Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes
Politics has never been more chaotic, and most podcasts just add to the noise. Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes cuts through it.
Grant is an AP Award-winning journalist with over a decade of on-the-ground reporting on the biggest political stories, scandals, and elections in America. Twice a week, he takes the stories dominating the headlines and breaks them down in plain English — no jargon, no spin, no shouting.
If you care about what’s happening in this country but you’re exhausted by how it’s being covered, this is the show for you. Real reporting. Clear explanations. Actual context.
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Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes
How John Roberts Broke the Supreme Court This Term
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Andrew Torrez is a lawyer and co-host of the legal podcast Law And Chaos who has spent his career watching the Roberts Court systematically reshape American law. His verdict after this term: John Roberts broke the Supreme Court from the inside, and the court is now best understood as a right-wing policy-making institution rather than a judicial one.
Grant and Andrew go case by case through the most consequential term in a generation. Birthright citizenship: a five to four decision on a question that should have been nine to nothing, since the 14th Amendment says what it says. The VRA gerrymandering ruling: you can now draw a million computer-simulated maps of North Carolina and only one comes out 10-4 Republican by chance, but the Roberts Court said that's fine and then eliminated the legal mechanism for challenging it. The tariff case: Kavanaugh ruled against Trump but included a roadmap in his dissent for how to achieve the same tariffs through a different statute.
They also get into the shadow docket, which went from a rare emergency tool to a routine practice under Roberts. Grant reads from an internal New York Times-obtained memo in which Roberts explicitly cajoled his colleagues to issue an emergency injunction against Obama-era clean power regulations because solar power plants, in Roberts' own words, are not built in a day.
And they talk about what Congress could actually do about all of it: court expansion, term limits, and a constitutional provision called jurisdiction stripping that would let Congress tell the Supreme Court it cannot hear certain categories of cases at all. It has never been used. It is in the Constitution.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Hot dogs, snowballs, and the Supreme Court
2:45 This term in one sentence: the Roberts Court is a right-wing policy-making institution
4:00 Birthright citizenship: a 5-4 decision on a question that should have been 9-0.
6:00 How John Roberts broke the court from the inside, starting with the Michigan union dues case
8:30 Scalia vs. Alito and Thomas: why originalism gave way to bad faith arguments and Charlie Kirk logic
12:00 Kavanaugh's tariff opinion: ruled against Trump, then included a roadmap for getting the same result
16:00 The Slaughter case: Trump fires independent agency heads, the Fed exception, and what Russ Vought gets now
20:00 Louisiana v. Callais: the VRA is dead and Democrats have to overperform by 4 to 6 points just to win the House
24:00 One million computer-simulated maps: the math that proved gerrymandering and the Roberts Court ignored it
28:00 Grant reveals he almost became a political mapmaker. This is why he walked out of the room.
30:00 Minority rule is the goal: how an unpopular party stays in power permanently
33:00 Kavanaugh's "wrong statutory box" logic: it applies to shipping humans to torture camps but not Trump tariffs
36:00 Senator Kavanaugh: why he keeps writing roadmaps for Trump from the bench
40:00 The Roberts Court's shadow docket: from emergency tool to routine practice
44:00 The leaked memo: Roberts writes "solar power plants are not built in a day" to block clean energy rules for coal
46:00 Drawing a legal quarantine zone around the Roberts Court: why its precedents shouldn't count
48:00 How Congress can actually fix this: court expansion, term limits, and jurisdiction stripping
50:00 Jurisdiction stripping explained: Congress can tell the Supreme Court it cannot hear certain cases at all
53:00
The shadow docket and a national emergency over elections: could this go to the Supreme Court this summer?
57:00 Why district court judges — including Trump appointees — are still doing the hard work
59:00 Kilmar Garcia, Guatemalan children, voter rolls in 13 states: what district courts are actually stopping
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