Melissa Murray & Kate Shaw - “Strict Scrutiny” & Trump’s Fight for Immunity | The Daily Show

[Applause] my guests tonight oh I love them so much they're law professors and constitutional experts elitist who co-host the podcast about the Supreme Court called strict scrutiny please welcome to the program Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw please hey guys now let me first I want to apologize so you have a third Leah Litman who couldn't be here because of the uh delicate configurations of our desk we would have loved to have Leah be here as well but she's in California and so uh I didn't want to

let that pass uh I want to start with you guys a simple question John Oliver has offered Clarence Thomas a winnabago and a million dollars a year to and this is his words not mine get the off this Supreme Court uh will in your your court Watchers your experts on the Supreme Court will he accept this offer I I think this is a Harland Crow counter offer opportunity you believe that his benefactor is going to have to counter but what do you counter with it's a beautiful Winnebago and a million doll

ars a year is there anything else to life not if you enjoy spending time in the parking lots of Walmart as Justice Thomas I do he says he does but apparently he likes to quail hunt in a robe uh I want to ask you there's a strategy that's starting to Bubble Up which is getting Americans comfortable with authoritarianism and getting us to not think critically about the differences between a free society and not a free society and in that regard they are starting to paint Trump as naali that the tr

ials that he is facing in America are similar or the same as what Putin did to naalii please explain to me why that's horseshit well we are not experts in Russian criminal procedure but I think it's safe to say that Donald Trump is likely receiving more procedural protections right now in the four criminal indictments that he's currently subject to than Alexa Naval had in his time in Russia so I think this is not the same situation would you say that he Donald Trump has actually received doer pr

ocess than most people in America I mean this guy is clearly on the Platinum due process plan like he the har Crow do process the har Crow do process like he's getting every the doest of process the doest the processes so how is this even uh uh comparable it's not at all comparable and and I do think it is interesting as your last segment made clear that Trump is adverting to the situation in Russia right now and invoking nalni um and I think that it's right to draw comparisons right now but of

course the casting is all wrong right now in the arguments that Trump is making in some of the Pand criminal cases against him he is essentially casting himself as above and beyond the law and you know we are essentially seeing what saying President should have complete and total immunity because if you can't kill people then what fun well this was actually a hypothetical that came up in the lower federal court uh argument in this immunity case Trump's lawyer was asked so you're saying that a pr

esident could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and the criminal law couldn't get him for that sounds familiar it does it was and Trump's lawyer basically said unless he's been impeached and convicted first the criminal laws can by the in a political process so you have to go so our criminal laws are suspended for the president didn't we fight a war about that well we we not only fought a war but our whole constitutional structure is designed to prevent consolidations of power

within the presidency exactly and so this whole idea you got you got an A in our constitutional law classes but I mean what Kate is describing is essentially very authoritarian forward I mean the person that Donald Trump is is not Alex naali it's Vladimir Putin right and that's who he wants to be that's who he admires but in in our Judicial Systems defense in my mind over these past few years it was one of the few institutions in America that actually held pretty strong and you are frowning at

me you disagree with this so well on our podcast we take different roles Kate is I think much more amenable to your position I I think I think hold on one second talk to Kate well explain like I like there's something to this I do think that there is a way in which courts really did stand as a bul workk against some of Trump's worst instincts and impulses while he was in office and even since you know 60 plus lawsuits he filed around the 2020 election all unsuccessful he argued for different ver

sions of immunity in civil and criminal cases previously those have been unsuccessful essentially throughout but we are in a real test moment of that proposition in that the Supreme Court is right now facing this question of whether he will ever stand trial for the January 6th events if they Grant him blanket immunity we don't have a a republic anymore we don't have a constitutional republic if the head of it has immunity the thing I liked about what the courts did is they set a standard of evid

ence anybody can say whatever they want on a a basic cable show or wherever they go or at a rally or anything else but when you bring it into a court as juliani famously said no we don't have any evidence but we got Slots of theories and they threw them out okay so that just suggests that the bar is in hell right yes of course the courts are a Bull workk against the most totalitarian impulses in our society but we forget that the court system we have the Supreme Court we have the debates we're h

aving about the Supreme Court are all right now the product of what Donald Trump did like this is a person who would not Not Elected by the popular you're saying these questions would have been utterly unimaginable in previous we right now debating whether or not in the next presidential term we are going to see a national ban on abortion we wouldn't be having that discussion if Donald Trump's six to3 conservative supermajority had not rolled back rooll versus Wade we wouldn't have that discussi

on at all right so or the immunity discussion or anything else all of this he has created the conditions for the way we talk about this court and that's the thing that ultimately is at stake in all this I want to thank you guys so much for uh coming on you're fabulous check out their podcast please strict scrutiny new episodes drop on Mondays it's a fine day to drop them uh Melissa Murray and K off