 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Hey ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. I'm joined in studio by our friend Alan Mendenhall. I'm sure many of you know him. He's an attorney and dean of a law school here in the state of Alabama. And he's also our residential legal expert when it comes to the Mises Institute analyzing court cases and in this instance Supreme Court justice. So we're talking about newly appointed Brett Kavanaugh as our subject this week. You know Alan I'm looking at this guy and first and foremost it's so untrump-like because I read somewhere some commenter said this is a guy that a president, Rubio, or a president Ted Cruz easily could have appointed. This is a swamp guy. He was probably the swampiest of the swamp critters of the possible nominees. He was my least favorite of the four that they were down to. We were down to Barrett and Kethledge and Hardiman and Kavanaugh was probably my least favorite. And so I sort of agree with Judge Napolitano. He came out with an op-ed yesterday saying he was disappointed in the pick and I have my reasons for that too. I do think that had Roy Moore not lost the election to Doug Jones and the Republicans hadn't lost that seat and John McCain if he didn't have cancer and you had those two sentencing it probably would have been a different choice. You probably would have seen Trump pick someone with a little bit stronger conservative bona fides for lack of a better word. But I think concerns about Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Markowski and how they might split might defect, made this choice more moderate, more palatable to people on the left. So he's definitely the safest pick of those four. Well, the other thing about the swamp is this guy literally grew up in D.C. and that seems to me a very bad omen for people who think like we do. You know, I'm thinking out loud of other people who have grown up in D.C. Al Gore, Pat Buchanan actually grew up in D.C. The sports writer John Feinstein grew up in D.C. and I think it's a very odd place to grow up. You know, this whole brouhaha over his nationals tickets. I think it gives you a hometown sense of a place that isn't really a hometown. It's not a real place. It's a false place. Yeah, it's a transient community. And so, yeah, you're right. And in his career was basically in D.C. from the time that he was, you know, before he was associate counsel and senior associate counsel in the White House and he was very resistant to W. Bush and all that kind of stuff. You know, he had clerked for Kennedy. He clerked for Kaczynski, which I see as being interesting. I don't see Kaczynski as being your sort of standard cookie cutter establishment type. But, you know, working in the office of independent counsel Ken Starr doing, working on the Starr report, working on the Vince Foster investigation. There's a reason why it looked as though this guy is everywhere. You know, he's in the Bush administration when Katrina happens. You know, when Rehnquist dies, he's there at the Starr report, all this Clinton stuff. And that's why he had such a tough time getting confirmed when he was first nominated back in 2003. It took him three years to get confirmed to the D.C. circuit. Why is Trump of all people nominating a bushy? It's a surprise. Unbelievable. It's a surprise. I think that he had a lot of people advising him about confirmability. And I think that's really what this choice came down to. And there's a little lore circulating that having a former Kennedy clerk replace Kennedy with something Kennedy wanted. And that Kennedy had privately told Trump, I'll step down. I'll retire if you replace it with ex-people. And, you know, who knows if that's true or not. But that's, you know, that's out there in the rumor mill. Yeah. Well, I bet Ruth Pader Ginsburg thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president. Well, she's 85. So you would expect her to... She screwed up. If she were to retire during Trump's term, which is unlikely that she will, you know, that would be momentous to say the least. Breyer, 79, he turns 80 next month. So he's not a spring chicken either. I think if you still have those two on the court going into the next presidential election, it will be another one of those elections where you say, oh, this election is really about the Supreme Court. Right. Which raises all kinds of questions like, why does the Supreme Court have this much power? Why are we voting for a president based on what nine lawyers, a composition of nine lawyers is? That seems to be odd. Well, if Trump manages to win re-election in 2020, Ruth Pader Ginsburg is 86 at that point. Yeah. I mean, not to be an delegate, she could die. She could. Yeah. She could. There's actually no mechanism if a justice were to become incapacitated in office or to be in some sort of vegetative state or something. There's no mechanism for removing that justice short of impeachment. You would have to actually go and impeach that person who's in ill health, and that would not be seemingly, but it might be necessary. But she wouldn't step down. She'd just be sick and missing votes and missing arguments and not step down. It's possible. There's no way she'd step down with Trump. I don't think she'll step down during Trump. No, I really don't think she'll step down during Trump's tenure. I would be shocked if she did. Well, Kavanaugh spent at least a few days, a few years out of D.C. because he went to Yale. So he spent three years and presumably in New Ham, Connecticut. This just makes me absolutely sick as a libertarian. This Harvard Yale chokehold on the Supreme Court, I think it's exceedingly anti-diverse. I think it gives a northeastern establishment a hold on all kinds of policies and imagine them talking to us about diversity. You know, it's interesting because the correlation between these Ivy League schools and the politicization of the court have sort of worked in concert. I think presidents are trying to pick people that they can't be accused of being unqualified. I think after Harriet Meyers at least. After Harriet Meyers, people are saying, well, we need to make sure we pick somebody that is not susceptible to accusations of being unqualified. And I personally, like you, would like to see a lot more diversity. I think there are plenty of really excellent law schools out there and many, many excellent attorneys who went to law schools that were not Ivy League. And that's why I think Barrett was a Notre Dame law person and I liked that about her. I thought that was a unique quality. And then Catholic and Hardiman as well were sort of outside that typical cookie cutter resume, put it that way. Right. I guess Hardiman went to Georgetown, I think. Yeah. So by Ivy League standards, that's almost the South or whatever. That's a Southern law school, I guess. But it is interesting also that, you know, so much has been said about his Catholicism. And he appears to be a pretty serious Catholic. I think that's right. And you and I talked about this off air, how the Supreme Court was always viewed as this waspy institution. In fact, there were no wasps whatsoever on it for many, many years up until Gorsuch, who is, I guess, raised Catholic but is now Anglican. Yeah, that's correct. So it's not a wasp court, but it's a very Catholic court or it will be if Kavanaugh wins this nomination. Yeah, that's true. And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is that, you know, Catholicism has a pretty deep and rich legal theory, tradition of legal theory. I mean, I'm thinking of Gorsuch in particular being schooled and natural law and studying with John Finnis and lecturing at Notre Dame. And that was one thing that made me actually more comfortable with Gorsuch was that I felt that his understanding of natural law theory and his commitment to the idea that there is a higher law that is antecedent to government promulgation made him more trustworthy as a jurist. Of course, the difference is you are replacing Scalia with Gorsuch. So that's almost a conservative for conservative. The difference here is that Kennedy is that fulcrum justice. He's the one that, you know, could go either way. So replacing him with somebody can change the dynamics of the court altogether. You know, you've got Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor and Kagan on one side and Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch on the other. And if Kavanaugh fits in on that right side, then you've got a pretty reliable 5-4 majority for most votes. And I think that's what makes the left hysterical about this. But isn't there an inherent conflict here? The left is never going to accept the idea of a higher authority or law. Civic nationalists even on the right don't really accept that. So, I mean, there's baked in conflict here. The secular left simply doesn't think a Supreme Court justice should be influenced by his or her religious views. That's true. Yes. And I think that's another reason why sort of originalism and textualism is a safe methodology for these justices. Because then what they're doing in their confirmation hearings is they're discussing their judicial methodology. They're not results oriented. They deal with the questions as framed when they get them. And they are analyzing statutes as written according to what a reasonable mind would have believed the terms to mean at the time the text was adopted. And so that prevents justices from inserting their ideological views into the interpretive process. And I think that maybe isolates some of these conservative nominees from criticism. And you would think actually, but the left doesn't see it that way. And it's interesting though if you recall that now we have many people on the left that are saying we're all textualists now. I think Scalia sort of changed the way judging was done in a lot of ways as far as influence goes. I mean, everybody has to at least account for a textualist or originalist approach. Whether they're taking it or not, they have to at least account for it in their appellate decisions. At least federal appellate judges have to do so. So in a sense, there's been a bit of a victory on the right because 30 or 40 years ago you probably wouldn't have said that. Whereas in other words, the Federalist Society types have won that point somewhat because the left now feels like they have to apply textualism at least as an argument. I think that's right because I think that textualism and originalism, I mean, there are many, many schools of these things and they're pretty rigorous. And there's a deep philosophical debate going on among originalists. But one thing you're not going to see now is Eisenhower nominated Earl Warren and William Brennan. You've got Nixon doing Justice Blackman who authored the Roe v. Wade opinion. You've got Ford doing John Paul Stevens and H.W. Bush doing Souter. And you're just not going to see that anymore. I mean, this process of creating a list from which the nominee will be chosen is a new thing. I mean, that's sort of a new phenomenon, at least a public list that's available to everyone for scrutiny. And this allows the general public, in addition to just senators, to give feedback on each person. And there are lawyers all through the country that can scrutinize opinions or, you know, we're sitting here in the 11th Circuit right now as we speak and say, I practice in the 11th Circuit. Well, I may have some opinion about some judge on the 11th Circuit and my dealings with them. And I'm able to tell my senator about those sorts of things. And so that sort of transparency, I think, is a good thing. And, you know, it's interesting that we talk about all this from a libertarian standpoint because I do think, and this is common for everybody, that there's a tendency to look at results as libertarians. And we say, OK, you know, is this person pro-Obamacare or are they pro-police? But a lot of the analysis that goes on in a courtroom isn't that. I mean, you're getting a statue and you're having to determine whether the law that's already been enacted through a legislative process comports with the Constitution. And so we as libertarians sometimes think, oh, this is bad, but we forget that there is a methodology that the judge is applying. And so the question is, given the system we have, would you rather have a judge that has adopted this methodology or, you know, my fear would be that you would have a judge that would adopt some methodology that then someone on the left could use against you? Like say you just want to start talking about rights that are unenumerated and then you were to institute those rights in an opinion, for example. Well, what happens when the left sees that methodology and says, OK, now we're going to have a right to basic subsistence. Now we're going to have to write to a minimum income for people. We're going to have a right to this and that. And now you've, because you were trying to be results oriented, you've now opened the door to results oriented approach on the other side. So that's something I'm always would be cautious about. But I'm not sure the American public buys it. I think most Americans view the Supreme Court as a wholly political super legislature and that it is completely results oriented. And judges have viewpoints and decisions in mind and then they reverse engineer some legal argument to make the desired result happen. I mean, that is the perspective I personally think as a libertarian that's healthy. Yeah, we view the court as a political thing just like I think we should view the Fed as a political thing. But it's it's the the rhetoric is that, well, we're bound by precedent and that we have a we have a methodology. Well, and it's always, of course, it's always skeptical. It's always good to be skeptical of all government institutions. One thing I would say to that is that the process and I there is an element of the Supreme Court becoming a super legislature. I mean, when Marbury v. Madison was handed down, it was one thing to say that, oh, it's it's the province of the judiciary to say what the law is under the constitutional scheme. And and to tell Congress if Congress has done something unconstitutional, then somebody has to be able to tell Congress that they've done something unconstitutional. And that that duty impliedly falls to the judiciary. That's one thing. But what Marbury Madison Marbury v. Madison did not contemplate was this idea that Supreme Court become this massive super legislature. It was, you know, it was still understood that Supreme Court wasn't making law. It wasn't legislating. And that's what's happened with the Supreme Court over over the years. And I do think from request on the court has scaled back on that. And some of the movement toward originalism and textualism that we talked about that even judges on the left have to account for has has sort of scaled that back. But but now we have an out of control administrative state that the justices have to deal with. I mean, you've got executive agencies that are created by the legislature, but they exercise these quasi legislative functions. And then Congress, you know, delegates the powers to these agencies. And then that that gets rid of their accountability. Then they can just yell and shout about agencies and they can blame all these things on the agencies like I hate the EPA. I hate that. But they're the ones that delegated the powers to them and they can take them away. But but then if it becomes their responsibility, then they're the ones to blame and they have to go tell their constituents. So for in some ways it's convenient for the politicians to be able to blame agencies. So there's an incentive structure in there for politicians not to go after agencies because, you know, they don't want the they don't want to take the responsibilities that, you know, they want Congress to have these responsibilities that they've delegated to agencies. So that's a that's a dynamic that's got to get worked out. And if it's not too late. But you know, one thing that's telling about Marbury versus Madison judicial review is you'll hear the public and even journalists say such in such case is the law of the land. That's right. Yeah, you hear that all the time. And then you see the supremacy clause cited erroneously a lot because the supremacy clause is, you know, federal laws that that are actually consistent with the Constitution are, you know, the law of the land. So, you know, if you created some some federal law that that was just obviously unconstitutional. Well, the court can strike that down and it's it's not going to be the law of the land. So, you know, there there are a lot of you're right there. There's a lot of issues with with starved decisis with precedent. I think part of the problem is the incorporation of, you know, the ancient. English common law into an American system of federalism with 50 states and trying to figure out what it means to have this sort of horizontal. Binding starved decisis versus, you know, what what does it mean to have federalism and what what role the state's going to play versus the federal government. You've got these these federal courts and these state courts, these federal courts all created by statute with the exception of the Supreme Court, which is which is constitutional. And then you've got all these state courts and what what is the inner place supposed to look like how are these circuits supposed to deal with state Supreme Court decisions and the Constitution doesn't give you clear answers to that. So we've been trying to work that out ever since the founding and it's been messy. And that's not a system that lends itself to sort of the traditional ancient understanding of the common law as customary and bottom up. I mean, in a system where you've got a top down Constitution that establishes the framework in which all law has to operate. That's very different from a system of custom that comes from time immemorial time out of mind that just exists and that judges locally have to respond to and that you can't really understand. I mean, the common law is you're going to different areas of the realm and determining what laws do these different regions have in common and how are judges getting that from jury decisions. The root is the same as commoners. Yeah, well, that's a good point. Imitating from the people rather than from from the top down. You know, I just want to get back to this originalism and textualism. Let's make an important point here is that a huge percent of the country is just not buying this because the whole idea that we should look at the original intent of either the founders or whoever drafted a federal piece of legislation who is in Congress at the time. A lot of people say, why should we be bound by these old dead white guy founders, property owners, slave holders, etc. We hear this ad nauseam or why should we even be bound by a bunch of dead congressmen from the 1930s? In other words, I'll just say generically, the left doesn't buy it and the right uses it, I think, in hypocritical ways. In other words, they use textualism when it serves their purposes. So yeah, to give an example, maybe you would look at like a fourth amendment case and you would say, okay, the framers clearly could not have contemplated. We'll use the claiming case that I thought Kavanaugh had a very bad line on, which is where he said in my view, I think that this government's metadata collection program is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment. Well, you pick up the Fourth Amendment, you read the Fourth Amendment, you're like, well, how is this consistent with the Fourth Amendment? I mean, on its face, the framers never would have contemplated an iPhone. How do you deal with that? Well, people like Rehnquist would say, okay, the principles are what are perennial. They're what sort of get repurposed over time in light of change circumstances and new technologies and these kinds of things. But the principles are the same and you just apply them to new facts so that you're not doing the living constitution thing. That's sort of maybe the Rehnquist response to that. But I think with Kavanaugh in that particular case, I just want to throw this out there, I think he's wrong in that case because he's assuming that you would have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the metadata in your cell phone, which no one new government was collecting at the time anyway. And then you would think that if the government were to say, oh, this is reasonable for us, they'd at least be able to show that the collection stopped some kind of imminent attack. And if they can't show that, then it seems especially unreasonable. So that was the case that I think people were worried maybe Rand Paul wouldn't vote yay. And that's a valid concern and it's one that I have with Kavanaugh myself. Congressman Justin Amash has actually been tweeting about Kavanaugh's bad Fourth Amendment decisions. Obviously, Amash won't vote on the nomination, but you know, and there's kind of two questions with respect to the cell phone metadata issue you raise and that apparently Kavanaugh is bad on. One is whether metadata vacuuming after the fact is okay and comports with the Fourth Amendment or a different analysis is whether the Fourth Amendment even applies to this NSA activity. So there are two separate questions. Yeah. And I mean, the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent arbitrary government interference into the private affairs of individuals. And the government would have to show that this is not an arbitrary thing. And to do that, they'd have to say, well, it's not arbitrary because we're trying to prevent terrorist attacks or whatever. But if they can't even show that, then it sure seems arbitrary. They can't show that there's actually any kind of causality. Oh, yes, doing this in fact has stopped X, Y, and Z and they can't do that. Then it's arbitrary. It's arbitrary collection. Have you seen much to form an opinion about Kavanaugh on what we would call economic liberty? I think he's okay with the Obamacare mandate, for example. Well, the Obamacare mandate is, that's a different issue. So that's the Seven Sky case. And there's some debate over whether he created a framework under the individual mandate's penalty to treat it as a tax that would have enabled someone like John Roberts in 2012 to bar from that scheme. So what he did in that case is he actually said, I don't think this court should have jurisdiction here because of the Anti-Enjunction Act, which barred courts from ruling on tax issues before they took effect. And he's saying, well, this penalty hasn't taken effect yet. So we don't have jurisdiction to rule on it. But in writing about this issue, he said basically that the scheme of the penalty, because it requires the assessment and collection, as a tax would be assessed and collected, then it is in effect a tax if it is like a tax. And that did create something for John Roberts to work with. So it is entirely reasonable to conclude that Kavanaugh created a framework that Roberts could have borrowed from or at least considered in upholding the individual mandate as a tax and not a penalty. So yeah, that's another glaring case that bothers me about Kavanaugh. There's the Clayman, there's Seven Sky. Now, there is some evidence that he's good on administrative agencies. The White House is touting him as having overturned like 75 regulations from administrative agencies. He's attacked the EPA on cases and in particular in areas regarding admissions regulation, state air pollution rules, greenhouse gas regulations. So he is doing stuff to push back against the growth of administrative agencies. He's got a case in Heller where he's appeared to be productive of Second Amendment rights. But as far as economic liberty as a concept, you don't really see much overarching philosophical discussion by Kavanaugh. So unlike Gorsuch, you might get some philosophical discussion. So Gorsuch may have some kind of conversation about natural law or whatever. Well, Kavanaugh is going to have some kind of conversation about a procedural technicality or an issue of statutory interpretation. That's his world. He's sort of a scholar of procedure and forms versus Gorsuch who's much more of a philosophical deeper thinker. Someone that's going to look at a tradition. I mean, Gorsuch is going to go look and see what Locke and Montesquieu and Cook and Blackstone and all these people thought about things. And Kavanaugh is much more likely to look and see what did the last judge say in the last case and the last opinion and what's precedent and what's going to bind me. So he's sort of a real nuts and bolts federal appellate lawyer. But I think he probably speaks to his competence and his importance that some of his theories and ideas have gone upstream and been considered by a renquist or somebody at the Supreme Court. Excuse me, by a Roberts or somebody at the Supreme Court. So he's usually the other way around. Yeah, there have been the Supreme Court has adopted some of his opinions and sort of validated his legal reasoning. And he's on the DC circuit, which is considered sort of the stepping stone, the Supreme Court and cases from the DC circuit often end up at the Supreme Court. So his analysis is is more likely than most judges to be considered by Supreme Court justices. And I think people generally agree that he is a very smart person. He's a very intelligent person. So it's worth going and look looking at what he said and how he analyzed it just to see whether you disagree or not. If Kavanaugh has written on the issue, you you're going to want to see what he said. So he said some mealy mouth things about Roe v. Wade as a libertarian Roe v. Wade doesn't excite me one way the other. I think it's wrongly decided. I think there's nothing about abortion in the Constitution ought to be up to the states. And we were discussing this earlier. There's no reason why certain states couldn't be more liberal with abortion under under a pre-Roe framework. But but nonetheless, he said some mealy mouth things. What does he do as a Catholic who presumably thinks abortion is wrong? What does he do? He mumbles about precedent. Yeah, I think that's what he does. And that's respecting president. And that's what he did in his 2006 confirmation hearing. He said, basically, I think Roe v. Wade is the law of the land. We don't upset precedent. But again, he was a lower appellate culture. He wasn't going up for confirmation on the high court. I don't know that it matters exactly how he treats this. I mean, he's just going to say probably I can't discuss it because this matter might come before me on the court. And that's basically a punt. And that's probably what he's going to have to do is just not going to come before and miss it. They're not going to do anything to Roe v. Wade. Well, and it's actually interesting because everyone talks about like overturning Roe v. Wade. Well, that's almost not the way case presidents typically change. I mean, if you look at Casey and Carhart, I mean, these are adaptations to Roe v. Wade. I mean, when Roe's going to look at this balancing test where you're going to balance the state interests and health and the woman's health and all the stuff. And they versus versus the the interest in a woman's privacy. And then you're going to establish this balancing test that incorporates this third trimester framework. Well, then later on, you know, the court gets rid of that third trimester framework. And it's just a gradual process. So the likelihood that the court is going to take up a case and just say we hereby over Roe v. Wade is really unlikely. I mean, litigants have to frame the question the right way, bring it up through the appellate process and the right process and get the constitutional question exactly right. And it's just unlikely for fact patterns out there in the real world to actually fit that. So if Roe v. Wade goes away, it'll probably eventually eventual process by a series of decisions rather than one case that just says we hereby over Roe v. Wade. So I, you know, the left probably is right to be concerned that there that the Roe v. Wade is jeopardized. And the right is probably right to be thrilled that that Roe v. Wade might eventually be jeopardized. But for Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, I don't see it making a difference because, you know, I have a feeling that Republicans are going to be able to get them through in light of the nuclear option. They're going to be able to get him through. I don't think you're going to see many senators. I don't think you'll see really probably any defecting and you're going to have people like Joe Manchin who's running against Patrick Morrissey, the popular AG that's a big Republican. And, you know, he's got to vote for Kavanaugh. And Kavanaugh is not seen as some rabid pro-lifer that Murkowski or Susan Collins have to defend against with their own voters. No, I think he totally satisfies Collins Murkowski. He's not Robert Bork. No, that's right. He pulled votes from Joe Donnelly. I don't know what Doug Jones and here in Alabama, what he's going to do. I mean, if he wants to have any shot whatsoever in keeping his office, he's got to vote yes. Well, he's been on, I think, Fox intimating that he would consider voting yes. I think he's saying I'll keep him open mind and all that, which, what else would you expect him to say? He's got to say that. But, you know, there's some question marks out there. Claire McCaskill, Missouri, John Tester, Montana. I think they both voted against Gorsuch, but primarily because I think they realized, okay, Republicans are going to get a nuclear option. We'll vote this way just to appeal to our party base. And that's also a couple years before their election. Right. An election year is different. An election year is different, which is why people like Joe Manson are sort of on the hot seat. Well, the thing about abortion is I think it's a great litmus test for libertarians. This is an aside, not, not on the issue itself, whether you're pro or against abortion, but rather how it's handled. In other words, from my perspective, we can't have one abortion rule for top down for 320 million people in a country as diverse as ours. And I think it ought to be localized as much as possible. I would like to see common law, as you discussed earlier, common custom and practice and locality governed. But a lot of libertarians who are very strongly pro-choice say, you know, are pro-federalization, pro-nationalization, and say, no, we did an overarching federal law that says abortion's legal. And that that is the libertarian take on this, because if not, you'd have these regressive states like Alabama trying to radically restrict abortion. I think that's the wrong libertarian answer. I think the right libertarian answer is that, and again, I'm not personally animated by the pro-life pro-choice side. But I think the right libertarian answer is that it should be decentralized and you should live with the fact that other people see these intractable social issues differently than you do. Well, there are competing schools, in my view, among libertarian jurisprudence. I don't like when, and I said jurisprudence, not jurisprudence, but I don't like people trying to come forth and say, this is what a libertarian jurisprudence is. This is it. We figured it out because, in my view, there is a difference. And conceptually, there's one concept that says, okay, we ought to have a centralized, robust federal judiciary to ensure that all the states come into compliance and protect individual liberty. And then there's another methodology that says, look, we need to have decentralization, diffusion of power, dispersal of power. We need to have diversity of jurisdictions. And that's more along the lines of where I fall. So I'm more of a thinker that is, you know, I'm Hayekian in that sense. I'm sort of with like, I'm sort of conservative in that sense. I can see myself coming out of a Michael Oak shot tradition. And I like to see some competition between jurisdictions and letting people decide in their own personal communities what works and operates. I like the bottom-up process. I like, you know, I like the messiness and the checks and the balances and the separation of powers. I don't think it's a good thing to centralize and nationalize power and then dictate to faraway places what ought to be the libertarian viewpoint. And the flip side of that is if you demand an overarching federal law, what if the right comes in and makes an overarching federal law banning abortion? In other words, you're opening yourself up to executive, or in this case, judicial power. I want to finish up with a little bit more about Kavanaugh, the guy. Ryan McMacon wrote a great article about a week or so ago on Mises.org about how the Supreme Court is way, way, way too powerful. And one thing he mentions, he mentions this about Hillary Clinton in other contexts, but that so many of these old Supreme Court justices are completely removed from ordinary life. They don't really, they haven't had a real job for decades. They don't really do normal things. They don't mow lawns. They don't go to normal places that they're really in a bubble because they've been appellate judges at the federal level for so long. Now they're a Supreme Court justice and that it's dangerous to have these people so detached. Nine people, I might add, so detached from the 320 million people over whom they hold this great power. And Kavanaugh seems to be bucking that a little bit with his image. He's got the beer drinking allegations. He has Nats tickets that he apparently bought with credit cards. He seems like kind of a normal guy. Wonderful play to that. That's a good question. I think Gorsuch tried to play as the normal guy, too. He tried to say, look, I'm a hunter, a fisher, outdoorsman, that kind of thing. But also a PhD academic. Exactly. Brilliant guy. Is Kavanaugh brilliant? Because I think Gorsuch, love him or hate him, is legit brilliant. I think, I agree with you on Gorsuch. I think Kavanaugh is a very smart guy, but he is less of a historian and a philosopher and more of just a great lawyer. So he is brilliant too, but he put his brilliant mind into being a lawyer and poured it into that whereas Gorsuch was more exploratory and tried to think outside the box and as an academic would follow questions where they might lead and be more of an open-minded person and be interested in the big questions and sort of the perennial themes that pop up in all generations, whereas Kavanaugh is much more narrow, lawyerly type. But not to put too finely into distinction. I mean, he seems kind of normal in the sense he doesn't look, his physical appearance, what he sort of does in a spare time. You know, Souter had that really intellectual kind of almost a daininess to him that is very off-putting, I think, to a lot of people. Not to denigrate Souter. I'm sure he's a brilliant guy. Yeah. But Kavanaugh has got kind of, not a blue collar vibe to him, but an ordinary vibe. He's your guy next door. He's got two young kids. He's 53. He likes sports. He's 53. 53, runs up credit card debt anywhere between $60,000 and $120,000 depending on what you read. That's increasingly normal in America. Yeah. Well, I was shocked when I saw that, but I didn't realize that that was normal. So maybe he's a complete idiot in his personal life. I mean, how do you run up 60 to... Over three cards, I think. Three cards. Well, we're out of time, but it's always great talking to you. It's always great being here. If there's another Supreme Court vacancy, I know Amy Barrett didn't make the cut, but there's another Notre Dame grad named Andrew Napolitano. Judge Napolitano. I think would be an absolute great fit. And of course, his Freedom Watch show is rumored to be returning to, I believe, Fox Business. I'm not sure if it's Fox, regular or Fox Business. We'll look forward to that. And we'll look forward to having Alan Mendenhall back very soon. Thanks so much for your time, ladies and gentlemen. Have an excellent weekend.