Hello, friends, and welcome to a very special episode of the Bill Press Pod for this holiday season.

In earlier days, they were called The Brethren. But Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once described them as nine scorpions in a bottle.

Of course, I'm talking about the Supreme Court, which is very much back in the news these days,

with two extreme conservatives Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh appointed to the court by Donald Trump,

and with everybody worried about the health of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The fact that Justice John Roberts is now the centrist or the swing vote just shows you how far

the court has moved to the right. We depend on a very small, dedicated group of journalists to

keep their eye on the court every day and to keep

us informed not only on the big cases they're considering, but what's happening behind the scenes.

And nobody has done it longer and nobody does it better than NPR's Supreme Court reporter,

Nina Totenberg. I had the pleasure of interviewing Nina Totenberg

a couple of months ago in front of an audience at the Hill Center on Capitol Hill in Washington,

D.C. Today was a day of breaking news at the Supreme Court. I was afraid you might not even be

able to make it. So there was so much news.

So can we start there on the judges on transgender issues? Let's start with that.

So the first question was there was a motion from the Solicitor General asking the Supreme

Court for two things. It asked the Supreme Court,

number one, to allow the administration to go forward with its essentially a ban on transgender

personnel in the military, although there's some exceptions. And there are a whole bunch of judges in lower courts that had said that the administration

had not given a good enough justification for undoing the Obama administration policy

that allowed transgender in the military.

And that therefore there were a bunch of nationwide injunctions that said, you can't

...