Steve Vladeck on the Trump Administration, the Courts, and the Rule of Law

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Where do things stand fifty days into Trump’s second term? According to Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck: “We’ve never seen such a wholesale attempt on the part of a president [to] hollow out the executive branch [and] install loyalists in all of the relevant positions of government.” Amid a blizzard of lawsuits in response to Trump’s executive actions, Vladeck analyzes whether and to what extent the courts, Congress, and other institutions might contain the Trump administration by asserting their own Constitutional prerogatives to defend the rule of law. While he notes that courts may push back on certain executive actions on First Amendment and other grounds, Vladeck argues that the courts simply were not set up to handle the kind of large-scale litigation that might follow from mass terminations in the civil service, for instance. This is a must-watch Conversation for anyone interested in understanding how the separation of powers, a bedrock of our constitutional government, is playing out in our institutions in real time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.
0:15.9	Welcome back to Conversations.
0:17.9	Very pleased to be joined today by Steve Vladick, Professor of Law at Georgetown University, where he teaches the Supreme Court, federal courts. And I discovered from looking at your, quickly at the Georgetown website, National Security Law, which I hadn't realized you were as much of an expert on, which is actually very interesting. And maybe we can get to that a little bit in this conversation. But Steve's well-known as really one of the best, I say, explainers of complex legal issues to normal people who are
0:43.0	not lawyers or not constitutional lawyers or not law professors, but explaining them in a way that
0:47.2	does justice to the complexity as opposed to simplifying, author of an excellent book on the shadow
0:52.5	docket. I guess that's a phrase you get credit for inventing.
0:55.0	Is that true?
0:56.0	No, no, Will Bow did it.
0:58.0	Oh, Will Bow did, right.
0:59.0	I shamelessly stole it from him and don't even pay him royalties.
1:02.0	I bet you don't have a little footnote on the cover there, you know, this phrase borrowed from Chicago Law Professor Will Bow.
1:09.0	No, I guess not. And Steve has an excellent substack weekly,
1:14.0	but now I notice you've been doing it more often than weekly, but there's so much news called
1:17.8	one first, O&E, one first, which you should all subscribe to, and it's really informative about
1:24.7	what's going on in the courts. And I noticed also from your Georgetown bio that you're a Mets fan, which I had not realized.
1:30.3	And I was a Mets fan before you were born.
1:32.8	And it's, has it, yeah, that's nice.
1:35.6	Yeah.
1:36.3	I've survived.
1:37.1	So, you know, you have, you can help you can keep going to.
1:41.4	I mean, you know, there's, there's, M's, the Mets fans, we all know how to suffer in
1:44.6	silence, right, Bill? Exactly. Right. Occasional groaning of something during the playoffs, right?
	...

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