Originalism, Executive Power, and the Roberts Court

The Politics Guys

Michael Baranowski

Politics, News

4.4 • 783 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike talks with Thomas Berry, director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review, about how to understand the Supreme Court beyond simple liberal/conservative scorekeeping. They discuss originalism, precedent, executive power, independent agencies, and the emergency docket. Berry defends a text-and-history approach to judging, criticizes presidents of both parties for stretching old statutes to justify new policies, and argues that Congress’s weakness has pushed too much power into the executive branch. The Cato Institute on X Check out the Future of Our Former Democracy podcast The Politics Guys on Facebook | X Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible. You can support us or change your level of support at patreon.com/politicsguys or politicsguys.com/support. On Venmo, we’re @PoliticsGuys. The Politics Guys is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:53.9	Teas and seize eligibility and limitations apply. Price review based on the off-gen price cap after 12 months. See Britishgas.com.ukau.U.K. for more. Atheists, agnostics. Long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vanroll. I love. The government. Hug the government. Love. The government. Hug the government. Love. the government of the government welcome to politics guys i'm'm political scientist Michael Baranowski, an emeritus professor at North Kentucky University.
1:18.5	My guest today is Thomas Berry, the director of the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
1:28.3	Before joining Cato, he was an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and clerk for Judge
1:33.6	E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
1:37.6	Thomas Berry, welcome to the show.
1:39.4	Thank you.
1:39.9	Thanks for inviting me.
1:41.1	So I thought I'd start with Cato itself and its approach to the Supreme Court.
1:46.0	What would you say is distinctive about how Cato approaches Supreme Court litigation, commentary,
1:54.3	say compared with groups like the Federal Society on the right or, say, the American Constitution Society on the left?
2:02.3	Sure. So for decades, debate about constitutional interpretation was often summed up into
2:08.0	two competing sides, so-called judicial activism or judicial progressivism versus judicial
2:14.2	restraint or judicial conservatism. So much of constitutional commentary was defined
	...

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