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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm feeling a little feisty. How are you? Are you feeling feisty?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, in contrast, I think I need to raise my energy level. Listeners, anytime we start the podcast where Nia boldly proclaims that she's feeling feisty, I'm like, what's that movie quote? "Hold on, it's going to be a bumpy ride.".
N. Rodgers: My friend Neil makes the awooga, awooga, dive dive sound when I say I'm feeling feisty.
J. Aughenbaugh: So I have to ask, why are you feeling feisty this morning, Nia?
N. Rodgers: I'm feeling feisty because we're getting ready to have a bumpy ride here with the Supremes for the next couple of weeks. As more stuff comes out, I know that my personal blood pressure is going to go up. I know that the blood pressure of the country is going to go up because there are things that I believe they are going to do. I personally do not believe they will take away the right to birthright citizenship. That's going to make a whole bunch of people mad. I will not be one of them. But I also think there's stuff they're going to do that's going to make me mad, and I'm going to be like what? Rah, rah, rah. It's how I talk to myself, and it is occasionally how I talk to you. But I try really hard to separate the court's decisions from being the members of the court. And we often say we can predict what certain members will do, and then they do something crazy like, I don't know, Elena Kagan agreeing with Justice Alito and then me having to lay down and put a cold rag on my head since the world has shifted. But that's civil discourse. That's people being able to say, I can separate this thing that you believe and how much I dislike it from you as a person who I like or who I at least respect. Those being two different things. And I think we're about to go through a period where people are going to have a tough time separating I hate what the court did from I hate the court.
J. Aughenbaugh: Court. Yeah. Listeners.
N. Rodgers: And that's a real struggle.
J. Aughenbaugh: The focus of this episode is, again, this is part of our Schumer of SCOTUS. So most of our episodes, at least for the next few weeks, are going to be about the Supreme Court. But until the Supreme Court starts handing down some of the more controversial rulings, which is what Nia, me, and pretty much almost every other Supreme Court follower is predicting, we wanted to take a look at a phenomenon that has been bothering Nia and I for the last few years, which we entitle When Attacks on the Supreme Court in Our Estimation Go Too Far. To put some context to this particular episode, most of you all who listen to this podcast on the regular know that neither myself or Nia are shy about being critical. We have criticized poorly or vaguely written government documents. If I really wanted to get Nia going today, I would go ahead and say, "So, Nia, what do you think about the quality of the written pros of the US Constitution?" And Nia would be.
N. Rodgers: To which I would explode and begin to say, could you vague that up for me? Rah rah, rah. I have a lot of feelings about the written texts.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or in my case, government processes. I tend to focus on what institutions do and how they do things.
N. Rodgers: Aughie, I've decided to get rid of the comment period.
J. Aughenbaugh: For notice and comment.
N. Rodgers: What do you think about that?
J. Aughenbaugh: We've looked at bad behavior by government officials. Heck, we even did a series of two or three episodes about members of Congress and presidents running for office when they have to know they're too old to do the job. So any number of examples. But we created this podcast to encourage people to use their mental faculties to examine what the government does, and then to analyze what it does well and what it doesn't do well and how they can be more informed as members of the democratic republic known as the United States. In other words, we encourage people to engage with others in a civil manner. It's one thing to be critical, and as Nia, you just pointed out, I can despise or dislike your thought process, what you believe. That's one thing. But to then translate that into wanting to cause you harm or to make your professional life or your personal life so miserable, for us, that's perhaps going too far, and that's what we want to explore. Examples of individuals who have attempted to attack Supreme Court justices in a manner that we think goes too far, and probably what got us really going here is something that happened three weeks ago, maybe a month ago. Somebody called the police to report gunshots at the home of Justice Coney Barrett. The call was a hoax. This is known as swatting where you [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: Yeah. and the purpose of swatting is that you call the cops so that the cops go to a location already armed, already with their adrenaline going because they think something bad is happening. It's often called in as a domestic call or a kidnapping or attempted kidnapping or gunshots. So the cops come in hot because they think there's a hot situation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: And it has ended in the death of not a few number of people.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. In this particular instance, fortunately, local police officers coordinated with the Supreme Court police detail, which is assigned to every single justice today. All nine of them have either secret service agents or Supreme Court police details. Yes, the Supreme Court has a police department. So nothing bad happened.
N. Rodgers: It was luck that there were people that they could talk to because previous Supreme Courts have not had this detail.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: And who knows what would have happened?
J. Aughenbaugh: It is at minimum, harassment, because you know that this required a lock down of Justice Coney Barrett's residence. All the people in her family who were in the house could not leave. They were told to basically shelter in place. So at minimum, it's harassment. But as Nia points out, there have been numerous reported examples of where swatting has actually led to deadly outcomes. Somebody's [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: To me when you swat and the cops end up killing someone, you should be guilty of murder because you plotted to have someone murdered. That's what you do when you swat and knock it off. It is wrong in every circumstance. And it started in the gaming world where would people would try to interrupt somebody who was winning by having the cops come to their house, it interrupts their game play, and then they lose in the game. One, if you are that into a game, go out, touch some grass and turn off your computer. No, turn off your computer, go outside and touch grass. Do it in that order. Because what is wrong with you? What is wrong with you that you would be willing to risk someone's life? But in this instance, the added political and social anger involved at the Supreme Court, Coney Barrett is one member of nine. One, I don't understand what you think that will get you by wiping out Coney Barrett. As a side note, let me also say, to all the people who want to do things like this, if you are listening to this podcast, which I in some ways hope you are and in some ways hope you're not, if you think that Coney Barrett is the worst justice that Donald Trump could find to put on the Supreme Court right now, you need to turn off your listening device, go outside and touch some grass because I'm telling you that man could find worse people. He could find worse people, and right now they can get through the Senate. Aughie will explain the whole filibuster thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: The point that Nia is making here, listeners is be careful what you wish for. Another example we're going to touch upon in just a few moments is an effort by an individual who was arrested and convicted of wanting to go to the home of Justice Kavanaugh and kill him, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah, he's carrying like a gun and a knife and a whole bunch of stuff, like, dude.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you get a problem with Coney Barrett or Justice Brett Kavanaugh, as Nia pointed out, there are just off the top of my head, I could give you the names of at least half a dozen federal appeals court judges younger than Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett who Trump [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: That guy in Texas. I can't remember his name, but that guy in Texas.
J. Aughenbaugh: James Ho.
N. Rodgers: If you think they're bad in terms of what you don't like about the court.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. If you don't like the Court's jurisprudence or Coney Barrett's or Kavanaugh's jurisprudence, wait till you get a lot of [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: Donald Trump will actually hand you a beer to hold while he goes out and finds.
J. Aughenbaugh: And because of the removal of the filibuster for both lower federal appeals court judges which occurred when Obama was president done by Senate Democrats. But then the removal of the filibuster to delay and possibly obstruct voting for Supreme Court justices, which occurred during the first Trump administration when the Republicans controlled the Senate, there's nothing for the opposition party to do to stop such a justice being confirmed. It could be worse. And I know that's not much of an argument, but again, in terms of [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: I don't know. I think it's actually a pretty good argument when somebody says, how could this be worse and Aughie is like, I could give you names.
J. Aughenbaugh: There you go, I can give you, but if your point is to enact change on an institution you believe is issuing bad policy or in the case of the Supreme Court bad decisions, it's not going to get you anywhere, right?
N. Rodgers: Not in the current system. It's not going to help you.
J. Aughenbaugh: If anything, it sets a bad precedent, which Nia and I frequently talk about, right?
N. Rodgers: Right. Once you cross this rubicon, you cannot come back. Once it starts to be that you just kill justices that you don't, then either one of two things happen. Either complete anarchy, just the whole thing falls apart or what I think is even in some ways worse, no one will agree to be on the Supreme Court.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. And we're going to touch upon that.
N. Rodgers: Because why would you do that? Like, good or bad people will not agree to be on the Supreme Court because you could get murdered at any time, and nobody cares. This is not how civilized people handle their disputes.
J. Aughenbaugh: And what to me was remarkable was, Nia, right after the swatting incident at Coney Barrett's residence.
N. Rodgers: And suppose it's civilized individual.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Senator Raphael Warnock, who is a senator from the fine state of Georgia, right?
N. Rodgers: And a good guy generally, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, well, Nia and I generally think that he's a quality US senator. He sat down with the New York Times for a lengthy interview. And during that interview, he got questioned about the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais ruling. That's the ruling that we've previously discussed on this podcast, where the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act. And he went ahead and said, while he accused the Supreme Court of "committing violence against the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system", and we just thought that that was at minimum, extremely tone deaf.
N. Rodgers: I thought it was incendiary and he's trying to pull me back to tone deaf. It's somewhere between incendiary and tone deaf.
J. Aughenbaugh: But again it would suggest either he didn't know what had just happened at Justice Barrett's home.
N. Rodgers: And he may not have known.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or he is following along what we think is a very troubling pattern, which is the Supreme Court issues a decision you don't like, and then you go public with some extremely inflammatory rhetoric, right? And it reminds [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: I think you put the word irresponsible in your note.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: And I think that captures it accurately. That is an irresponsible way to describe the Supreme Court. He also goes on to describe Jay Rob as someone who "despises the Voting Rights Act". Now, I personally believe that John Roberts would like to see the Voting Rights Act done away with or rewritten almost entirely.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But I don't know that he despises it.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: And I don't know that he despises the concepts of it. He despises the way it has not been updated.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: In the number of years since it was passed, and the court has begged over and over for it to be updated. I think John Roberts is saying, please, we have told you over and over how to fix it so that it can do the thing that you want it to do in the modern legal context, and you refuse to do that, Congress. Instead, what he's doing is blaming John Roberts and saying, well, he hates the Voting Rights Act. I guess at its base, he hates the way it's currently written. I don't know, but I think irresponsible is the right word here. I think it's irresponsible rhetoric to say that they're committing violence against the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system? That's very pointed.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, Nia, you and I in a previous podcast episode discussed the Supreme Court's ruling in the Clay case.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, and we both flailed our arms. There are things we didn't like about it.
J. Aughenbaugh: We didn't like very much about the court's decision in that case. On the other hand, as I pointed out in that episode, for current members of Congress to complain that the Supreme Court, out of the blue got in the Voting Rights Act. I'm like, on what planet? If you've been living. The court for well over a dozen years, has been sending a very clear message to Congress. If you want to pass the Voting Rights Act or have a current version of it to enforce the language of both the 14th and the 15th Amendments, then you have to rewrite it. The Congress ignored the Supreme Court. But Warnock's rhetoric, I think fits into a more troubling pattern. Nia, you and I have a previous podcast episode where we looked at some language from Senator Chuck Schumer from 2020, where on the steps, I believe, of the United States Congress, he actually warned Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, "You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions."
N. Rodgers: There is a price to pay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, there's a price to pay.
N. Rodgers: That's a phrase he used. There will be pay a price to pay.
J. Aughenbaugh: You will pay the price.
N. Rodgers: Because that's not threatening.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, per the First Amendment and because he is a member of the United States Congress, he has every right to say them, but are we then surprised when people go further in their efforts to intimidate the justices?
N. Rodgers: Because if sitting senators, which these two people are, are using this language and feel comfortable using this language, regular Schmoz like me will escalate because we get feistier than sitting senators do. I promise you, I get feistier than both Warnock and Schumer. I am a feisty girl. You know what I mean?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: If you are part of the measured and deliberative part of the government, that is the Senate, and you're out there saying chuckleheaded stuff. There's no hope for people like me not saying chuckleheaded stuff, unless I specifically tell myself not to. Unless I specifically try to dial back my own personal rhetoric and my own personal remarks, so then I am not adding to the problem.
J. Aughenbaugh: Not surprisingly, we've seen some behavior in recent years.
N. Rodgers: Every time you protest on somebody's lawn, please keep in mind that other people live in that neighborhood who had no choice about whether that person bought a house in that neighborhood or not. They didn't take a vote and say, we get a Supreme Court justice in our neighborhood. That is not how that works. You're out there yelling at 4:00 in the morning. You're keeping up the whole neighborhood.
J. Aughenbaugh: What Nia is referencing, listeners is after the draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson abortion case got released, a pro-abortion group entitled Ruth Sent Us doxxed the Republican appointed justices after that leak.
N. Rodgers: For anybody who doesn't know what a doxing is, it's when your address or your other private information is made public, your phone number, your email address, if those things are private. Aughie and I don't have any privacy in terms of email or phone numbers. You can get ahold of us because we're public facing parts of the university, but our addresses are not.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I'm assuming you can find it if you're clever because you have our names, but they're not generally speaking just out there in the world. Doxing is when it is put forward to people so that they have it easily. They don't have to search for it and they can come to your house or send you things or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Protesters have descended on the justices' neighborhoods and homes. We've even had, for instance, an armed man was arrested outside of Justice Kavanaugh's home. He was carrying a pistol, knife, zip ties, and burglary tools, and he told law enforcement his intent was to kill him. An Alaska man pled guilty to sending over 465 threatening messages calling for the murder and torture of six justices and their families. It's getting to the point now to where the message is pretty clear. You rule the wrong way, and we're going to make your life miserable, and probably in my estimation, the most recent example was what I thought, and I don't know if Nia, you agree with this, the attacks on Justice Alito's son, Phil. Justice Alito's boy works in the treasury department, and there was an attempt to go ahead and ask Justice Alito to recuse himself from any case concerning the treasury department, which has had a prominent role in the tariffs of the Trump administration, claiming that there was a conflict of interest. Even though the Treasury Department made it very clear that Alito's son Phil did not work on any of the tariff policies or defense of them in federal court. Now we're going after the offspring.
N. Rodgers: Well, and we've regularly gone after spouses.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, my goodness.
N. Rodgers: Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett, and back in the day Ruth Bader Ginsburg's husband.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's where it started, I think, with spouses, and it was on both sides. It was going after legal spouses on both sides and trying to make their lives miserable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I think in the current political climate, what you're seeing is a lot of abuse of the more conservative Republican justices. But I'm worried that now that we've opened this door, when the court swings back to the other side going after the liberal or progressive justices that are on the court. What you're seeing here is the beginning of the breakdown of this in terms of it's happening from probably the progressive side to the conservative side, but that's going to flip when the White House flips and when the court flips.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. We know it's going to happen.
N. Rodgers: Because people seem to have taken the governors off the rails and they're just like, let's make this train go as fast as possible. No, it's not okay to do this to either side. It is not okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. You make a really good point. I'm old enough to remember when Justice Ginsburg was on the court. For listeners, if you don't know this, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's husband was a prominent tax attorney, one of the most successful.
N. Rodgers: High end.
J. Aughenbaugh: High end. In fact, a lot of their family wealth was because of how good of a tax attorney he was.
N. Rodgers: She was more in the social ACLU end of things, and that doesn't make you a lot of money.
J. Aughenbaugh: She did government service.
N. Rodgers: She wasn't making a whole lot of money. That was him that was doing the heavy lifting on the finances.
J. Aughenbaugh: But I remember Republican interest groups, making a concentrated effort to encourage businesses to not use her husband's tax firm, as a way to punish Justice Ginsburg. I'm just like but again, you have a problem with what the institution has done. The problem isn't with her.
N. Rodgers: But what we're seeing is an escalation because that was a don't use his business. Let's put him out of business, and this is a let's show up and kill people. What are you doing?
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners don't miss that point. I think Nia, that's a really good one, because when you target, for instance, spouses, so for instance, John Roberts' spouse is a lawyer. She's a good one, and she had a very successful career before they got married and they started having kids, and she decided to dial back her professional experience. But at one point, she was being hired to work as a recruiter for law firms, and Democratic interest groups put pressure on law firms to not hire John Roberts' spouse. Because she was married to the Chief Justice of the court that was issuing all these bad decisions. But now you're showing up at homes. You are giving the names of the schools of where the justices' kids go. These are kids for goodness sake.
N. Rodgers: Terrifying. Leave the spouses and the kids out of it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They are off limits. That is not who ran. That is not who serves. That is not who deals with. If you're in a political of anything, if you're talking about senators and congressmen and governors and all of those people, the families are off limits. The families had nothing to do with the choices that are being made, and they are certainly not levers of government. The only time that you get to bring a spouse into it is when the person has brought their spouse into it by saying, I have made this person part of my political thought process, circuit, whatever. Bill and Hillary Clinton talked about that a lot, that they were a partnership. Well, then she's fair game. You get to talk crap about her. Chelsea wasn't. She wasn't part of any of that. She didn't have anything to do with that. Don't make fun of her hair and her teeth. Leave her alone. What's wrong with you? If you can't see those lines, you're too close. If you can't figure out whether to leave somebody alone or not, leave them all alone because you're too close. You're too emotional about it. You're too feisty. You're feeling your feelings, and you know what? You have the right to hate anybody you want to hate. If you want to hate me, I will just tell you better people than you have hated me, and I'm fine with that. I don't care if you hate somebody. I don't even care if you hate how they operate. You think they're slimy, you think they're gross. There are a lot of people out there who hate Justice Thomas on sheer just because he seems like a guy who's grifty and corrupted and whatever else. That's fine. You can hate Justice Thomas. You're welcome to do that. What you're not welcome to do is say, Justice Thomas puts no thought into what he does on the court because that's just not true. He puts a great deal of thought into what he does on the court and you don't have to like his reasoning, you don't have to go along with him or agree with him, but you have to treat him with the respect of he at least thought about what he was doing and made a thoughtful decision. These people are making thoughtful decisions. They are not making decisions to personally upset you, first of all, they don't know you. Second of all, they're not in some instances, making personal decisions no, I take it back. They're not making personal decisions. They're making decisions in the course of doing work where they know it's going to affect millions of lives. That's a high pressure situation that they're working under. Sometimes they get it right in my opinion, sometimes they get it wrong in my opinion.
J. Aughenbaugh: Something that just came to my mind as you were describing that, if you think about some of these justices on the current Supreme Court, Elena Kagan had a successful career before getting involved in federal government service. For goodness sake, she was the dean of Harvard Law School.
N. Rodgers: She could have retired from that.
J. Aughenbaugh: She doesn't need that crap. John Roberts was one of the most successful appellate attorneys in the United States. Two thirds of the cases he argued as a private attorney in front of the Supreme Court. He was making some serious bank before he agreed to go back to work for the federal government. Think about, you mentioned Clarence Thomas or Ketanji Brown Jackson. Successful lawyers of color in the United States can basically write their price tag.
N. Rodgers: I want to work for this law firm for $1.4 million a year. Yes, please.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, please.
N. Rodgers: There you go. Here's the check.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. We want you on the letterhead. We want you on the name outside the building. But they decided to go to work for the federal government, handling difficult cases.
N. Rodgers: Making peanuts, relatively speaking.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Remember, folks, the rulings that they are making are in cases that are extremely tough. If they were easy, they would not get to the Supreme Court.
J. Aughenbaugh: They don't have to be doing this. In many ways, instead of us making it personal, we should go ahead and say, hey, I thank you for your service. I disagreed with how you did your job or your opinion or your vote. But at the end of the day you've joked, hey, Aughie, if I become president, I'm going to put you on the Supreme Court. I'm like, no, I don't want that.
N. Rodgers: Aughie, by the way, makes more money than the Supreme Court makes. That's not why he doesn't want that. He doesn't want that because of, I assume, the ongoing pressure of understanding that you are wrestling with some of the most difficult philosophical questions that come up in the United States in a democracy. Democracy is hard. Anybody who tells you democracy is easy, lied to you. They lied to you. Democracy is hard. If we don't have the people who are willing to do the hard work.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then it fails. Here's the other thing, folks. When you intimidate judges, you are calling into question the judiciary being independent. Again, I asked my students this with some regularity. If you want to remove the judiciary's independence, are we willing to accept the consequences? If we're trying to intimidate them, we are trying to go ahead and have the court act like a political institution. A political institution does not issue Brown versus Board of Education. A political institution does not go ahead and say to Virginia, your law banning interracial marriage is unconstitutional.
N. Rodgers: Political institutions at the time would not do that because they would have gone down in flames completely antithetical to what was going on in the United States at the time. Be careful what you wish for.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you want to make change in a democracy, back to your point that you just made a few moments ago, you have to do the hard work.
N. Rodgers: Also if you intimidate people enough no one will serve. You won't get the brilliant minds. You won't get any minds? You won't get anyone to serve because people will say, are you kidding me? People get killed doing that job. I'm not going to do that job. There are many, many reasons why I am not a firefighter. One, I am short, fat and out of shape, so that's three reasons. But also, I couldn't control my fear enough to run into a burning building and save other people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If you start making firefighters lives hell and you end up with somebody like me showing up to a fire, I'm going to be like, I'm not going in there. That thing is on fire. Why would I go in there? They would say, because that's what you do, and I'd be like, no, not me. You'd get people like me being firefighters. You don't want that? You don't want that. It doesn't make any sense for the long term. You may get rid of this person in the short term. You win, but in the long term, who's going to agree to serve if it's going to be like that?
J. Aughenbaugh: You don't get, for instance, a Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
N. Rodgers: Because she's got kids. Why on Earth would she choose to serve if you could kill her family at any time. Why on Earth would Coney Barrett choose to serve if she knows her family could get killed at any time?
J. Aughenbaugh: Guys, we just want to throw this out there. Remember, democracy is difficult. We have a proposed solution if you don't like the rulings of the Supreme Court. Instead of trying to intimidate the justices, do the hard work required in a democracy. There is a process laid out. Pick a president, who will pick justices and elect members of the Senate who will confirm federal judges who issue rulings that fit your preference. That's the process in the Constitution.
N. Rodgers: [inaudible] what democracy is? It requires patience.
J. Aughenbaugh: And persuasion, which means you have to go ahead and persuade people. Which means you have to actually go ahead and sit down and talk with people instead of trying to physically intimidate and/or hurt them. I don't know anybody who has been persuaded when you go ahead and lead off with, if you don't agree with me, I'm going to go ahead and swat your house.
N. Rodgers: What is that phrase? The beatings will continue until morale improves. That is not going to happen. We know that for a lot of our listeners, especially our younger listeners, you're not used to talking to people. You're not used to persuading people. You're not used to having long conversations with people because that's not how y'all roll. You text. You do a lot by text. This requires that you sit down with somebody, you look them in the eye, and you say, I don't like this thing you did, but it doesn't mean I don't like you. We can have a civilized conversation where we try to find the points of agreement because almost always there is a point of agreement. Then you go away from that as to what to do about that point of agreement. I think we can all say we all agree that immigration in this country is broken. I think every American would agree with that. It's how we fix it, is where we start to lose each other. Let's work from the point of, we know it's broken. What can we agree on that we think will start to fix it? Then let's try to build from there. That's how this works.
J. Aughenbaugh: Persuasion is an interesting thing because, Nia, you and I have been recording this podcast now for how many years?
N. Rodgers: Seven, eight.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, seven, eight years.
N. Rodgers: It feels like 500, but I don't think it's that much. I don't think it's pre-constitution. Because we had some things to say. That would be a great podcast from 1776.
J. Aughenbaugh: We frequently disagree, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah. You're an institutionalist and incrementalist, and I'm a feisty lunatic who's also probably in some ways a Marxist, and so it's like, okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: But we oftentimes find agreement, but we can only find agreement because we sit down and we chat, when we record, right?
N. Rodgers: Right. We're willing to concede when the other person has a good coin.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, I've told you this off recording. How many times after we've recorded an episode, you have said something that has got me to start thinking in a way that I had never considered previously.
N. Rodgers: That's something I have to consider now.
J. Aughenbaugh: In part of persuasion is humility. Being humble enough to recognize that I may not necessarily be correct that somebody else has a better idea than me. Let's go back to, for instance, the Cale decision. Now, you and I disagree with the court's ruling in that case, in part because we are a generation that believe that the Voting Rights Act made some significant long standing improvements for voting of people of color in the United States. We proudly point to that as how the United States can change for the better.
N. Rodgers: Right, to progress.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But in reading the majority opinion, I kept on coming back to the fact that are the conditions that led to the Voting Rights Act still present today?
N. Rodgers: How does the jurisdiction get out of prison? How do they prove that they're in line and they're doing what they're supposed to be doing?
J. Aughenbaugh: They're supposed to be doing. It got me thinking. Now, I frequently disagree with the author of the majority opinion in the Calais case, Justice Alito. Nobody is ever going to go ahead and say that Justice Alito and John Aughenbaugh think in similar ways. But nevertheless, it got me thinking. It got me thinking as to who do I go ahead and vote for for the United States Congress and why haven't they attempted to update the Voting Rights Act? Now, that's the mark of persuasion. Now, I may still end up believing that the Voting Rights Act should not have been narrowed by the Supreme Court. My preference is, it would have been updated by the United States Congress.
N. Rodgers: My preference, generally speaking, in almost all instances is that the Congress gets off their butt and does their job.
J. Aughenbaugh: Instead of relying upon the president or the courts, right?
N. Rodgers: Right. But depending on people who are in one instance, fundamentally undependable and in the other instance, occasionally undependable. I say that about any president, by the way, it's not just Donald Trump. I think presidents in general are not dependable because they talk about Hebrews. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. I'm discussing that at this point. We'll discuss that in another episode.
J. Aughenbaugh: In some ways, listeners you got the short end of the stick with today's episode because the more hilarious Nia rant pre-recording was Nia and I discussing the opening of the brand new Obama presidential library. My goodness.
N. Rodgers: I had some things to say about that. Well, we should probably not call it the Obama library because it's not actually a library, but that's neither here nor there, and we can't even discuss that either. But those discussions are what-
J. Aughenbaugh: Make democracy different than other forms of government.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. That discussion that you cannot have in any other form of government, because in every other form of government, you have to concede to the government.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The first thing in the first Bill of Rights is you're able to assemble and go, like this. Your right to is enshrined. Your right to say the president is a fink is enshrined and your right to assemble with a bunch of other people and say that is enshrined. Use that. This thing of threatening people, knock that off. What is wrong with people? The world is scary enough. You don't need to add your personal scary to it. Dude, just live in any one day and not be worried about something. Good luck. Why are you adding to the problems? The wildfires aren't enough for you and the climate change is not enough for you, and the rising season is not enough for you and possible alien invasion, according to Steven Spielberg, is not enough for you. All the other things that are happening are not enough for you, you have to add to what you're like, no, I also need to torture these individuals by showing up to their house with zip ties and burglary tools. What is wrong with you? I need to show up to Nancy Pelosi's house and beat her husband in the head with a claw hammer. Sit down. You, Mr. Vigilante Justice, are not going to fix this. That is not how we fix what's broken in this country. We don't go after an individual to fix what's broken in this country. We change the system.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've never found the threat of violence to be a very effective tool at long standing persuasive change.
N. Rodgers: It works very much in the short term. If you suddenly leaped in here with a hammer, first of all, I'd laugh. I'd be like, what the heck are you doing? But if you were like, I'm going to beat you to death if you don't say these four words on the podcast, I'd be like, I'll save them. That'll work in the short term, but it won't work. You've not persuaded me, all you've done is terrorized me. That is a different thing entirely. I personally have come to believe that the foremost powerful words in English language are, I might be wrong. The ability for you to say about yourself, I might be wrong. I have to stop and that's it with this person.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's an invitation to the other person to then try to persuade you, which forces them to listen to you to see where you might be wrong where you are open to the conversation.
N. Rodgers: Well, it forces them to marshal a good argument because otherwise, if they say, because I said so, well, never mind. I'm not wrong then. Thanks for fixing that. I now know that I'm not wrong, and you're a lunatic. That's why that doesn't work. But if they come up with a coherent, persuasive argument, then you're like, I really might be wrong. I may have to actually change how I feel. Anyway, we're just basically saying quit doxing, quit swatting, quit showing up with violence in mind, because that is not persuasive. Violence doesn't persuade anybody of anything. That's not how this works and leave the families out of it. You want to show up at the front of the Supreme Court and yell like all the other people who are civilized do with their signs and their yelling. That's how we protest in the United States. We don't protest with personal violence or at least we shouldn't.
J. Aughenbaugh: We shouldn't. Hey, thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
You've been listening to Civil Discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the Workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaak Hopson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/discourse. As always, no documents were harmed in the making of this podcast.