Hey, everybody, David here. What you're about to hear is an episode of the bonus show. We do a bonus show every day for our members and for a limited time. We will release one of the week's bonus shows on Saturdays exclusively for our audio podcast listeners. If you'd like to get access to all of the bonus shows, simply sign up at join packman.com.

Here is that bonus show episode.

Welcome to the bonus show.

As we know, Republicans and Trump have had this plan of firing, laying off and firing on a

permanent basis federal government workers during the shutdown.

We knew when we set up front, there really isn't any additional power that Donald Trump

has to do that during a shutdown, but that doesn't mean that he won't try. And we now have a federal

judge who has said, uh, can't do it against the law and has effectively halted the layoffs of

4,100 federal workers. Now, of course, MAGA is doing the expected saying this is a liberal San Francisco judge.

And she's a woman, if you can believe it, Pat.

But what we really care about is the substance and the law.

Now, the judge is an appointee of former president Bill Clinton.

She says that she sees evidence suggesting the administration has taken advantage of a lapse

in government spending and functioning to assume that all bets are off and the laws don't apply

to them, but that politically motivated layoffs are illegal no matter whether the government

is functioning or not.

And I think that that's sort of like one of the most interesting practical things here, which

is it's really common that these conversations, it's sort of like the horses out of the barn.

They're going to lay off workers.

And then we kind of slow down and we say, wait a second, why would you be allowed to do things when government

is closed that you're not allowed to do when government is open?

It's not like the rule of law goes away.

...