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[Show Intro]
Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments, this is episode 392. I’m Thomas, that’s Andrew. How’re you doing, Andrew?
Andrew: I have to say fantastic, right?
Thomas: You are contractually obligated, but uh-
Andrew: I’m excited to do the show, I’m not excited that the world is still on fire, but I am excited to do the show.
Thomas: Yeah, we can do a little contract law. You are obligated to say “fantastic,” but at what point has the world become such an act of god or whatever?
Andrew: [Laughs]
Thomas: Does the state of things?
Andrew: [Laughing] Yeah!
Thomas: At what point can you no longer be held to that?
Andrew: Force majeure clause!
Thomas: Yeah exactly.
Andrew: [Laughs] I don’t have to be fantastic.
Thomas: I think you just argue, “You Honor,” and then just gestures about the world, “just look at everything,” and then he’d be like “case dismissed.”
Andrew: Our listeners know that I and the firm have been hard at work on our amicus brief in the Michael Flynn case. I will tell you; Morgan and I have had to edit out stage directions from the amicus brief on multiple occasions. [Laughing] You know, “point and shrug.” There’s so much where you’re just kinda like “neh, look around!”
Thomas: Yeah, speaking of, little bit of news. [Laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, let’s get to it!
Thomas: Little bit of news. There’s so much. We’re gonna talk about George Floyd, we’re gonna talk about the charges were upgraded, I’m very curious to hear. I don’t know if this was an Andrew Was Wrong? Or something, but we’ll see what that was. We’ve got the insurrection act.
Andrew: [Sighs]
Thomas: Oh my gosh. I wish, you know, if we could broadcast this episode back to our 2016 selves-
Andrew: Yup.
Thomas: We’d just be like “yeah, no that sounds right. That’s exactly what we all thought would happen.”
Andrew: [Sighs]
Thomas: [Laughing] The insurrection act! Curfews, roaming militias, let’s see and then we’re gonna do something a little special today which is there is so much and we love our patrons so much that we’re gonna do extra for patrons. There’s just too much to contain, so we’ll do a little lightening round bonus segment for everybody, because we’re not trying to hide any information from anybody, but then we’ll do an extra patron deep dive into these issues.
So it’s Rod Rosenstein and we’ve got a Judge Sullivan update, and also you may have seen, a lot of people are posting something about Doe v. Trump/Epstein, I don’t even know what the conspiracy theory is but we’re gonna do a little debunking of that.
So that’s the episode, I know Andrew we’ve got an announcement or two before we get to it?
Andrew: Yeah, two quick things. I am very, very excited. On Tuesday’s episode we’re gonna have an interview with Gabe Roth from Fix the Court and he has uncovered through diligent journalistic exercise interesting information about our favorite judicial nominee, Justin Walker, who I will point out shamefully as of today has been advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line 12-10 vote. He is Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and his criteria include having had his ass kicked in a debate by me and that’s it.
Thomas: [Laughs]
Andrew: It’s bad.
Thomas: Well in fairness, no matter how good a judicial nominee, they still could’ve had their asses kicked by Andrew Torrez in a debate.
Andrew: [Laughs]
Thomas: I’m just saying, be fair to-
Andrew: I’ll be fair, alright.
Thomas: [Laughs]
Andrew: Then you pointed this out to me and I think it is really, really important. Much of this show is going to be focused on the aftermath of George Floyd. It would be irresponsible for us not to talk about it, and not to talk about Trump invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and all of that other stuff, but it is worth reminding that this is part of Trump’s plan to distract from the fact that he is an incompetent gameshow host who has mismanaged an epidemic that is still raging in this country.
A) we’re not gonna let him fully distract; and B) if you are participating in protests – and I get it – much of the peaceful protests that I have seen involve people practicing appropriate social distancing techniques. Please be safe, okay? We still have a pandemic raging, and the fact that it hasn’t been appropriately dealt with, that we’ve had insufficient testing and tracking and tracing and all of it, yes. Donald Trump is incompetent at that; we will not forget that. But take care of yourself, man.
Thomas: Yeah. It is-
Andrew: It’s hard!
Thomas: It’s tough. I wish – obviously I wish we weren’t in a pandemic. [Laughs] I think it’s safe to say, because it would be way better to be able to demonstrate and protest and all this stuff and not worry about that. I do love the attempt at a “gotcha” where it’s like “Oh, I see! When we wanted a haircut, then it wasn’t okay to protest! But now that police are executing unarmed black men [Scoffs] all of a sudden protest is okay, huh?” It’s like, yeah.
Andrew: Yes!
Thomas: It’s true.
Andrew: [Laughs] Nothing like when the argument is … yes.
Thomas: It was stupid that you were protesting that you couldn’t force someone to get coronavirus to give you a haircut, yes, that was stupid.
Andrew: Right. [Laughs] Yeah.
Thomas: [Laughs] We agree, okay.
Andrew: Case closed!
Thomas: Okay, let’s get to our show. Good reminder there, let’s get to our first segment.
[Segment Intro]