Into the Gerrymandering and Slush Fund Legal Thunder Dome

Law Talk With Epstein, Yoo & Cooke

The Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin

Politics, News, History, Government

4.8 • 704 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2026

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Supreme Court drops a bombshell voting-rights ruling, Richard Epstein declares the republic is heading for the rocks, John Yoo says everybody needs to calm down because politicians have always behaved terribly, and Charlie Cooke tries to referee the whole thing before the podcast devolves into anarchy. Along the way: racial gerrymandering, constitutional originalism, the mysterious “Republican Form of Government Clause,” whether Trump can legally settle a lawsuit with… himself, and why both parties suddenly love slush funds when they’re the ones holding the hose. It’s a cheerful little conversation about whether America’s political system is fundamentally broken — and whose fault it is.

Transcript

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0:00.0	John, you're looking very stoic.
0:02.0	Welcome to Law Talk. I'm Charles C.W. Cook, and I am joined, of course, by Richard Epstein and by John You. This is a production of the Civitas Institute at the
0:25.3	University of Texas at Austin. Gentlemen, welcome back to the show. Great. Hello, Charlie.
0:32.3	All right, well, it's not as fun as the last one where we were all in person in a courtroom like setting in Texas.
0:40.0	Oh yes.
0:41.3	Zoom will have to do.
0:43.1	And since the last episode, we have had a decision from the Supreme Court, Calais.
0:50.8	And this has affected our politics for a month now.
0:56.3	We have its advocates saying it was about time and its opponents saying that this is a return to Jim Crow,
1:03.3	it's the second destruction of reconstruction, and all the states are scrambling.
1:08.9	So the basic question at hand in this case was section two of the
1:16.5	1965 Voting Rights Act, specifically how that, if that, applies to or mandates or allows racial gerrymanders.
1:29.3	The moment that this came down, a whole bunch of states in the South said hurrah,
1:33.3	we can now draw different maps.
1:35.3	We've had subsequent litigation with federal courts getting involved.
1:40.3	The Supreme Court has been asked on its emergency docket to make decisions as to
1:45.9	how to apply this. We've had the related case per cell debated as well. So there's a whole lot
1:53.5	to get involved in. But let's start with the Calais decision itself, which I think we previewed on a Law Talk episode
2:02.8	earlier in the year.
2:05.3	John, you take us from the beginning.
2:08.3	What was this about and was it the right call?
2:11.7	I think it was the right call, but it required the court to reconcile two different streams of its case law.
	...

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