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Bulwark Takes

America’s Lawless Wars—From Chicago to Caracas (w/ Ryan Goodman)

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Society & Culture, Politics, News Commentary

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Bill Kristol is joined by law professor Ryan Goodman to discuss the Trump Administration’s expanding use of “national security” at home and abroad, NSPM-7, National Guard deployments, Chicago raids, and lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean. Plus the legal pushback, Posse Comitatus, district court rulings, and the looming War Powers in Congress.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Building a coffee business?

0:01.5

Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new sum up terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the sumup point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best selling blends. Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more. Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to Pullwork on Sunday. Very pleased to be joined by Ryan Goodman,

0:25.4

Professor of Law at NYU, editor, maybe he's co-editor of the Just Security website,

0:31.0

which is a must read if you're interested in questions of national security and their

0:36.5

overlap with interaction with with questions of law,

0:40.1

I suppose, which there's a lot of those questions these days, right?

0:44.4

A lot of overlap and a lot of argument about them.

0:47.9

So that's what we're going to discuss today.

0:49.5

I mean, in light of what's been happening both domestically in terms of the president's,

0:54.0

I guess, invoking of his national security powers, his commander chief powers to do things here at home, National Guard, some of the ICE stuff, even, the national security memorandum, and then also abroad in terms of blowing these boats out of the water in the Caribbean and stuff, and maybe the relationship between those two. So lots of cover. I really think we won't cover everything else. We could discuss about executive power and the law, you know, but I do think the commander and chief side of it, so to speak, don't you think is sort of maybe a coherent thing that we can cover a little bit at least in 30, 40 minutes. So thanks, Ryan, for joining me. Thank you so much, looking forward to it. And you've written excellently on this and published such good pieces. So maybe we should begin with the domestic side. I mean, normally one thinks commander-in-chief, one thinks foreign policy, but I do think pretty hard to understand the president's claims, which is put this way about use of the National Guard. To some

1:44.9

degree, a lot of the claims in the immigration sphere and the use of ICE are, let's call it,

1:49.2

national security, are they related? So, and then the question of how much the courts can do gets,

1:56.2

becomes related to national security law. So, I mean, what do you make of it all? Where are we in terms of the president's ability to send federalized national guards

2:06.0

and send federal troops to places in the U.S. to deal with problems that he sees real or imagined?

2:14.8

So I think we're in a very different place than when we last had a conversation in the sense that everything that you just described, I believe, comes together, whereby we have the operations on the high seas against so-called unlawful combatants, according to the president, and then operations inside the United States,

2:37.5

which now, according to the president, are the enemy within, according to his speech,

2:44.2

to the 800-plus most senior military officers.

2:48.7

So I do think that these things are joined together in a way in which we just spoke a few

2:54.0

weeks ago.

2:55.4

It's enormously different terrain and much more threatening in terms of the overuse of

3:00.7

presidential powers of the claim to presidential powers, which might not actually exist.

3:06.4

That's so interesting.

...

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