Food stamps, trial-for-profit, and the worst SCOTUS decision of the modern era | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. But it's Tuesday at noon and that means we chat with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of long Leaf Politics. Longleafpol dot com is the website you can subscribe also to his podcast and newsletter over on the website there. And also he is a contributing columnist over the Charlotte Observer on occasion. Welcome to the program once again, sir. How are you? Oh? I'm doing all right. There's a lot going on today. You know. It's one of the limitations of this time slot, this noon to three time slot, is that the Supreme Court rulings come down at like ten am. And if they're dumping like three of them, you know, four of them a day, I don't have time to read them before I go on the air. So I'm like, I'm scrambling to read through. And you've read these opinions, I'm sure, like it's it's it's legal jargon stuff, and you gotta I gotta read through the stuff. I gotta read sentences like four or five times to understand what the heck they're talking about. Oh, it's just yeah, so. Well, and you've got to read the six hundred page state budget too. No, no, that's not not that's not happening. So and that's news to me. So what did they did? They They they've got a budget finally, so we can finally like uh not have to listen to leftists screaming about we don't have a street budget anymore. Yeah. I don't know what they're gonna tweet about anymore. But yeah, the propos we finally. Came out this morning about an hour ago. I've been going through it and they they say they're going to vote it on it and have it all. Approved before the fourth of July. So that's exciting. Ah, all right, Yeah, I don't know that's going to take a talking point out of their out of their arsenal foreshore. Although I always I always point out when they say, oh, we don't have a budget, I always point out, we do have a budget. They they passed this law several years ago that the last budget approved just carries over, so we are operating on a budget. It's not like we have no money. They're just it's just all being allocated based on the existing budget framework that was already approved. We just don't have a new budget for the new buyennium. That's all exactly Honestly, that was one of the smartest things that General Assembly did about a decade ago. You know, when you're on a time crunch, you tend to. Make bad decisions. Oh yes, being able to breathe and everything be okay is stremely useful for our state. All right, Well, speaking of the budgets, this may have an impact on our state budget. The SNAP program Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, I believe is what it stands for, also known as food stamps. I'm not really sure why we changed the name because now we just use both interchangeably, but I guess that's fine. Sort Of like fire and blaze in reporting, you always have to refer to it's an apartment fire, and then on second reference it's always the blaze started whatever. So keep things fresh. Yeah, exactly, got to have a couple of synonyms in the in the arsenal. The federal government has historically paid the full cost of snap benefits you're write, while states and counties handle much of the administration. But that arrangement changed in the One Big Beautiful Bill. So how did this change? Yeah, so basically one of the big parts of the One Big Beautiful Bill, well, I say big, but the RDAR but important. It's always big. All aspects of the One Big Beautiful Bill are all big. That's I think that's why design everything is big. That's right. But basically what it said was they want to crack down on errors in the food stamp program. Is apparently there is, you know a lot of states, as much as ten to fifteen, sometimes even twenty percent of the payments are in error. Sometimes people are overpaid versus what they were supposed to get. Some people are getting food stamps when they don't really qualify for it. On occasion there's underpayments. Though that doesn't seem to be as big of a problem. Shocking. But what the bill does is basically they're creating a big stick on states to. Force them to clean up their acts there. And basically what it says is by next year twenty twenty seven, any state that has an error rate of above six percent, which to me is still pretty generous, but above six percent, then you're going to have to pay for part of the cost if you're a state, So instead of the federal government paying. For it all, the state will have to pick up a share of the cost. And based on how high your error rate is, it's kind of a sliding scale on how much. What percentage the state would have to pay. So this six percent number, that is what six percent of total payouts, like the size of the program. Exactly, Okay, Yeah, So basically it's. Looking at what number of dollars were paid in error and if that is above six percent of the total benefits. Then you start paying those penalties. All right, So, first off, you're right about this. There's some good news and some not so good news. How is North Carolina doing when trying to comply with this six percent rate? Yeah, Well, the good news is that North Carolina is lowering its error rate faster than just about any state in the country. I crunched the numbers from the US Department of Agriculture this year versus last year, and North Carolina, I believe is number three in the country in terms of how much it reduced its air rate. So that's the good news. The bad news is that North Carolina's air rate is still over that six percent. It's at seven and change now, so you know, it's within striking distance of getting under the threshold. But as things stand now and less North Carolina can improve even more how it administers food stamps than the state's gonna have to pony up some money next. Year, all right, And so some of these numbers don't look very good. We have roughly two point eight billion dollars in annual federal snap benefits, and so if we do get nailed at the lowest level, it could be costing us an additional one hundred and forty million per year. If the state goes back above eight percent, you're write the bill could be two hundred and eighty million. And if for some reason we completely went off the rails and it went over ten percent error rate, we're on the hook for what appears to be almost a quarter or a half a billion dollars. And so you are you're issuing sort of a request, I guess, or a pleading to State Auditor Dave Bullock. You're a big fan of Bullock. You like a lot of the stuff that he's been doing so far. And he has already done an audit of the SNAP program, right he has. So Dave Bullock put out an audit of SNAP, but. It focused primarily on how quickly payments were given out. It didn't really deal with the error rate at. All, but it at least shows that the State Auditor's office has some folks who know their way around this data and could could jump in and get some more oversight to this help the Stein administration a little bit. Yeah, well, that would be a unifying thing. And according to his tweet today, Josh Stein's all about unity, so that that might be something that they could unify on. Let me ask you now. Actually, there's also some late breaking SNAP related news. So as I was going through the budget over the past hour, I noticed that there is some money allocated to the Department of Health and Human Services to start trying to bring this. Rate down even more. And there's also a really interesting mechanism in here that basically says if North Carolina does get hit by the federal government and does have to pay some of those millions of dollars. The state will have the ability. To withhold sales tax revenue from counties from the worst counties if there's bodies that are the worst offenders driving up air rates. So you're getting this news first. I'm gonna write something about this, but your listeners are getting the scoop. Early breaking news right here. Well, thank you for that. See I read through Supreme Court opinions on a tight deadline. You pour over USDA data and state budgets, right, so it's like a one to two. So that's interesting, which makes sense because if you've got you know, Mecklenburg County for example, and we've got an error rate of you know, twenty percent or something, we could skew the entire state and then every other state agency basically suffers because of the increase in the funding required at the state budget level. So that does make sense, right exactly. I think it's smart. You know, I imagine some folks are going to be mad about it, but I think this is smart and it's a good tool to have. Yeah, they're mad at everything anyway, So all right, next up, House Bill three point fifteen, new law that makes North Carolina the first state in America to ban third party litigation investment. I have to tell you, I had no idea what you were talking about when I read this at Longleay Politics. So yeah, it's super interesting and it doesn't quite roll off the tongue as smooth as First in Flight. But you know, this is another good thing for North Carolina to be first and apparently, and I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, so this wasn't high on my radar. But around the country you've got you know, investors basically putting up money for big lawsuits, with class action lawsuits things like that. So investors are are banking their money in there in exchange for a cut of the ultimate settlement or the ultimate you know, jury verdict. Wow, it's I mean, it's pretty clear how quickly those incentives can be misaligned with the actual administration of justice. I think it's kind of a note. Brainer that we don't want you know, New York hedge funds investing in lawsuits. In North Carolina. It just creates the incentive to drag things out and inflate some of these payouts and basically pervert the justice system. That is a concept I never would have could. I just don't have the mind of like a fraudster or a criminal. I guess like I never would have considered, but it makes sense, right, I mean, like, hey, if we just you know, fund a bunch of high powered attorneys, do a mass class action lawsuit against somebody, get a massive award, and then we profit, Like it's kind of brilliant but also really nefarious. Do we know how big of a problem this actually is. I don't. I haven't actually seen much reporting on how big of an issue this is, but it clearly it was really high on the priority list for the North Carolina Chamber, So it must be something that they're hearing from the business community. And I think it's also a sign, you know, when our best and brightest minds are going in finance, this is the kind of thing they come up with, all right. And so this this bill actually was signed by the governor. No veto on this one, which I was no veto. Yeah, signed, I got signed into law. You know. Sign actually has yet to veto a bill this year, and now he's had lots of his vetos overridden because those were vetos from last year. And I don't think he's going to veto this budget. I think it's gonna get signed, and I think we might just exit twenty twenty six without a veto. Wow. All right, that's a bold prediction. If true, Andrew done. You can read his work at long Leaf Politics longleafpol dot com. You can subscribe to his podcast as well, and check him out over to Charlotte Observer where he does a call him every now and again. Andrew, thanks so much. Happy Independence Day to you and your family. All Right, For over a year now you've heard me talking about Create a video. Great local company in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photoo VHS tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now creative videos helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. 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I guess I was going to say not immune, but it like it's it seems like they know where they want to be and then they kind of rationalize their way towards that. And he was joined today by Amy Coney Barrett yet again and all of the lefties on the Supreme Court to say that the fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which according to the Congressional record, was never intended to give citizenship to what are referred to as anchor babies, children who are born in America to illegal aliens. But they said, no, you're born within the borders. That makes you a US citizen because that's just the way it's been done for one hundred and fifty years. And I don't want to be called a racist, all right, I added that last part. But that's the way it seems to me, because again, if you go and I brought these quotes out, these were comments that were made. This was floor debate in the Congress, and they explicitly were asked about this question. And the members of Congress that were running the bill, they said that this is only basically four freed slaves, people who are born in America and are subject to the jurisdiction thereof. In other words, they are not subject to the jurisdiction of any place else because they were born here. They had multiple generations that are from here. Birthright citizenship is the concept that every person born in America and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, is a citizen, as set forth in the fourteenth Amendment. And the question turned on what does it mean subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Are the children of mothers illegally in the country or temporarily here on a tourist visa, are they automatic citizens? Well, the three Lefties and Roberts and Barrett say yep, they're citizens, and they had the option, so Brett Kavanaugh joined them in sort of their conclusion. But disagreed with them on how they got there, because he was more focused on just the executive order that Trump issued saying no birthright citizenship, and he focused only on that, and that was the off ramp for a majority to take. But Barrett and Roberts did not take it. All right, So I have seen this referred to this birthright citizenship ruling today among one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has made. And again I have not had time to read through at all, but yeah, it does kind of seem like it's a really bad one like dred Scott, Roe v. Wade type of bad, which probably means that there's now going to have to be a long term political and legal and pr project launched in order to address this. There's already a couple of lawmakers that are talking about, you know, specific legislation to try to get at this issue, because what the Supreme Court has essentially said is that and this is occurring right now. By the way, this is not some sort of hyperbolic fantasy that I'm dreaming up in order to scare people. This is actually happening right now. There are birth tourism centers in America. I think the count is somewhere around one hundred thousand Chinese national women who have come to America, gone to these birth tourism centers, had their child, and then left. You're building a US citizen class in communist China right now, and you're not going to see the effects of this right now. You're going to see the effects of it in somewhere between fifteen to twenty years because at that point they all become eligible to vote. And if it continues the pace, the numbers grow to the point where you will have people who are US citizens eligible to vote in America and have never been in America except for the moment of birth. They can be born to a Chinese spy. They could be born into spied them. Right. You're gonna tell me the Communist Chinese Party wouldn't know the children that are born in America America at one of these centers. Of course they do. They set them up and now they know they're going to tract that kid and when the kid gets older, now that kid can at minimum vote in elections. They're US citizens, so they can come back and live in America. They can spy, or how about this, they can run for president. Yeah. Uh, huh. They could run for president because they're US citizens. They're natural born US citizens, and once they hit age thirty five, they'll be able to run for president despite having never lived here. That could happen. Is that a problem? I feel like that's a problem. The Founders felt like that was a problem, right, That's why they made those criteria part of the criteria for being president thirty five years old, natural born US citizen because they did not want to have the situation that say, old world Europe used to have, where you would have foreign born leaders of a populace because you know, one royal family married some other royal family and so now they're the king of your country and all of this. They didn't want that. But thanks to Roberts and Barrett. Look, I expected no better from the lefties on the court. Okay, I expect no better from them. I know who they are. But Roberts and Barrett complete disappointments on this issue. It's not to say that there are other issues where I've agreed with them on, but on this one wrong. They got this one so so so wrong. By dread Scott wrong, as I said, they could have because Kavanaugh agreed with the result striking down the executive order by the President. But he would have limited it just to the executive order. He would not have gone as far as they did the rationale, the explanation that they used the rationalization for their decision, Kavanaugh did not agree with. So. The citizenship clause of the fourteenth Amendment provides those born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are US citizens. The clause was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children, not on the children of aliens temporarily visiting the United States or of illegal aliens. This from William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection. He's a Cornell University law professor. He says, the court ruled five to four that children born to women illegally or temporarily in the country are citizens at birth. And here's a really good question that was raised by one of the dissenting judges. I think it was Thomas, or it may have been Alito. And by the way, if you are curious, what like where do I tend to fall Justice Alito more often than not, like almost one hundred percent of the time. Actually I agree with him when I read his opinions even when he's in the minority, no matter where he's writing, like I fall down with him, Like that's he's like, I don't want to say spirit animal. I agree with Alito's jurisprudence, his judicial philosophy, and his line of reasoning on this stuff. But I think it was Alito who raised this question. If this Fourteenth Amendment has never applied to children of foreign diplomats, why would it apply to illegal aliens who have less of a jurisdiction than the diplomats do. At least the diplomats are allowed to be here. Right, But for some reason we've now conjured up to like a right to privacy somehow covers abortion. We've conjured up this idea now as well, all right, So from the Robert's majority opinion on the birthright citizenship case. At issue in this case is whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States. See to me, like that right, that line right there, parents unlawfully in the United States, That right there should be an indication, so you're unlawfully in a place. And then if you download the kid in the place that you are unlawfully at. Now the kid enjoys all of the benefits of that place. So, for example, if I were to smuggle into the Supreme Court Chief Justice's chambers a pregnant woman and she were to give birth, and let's say we were looking around for, you know, some clothes to swaddle the baby in, and oh, look at that. There's a black robe hanging on that coat rack. So I take the black robe and I swaddle the baby, and so the baby is born into the black robes. Well, that baby is now a Supreme Court Chief Justice. That's how that works, I guess no, he says in the opinion. The ordinary legal meaning of the text of the clause thus neatly captures the common law rule, with its broad reach and narrow exceptions. The same groups included and excluded by j soli, which means by soil. These are the two competing philosophies when it comes to citizenship. There is jue soli, and that means of the soil, meaning if you're born on the soil, then you are of that soil. Or there's jue sanguinity or sanguinity sanguinae, or something which is of the bloodline. And by the way, we are like the only Western nation left that still does jeue sol. Canada does this. We do it, and basically nobody else. I think Ireland was the last one to make it by lineage by bloodline, and they did that about twenty years ago. The same groups included and excluded by jus sol were included and excluded by the conventional understanding of jurisdiction. Excluded by both were the children of foreign ministers and members of nineteenth century Indian tribes over whom the United States had ceded a part of its territorial jurisdiction to preserve its relationship with a foreign sovereign or quasi sovereign right. So the fourteenth Amendment explicitly did not cover Native Americans because they were of a different jurisdiction, a different sovereign. They lived on reservations, right, so they were not American, So they were excluded, as were the children of foreign ministers. So again, how is that any different? How is that any different than someone who is unlawfully in the country. No such inter sovereign concerns applied to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States. No foreign sovereign would quote have any motive for wishing them outside this nation's authority. Those children are the subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They satisfy both elements of the citizen citizenship clause. They are born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Okay, so do they have to register for the draft? That would mean they are subject to the jurisdiction thereof. No that right that they have. You're giving them citizenship. So they're all right, they all have to register for the drift because they're all citizens right under the Constitution. They are citizens at birth, he says. In any case, post enactment, history cannot override the text. If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the citizenship clause conveyed that design. Again, Congressional records show they explicitly said, we're not talking about people in the country illegally. They said that. But that is not enough for the historical record, I guess Forroberts and Barrett, And while the clause does ensure state citizenship attaches for US citizens in the state wherein they reside. The explicit invocation of residents for state citizenship only highlights its absence from the criteria for US citizenship. Citizenship then and now was the right to have rights to freely participate in our political community. That's from the Roberts majority opinion. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetekallanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.