Ryan Goodman: The Trump Administration and the Supreme Court

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

What has the Supreme Court done—and not done—to check the Trump administration so far? What are the broader political and constitutional implications? What might the next months and years look like? To discuss these questions we are joined, again, by Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University, former special counsel in the Department of Defense, and co-editor of NYU Law’s Just Security blog. According to Goodman, “there are many danger signs coming from the US Supreme Court that they [are] not ready to meet the moment.” As he explains, to this point, the Supreme Court has deferred to the Trump administration on a broad range of issues, including, for example, the use of the military domestically and the militarization of ICE. Goodman also describes the increasing weaponization of the Department of Justice against political opponents. Amidst uncertainty about how the Supreme Court will respond to executive actions that ignore constitutional authorities, and in the absence of pushback by Congress, Goodman argues that civil society must step up to defend the rule of law.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again by Ryan Goodman, Professor of Law
0:21.3	at New York University, a co-editor of the Just Security website, a really must read if you
0:27.6	want to follow what's going on in the world of law and the courts and the rule of law
0:32.9	in the United States. National Security also a very important part of that. And Ryan also has a substack,
0:39.8	which you should be reading every week and accounts on social media. You should be following
0:45.3	every day. Anyway, Ryan, thanks for joining me again.
0:48.3	My pleasure. I look forward to the conversation.
0:50.3	We spoke five, almost exactly five months ago. We're speaking now just for the record
0:54.9	here on July 2nd, Wednesday morning. This Supreme Court term is over. The wonderful big bill has
1:00.5	passed the Senate, and I think he's probably going to pass the House today. So just to locate people,
1:05.0	President Trump was in the Everglades yesterday, touting his detention camp there.
1:11.6	And, okay, that's enough editorializing for me.
1:14.6	And I thought, what of Brian's, I'll just say this to the audience,
1:17.6	one of Brian's great virtues in my opinion is,
1:20.6	I mean, I'm political philosophy background,
1:22.6	so I'm probably too much of a 30,000 footman.
1:24.6	I want to jump to big macro conclusions based on maybe not quite enough evidence. A lot of our friends, I think especially lawyers, litigators, are extremely good and very important in terms of their grasp of the details. And obviously, if you're a litigator, that's what you deal with, right? You're in a court arguing a case before this judge with this set of laws and facts. very few people, I think, are able to get into that middle ground. I don't know what that would be. What's that? I don't fly planes. 5,000 feet, 8,000 feet. You're high up enough to see things, but low down enough to see the details as well. And Ryan has a great ability to do that. And so I'm really pleased that you're able to join us here.
2:02.3	Our conversation from five months ago stands up well.
2:04.8	You were alarmed just a month into a couple of weeks
2:08.3	into the Trump administration.
2:10.3	I want to talk about immigration.
2:11.5	I want to talk about the unitary executive
	...

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