thing. >> jeannie suk gerson, harvard law professor, thank you for weighing in and you can watch ao missions granted tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern here on msnbc. that's going to do it for me. o back next saturday. prime weekend is next. ♪ ♪ >> welcome to prime time weekend. i'm nicolle wallace. let's get right to the week's top stories. underscoring the stakes of the election in november even further, newly released decisions by the u.s. supreme court, the conservative super majority which includes three of the justices hand-picked by donald trump himself overturned a 40-year-old president taking aim at the power of federal agencies to function. the dechevron ruling as the blo puts it, cuts back sharply on s the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they mr. andrew that courts should rely on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws. the decision will likely have er far-reaching effects across the country environmental regulation to healthcare cost. today also saw the court ruled in favor of the january 6th insurrectionist who challenged his obstruction of official proceeding charge. that ruling, which we will dive into a little deeper in chcta l minute could have an impact on hundreds of other january 6 prosecutions as well. and there's still more to come from this highest court in the i land. the supreme court has indicatedn that on monday it will be their final day and on monday we will find out just how extreme this t court really is when it releases its final decision on donald trump's claim that a president should be immune from prosecution. it will be a momentous decision and we will see if this court believes that donald trump or any president is above the law in the united states of america. senior editor for slate and the host of the podcast is back with us. also joining us, the executive director of fix the court, gabe roth, and former top prosecutor doj msnbc legal analyst, andrew weissman. i know chevron gets shorthanded. i need someone to take me to school. school. can you just remind me mwhat this decision is and what their opinion does? >> chevron is essentially shorthand for a long-standing tradition that says if there is an ambiguous statute, the uo courts defer to the agency itself and their interpretation of how to read sethat statute. because agencies are teeming with people who know science and who understand how the climate works and to understand how healthcare works and who understand how those work and essentially what the court said today was, nope, from here on in we are going to courts to decide how agency regulations are interpreted and i don't want to be in any way alarmist about this, but this is a wholesale transfer of power over federal regulatory agencies, clean water, clean air, guns, healthcare, monetary policy, all y anof it is shifte away from federal agencies and into the laps of courts and i think the last very cynical thing i'm going to say is that the supreme court can't even control his own website this week, downloading and uploading opinions before they are ready to go. it's hard to understand how they can have the kind of expertise to talk about nuanced things like climate and healthcare if they can't even sort out their own in-house procedures. >> it's a pretty profound point. it sounds small but it gets to the essence of what the decision does. i appreciate everything that you have said and especially this contrast and this morning almost to be careful if you dabble in horserace analysis because nothing less than the future of our government to function is already on the line, is already at stake, and the only thing i would say is you are not being alarmist but o justice kagan certainly was. let me read from her descent. in one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue-no matter how expertise driven or policy laden -- involving the meaning of regulatory law as if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the countries administrative czar. that is an alarm the likes of which i don't know that we have seen this term. dahlia. dahlia. >> the [toe)+thing i would justm point out that justice kagan does, and ■çthis is familiar to us who remember the dissent in dobbs is, her descent is a cri de coeur about what it means when the -- willy-nilly reverses precedent without doing so carefully or thoughtfully assessing what it is that's happening and we've talked soly appso much in the l months about the need for ut stability and predictability in the law and what she ilis warnii in addition to this kind of wholesale power grab the courtst that, frankly, you are right, terrifies her. i think the other thing she is saying that every precedent is on the line. this is now a decision that if n it gets five votes, precedent is gone and, again, we have , organized our lives for four decades on the proposition that this is how the government works and ■çregulatory agencies should feel free to try to do wo their best to regulate complicated social problems and to have that go away in the ei blink of an eye without much understanding of what it is to reverse that precedent is almost the most chilling part of this for justice kagan. >> let me read a little bit more of what dahlia is talking about from justice kagan's quote, it barely tries to advance the usual factors this court invokes for overruling precedent. it's justification comes down, in the end, to this : courts must have more say overregulation -- over the provision of healthcare, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems and so on. a long-standing precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. the majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power. wow. i've read that four times and only out loud twice and that just feels like -- that just feel so profound to me. the majority disdains restraint and grasps for power. >> nicole, and somebody who understands what republicans in this country stand for, that's what's so -- the court is supposed to be a body, according to republican orthodoxy, what used to be republican orthodoxy, restraint of the courts, because it's viewed as a sort of anti- democratic check and that is what she is saying is not. in some ways this is a real wake-up call from last night because it tells you, if you didn't know this from dobbs, you know this from this decision that the supreme court is so on the ballot for those of us in the legal field, it's hard to stress enough what dahlia is saying because it's not just that this changes the fundamental way in which the courts have dealt with the administrative state, certainly at least since fdr but also because of the complete lack of respect for precedent, it signals that this court is willing to do to chevron and roe versus wade and if it goes forward in trump 2.0, everything is on the table and g that is the message from the decision today, more than any of the cases that we see in this term. this is such a clarion call for why it is so important for people who disagree with what's going on to get to the ballot box and really think about the supreme court in the way that republicans for decades have thought about the supreme court being the fundamental institution they wanted t to change. >> what uncork's -- all of them, did they lie in their d confirmation hearings when they described precedent and super precedent and if you're not y a lawyer or supreme court watcher, you barely understand that but you think it means they won't touch things would've been there for a long time, what uncork's them and turns them into this really active, agitated sort of burn it all down body? >> i don't know and i also don't know if there is an kn answer for all of the justices. i think that there is an answer for alito and thomas that may be different than any -- amy coney barrett and chief justice roberts and the reason i single out amy coney barrett is she's issued some interesting decisions in the last couple weeks. we are going to talk about the obstruction decision and she actually writes the descent and so, you do get the sense of a mind that is thinking and that is not just a knee-jerk reaction to side automatically with what you know justice alito is going to think but i think for justice alito, he is leading a charge that is very much what i would call a maga justice. it seems so unthoughtful and so untethered to the facts and a complete disrespect for decades of other jurors as if the other people who served on the supreme court were a bunch of bumpkins. there is just the whole idea of what's called stare decisis where you're supposed to say, i may disagree with the prior decision but it cannot be that just because the composition of the court changes that you are suddenly going to overturn a decision from last week or last year and there's supposed to be a sense of continuity and once a decision is made, it's supposed to take a lot to overturn it and that is the thing that i thought was so fundamentally upsetting about the decision today was that t there was no really good argument for why suddenly, now, chevron was gone and in such a bold, sweeping way. i thought their treatment of precedent signaled to me that if you think dobbs was the end of where the court was going to go, to me, this decision means, no, that's the beginning. >> gable, dobbs was something that you didn't have to be an expert in the supreme court or the law to understand because it affected every woman's life. chevron affects every element of american life as well but it's more complicated to tell. can you start trying to tell that story for us? >> sure. the federal government has billions of employees and many are experts in their field from folks ensuring that our water and air is clean to our r medicine and food, our safe and those individuals work for that brand. sometimes when congress writes a lot about medicine or food ore health, the language is ambiguous and that's the nature of language. if language wasn't ambiguous, your show would be 30 seconds long with -- end of show and it would be dead air for 59 1/2 minutes. but language is ambiguous and it's worth talking things out 59 and sometimes that means deferring to the peep -- the experts in the field. to me, it's not just the supreme court that is going to o be doing it. there will be earthquakes and aftershocks that we will be feeling for decades and e you have lower court judges appointed by presidents of both parties so pick the ones you like and pick the ones you don't like but you're going to have about half a dozen cases of chevron coming down the next couple years but you will have thousands if not tens of thousands of cases in the lower courts where there's going to be an ambiguous agency action and you have lower court judges, unelected officials, deciding things about water and air and medicine and healthcare and the like and if you don't nd like what an agency is doing, you vote out their boss every four years. the agency head is beholden to a the president and the president's change every four years. you don't have that in the judiciary. lower court justices serve for life so they are viewing chevron or the end of chevron in one way and that way isn't great for our air or water. that view is going to be the prevailing view for decades unless congress gets its act together and passes a law that brings some of the power back to our elected officials. >> gable, let me ask you to jump in on the skpolitical conversation that i'm so grateful to all of you, we are having side by side. that's how the american people are experiencing these decisions. they have unprecedented levels of skepticism and questions about the supreme court because of these decisions. this is something justice sonia sotomayor said leat harvard las month. i've played it before but i want to play it again. >> we did go backward in dobbs. i said it on my dissent so i'm not saying something new. we've taken away our right. we've never done that in our history. mind you, there are days that i've come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried. there have been those days and they are likely to be more. >> you take what she's saying and what justice kagan has written and it feels like the warnings or calls are coming from inside the house. >> yeah, this is a very upsetting time i twould imagin to be a liberal justice on the supreme court. primarily with dobbs. that was the earthquake of all i think justice ur sotomayor was referring to that when she was talking about closing her door and crying but there are other opinions that overturn precedent, like today's decision that not only liberals aren't going to like but conservatives have to breathe the air and drink the water too and take the medicine and eat the food. i think that, though there have been some interests that want the end of the chevron, that want this outcome, they may come to regret it if every city's drinking water is like flints in five years. >> a remarkable moment. quickly, how are you thinking of this decision as we look forward to monday? is >> i'm thinking of this decision in light of another case we don't have time to discuss in depth but today the s court made it easier to go after the homeless sleeping in parks out west and in justice sotomayor's dissent, she is so careful to explain why there iso homelessness and she talks about housing policy and she talks about climate change policy and she essentially says this whole administrative state that is obscure and abstracts to you, this is the reason people are sleeping in parks. or part of the reason. so i want to connect it to whatn you said about justice sotomayor, the supreme court is causing some of these problems and then, turning around and making it impossible for agencies to solve them and it's really important to look at both what is coming on monday and today and think of it y through the lens gabe is offering up which is, these areg going to affect real people's real lives every single day and so, to think of it as an abstraction is to make it something that we all say we have no skin in the game. every single one of us has skin in the game because the way our lives are organized is being scuppered by a court that is thinking about nothing, i think, other than making sure that very wealthy people find it easier to bribe or give gratuities and that very poor people have nowhere to sleep. >> no one is going anywhere. e we have another huge decision to tell you about. the ruling that prosecutors -- the supreme, court -- charging a writer with obstruction of an official proceeding. we will tell you what that means for members of the trump mob that attacked the u.s. capital that day as well as the case against the disgraced and convicted ex-president himself. convicte d 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now, xfinity internet customers can buy one unlimited line and get one free for a year. get the fastest connection to paris with xfinity. the supreme court the supreme court today essentially ruling against the ability of a democracy to hold people accountable that threaten it. what the dissenting justices called textual ■1ackflips to side with this guy, january 6th rioter, who you see, here in a physical confrontation with police officers inside the u.s. capital on january 6th. the ruling narrows an obstruction charge in his case and could impact justices reliance on that charge, on that law and its prosecution of hundreds of others of january 6th defendants including one convicted felon who happens to be ex-president donald trump. the three dissenters were justice sonia sotomayor, elena kagan, and amy coney barrett who writes this, quote, court does not dispute the congress's joint ■çsession qualifies as an official proceeding, that riders delayed the proceeding or even that fisher's alleged conduct was part of a successful effort to forcibly hold the certification of the election results. given these premises, the case that joseph fisher can be tried for obstructing, influencing or impeding official proceeding seems open, so why does the court hold otherwise? because it simply cannot believe that congress meant what it said. we are back with dahlia, gabe and andrew. that is chilling. >> i think there are a couple things worth noting because a lot of the reporting is sort of getting this wrong. one, there is the trump take on this which is that somehow this shows that the department of justice overreached and was doing so politically. it is really important to remember, not just that you have this very well written &%mmq1ñled by amy coney barrett, a trump appointee, but of the 15 trial judges who heard this exact issue, 14 of the 15 including three trump appointees agreed with the government's review of the obstruction statute. so this was not some outlier, some off-the-wall theory. this was, in fact, how everyone had been interpreting this including very conservative judges and at least one very conservative supreme court justice. the second is that i think, although i disagree with the opinion, the majority opinion, it is -- i do not think, because ■çthey carefully, narrowly circumscribed how they were eliminating the obstruction statute, i don't think it will have any effect whatsoever on the trump january 6th indictment. the real issue there is the one we are waiting for on monday which is, will that ever go to trial? but i don't think the obstruction charges there will be affected by this decision nor with respect to the 1400 or so january 6th cases. this is going to have a minimal effect on their cases. let me give you a quick example. mr. fisher who is the lead plaintiff here is charged with other felonies including assaulting officers. those charges stand bmkand as ketanji brown jackson says, he may ágr&l be able to be