Foreign Policy Sanctions and Constitutional Authority

Attention all passengers. The Uber ride for Jeff's rugby team will depart in five minutes from platform 15. Your ride comes with six toilets and a refreshments carriage that you'll empty within five minutes Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber . Trains on Uber. Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize, and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home, with ongoing support whenever you need it You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk/slash podcast to learn more. Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma. Alright, here's an actor and the filmmaker of the new documentary Everyone is Long to You for Money, Ben McKenzie. He's a New York Times columnist, podcast host, and visiting professor at Limskom University, David French, and he's a historian and podcasts are new book. Come here. This wall is called Castles, Dan Jones. All right. All right. First one's for you, Ben. What which politician understands the risks of cryptocurrency best? Oh yes. Anyone on our side? Uh there there are a few. Um Elizabeth Warren understands the um the issues quite well. Um uh Senator Chris Van Hallen understands the issues quite well, and that's it. All right . Uh for Dan, do you think it's correct or incorrect to call right wing leaders like Georgia Maloney fascists? She's the head person in Italy. Um , no . I mean I think that You think she's a fascist? No, I don't think. I think that we're using this um this outdated language from the twentieth century to describe a whole new style of politics. And I think that um that in fact the reaching for the term fascist has become so easy and so lazy that anyone who expresses any opinion pretty much at all, you can fascist, fascist, fascist. Let's say that common I think it's easier to define communism than it is fascism. Fascism, I've heard so many different definitions, and I think we all kind of feel like the Supreme Court with pornography. I know it when I see it . But it's hard to kind of corporate power with military power. You know, what is it exactly? But you know it when you see it. Well, I've been saying it about Trump for years, that you know, like there are things that look like they're head ing toward autocracy or fascism. But you know, honestly, in a lot of them, we haven't gotten there. Well, I mean, the 1930s fascism was is fairly easy to define. It's militarism, it's nationalism, it's control of the press. A lot of things that are brewing now. The trouble is by using that term. And because it's now I mean you you get things like eco-fascism. What the fuck is eco-fascism? So the the term has lost its its meaning and in using it uh it's it's just become a sort of lazy term of generic abuse. Like do you think I think in the case of Maloney in Italy, I think her and you know, her was it her father or her grandfather, I think, was a fascist. But, you know, you could say about the Democratic Party, they're the ones who fought for slavery. Okay, so I mean everybody's got if you go back in time, it it doesn't matter. What are you now? I d I mean I'm not even sure she's that much of a right winger. She seems to be liked by the other people in the EU. They don't seem to treat her like she's some sort of crazy lady. I mean it it overlaps now with with populist in Europe. So I mean people would call Nigel Farage in the UK a fascist. Well undoubtedly he's a populist and he's an old-fashioned conservative and he has views on immigration that some people would say are uh harsher than But that is not the same as saying he's, for example, Oswald Mosley. I mean there's there's a profound difference. And in some of it, I think comes down to a failure to be able to define the politics of our own times. We don't have a like an adequate language for what's happening in the world at the moment. So we're reaching for this language out of time, which is is in a lot of cases the language of the mid-twentieth century. you would like to see implemented on the Supreme Court. Oh. How much time do you have? No. I'll start with one. I'm I think we need term limits for Supreme Court justices. The system is becoming broken in the sense that we're now nominating younger and younger and younger people with the hope that they can be in all uh be in their robes for 30, maybe 40 years. That's an enormous amount of stagnation. Number two, what we have is an enormous amount of unpredictability. So you don't know in any given presidency, are they going to be nominating a Supreme Court justice? Are they going to be nominating three? You know, we we had one four-year term with Biden, he had one. We had a four-year term with Trump, he had three nominations. That level of unpredictability starts to drive voters crazy because every single presidential election the Supreme Court is theoretically in play. If you do it with eighteen year terms, that's plenty of runway to be a justice. Right. And that would mean you'd have two election or two nominations per four-year term . Year one, year three. It's very predictable. The other thing that I would like to do, I want to get back the filibuster on Supreme Court justices. That is not a Supreme Court reform, it's a Senate reform. But one of the problems that we have now, Bill, is if you look out at the the w universe of judges who are who are ineligible who are eligible to be Supreme Court justices, what they're doing now is a lot of auditioning. They're writing opinions, ex pressing very strong opinions and concurrences and dissents that are all sending messages to few to senators. Nominate me, I'm strong, I'm strong, I'm strong. When I was coming up in the legal profession, the people wanted to be justi ces and judges played their cards close to the vest. They were scrupulously fair. They were scrupul scrupulously unbiased in their public statements. I don't think it's an advance. I don't think it's I don't think we're better off because lower court judges, law professors, et cetera, who want to be justices are sort of advertising their ideological street cred. I think that's a bad way to do this. So those are two big ones. Bring back the filibuster so that you actually have to have deliberation and compromise and term limits so that the American people know how long justices are serving, when they're getting new justices, and not every single presidential election it go goeses crazy . Besides the fact that you're right, they're nominating younger and younger people. I mean I could see a funny sketch where there's a nine-year-old out. But y you left out the other big thing why it's broken is that Mitch McConnell changed the rules. Mitch McConnell completely changed the rules. I mean the rule was always you get to pick. Now it's kind of pot luck who dies when you're in office. But if they do die, like Justice Scalia did, you get to pick unless you're a black president or a Democratic president. Whatever reasoning they were using at the time. And that to me just threw a wrench in the whole thing. It said this is just a completely broken system now. Well no, but but Justice Roberts assures us that they're not political. Okay. They're not actors. They're not political. Let me defend the court for a minute. Look, this is a court that's a good thing. You can defend the Mitch McConnell thing? No, no, no. I'm defending I'm defending the Supreme Court. This is a court with six Republican nominated and uh justices that struck down Trump's signature domestic policy initiative that has blocked him from deploying the government. I agree with that, yes. And so there is real independence there. But I am just saying that changed the whole game. I mean, it was a whole year before an election, and that was the excuse they used. We can't do it this close. That was never the rule before. Somebody died. Obama had a pick. And they said and it was going to be Merrick Garland. And it would have been better if he was on the court, because he did such a shit job as the attorney General . Okay. Does the panel have any thoughts on who Satoshi Nakamoto is? He's that's a pseudo name for the founder of Bitcoin. I'm the resident crypto guy. Right. So Satoshi is the the the cult-like uh leader of this thing, right? It's a pseudonym. Uh it's what he's the guy who invented it. It didn't exist until he picked it out of thin air. Right, right, right. And the New York Times has done some reporting on this. They think it's uh this guy, Adam Back, who's a British cryptographer. Uh I don't know if they've proved it, but here's the cryptographer? Yeah. A map maker? No. Oh, that's something different, huh? What's a map maker? You would know, Dan. So much more interesting if he turned out to be a map maker, I tell you. One thing that's interesting about Adam Back, so crypto has has this myth of Satoshi has a given it this real like sort of cult-like uh intensity. But Adam Bach , his company received funding from Jeffrey Epstein. That's in the Epstein file. What's his company? What's he doing? Lockstream. It's a crypto company. It's crypto company. Oh, I see. I mean, that's what we're talking about, right? When I talk about crime, it gets very abstract. Well, you know, yes. I mean he has there's there's a side hustle. How could there be a company before he made it up? It's all so stupid. What's the panel's reaction to CIA Director John Ratcliffe visiting Raul Castro on Thursday? Well well uh for Cuba I mean this is a tough one. Cuba, we took over Venezuela. Okay. The bank shot from that was maybe we can get Cuba too, because Cuba got a lot of its oil from Venezuela. We cut that off, trying to destroy this regime and it is a horrible regime. It's a little like when you have a fever. Like the fever is a good thing. It's there to kill the germs in your body. It's roasting them to death. But if you let it get too high, it could kill you. You know, do we let the f the fever of no oil kill the regime, or is it gonna kill the people? Right now it's killing the people though. Right now it's it's it's olutely. I mean, hospitals are being shut, they're not power, children are dying. Yeah. I mean this is this is horrific. It is very easy to inflict. No. But it is very easy to inflict suffering with economic sanction sanctions. It is very difficult to change a regime economic sanctions. And we have seen this for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And the other thing I want to say is I I am I take a backseat to no one in my loathing, for example, of the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime was responsible for killing men I served with in Iraq. I have no love for that Iranian regime. But my hatred for the Iranian regime or my loathing of communist Cuba does not overturn the Constitution of the United States. Right. And the Constitution requires the President, before he's going to engage in aggressive military action or acts of war and blockades or acts of war, to go to Congress to make a case of the American Union. We haven't done that. Nobody's done that for generations You can't lay that all on this. No, I'm not. But we had George W. Bush went to Congress for Iraq, even when his own Department of Justice told him he didn't have to. His dad went to Congress for Desert Storm. This is not an Trevor Burrus And he got kind of a blank check. It wasn't really to go to war. It was like if you have to do something, uh go ahead, do it. I mean, Vietnam was a police going back to Korea was police action But we can't just say, well, because past presidents have fumbled the ball and and defied the Constitution that it just doesn't matter. I agree. Well what we can what we can say is in the 2025 inaugural address, Trump said people are gonna love me for all the wars I stopped and all the wars I didn't start. I mean, and here we have Venezuela, Iran. Well this one was supposed to be short. Supposed to be hit it and quit it, but you know. Wars are like relationships. Easy to get in. Hard to get out. You know ? I mean , we'll cut it off there. Thank you very much, ladies and Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.