Lindsey Graham and trying to beat Mitch McConnell just huge wastes of money. The same was true with better or or or or came closer to Cruz than people kind of acknowledge it. It seems this race has a chance, especially if it's Paxton and it's Talerico to maybe Talerico loses and all that money Democrats think about spending in Texas is a waste of time, but it does seem to me that to be an opportunity. When you look at all those other races where Democrats spent a lot of money against candidates, they weren't going to be an opportunity to use a local Senate race local in the sense that it's just one state to make larger claims and larger arguments about the party. To the extent that Paxton is Donald Trump like this becomes like a second beat to talk about issues that Democrats would like to probably. I'm wondering if that's the case. It feels like it has some conditions to make that the case. Right. But that isn't there this like potentially missing connection that like, OK, that's all good. But if you don't put in place a kind of longer term organizing structure, then all you've done is create a campaign. It's like a pop up store as opposed to a business that stays open. I mean, isn't that like a longer term problem for Democrats in these red states? Yeah, I was assuming basically, Talerico loses, but that there still is a national benefit for Democrats in a way that there never was in South Carolina and Kentucky. Got that. You know, you people do pop up stores to to extend your laborious analogy. People do pop up stores because often they intend. I liked my. I like your analogy too. I know, I think it's really good because they intend to then have a brick and mortar presence like you do a pop up as a test. And and one thing that you can imagine a Talerico, even a failed Talerico campaign doing is helping to build more democratic infrastructure. Even if you end up losing the race, you're probably not going to you're probably going to lose it by a fairly small margin. And that gives heartens Democrats who are in South Texas and tells them like, you know what, maybe now maybe now is a time to keep pushing on this because it's also quite likely that Democrats are going to are going to do well in some of the Texas House seats that have been either Republican or have been trending Republican in that are largely Hispanic or heavily Hispanic. And I and that would be exciting for them if they can start to to to use this campaign to build some more durable infrastructure, which I guess you're saying they didn't do that for better work. But every year that passes, the state is becomes slightly less accessible to Republican. Yeah, yeah, more accessible to Democrats. Yeah, I just think you have to and I don't know how to do this, but you have to be strategic about the kind of organization you're building that it's going to continue and not feel like a pop up that just closes. And then I think also you just have this long term longer term challenge about the Democratic brand and what you're going to do about in these red states. And if Talerico can help address that because he's appealing and if the Democrats win some state level races, totally agree. Like then you're starting to chip away. But I think that that challenge remains and I still don't see the party really grappling with that in a way that makes me think like, oh, they're going to overcome this in some foreseeable future and figure out how to really compete nationally in all these places. Or more of them at least. One thing that I think just has been really on my mind a lot is that the 28 presidential election is going to be an open, you know, neither party will have an incumbent candidate. JD Vance as vice president does not qualify in my in this context, I don't think. And that is going to create some extraordinary rock'em sock'em politics as both parties try to work through these issues. And we, I mean, it's just, I mean, we've got some, it really, the last time we had this, right, was 2008, where you had both parties seeking a nominee. That's just going to be a, it's just, it's going to be wild. Isn't that what Trump said on January 6th? Yes, exactly. Well, I think in much the same way, I think it's, it's going to be wild. Let us go to cocktail chatter. Emily Bazlan, when you are getting back from spring break, you were and you're back. I'm back. I'm back. I've been back. What is now, it's no longer, it's no longer Puerto Rican cocktails. It's just a gigantic pour of white wine. What are you, what are you going to be chattering? Prosecco, please, Prosecco, please. Okay. So I cannot let pass this executive order about mail-in voting from this week, which like, oh my God. Okay. So the president who, you know, does not, the constitution does not confer upon the president authority to dismantle and completely override state election law. And yet this executive order directs the department of Homeland Security to create a state citizenship list based on data they're collecting from all kinds of other agencies because they have access to all that now. And then federal officials send that list to the state election officials. And by the way, if you're a state election official who accidentally gives a federal or ballot to an ineligible voter, you're now going to be prioritized for prosecution. But if you do what you're told, then you work with the postal service, which is going to have this registered list of voters and only those people on this national list are supposed to be able to get their mail-in ballots. I mean, I just like the level of bureaucracy we are talking about, the thicket of restriction the way of just trying to make it really hard for people to vote by mail is pretty astonishing. And this is of course like a step along the way of having a national citizenship registry, I guess, or a national voter registry, which then the federal government would control. And while you can have like a really interesting conversation about federal versus state regulation and oversight of elections, right now to have the centralized federal power and control and authority seems like quite a bad idea when we have a president who is absolutely flirting with threatening free and fair elections by taking them over in some way with yet another executive order. So I look forward to this one being blocked in court. It will be challenged right away. It probably already has been. But yeah, it's really, really a creating serious obstacles to people voting by mail. John Dickerson, what's your not so gloomy chatter? Well, it's not. It's mildly gloomy. We should acknowledge that we are at the one year anniversary, essentially of what the White House and the president called Liberation Day. And I think in the context of the war launched in Iran, we shouldn't forget that the war, the trade war that was launched to the extent that Iran is rewiring the global economy as countries stick with me gang. To Ed Chairman Powell said, hey, we see these spikes that are coming as a result of fuel prices and it's worrisome, but it doesn't necessarily worry us so much that we're going to raise rates to combat it because what can happen is rates will kick in after the oil shock goes away. In other words, the war will have been somehow resolved. Oil prices will go down and then you'll be stuck with higher rates because they they lag and they're not a good short term response to what might be a price spike. He said, on the other hand, people might go, oh, gee, gas is at four, it's going to five. I'm going to ask for more money at my job. Companies are going to stop producing as much because they'll be like people are paying more for gas and they'll pay less for our stuff. And it can have long term implications of the economy, which is what the 70s were in the States. So Powell is like balancing these two things. The EU decided, no, it's over. We've got a long term inflation problem created by this war. And so we are now suggesting measures to deal with that new emergency. So before the global economy was being disrupted by the war, it was being disrupted by these trade policies. And the number one idea behind them was that manufacturing would improve in the United States as a result of this trade war. Ninety eight thousand fewer jobs year over year were created in manufacturing. There are 29,000, almost 30,000 fewer auto manufacturing jobs and 18,000 fewer wood manufacturing jobs. So the stated reason, which was to create jobs by this tariff scheme has not happened. There is increased productivity at manufacturing in manufacturing, but that's because robots are getting the jobs. So it's important, I think, to note that score keeping on this other significant or that has been launched by the Trump administration. OK, I'm going to run through a couple of chapters quickly. Number one story this week about the God Squad. There's this panel that can wave environmental regulations for energy projects. And what it means is that they can sort of say, oh, we don't need to worry about these. This or that endangered species. And they waved huge set of regulations around offshore drilling so that there could be offshore drilling for oil and gas. I just want to point out that this is the same administration that used environmental concerns to stop offshore wind projects that it said, oh, these offshore wind projects are damaging. They threaten the environment. That was one major excuse. And so we have to kill these projects. But when it comes to drilling and natural gas, it's like, oh, no, no, no, we can't have environmental regulation stopping this quest for American energy. It makes me furious. OK, that's number one. Number two, absolutely magnificent story in Emily's New York Times this week by Alex Vatacool. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. And it's about a New Jersey teen named Michael Haskell. And Michael Haskell is a kid who's watched some of these storage war TV shows and decided he was going to buy abandoned storage units. And so he buys abandoned storage units, which somebody stops paying on the storage unit. Eventually that storage unit gets auctioned and you buy the contents and then you discover what's in it and then you sell what you discover. And so he's built a nice little business where he buys abandoned storage units and auctions off the goods. And he's just like a wonderful kid. Like you read about this kid and you're like, he's so deep. He's really thinking about the lives of the people who whose storage units he's buying and where they went awry, where things went south for them. And it's just like a real heartfelt story about a kid who's clearly a great business person, but also somebody who's discovering the humanity of others through this process of excavation. Great, great story. Did either of you guys ever watch storage wars? I've watched one episode of it. We used to watch it with some, with some regularity. And I too was like, I'd say the same as the same with abandoned houses. Like I really lose myself in thinking about the lives of the people who collected those things, who put them away thinking they'd come back to them. Like, I mean, I just, it's a very, it pulls on my emotions deeply. I can't wait to read that piece. Yesterday and today, we're, we're cleaning out a house that the house that my mother and my uncle grew up in that my grandmother lived in, you know, that my family has owned since 1945. And, and we're about to sell it. And so we're cleaning out this house, which has 80 years of family life in it. And honestly, I'm, I mean, I'm a sentimental person, but I actually, well, I'm not, I'm not, I would not be the person who would want to do storage. So because I'd be, I'd get into that and be like, throw it all away. Who wants any of this crap? Like nobody needs it. This old China, get rid of it. It's just like you need to have less stuff, clear out, move on. And it's, it is, on the one hand, I totally understand the, you know, the pain this is causing for my mother and for my uncle, who's, who, for whom this is their home. On the other hand, like if I were, if I was cleaning out my, my own childhood home, I would not have any problem getting rid of 99.999% of stuff. Emily's just, I don't know what Emily's face is. I cling to the last Pez dispenser. Yeah, I'm, you're definitely a Pez dispenser. I mean, I think that this is a. I am the problem. I think it's, I really think it's a, they're fundamentally two different personality types. Emily, where do you land? Uh, I mean, more with you, I get very overwhelmed by a lot of stuff. Your house is pretty packed. See, that's like crushing to me because I'm constantly trying to throw things away. But what I was going to say before I was distressed by that comment is that, um, I have a lot of furniture that's both from my husband's grandparents and from my grandparents, and it actually matches because it's all was purchased like between 1915 and 1929, um, before the stock market exploded in New York City. And so it anyway, but so I, and I really love having it, um, including a rug that is like beautiful, but has some threadbare patches. On the other hand, just the idea of like having to sort through a lot of other people's stuff, I find really difficult. Can I, can I, here's the correct. We can do cluttered about my house. No, no, it was more brick and rack. Um, Nick neck. Okay. Patty whack. Isn't the answer that you basically keep the stuff, but in the basement, neatly organized with labels and then therefore it's out of your, your house. You guys got your house is a pure. Fucking angry when I go into my mother's basement because I'm like, Oh yeah, this is the pre, because I just put a bunch of storage stuff and storage. And I was like, no one's going to look at this the same way they didn't look at the other fucking boxes that you have here or the ones before that. It just makes me furious. It makes me furious. Are they neatly labeled? They're labeled. Not probably. If you don't keep all the random brick a brick, what are you going to base your tedious podcasts around? Good point. Listeners, I don't know where we've gone today. You have chatter. Please email them to us at gapestateslate.com. I got a great joy out of reading our listener chatters this week. And this week we're hearing from Keith in California. Hello political Gabbers. David's comments about the growing movement against DHS's purchase of large warehouses for conversion into concentration camps and our collective unwillingness to watch the unjustified suffering of others reminded me of a classic work by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's called the ones who walk away from Omelas and it's somewhere between a short story and a sociological thought experiment. It asks us to imagine an idyllic utopia in which everyone has all they want and lives a comfortable and rewarding life. Almost everyone, that is, because the price of that perfect existence is that somewhere in Omelas, there is a cell in which one child is imprisoned in squalor and misery. That child's suffering is what allows the rest of Omelas to be a utopia. And Le Guin asks us to contemplate the difference between the majority who are willing to pay that price more precisely to see someone else pay that price. And the relative handful who walk away from Omelas. It's not a long story, only about 10 pages. But once you've read it, you'll never forget it. It is a memorable story. That is absolutely true. Sounds like a Peter Singer problem. Yeah, it is basically. I can't believe you've even read that story. You should go read it. It's like, yeah. Anyway. Shout out, by the way, to John. I think it was John Griffith. I hope I'm not mispronouncing his name. Gap Fest listener who chatted with me in the hotel elevator in Chicago. It's always a lot later running to people who are ardent fans of the Gap Fest. So thanks for saying hi, John. We're not the only slate podcast worth listening to this week. What Next has an episode about insider trading and insider trading in the wake of various successful bets about US policies, including US attacks on Iran. And Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, is on what next, talking about this form of insider trading and how it can be tracked and monitored. Paul Krugman is super interesting on almost any subject. So I look forward to listening to that. That is all for our episode this week. We have a bonus episode in your feed. We're going to talk about Artemis. We're going to talk about the Moon Expedition. That is for Slate Plus members only, though. Slate Plus members who get bonus episodes on the Gap Fest and other slate podcasts. They get special discounts to live shows. They never hit the paywall on the slate site. So come on, become a member. Become a member. Hear us talk about Artemis. Hear us talk, muse, about space exploration poetically. Wouldn't you want to do that? But these Slate Plus episodes are great and we love doing them. And you should become a member and support that. And you can do that by going to Slate.com slash Gap Fest Plus or going to the political Gap Fest Show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. That's our show for today. The Gap Fest is produced by Nina Porzuki. Our researcher is Emily Ditto. Our theme music is by they. It might be Giants. Ben Richmond is senior director for podcast operations. Me, LaBelle, executive producer of Slate Podcasts, Hillary Fry, and Senator George Slate for Emily Bazalon and John Dickerson. I'm David Plots. We will talk to you next week. Hey, Sainsbury's. I'm cooking for everyone this Easter, but I don't want to break the bank. Got any tasty offers? Well, with Nectar, there's half price on selected sides of salmon and selected beef joints and whole legs of lamb are better than half price. Oh, dubby as happy as my wallet. Sainsbury's good food for all of us. 18 plus Nectar required excludes locals end 7th of April subject to availability. Teas and seas apply. Hello, it's Giovanna here from Happy Mum, Happy Baby, and we're currently sponsored by Volvo and the fully electric EX90. The Volvo EX90 is a large, fully electric, luxury SUV, perfect for the family. With seven seats, there's plenty of room for everyone and up to 378 miles range, which is great to keep the journey going. It's also reassuring to know that the EX90 is designed to be the safest Volvo car ever made and the fast infotainment system is perfect for seamless connectivity so you can keep the music playing for the whole time. What more could you want? Search Volvo EX90 to find out more. Electric range may vary based on driving behaviour and conditions.