Advisory Opinions

It’s October 15, 2020, and 12.4 percent of the votes that were cast in the 2016 election have already been cast this election cycle. Sarah and David try to discern through the tea leaves what this means for voter turnout this year. “There’s two different schools of thought here,” Sarah says. “One is that we’re on pace to have record turnout and one is that we’re simply banking Election Day votes e...

The Senate Judiciary Committee kicked off its confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett today with a predictably partisan spin. There were dog whistles from Republicans about religious tests and procedural complaints from Democrats in defense of the Affordable Care Act and against advancing Barrett’s nomination before November 3. But all things considered, the first day of...

Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence faced off Wednesday evening for their first and only vice presidential debate. But analysis of the candidates’ performance was disrupted by Trump’s announcement Thursday morning that he will not participate in the October 15 virtual debate against Joe Biden. Is the president bluffing? Or is he simply trying to hide his COVID-19 symptoms from the Ame...

Supreme Court oral arguments have resumed via telephone and our podcast hosts are nerding out. The court kicked off today with an interesting denial of cert from the Supreme Court on a case out of Kentucky involving Kim Davis, the county clerk who refused to certify marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015 for religious reasons. “This petition provides a stark reminder of the consequences of...

How will Amy Coney Barrett shake things up on the bench if she is confirmed by the Senate before November 3? “Amy Coney Barrett will not be as revolutionary as the left fears or the right wishes,” Sarah argues, “Because no justice really is, because it’s one vote.” On today’s episode, David and Sarah address the hysteria surrounding her upcoming Senate confirmation battle while breaking down what...

Several new polls were released over the weekend and Donald Trump is still trailing Joe Biden by roughly 7 to 10 points, depending where you look. Despite Biden’s steady lead, bad takes abound in the journalism world. “Here’s what happens when a race is not particularly close on the numbers,” Sarah explains. “People in the media try to make it more interesting by finding tea leaves and little nugg...

A Louisville grand jury on Wednesday indicted one officer in connection with the March 13 police raid that took Breonna Taylor’s life. The grand jury declined to charge the two officers who fired directly at Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend that evening, instead only charging the third officer, who was outside and fired indiscriminately, with wanton endangerment. David explains the basic facts lea...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, rocking the nation and setting the stage for a blistering Senate confirmation fight  should the Senate Judiciary Committee go through with the hearing process before the election. Today, our podcast hosts walk us through the history of SCOTUS vacancies, reflect on the legendary friendship between Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Antonin Scalia, and offer...

After reflecting on the best and worst parts of our country’s founding document for Constitution Day, David and Sarah dive into Attorney General Bill Barr’s Constitution Day address at Hillsdale College yesterday, in which he defended political judgment in bringing prosecutions and railed against federal prosecutors’ propensity to punish as much misconduct as possible. Our podcast hosts agree with...

For the month of August, the Biden campaign outraised the Trump campaign by a whopping $150 million. (Biden raked in $360 million last month compared to Trump’s $210 million). As stark as this fundraising difference may be, is there any reason to believe it will be meaningful in the long run? A lot of this money will go toward television ads at this point, but campaign money starts diminishing in...

Last week, President Trump encouraged North Carolina voters to test their state's election security. David and Sarah discuss how, exactly, someone commits voter fraud, and what voters need to know as we close in on this November's election. But that's not all: Sarah gives us the latest on the state of the race and how the Trump campaign lost its cash advantage. Plus, David has some thoughts on Ten...

There’s a bit of post-2016 election PTSD among American political strategists, where any slight uptick in Trump’s polling numbers is perceived as an emergency situation for the Biden campaign. But despite the almost constant news cycle turbulence in American politics that would have caused big swings in a normal presidential election, the polls have remained relatively stable over the past few mon...

Ever since its humble beginnings in March 2016, The Babylon Bee—a Christian, conservative version of The Onion—has been a godsend for Americans who have become worn out by news outlets that take themselves too seriously. From its theological inside jokes about the prosperity gospel to its Snopeslong-standing feuds with and CNN, the Bee has made its mark in the world of satire. On today’s episode,...

Violent riots escalated quicky in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. . On Wednesday, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with first-degree homicide for the shooting deaths of two people in Kenosha on Tuesday evening. Sarah and David break down what we know and don’t know about the Jacob Blake shooting on today’s episode of Advisory Opinions and talk through the lega...

Today our hosts are joined by Phill Drobnick, head coach of the Olympic curling team, for some hot takes about the sport that inspired Sarah’s new campaign newsletter The Sweep. Listeners who are unfamiliar with this sport, which gets even passing national coverage only during Winter Olympics years, might be wondering about curling’s origins. “It started in Scotland, like every goofy sport that in...

Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was arrested Thursday—along with Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato, and Timothy Shea—after federal prosecutors discovered they defrauded donors involved with the “We Build the Wall” campaign, a GoFundMe that shored up $25 million in donations since its inception in 2018. The unsealed federal indictment is damning, and even shows evidence of the grifters’ amusement wi...

The 9th Circuit recently heard an appeal from a challenge to the state of California’s ban on large capacity magazines (in this case, any magazine that holds 10 or more rounds). California didn’t just ban the sale of these magazines, it banned their transfer, importation, and outright possession in the state. The 9th Circuit ended up striking down this law and departing from its sister circuits on...

In 2017, an anonymous individual named “Q” began posting on a public messaging board called 4chan about “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory alleging that a restaurant called Comet Ping Pong was really an underground child sex trafficking ring run by deep state political elites. Q quickly gained acclaim online after he continued posting unsubstantiated clues—what QAnon followers call “bread crumbs”—ab...

How realistic is the SpaceX dream to get to Mars? What does the latest scientific literature have to say about supernovae? Is there intelligent life in the universe? Today, Sarah and David are joined by Atlantic staff writer Marina Koren for a deep dive into all things space. Hear everything there is to know about the space race between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, colliding black holes, and other cr...

People who watch and comment on politics do so very differently than campaign operatives do. Campaigns use voter scores and voter modeling—which is essentially “Moneyball” for politics—to gauge which voters are worth spending money on. As Sarah explains: “It’s a quadrant: on the y axis you have who you’re going to vote for, and on the x axis, you have your likelihood to vote. So you may be the mos...

Rewind millions of years and a dinosaur-killing asteroid is racing toward Earth at breakneck speed. But what exactly happened in the immediate aftermath of this event? Which species survived and which ones were met with instantaneous extinction? In a much-needed break from today’s partisan political climate, David and Sarah are joined by Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at...

The D.C. Circuit has decided to hear the Michael Flynn debacle en banc. For the meantime, as Sarah reminds us on today’s episode, “Michael Flynn seems to be getting some extra justice that a lot of criminal defendants would be really happy to get.” If it goes back to the district court, would Trump pardon him? Our podcasters weigh in. On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted that we should con...

Our esteemed podcast host Sarah Isgur launched her new Dispatch newsletter called “The Sweep” today, in which she broke down the effectiveness of the new presidential campaigns ads. Conclusion? Biden’s new ads are strategically boring to offset his opponent’s predictable unpredictability, whereas Trump’s play up the anarchy of the radical left. As Sarah reminds us, persuasion ads don’t work. This...

A federal judge ordered the release of Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen from prison on Thursday. On July 9, Cohen and his lawyer went into the U.S. Probation Office in Manhattan to transition from furlough to home confinement. But instead Cohen was arrested by three U.S. Marshals and brought back to prison. Why did this happen? David and Sarah explain. Check out today’s episode to hear our po...

The 2019-2020 Supreme Court term was quite the spectacle: the court canceled its March and April argument sessions, held oral arguments by telephone for the first time in May, and stretched its opinion announcements into July for the first time in many years. The term was packed with several blockbuster cases and ended with an announcement from Justice Ginsburg about a pancreatic cancer recurrence...