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This is Words Matter with Norm Ornstein.

We've got the boats and screw the rest of you.

And Dr. Kavita Patel.

These might be some of the smaller moments, you know, with all of the off-shells. Didn't catch people's eyes.

Hello and welcome to Words Matter from the DSRnetwork.

Each week, Norm Ornstein and I will talk about the issues facing our country as we go into another election cycle.

We have a couple of weeks not off because our listeners were able to get weekly podcasts, but Norm, we recorded some of those episodes earlier with our friend David Ruffkov.

And a lot has happened since then.

I think today we're going to tackle if I had to put a theme on it. Maybe I'll put the larger. I think an original theme norm, if you will, was a man or two just series really screwed up.

And I think we can now put an asterisk on that and say, man, all of our public institutions are really screwed up because we can include the Senate, the House.

We can include the administration, we could also it's a topics and to into that theme, but we were hoping with our general discussion to talk about some of the judiciary issues that have intersected with reproductive health.

And maybe we'll touch on how that spills over into some of the election issues. And then in our members only section will tackle a little bit more specifically one of our favorite justices, Clarence Thomas and some of the incredible world of controversy or in his mind, non controversy because he didn't do anything and he checked with his colleagues on luxury trips.

And we can talk about that as well. So norm, how are you doing? This is quite a hefty week. Tell me, tell me your thoughts and reactions to many of the things that unfolded that I just mentioned.

First, Cavita, one larger issue here that I find very troubling, which is the idea that one loan district judge out of the many hundreds in the country can somehow issue a nationwide injunction, imposing that judges views on the entire country.

And I find it bizarre. I cannot fathom the possibility that the framers ever would have accepted anything like that. Of course, there were no district judges back at the time.

And the court when it was first created was given a very narrow jurisdiction in our constitution and then whatever else Congress gave to it, but it has loomed so much larger and it's loomed so much larger with this collection of utterly radical judges for which we can thank Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, Mitch McConnell, and then of course Donald Trump, but it isn't just them.

We have two cases in the last couple of weeks that stick out one was a George W. Bush judge, Rita Conner, who basically unilaterally knocked out a key part of the Affordable Care Act.

...