We have a constitutional crisis. Now what?

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Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode, Kai Ryssdal and Kimberly Adams discuss the Donald Trump administration’s disregard for the courts. The White House has ignored a judge’s order to turn around a pair of deportation flights and failed to rehire federal workers. A constitutional crisis has arrived. Plus, get ready for a three-bleep Kai rant. And how anime helps explain the GOP’s attempt to get around the real cost of its $4 trillion tax cut.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

“Black War Hero’s Medal of Honor Page Deleted by Pentagon” from Newsweek
“Donald Trump Is Itching for a Legal Showdown Over Deportations” by Vanity Fair
“What court orders? Trump’s moving full steam ahead to slash more federal workers” from Politico
“Exclusive: How the White House ignored a judge’s order to turn back deportation flights” from Axios
“Trump admin live updates: Border czar says ‘I don’t care what the judges think’” by ABC News
“Crematory horrors spur Maryland lawmakers to push for reform” by The Washington Post
“A Congresswoman with Dementia Stopped Coming to Work. The DC Press Corps Never Noticed.” by Politico
“The Budget Trick the G.O.P. Might Use to Make a $4 Trillion Tax Cut Look Free” by The New York Times
@bbkogan.bsky.social on Bluesky
“Republicans press for change in how CBO tallies cost of legislation” from Marketplace

Got a question or comment for the hosts? Email [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Jake, I'm right when you are, I think.
0:08.0	Hey, everybody, I'm Kai Rizda. Welcome back to Make Me Smart. Where we make today make sense.
0:14.0	And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on this Monday, March 17th. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
0:20.0	Oh, my. Today we're going to do our usual Monday thing, some news, and then some smiles.
0:24.2	Kai, what you got?
0:25.2	Well, so I'm going to let the music fade out here before I say what I'm going to say so that
0:29.5	Courtney and Marissa and Bridget can fight amongst themselves to be first to the bleep button.
0:35.7	But the headline of my piece goes like this.
0:39.6	What the fuck is the matter with these people?
0:42.1	What the absolute fuck is the matter with these people?
0:45.3	So the news, of course, came late Friday over the weekend
0:48.1	that the Pentagon has gone further in its anti-D-EI mandate, I guess, from the White House.
0:59.0	And they have removed a web page honoring a guy by the name of Charles Rogers.
1:07.0	He's a Black Army General and a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam. That page now,
1:14.0	should you try to go to it, gives you one of those 404 errors. And not only that, the URL,
1:19.9	the little address that you put up in the web browser, instead of saying Medal of Honor
1:26.4	now says DEI metal.
1:31.1	Wow.
1:32.3	And so I'm going to say this again.
1:34.6	The fuck is the matter with these people.
1:41.3	That's all I got.
1:47.0	I will be very fascinated to see how recruitment does.
	...

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