French Friday: What Happened to Checks & Balances?

The Holy Post

Phil Vischer

Skyejethani, Society & Culture, Philvischer, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity, 226012, Christiantaylor, Atheism, Veggietales

4.6 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David French brings us his thoughts on why the GOP is no longer the party of the Constitution. Have political party allegiances broken the system? What Constitutional guard rails can operate when people are worried about falling out of the President’s favor? Then, he talks about Carl Schmitt, a German political thinker who may have the key to understanding the difference between the politics we’re used to—and the emerging politics of the New Right.

David French’s article on Schmittian politics:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/opinion/trump-maga-schmitt.html

0:00 - Theme Song

0:17 - Show Begins

2:11 - Tiktok—banned or not?

8:10 - Does Trump obey the Supreme Court?

15:30 - Resistant Bacteria Analogy

24:26 - Senators Following the People

27:29 - Political Parties as Checks

34:45 - The Gingrich-Clinton Wars

41:28 - Schmitt and MAGA Morality

53:15 - The Moment for Courage

1:04:52 - End Credits

Transcript

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0:00.0	Guess what day it is?
0:03.0	Oh, oh, it's French Friday, it's French Friday, so grab your prize and say,
0:08.0	hooray!
0:09.0	David French is here to play on French Friday.
0:13.0	It's French Friday.
0:15.0	David French, welcome back.
0:19.0	Sky, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.
0:22.3	You know, we always have this problem that there's just not enough to talk about when you come on.
0:26.8	I know. We're always straining. We're always straining. Okay. We are a week and a half into the second Trump administration. There has been a flurry of activity. I mean, it's exhausting
0:39.7	just turning on the news. But I want to cut through some of the noise and look at some things
0:45.2	that Trump has done or his administration has done, which are not completely unexpected,
0:51.1	but really pushing the envelope, maybe even just breaking through it
0:55.5	on legality.
0:57.5	So a couple of things come to mind and we can flesh these out.
1:00.4	One is his executive order ending birthright citizenship, which seems to be in direct defiance
1:06.7	of the 14th Amendment and a lot of jurisprudence over the years that has backed up
1:11.1	birthright citizenship.
1:13.1	And then the TikTok ban where on a bipartisan level, which is pretty rare these days,
1:19.3	Republicans and Democrats in Congress passed this ban on TikTok and it was pretty watertight.
1:25.1	And Trump basically let the deadline come and go and said, well, I'm just not
1:29.9	going to do it. I'm just not going to enforce it. And so I want you to unpack some of what it
1:34.7	is exactly that Trump has done on these fronts and others. But then I want to get to,
	...

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