What’s Up With Alan Dershowitz These Days

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Transcript

Above the Law – Thinking Like a Lawyer

What’s Up With Alan Dershowitz These Days

02/04/2020

 

[Music]

 

Intro: Welcome to Thinking Like a Lawyer with your hosts Elie Mystal and Joe Patrice, talking about legal news and pop culture all while thinking like a lawyer, here on Legal Talk Network.

 

[Music]

 

Joe Patrice: Hello and welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I am Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I am being joined remotely by Elie Mystal, who is — is he still out there in the ether?

 

Elie Mystal: I don’t recall the taste of food, nor the touch of grass. I am naked in the dark. There is nothing between me and the Trump Impeachment Trial.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah. You know, really — you can just flip the channel and I think 90-Day Fiancé or something like that is right there for you.

 

Elie Mystal: I have watched this thing gavel-to-gavel.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, that seems like a poor decision.

 

Elie Mystal: It’s really like there is —

 

Joe Patrice: I mean the senators aren’t even doing that.

 

Elie Mystal: I mean my right eye is jumping, I feel like I have a toothache, but I can’t think — like it kind of changes which side of my mouth the teeth are hurting, like I mean it’s bad, it’s real bad.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, there is a reason I don’t watch live court coverage. There is just nothing about like even these kind of fake judicial proceedings that make them viewer friendly, not that we shouldn’t have open transparency if people do want to watch them or are big fans of that, but yeah, there was no scenario in which I thought it was going to be particularly productive to watch gavel-to-gavel this whole thing.

 

Elie Mystal: And the days are so long, like I wrote about this actually at the start of the trial when really McConnell released his rules about how — I guess this will count for grinding my gears, just FYI for those playing along at home, but like even when McConnell released his rules, I wrote about how they were designed to force these incredibly long days in hopes that people would lose interest, lose heart, lose hope, that all of the words would kind of meld into like a Charlie Brown wah-wah-wah gobbledygook, that it would force a lot of repetition, like all of these things, kind of McConnell’s rules themselves were designed to exhaust us and I am fucking exhausted, like ah.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah. I can’t remember who, I think it was our old friend like Eric Segall from Law Professor, I think he put on Twitter that this is only interesting to lawyers and political junkies and it’s not particularly interesting to either of them.

 

Elie Mystal: Yeah, it’s not — interesting is not a word that I would get anywhere close to, which isn’t to say they are boring, it’s just they are important, okay, and so I am trying to cover it, because I understand that it’s important and I understand that a lot of other people aren’t going to have just the stand or the time, like they have real lives, to watch all of these important things. So like that’s why I am doing it.

 

But yeah, it’s not even designed to be interesting. It’s designed to be weighty and obviously the Republicans are trying very hard to make it as clownish as possible, but no, it’s not interesting, it’s not fun, it’s not intellectually stimulating, it’s mind-numbing, especially when the Republicans are talking.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah. And I am not altogether sure that’s not just a factor of what it is. There is a reason why people don’t watch lots of C-SPAN on a day-to-day basis. Conversations in that chamber are boring. You add to it that it’s like a court proceeding, which are by design not particularly exciting. Movie and television coverage of courtroom scenes notwithstanding, they are not scintillating. And yeah, you end up with something that is designed for the purpose of engaging the public that is by its very format — and not even because of gaming it, just by the very format of proceedings like this, not going to be interesting.

 

Elie Mystal: I think the difference though between this and like a real court proceeding is that a real court proceeding does and this is why real court proceedings make such good TV shows, in a real court proceeding there is drama.

 

Joe Patrice: Is there? When is the last time you watched one, because there isn’t, and most of the time — like I have obviously been a lawyer in trials as well as a juror once and no, there is not really drama.

 

(00:05:02)

 

Elie Mystal: No, I disagree. I mean I watched — the last one before this that I watched any length of was the Botham Jean trial, and when I say drama I mean like there is drama in the outcome. You don’t —

 

Joe Patrice: Oh, okay.

 

Elie Mystal: Right, that’s what I am talking about, right, you don’t know how it’s all going to play out, right, so you are listening to the arguments, you are trying to kind of read the tea leaves, oh, I think that might have been effective; oh, I am not sure if that landed, and then you are kind of waiting for like the result, which is a reveal at least, right, like what is the jury going to say, how is the judge going to rule. Like these are inflection points of drama that you are driving to and here you don’t have that because you know that the decision is baked in, right?

 

Joe Patrice: Right.

 

Elie Mystal: You know this is just talking to get to an eventual conclusion, right? It’s why sports fans try not to see the score of the game if they have it on DVR, right, like it takes a lot of the fun out of it. Even if you go back and it’s your team and you know that it wins, it takes a lot of the fun out of it if you kind of already know like what’s going to happen.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, no, I mean I could definitely hear that and look, trials are very exciting when you are a participant in them, but they just aren’t particularly interesting from the outside. In that way they are much like baseball. They are interesting games to play, but from the outside, just like paint drawing for several hours.

 

Well, I mean I guess if you are watching it through a camera that you are slowing down so that you can read signs, maybe that makes it more interesting, but otherwise I don’t know how you Mets people roll, but otherwise it’s yeah, no, this was just — it was never going to be particularly engaging and scintillating and it hasn’t been and you are showing the signs of wear and tear.

 

Elie Mystal: I think there have been moments that were engaging and scintillating, those moments were just interspersed between hours and hours and hours of Republican bullshit and some Democratic repetition, but mainly Republican bullshit and like there is only so much of that a human can take and I feel very close to my limit.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, it’s almost as though everything we needed to know about this we had already more or less known from just the process of a house investigation and maybe there will be witnesses and that will be different than just rolling with the house investigations, but we will see.

 

Elie Mystal: We will see.

 

Joe Patrice: I mean I am not — are you — do you believe these reports that there aren’t enough votes to stop witnesses?

 

Elie Mystal: No, I mean it looks like McConnell’s got — I mean one of the interesting legal questions that I have actually been trying to do some research this morning is what happens if it’s a 50-50 tie, right? Right now it looks like there are three Republican votes for witnesses, which if the Democrats stay in line will result in a 50-50 split, what happens then?

 

Well, in a normal Senate proceeding the presiding officer of the Senate, which is Vice President Mike Pence breaks the tie, but in these proceedings John Roberts is the presiding officer and so it suggests that he would break the tie. But you can also make an argument and I believe Roberts will make this argument, because he doesn’t want to have any role in this really, he will probably make the argument that he cannot break a tie for a mere motion, right, somebody will just be offering a motion to call witnesses, Roberts can’t break a tie for a mere motion and if a mere motion is tied, then it fails. You would need a majority to —

 

Joe Patrice: That would seem correct to me.

 

Elie Mystal: Of course because it’s impeachment, even if Roberts believed that, the Senate could vote to empower Roberts to break ties.

 

Joe Patrice: True, but that would require — theoretically they wouldn’t do that if they already weren’t interested in having him do that. Like if it’s a 50-50 tie already, my guess is the people who are voting against it would prefer it just die than give him the power to make it not die.

 

Elie Mystal: I think that’s right, although you don’t know if like there is a senator that might find it to have more — because they will probably think that Roberts will vote with them, is there a senator who thinks it will give them more cover, either way, right, is there senator who thinks it will give them more cover to not have witnesses if Roberts is the one that says it, or is there a senator who does want to have witnesses, doesn’t want to be on the record of voting against the great and terrible Trump, but feels like if they kick the decision to Roberts, Roberts will do it. I mean there are lots of different ins and outs and one of the things that I have been trying to resist is what most of the media does, which is just parrot what Mitch McConnell wants them to say.

 

Joe Patrice: Right.

 

(00:09:58)

 

Elie Mystal: Like Mitch McConnell wants everybody to think that it’s over. Mitch McConnell wants everybody to think that he has supreme control over his caucus and he knows the game before it’s played.

 

Joe Patrice: Well, except that’s the opposite of what he did, right, because he is the one who told Wall Street Journal he didn’t have the votes.

 

Elie Mystal: Although why, did he, why, why, what did he want from that? What he wanted was for Fox News to take a dump on Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, which they did, and perhaps that alone was why Mitch McConnell said anything to pull a Lamar Alexander or a Richard Burr or somebody like that back in.

 

I mean look, my point with all of this is that kind of reading — it’s an old — my God, I am so old, it’s an old Matrix line from the Oracle, you can’t see past the choices you don’t understand and people trying to predict what’s going to happen through the black box that is Mitch McConnell like aren’t necessarily doing themselves any favors.

 

So I am trying not to assume that anything Mitch McConnell is saying is necessarily true or that even if he is saying something that is true that there is not some deeper ulterior motive behind it, the best thing for me to do I think is to — and for Democrats to do is to ignore what Mitch McConnell was saying and keep pressing their points that witnesses should be called.

 

We will see what happens.

 

Joe Patrice: You are just soldiering on much like an ant, because today’s episode is brought to you by your ant farm, which is very mad at you, all because you have been at the office slogging through an endless doc review project. Make better decisions, keep your pet and work smarter with Logikcull, e-discovery software that gets you started in minutes. Don’t let outdated e-discovery be the hill that you die on, create your free account today at logikcull.com/atl. That’s logikcull.com/atl.

 

Elie Mystal: I like that one.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I mean we are starting to reach a point though where every week at around 2:30, I take a look and go huh, how many more animals can people keep as pets because we are starting to reach that limit, but I promise to keep trying.

 

Elie Mystal: We might have to go to like that 00:12:20 definition of Pence, which is a much more expansive kind of zoological definition.

 

Joe Patrice: I mean we have already dealt with ponies, we might extend to more general livestock. We have had ponies and potbellied pigs, maybe just more livestock, because for some people those are pets.

 

Elie Mystal: I feel like you haven’t fully plumbed the studio space around rodents.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, yeah, that’s true, I have done some rodents, but there are obviously many different kinds. I have done the spinning the wheel joke with hamsters, but I guess I can figure out something else. But what do others do?

 

Elie Mystal: Well, you know my — as some of you dedicated listeners know, my dog recently passed away and we are very sad about that here. Of course the kids don’t give a fuck and they are like we are going to get another pet. My youngest son is really like crazily into reptiles and so there is some talk in the family, like a gateway drug back into opening our hearts again, we might get some kind of gecko or iguana or some shit.

 

Joe Patrice: Oh, okay, okay, that’s good, but reptiles, okay, I will keep that in mind too.

 

Elie Mystal: I am generally against it, sorry, me and my wife are very much against it, but we are not sure if we have the votes.

 

Joe Patrice: That’s fair though, that’s totally fair. So what was it that you wanted to discuss today?

 

Elie Mystal: All right, so obviously I haven’t had a lot of time to read news that’s not about impeachment, but Joe, that’s okay because I think for our audience of high end, well-educated generally lawyers or want to be lawyers, we need to talk about the national embarrassment that is Professor Alan Dershowitz.

 

Joe Patrice: He has not had a good year.

 

Elie Mystal: He has truly — I mean fall from grace does not begin to describe it. First, it connotes a grace that perhaps was never there, but the delta between kind of the respect that — even grudging respect that Dershowitz was held in amongst legal community even 10 years ago, so what we are seeing now is just — the delta is so wide and it seems like this impeachment has been almost the capstone or death knell, depending on which way you want to think of it, of a storied legal career where he has gone from one of the more respected, again grudgingly, criminal defense lawyers in the country to truly through this impeachment trial a straight up mouthpiece for despotism.

 

(00:15:12)

 

His argument that’s being surfaced very much as we record this is the one that he made during the question and answer portion of the impeachment trial where he argued with no artifice that any president, certainly this president, potentially any president, potentially any politician always thinks that their reelection is in the public or national interest. Therefore, any type of election interference they might do or general corruption they might do in furtherance of their own reelection is definitionally an issue of the state, is definitionally in the public interest, not their private interest, because their reelection is in the public interest and therefore you can never impugn correct motive to any action whatsoever that a politician or president takes on behalf of their own reelection.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, it’s a bold take.

 

Elie Mystal: It is a straight up Louis XIV l’état, c’est moi, this I am the state vision of presidential authority.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, it’s pretty astounding.

 

Elie Mystal: There are almost no words. And for this to be said, again, not in the law review article okay, not in the East Northwestern law review of typesetting and plumbing, this was said in the well of the Senate, this was said as a defense for the current President of the United States and it is a defense that Republicans are parroting because they are so craven they will say anything that helps their God.

 

It’s hard to reconcile what Dershowitz is saying and what Republicans are apparently willing to go with, with any even philosophical conception of a republic bound — where the officials are bound by the rule of law.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah. And you say that this is kind of a change or an end of a career and certainly that’s a opinion that some people have. Obviously Jeffrey Toobin’s old student has said in interviews with Dershowitz, he is called the question that like something has happened to him, he never would have said this before and there is obviously — this impeachment trial itself has played things that Dershowitz has said in the past that would seem to run counter to his current beliefs.

 

On the other hand, taking a step back and I have had my issues fighting with Dershowitz. For those who are Above the Law readers, there was an exchange where he wrote an article answering me and I responded and whatever in our pages years ago; he was wrong. The point is this may not be — a lot of this stuff may not be as much of a change as some people believe and I think you allude to that a little bit, but I want to go with earlier today Columbia Professor Tim Wu made a point on Twitter that, and I will just read the tweet exactly and let’s just say Tim went there, went to Harvard Law a while ago so it’s not a recent thing.

 

When Dershowitz taught me professional ethics at Harvard, his overriding message was that there is almost no such thing as unethical conduct when it comes to the zealous defense of a client. The whole semester was a prolonged exercise in self-justification for low behavior.

 

And reading that is really — kind of puts into perspective what you were talking about that there is no argument so insane or so off-base that you can’t try to pull it off if you think you are helping your client, and it suggests, this tweet certainly suggests that this is a trend that Dershowitz has been — a rabbit hole he has been going down for a while.

 

Elie Mystal: This is really what I wanted to talk to you about today Joe, because I feel like for non-lawyers it’s almost like the Giuliani thing, where like for non-New Yorkers it’s like wow, who knew Giuliani was crazy and New Yorkers are like everybody, everybody forever knew that Giuliani was crazy.

 

Dershowitz is a little bit like that, for non-lawyers, whoa, who knew this Dershowitz guy was a loon? Lawyers, everybody, everybody for a while has known that Alan Dershowitz is a little bit off-kilter and the off-kilterness comes from exactly what Wu is talking about, his true belief I believe from forever, like this is not new, this is not recent, but his true core belief is that you can say anything in defense of a client.

 

(00:20:06)

 

It doesn’t have to be reasonable, it doesn’t have to be ethical, it doesn’t have to be factual, it doesn’t have to be rational. If it’s mouth noises that you can produce, that somehow help your client, it is okay.

 

I wrote today in ‘The Nation’ that one of the true brilliances of Dershowitz’s criminal defense career is that he is able through sheer bombast to make most of the cases that he’s involved in about him as opposed to the alleged criminal he is defending, which is useful if you are a criminal defense attorney because you’d much rather the jury be making decisions about you and your credibility as opposed to your guilty ass’s clients’ credibility, right? So, like this is part of the trick, this is part of the show making these kinds of increasingly outrageous arguments.

 

I think what’s been more obvious the last — again I would go back at least five-six years, but certainly more recently what’s been more kind of obvious is that just the intellectual quality of the ridiculous argument is starting to suffer, like the arguments that you would make ten years ago, like if you think about the famous Klaus Mambuello case like those were aggressive arguments, I mean he always argues basically like the crime doesn’t exist. He never argues that the criminal didn’t do the crime, he’s always arguing that the crime itself doesn’t exist.

 

But to start there and to end up at a point where the President is a despotic king that just shocks the conscience.

 

Where do you kind of trace the difference? Like I — plug this, look, I had seminars with Alan Dershowitz, I was at Harvard Law School, I liked Alan Dershowitz, I went to his office hours, I’ve had lunch with him, like it’s actually a little bit painful for me to be talking about him like this because certainly when I was in school I didn’t like him.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah.

 

Elie Mystal: But I first really became aware of that but maybe Dershowitz was not the kindly old professor that I liked when he started calling Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization.

 

Joe Patrice: Well, that was certainly for those who want to go back. That was the subject matter of the argument that we had in the pages of Above the Law. I made a quip that he clearly had — was out of his mind to do that and he felt the need so incensed by that to write in our pages a response about how they really were a terrorist organization and I responded that that was still not me answering any of my major points. But that was the subject matter of that interaction.

 

Elie Mystal: So that’s kind of where I trace it. In my personal kind of revelation that’s where I traced to like, oh my goodness, is this similar for you or were you kind of on to the grinch or the game a little bit before that?

 

Joe Patrice: I don’t know as though I was necessarily noticing. It was more of a slow boil. I feel as though — there are two factors at play here. The overzealousness and the kind of we want constant drive for attention and the questionable ethics that brings up the issue that Tim Wu was talking about in his tweet, that I believe I felt all along dating back to at least OJ era, but that’s distinct I think from the question of some of these political beliefs that have cropped up and we can see from those videos that have been circulating of how he held almost diametrically opposed positions in the 90s.

 

These political shifts — it probably was around the time of his take on Black Lives Matter although probably a little bit before because he was already defending Trump on Fox at that point, but around then is when the political side changed and the idea that he would be willing to use his flexible opinions about what it means to zealously defend somebody toward that end that is a different question that I think is — has been very much driven in the last five or six — at most five years.

 

Elie Mystal: I think the other thing that’s worth pointing at again like unlike a lot of legal commentators and pundants and whatever I come at these things kind of very straight up from the criminal defense’ side, like if I’m going to have a bias I’m always going to de-bias towards the criminal defense.

 

(00:24:53)

 

I think there’s — Joe and I have talked about there’s an overabundance of prosecutors in terms of shaping what we think the law is and in terms of just telling us what they think the law is that I think are kind of horribly bias I think and that doesn’t even get into the fact that I believe prosecutors have entirely too much power in this system and it’s all racially biased and I’ve got a lot of issues with the over-prosecutorial nature of our country.

 

And so, I am generally if not favorable certainly amiable to aggressive criminal defense arguments.

 

Joe Patrice: Certainly.

 

Elie Mystal: So I think we are going to say like I am not criticizing Alan Dershowitz or any of the Trump lawyers who are mounting a zealous defense for their clients, I’m criticizing them for mounting intellectually dishonest and in some cases straight-up false defenses for their client.

 

Joe Patrice: Right.

 

Elie Mystal: Like that is where the line is supposed to be. If you want to say something that you think is going to help your client get off by all means make your argument, but don’t start lying.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah.

 

Elie Mystal: Don’t start lying not just about the facts but just don’t start lying about what words mean. One of Dershowitz’s huge —

 

Joe Patrice: What the definition of is is, is that what you —

 

Elie Mystal: Right.

 

Joe Patrice: Call back to the last impeachment —

 

Elie Mystal: Right, but that’s where you start — I’m saying that’s where to me ethics starts getting challenged, like when you were being overtly intellectually dishonest about laws and facts, when you were being purposely deceitful about the facts of your own case, that’s where I start to have problems.

 

Alan Dershowitz’s argument that abuse of power does not comport with the original understanding of the impeachment clause has been rejected by the Federal Society, and Joe, you know, I am not one of these people that likes to bring up the Federal Society even when we agree, right? Like the enemy — my enemy is always my enemy when it comes to the Federal Society. But goddamn, even the Federal Society is out here saying Dershowitz’s interpretation of high crimes and high misdemeanors is simply not true that high misdemeanors absolutely included the idea of failure of due care, failure of loyalty, abuse of power. And so, Dershowitz is coming out here trying to gaslight the nation with a view that literally no other credible legal scholar supports that abuse of power is somehow not impeachable, that’s what I’m just — that’s what I’m talking about you’ve crossed the line from zealous defense to intellectual dishonesty.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah.

 

Elie Mystal: Jay Sekulow is offensive, annoying man. He is making a zealous defense without one, Pat Cipollone is lying repeatedly but for the most part Sekulow has not lied, he’s just odious and wrong. So there’s a way if you wanted to find Trump on executive privilege even though he never served executive privilege, okay, if you wanted to defend Trump on, yes, he did it, and, yes, it’s abuse of power, but it’s not that abusive and that we shouldn’t impeach them because there’s what — like all right, it’s not a great argument, but fine, but don’t tell me that the very constant of abuse of power was not included in the Constitution because it was and you’re just wrong and everybody says so.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah.

 

Elie Mystal: You don’t seem as offended but maybe if you had watched 68 hours of this crap you also would be more offended.

 

Joe Patrice: Right, right, I already knew that was their argument from awhile ago and didn’t need to hear it over-and-over again. Yeah, I mean, look, it’s — someone needed to watch it, gap with gavel and you have jumped on that grenade and a grateful nation. Thanks you for your service. And everyone should be following him on Twitter because he’s giving us a blow-by-blow of his pain by pretty much other than this short bit where we’re recording this, he’s pretty much constantly giving you exactly in real-time what’s happening. So if you can’t watch, the smart thing to do is just to be following him and you can see it while you’re at work or whatever. But yes, — no, I don’t have that level of outrage as I already knew that was what they were going to say.

 

But like you were saying it’s baked in, I don’t really need to get too worked up over it. I’ve moved on to other fights.

 

With that said, look, we’ve actually made it to the end of the show, relatively fast. We didn’t even get to talk about the New Orleans Saints and how I guess the Catholic Church believes they are real saints or anything like that. Are you tracking that story?

 

Elie Mystal: No, no, dude, I’m really like —

 

Joe Patrice: Oh, so apparently a litigation has revealed that the archdiocese down there the list of who were pedophile priests and who weren’t, apparently email exchanges reveal that the Archdiocese was running that by the New Orleans Saints to decide who really gets to count as a pedophile and not.

 

(00:30:12)

 

Elie Mystal: Wow.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, not quite clear why they thought the Saints should have an opinion in this, but —

 

Elie Mystal: Drew Brees.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, again, the only argument is that they thought they were really canonized for something, but yeah, so that was a — that’s a story that’s happening today that, this is also interesting and a little disturbing.

 

Malcolm Gladwell thinks that Joe Paterno needs to be exonerated, little things like this.

 

Elie Mystal: I did see that. Yeah, like I — basically if — since I am on Twitter right now all the time, if it pops up trending on Twitter, at least we get to be aware that it happened, like that’s how I found out that Koby died.

 

Joe Patrice: Right, right.

 

Elie Mystal: It was just — it was trending in my thing while I was researching something about impeachment.

 

Joe Patrice: Right.

 

Elie Mystal: So I am excited. I believe that if there — look, if they do call witnesses this never ends.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, you’re on this for a while.

 

Elie Mystal: But McConnell seems confident that he has the votes to crush witnesses, that he is going to have it all wrapped up by the Super Bowl.

 

So if that’s the case, that will be a sad day for America, but kind of — at least a good day for me and my wife where because she’ll have — she won’t be a single mother anymore and that — I will be able to go back and look at some of these other things.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, go back and play with your iguana.

 

So, with all that said, thanks for listening. You should be subscribed to the show. You should give it ratings that helps with the algorithm. You should be reading Above the Law as always as well as ‘The Nation’.

 

You should be following — as I said, Elie, who is @ElieNYC for his ongoing impeachment coverage. You can follow @JosephPatrice, which is where I — I think the last thing I put up was a meme about a Supreme Court case.

 

So, you know, slightly different and you should also be listening to all the offerings of the Legal Talk Network as well as The Jabot, which is Kathryn Rubino’s podcast.

 

And with all of that said, oh — a podcast business announcement, there is unlikely an episode next week so you’re going to get a week off unfortunately, but it is the Annual Legalweek Conference, which we have to cover and so we won’t be able to put an episode out, but we will be back the week after that, and I think we have an exciting guest lined up for that. So we’ll — you’ll hear from us soon.

 

Elie Mystal: John Roberts does not gavel out the impeachment proceeding, the gavel, he uses it every way.

 

Joe Patrice: Oh no, that’s the — that’s the Senate, the Senate uses the what’s called a feminine gavel, which is like a little, basically you hand-hold in the center and like yeah —

 

Elie Mystal: It’s called a feminine gavel?

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah — no, it’s yeah, well because the male gavel has the –

 

Elie Mystal: Because it has the balance.

 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, yeah. Yeah — no —

 

Elie Mystal: Just so, we learn the worst f**king.

 

Joe Patrice: But that’s always been true. The Senate has used that for a long time, so yeah.

 

Elie Mystal: Well, there you go.

 

Joe Patrice: Well, there you go. There’s your random little fact of the day. Okay, we should stop this before it gets even sillier.

 

Elie Mystal: Peace.

 

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