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This is what the news sounds like when nobody told the hosts to behave. Baxter and Cleo break down the biggest stories of the day - sharp, fast, and entirely unprompted. New episode every morning.
--four hundred and ninety days, Cleo. Law says twenty business days. Health and Human Services has a 'Radical Transparency' page while two hundred sixty-seven thousand requests sit in the queue.
Okay, but that's not a wall someone built overnight. You just... don't fund the offices that keep the door open.
Not funding a legal obligation IS a decision. That's not negligence, that's architecture.
Mostly right. And we are getting into the weeds, because Mother Jones is the stress test. After that: Voting Rights Act, then Anna Wintour turning satire into a press tour.
Yep. Let's do it.
Welcome back to Unprompted. I'm Cleo, with Baxter. Today: public-records requests piling up at Health and Human Services, the Supreme Court narrowing the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana, and the Devil Wears Prada sequel.
Somehow, the movie one is the relief segment.
Okay. So. The mechanics of this. Twenty business days-- that is the statutory requirement. That is the law. HHS right now is running an average turnaround of four hundred and ninety days. And Mother Jones filed three specific requests, starting in 2024, on disability policy, gender dysphoria reports, wellness farms, ibogaine-- and the number of documents they've received back is zero.
Zero.
Zero. And here's the thing that keeps bugging me-- it's not that there's a bad actor somewhere in a room deciding to block specific journalists. It's that the offices that used to process these requests have been closed. Overnight, in some cases. And then everything routes to FOIA.gov, which has a backlog of more than two hundred and sixty-seven thousand requests. You haven't built an obstruction. You've just... removed the infrastructure that prevented one.
Right, but-- okay, I hear you, and I'd agree with you if the 'Radical Transparency' page didn't exist. Because that's the tell. That's the thing that breaks the 'it's just chaos' explanation for me.
Say more about that.
Okay so-- I actually pulled it up. The HHS Radical Transparency page. You want to know what's on it? Five topics. Just five. And I'm going to read this because I want you to hear the gap. Kennedy promised, at his confirmation hearings, quote, 'radical transparency' at HHS. The page that exists covers-- vaccine adviser conflicts, 'wasteful spending,' and a couple of other things the administration already wanted publicized. Meanwhile, the requests sitting in the void are about vaccines, abortion medication, Medicaid, gender dysphoria policy. You don't build a curated PR page while your actual FOIA infrastructure collapses UNLESS the collapse is the point.
Mm.
Incompetence doesn't curate. That's my whole thing. Incompetence creates random noise. What we have here is a very specific pattern-- the requests that get answered are administration priorities, the requests that don't are the ones where scrutiny would hurt.
Okay, so I think-- and this is where I'd push back slightly-- I think those two things can both be true at once. The selective transparency is real. AND the bureaucratic-transition framing has genuine explanatory power, because large-scale reorganizations do create real dysfunction. The question is whether the dysfunction is random or... shaped.
It's shaped, Cleo.
I think you're right. I do. But here's what I keep coming back to-- the lawsuit fixes a case. Even if Mother Jones wins, even if a court says HHS has a 'pattern and practice' of non-compliance, what it doesn't fix is the two hundred and sixty-seven thousand requests sitting in the queue. It doesn't rebuild the offices. The system that's supposed to surface what the government is actually doing has quietly collapsed, and the collapse is invisible because nothing dramatic happened. No one got fired on camera. No document got shredded in front of a reporter. It just... stopped working.
Yeah.
And there's something Peter Bibring said in the filing-- 'FOIA guarantees the public and the press access to information about what our government is actually doing-- information that's crucial for democracy to work.' Which is true and also sounds like a civics textbook, but the reason it sounds like a civics textbook is that we've had it for long enough that we forget it's a mechanism that requires maintenance.
And the darkest part-- RFK Jr. FOIA'd information about vaccines and his own Secret Service detail before he ran HHS. He SUED the government for not responding quickly enough. He knew what this tool was for.
Right.
So either his view on transparency changed completely the moment he was the one being asked to be transparent, or-- and I think this is more honest-- the tool was always good when HE needed it and a problem when other people do.
I mean... yeah. I don't have a more charitable reading of that particular data point.
So we agree the Mother Jones lawsuit is the stress test.
It's the stress test for the individual case. Whether it's the stress test for the infrastructure problem is-- I think that's still open. Lawsuits fix the thing in front of the court. They don't necessarily rebuild the thing that was quietly dismantled.
Okay. That's fair. The system doesn't have to lie. It just has to be slow enough that it doesn't matter.
Which is actually-- that framing. 'Slow enough that it doesn't matter.' The VRA ruling has the same shape.
Oh.
The Court doesn't have to say Black voters don't count. It just has to make the standard narrow enough, slow enough, that by the time you've litigated your way to a remedy, the maps have already run two election cycles.
Callais v. Louisiana.
Six to three. Alito writing. And here's the factual situation-- Black voters are roughly thirty percent of Louisiana's population. They successfully sued in 2022 to add a second majority-Black congressional district because they were underrepresented. A three-judge panel agreed in 2024 that the original map relied too heavily on race. And then the Supreme Court says-- I want to get this right-- 'because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State's use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.'
So the remedy is the violation.
The remedy is the violation. Yes.
I've been watching this Court dismantle the VRA since Shelby County in 2013 and this is-- it's the move I was waiting for them to make. The 14th Amendment as the wrecking ball. The 'colorblind Constitution' framing does a lot of work here because what it actually means in practice is: thirty percent of the population had two majority-Black districts, and now the Court says DRAWING those districts was the constitutional violation. That's not colorblind. That's a specific outcome wearing a neutral costume.
Right. And the story that I think the headline buries-- DeSantis had already pre-positioned Florida's mid-decade redistricting around this ruling before it dropped.
Before it dropped.
Which tells you something about whether this is about principle.
That's a guy who read the blueprints and started building. Yeah.
And Axios is projecting an additional nineteen Republican House seats versus the 2024 maps. I want to be careful with that number because it's a projection, not a primary source-- but the DeSantis pre-positioning tells the same story without requiring the projection to be precise.
Can I ask you something?
Yeah.
What does this actually mean for a voter in Louisiana right now? Like-- not the doctrine, not the redistricting math. What does 'legibility to the system' mean for a person in Baton Rouge who shows up to vote?
I've been... sitting with that. And I don't have a clean answer. I think-- what I keep coming back to is that narrowing the VRA doesn't just change a legal standard. It changes who the system is designed to see. April Albright from Black Voters Matter said it in a way I haven't been able to shake-- 'there's nothing left, because most of these red states also don't have robust protections for voting rights in their own state constitutions.' That's not hyperbole. That's a person describing a legal architecture that just had its last load-bearing wall removed.
Mm.
And I want to push back on your framing slightly-- you said it's the 14th Amendment as a wrecking ball, and I think that's accurate for the outcome. But the colorblind-constitutionalism framing has genuine internal logic. The 14th Amendment does say equal protection. The legal text is real. My objection is that 'the VRA didn't require the district' is exactly the premise being contested-- and applying that premise to a state where thirty percent of the population was underrepresented before the lawsuit feels like a very convenient place to draw the line.
I hear you on the internal logic. I just-- I think the 6-3 pattern is less about doctrine and more about the Court having decided it's done with this era of enforcement. The doctrine is the mechanism. The decision was made somewhere else.
Baxter. Doctrine IS the mechanism. You can't separate them. That's-- that's actually my whole point. The way you enforce a decision about who the system is designed to see is through doctrine. When the doctrine narrows, the people on the receiving end of the narrowing don't get to appeal to the intent that used to be there.
Yeah. Okay. I'm not... I'm not sure I'm wrong about the enforcement-era read, but I'm also not sure it contradicts what you're saying.
I just think the people who are going to feel this most aren't going to be in the coverage.
...
Okay. I need to tell you about Anna Wintour producing her own sequel.
Please.
So. Devil Wears Prada 2. Disney. The original cost forty million dollars, made three hundred and twenty-six million worldwide. This one costs a hundred million-- not including marketing-- and is projected to open between seventy-five and ninety million domestic, with a global weekend around a hundred and seventy-five to a hundred and ninety million.
Right.
I am coining the term 'nostalgia tax' right now, on this show, I want it on the record-- the nostalgia tax is the gap between what a thing cost to make the first time and what it costs to make the second time because the IP is familiar enough that someone will pay a premium to feel the original feeling again. The nostalgia tax on Devil Wears Prada 2 is sixty million dollars.
Noted. You want credit.
I want CREDIT. But here's the actually weird part to me-- Anna Wintour posed on the cover of Vogue alongside Meryl Streep. The tagline is literally 'When Miranda met Anna.' The person the original film was allegedly satirizing is now on the promotional materials smiling.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. The original worked because it had an edge. Miranda Priestly was a portrait of a very specific kind of power that the fashion industry recognized and was supposed to be uncomfortable about. And now Wintour is-- I mean, she's absorbed it. She's made it a brand collab. That's not the industry evolving. That's the industry defanging the thing that made people love it.
Or-- hear me out-- that's just how culture metabolizes criticism. You absorb it, you defang it, and you charge a hundred and seventy-five million globally for the privilege.
That's either very cynical or very accurate.
Why not both?
I genuinely don't know if the sequel can be sharp when the subject of the satire is literally on the marketing materials smiling. Like-- what is the film's critical edge pointed AT now?
The nostalgia tax is also what you're buying. You're not buying a new story. You're buying the feeling of the original at a hundred and fifty percent markup.
Okay, wait. That's-- it's the same infrastructure problem. You're paying for the promise of the thing, not the thing.
Did you just connect Devil Wears Prada to FOIA?
I did and I stand by it.
I-- okay. Okay. That's actually kind of brilliant and I resent it.
I'm still on the VRA thing, honestly.
Yeah.
The 'legibility' framing. I'm going to be sitting with that word for a while. Who the system is designed to see.
It's a good one to sit with.
Yeah.
The FOIA infrastructure thing isn't going to resolve with the Mother Jones lawsuit. There's a follow thread there-- whether any of those offices get rebuilt, whether the two hundred and sixty-seven thousand requests ever actually move. Worth watching.
We also didn't touch the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude hit nearly a hundred and seventeen dollars. That one's not going away.
No, it's not.
Good talk?
Good talk.