YouSaid · the spoken record

Nina Totenberg

lines on the record: 64
first: 2020-10-26
most recent: 2020-10-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because it was just at that moment that one of the conservative justices basically flipped and started voting to support.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the last time, but interestingly, it was a slow burn for Roosevelt. It took three years for him to finally get up to the point where he had a court packing plan and he was ready to challenge the court. And his timing really, to use a legal term, it really sucked.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's true. I think we're likely to see a court now that will be more conservative than any court dating back probably to the 1930s when the court was willy-nilly striking down New Deal legislation at the time that FDR was trying to get the country out of the great”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that is very clearly in great danger for those who care about it. There's no doubt that the court will hollow it out and chip away and not too gentle away anymore because there are now very clearly six conservative votes on the court, pretty hardcore conservative votes. And even if one of them drops out, there are still five votes. Either the court will decide, well, we're just going to make this a meaningless right in the states that want to make it meaningless so that either there are no clinics there, no abortion clinics there, or there be completely inaccessible or the right is narrowed down to Certain limited number of weeks in early pregnancy. A variety of things that contradict Roe v. Wade, or they'll just eventually reverse it. And I think ultimately it's very likely that they will reverse it.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't, but I do know that she's been very critical of Chief Justice Roberts' opinion in not one but two cases. One was five to four upholding the mandate as a tax, and the second was an interpretation of the law as written, which was six to three. And the chief wrote, both opinions, and she's been very critical of the reasoning in both. You know, I've learned not to anticipate too much. But I think certainly the tea leaves would suggest that she probably thinks She may well think that you can't sever. One part of the law from everything else. But the counter-argument, of course, is that there is no mandate anymore for all practical purposes because Republicans zeroed it out. The language is still there, but they zeroed out the amount. For all practical purposes, the law is operating right now without a mandate.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, it's one of those things we're going to have to see. There's also a statute involved because the president does have the authority under a statute to give some guidance to the census bureau and the Secretary of Commerce as to how to report How and when to report. What the total numbers are.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not that much of an originalist. He also believes in sort of a degree of institutionalism and the institutionalism of the law as it builds up over time.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chief Justice Marshall, the most famous and important chief justice in our history, that he and his court unanimously inferred from the words of the Constitution. Judge Barrett is not big, as far as I can tell, on inferring much of anything, but because she's only been a judge for three years, and because we don't know just how much she's willing to go back to what on the court they call first principles, like back to the beginning, we don't know, but one suspects she'll be very much like Justice Clarence Thomas and to some degree also like Justice Neil Gorsuch and even Justice Leto, although Justice Lito is not as originalist about everything as those other two and certainly Chief Justice Roberts who is A conservative by anybody's measure.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or same sex marriage if he had the opportunity to reverse it. But at the same time, he was a person who did believe in also the foundation of law, which is based to a significant degree on precedent. Judge Barrett is completely right. There have been precedents that have been overturned. But after all, the famous case of Marbury v. Madison in the early 1800s, which said that the Supreme Court could overturn a statute if it violated the Constitution, that's not actually in the Constitution. That's something.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started when I was six in my hand. Originalism, as described by Justice Scalia, is that the Constitution means what it meant to the founding fathers and those who ratified the Constitution at the time it was written. The trouble is that There have been over 200 years, 250 years of precedents from the Supreme Court since then. And as Justice Scalia himself used to say, he was a weak need originalist because of all those precedents. He didn't agree with some of them and some of them he would have been able to”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the solution that they're offering, which is to do it in reverse by packing the courts, it's not that I think it's a good or bad idea. It's that I think that if you're asking a new president to do that, if there is a Democratic president, you're asking him, you're asking Biden to use up every...”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, that was striking. She couldn't tell Corey Booker whether or not she'd read any studies about systemic racism or read any books that are Pulitzer Prize winning books like James Foreman's book or The Real, the New Jim Crow. And those are all in the law and there are studies in the law that for anybody that is a lawyer or a judge that sort of is interested at all in this field you'd at least read. You might not agree with them, but you'd at least read some of them. I thought it was a strikingly uninformative. I don't expect. Judicial nominees for lower courts or the Supreme Court to say a lot these days, but to say really nothing. Is really striking.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that's right. But I think that increasingly these hearings are so unsatisfying to everyone that at some point They begin to break the back of the system. Now, I've seen other nominees do it, but I think perhaps because either because she wanted to and her reminders told her to, or because she had only 16 days to prep for a hearing. At the same time, she was meeting with people, that her basic line was sort of like Schultz in Hogan's Heroes for Old People. I know nothing. I know nothing.”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Judge Barrett is an originalist originalist from what I can tell. You know, she's only been on the bench three years. So there is a limited amount that we can tell that she's willing to do as a judge that she might like to do as a policymaker to speak in her terms because she talks so much about policy versus law and every nominee does. I mean, every nominee tells you they're going to follow the law. They're not going to impose their own views. And that stands for Democratic nominees. Well, listen, I”
2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source