Today on America’s Coach, Mark Whitney tells the story of how a prison typewriter and a clause in Article I of the Constitution got him out of federal prison. He makes the case that labels like “liberal” and “conservative” don’t matter—what matters is the law. With wit, insight, and a rubber chicken, Coach breaks down Amy Coney Barrett’s unpredictability, why you’ll have better luck in court than with Congress, and how Trump’s unconstitutional chaos may unwittingly and ironically rescue the Republic.
Show Notes — America's Coach (June 17, 2025)
Recorded Live In San Diego, CA · 9:00A Pacific
Theme: Certainty
Topics Covered:
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the myth of ideological predictability
The power of federal courts vs. political branches
Labels like "liberal" and "conservative" are ambiguous—unlike cats and chickens
UNOFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT (video is authoritative)
COLD OPEN · AMY CONEY BARRETT, NOTRE DAME LECTURE
I'm the first woman with school-aged children. Well, I was telling a friend recently that I feel sure that the other day before I came into court, I was the only one of the justices who was listening to the Encanto soundtrack in the car. The only one who was walking into the courtroom with like, you know, “Bruno, no, no.”
SHADOE STEVENS
Ladies and gentlemen, from San Diego, California, Mark Whitney.
MARK WHITNEY
Thank you, Shadoe! Good morning, everybody. It is 9 o'clock on Tuesday morning, June 17th. 67 degrees and sunny here in beautiful San Diego, California. That's right. We are here live and in color once again at americascoach.com. My name is Mark Whitney. And we only have one rule: never explain a smart joke to an idiot. And if that offends you, you can finish that one. Today's theme is certainty. The slogan of this program is your guiding hand in uncertain times.
And that was Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. We're going to talk about her today, but we're going to do it in this context.
I don't know what a conservative or a liberal is. I don't know what conservative means. I don't know what liberal means. I know what a cat is. I know what a dog is. For example, this is a cat. This is our cat, Maisel. Nice kitty, huh? Very pretty cat. Big personality. Here's another picture of a cat. This is my oldest son's cat, Boris. He's up there in Orange County taking in the sun. Pretty nice, serene picture, huh? And this is one of the crazy cats of my youngest son. That's Gibby. Gibby likes to sit on the towel rack.
Chris has five cats. I think between the—let's see. My wife and I have one cat, and one son has four cats. Right? Yeah, four cats. And my oldest son says, “It's like 10 cats.” We like cats. Look, this is also a kitty cat. This is Simba. That's a stuffed kitty. Does anyone disagree? Right? We're certain about this, right? These are cats. This is Simba. This is Tigger. This is a chicken. Not a real chicken—it's a rubber chicken. They used to use these back in vaudeville to get a chuckle when the joke didn’t work. That’s why I keep this standing by.
So we got cats and chickens. We know what that is. We don’t know what conservative or liberal means. And the reason I'm talking about this is because the New York Times recently did a piece on Amy Coney Barrett. Why did they do that? Because she defies labels.
When Trump nominated her, they knew she was Catholic. They didn’t know what kind of Catholic. They knew she went to Notre Dame Catholic school. They knew she was valedictorian. But they were concerned about red flags. Like, maybe she wasn’t crazy enough. They were concerned about her seven children, two of whom are Black and adopted from Haiti—Emma, Tess, Vivian, John Peter, Liam, Juliet, and Benjamin, who was born with Down syndrome. I don’t know if they were concerned about her sense of humor, but she does have a sense of humor.
Okay, so I’ll take a pass on the national injunction question, because that is one that could come before me. Dean Cole, you’re making me feel like I’m in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Yeah, so she’s speaking down at Notre Dame Law School, her alma mater, on the topic of federal equity jurisdiction. Is anybody still here? Anybody still here in the audience?
Federal equity jurisdiction refers to the power of federal courts to grant equitable remedies like injunctions. So an equitable remedy doesn’t involve money, right? It’s just, “You got to do this. We’re ordering you to do this.” Specific performance. An injunction. “We are enjoining you. You have to stop.”
Now, we have never, ever in our lives heard so much about injunctions. That’s all that’s in the news. Why is that? Because we have a president who just does shit. And that’s why I’m so optimistic about the future. I’m not like all these gloomy Gus’s who are whining and moaning about all of Trump’s unconstitutional behavior. And I have a personal experience about that to share today based on this principle. And this is a principle. This is not a value. And the principle is very simple:
Everything is constitutional until a judge says otherwise.
So if you’re just a regular person going about your business, you own a small business, you’ve got a family. Maybe you’re from Indiana, like Amy Coney Barrett—South Bend, Indiana, right? You’re just a regular person. You’re not particularly political.
But you need a remedy. Now, if you have a problem, is it more likely that you’re going to get a remedy from the president? Or the Congress? Or the governor in your state? Or your legislator who has to go and convince a bunch of other people to pass the law you want them to pass? Or are you more likely to get a remedy from a judge?
Courts are where we go to seek a remedy. It’s still really hard. But it’s our best shot.
So when I see the corporate media, like the New York Times, assigning labels, reducing judges down to labels like conservative or liberal, I get really upset by that. Because I know that our best shot as citizens is with courts. And I would hope, I would hope that these judges are capable of setting their politics aside and just doing their job.
But unlike perhaps you, I don’t need to hope. Because I have had a personal experience that I’m going to share with you right now.
I have here—let me see if I can clear out the rest of the audience. Let me bring up the sky cam right here. This is the United States Constitution, which I printed out this morning. It is 7,591 words. And just to put that in context, that is shorter than most magazine articles and way shorter than your software license or credit card agreement. 7,500 words is nothing. It’s nothing.
Now, there are 27 amendments to our Constitution from beginning to end. One of them is called Article 1. Article 1 is 2,800 words. Article 1, 27 amendments—Article 1 is 30% of the Constitution.
So in 1992, I’m sitting in federal prison with a three-year prison term to serve. I am broke, bankrupt. I’m like eight or nine hours away. My family’s in Vermont. I’m at a federal prison camp in Pennsylvania. And all I’ve got is this. So I start reading. And I start with Article 1. And Article 1 has, I think, ten sections. So I’m reading through the Constitution, and I’m trying to get out. I want to go home. I don’t want to be there anymore. So I’m reading, and I’m reading. I read about the House of Representatives, and I read about the Senate, and I get down to Section 9 in Article 1.
And I’m reading about this thing called the Ex Post Facto Clause. Here it is right here. I’m going to show it to you. Let me pop it up on the Skycam.
See this—Section 9 here? Limits. Limits on Congress. Now, when we wrote the Constitution—right, when we wrote the Constitution—we, the people, put some limits on Congress. We basically issued an injunction against Congress right here in the Constitution saying there are certain things you can’t do. Let me get down to the one I want you to see.
No ex-post facto law shall be passed.
Now, I remember reading that in 1992 in the prison law library in Pennsylvania. And I was like, “Ex post facto law? What’s that? I wonder if I’ve got that.” So that triggers a whole bunch more research. So now I’m studying ex post facto laws. And I learn that that is a law that’s made after the fact. So if you get in trouble with the federal government or with your state government in a criminal setting, they can only subject you to trial or punishment based on laws that are in place at the time of the crime.
And that just makes sense, right? That just makes sense.
Like if you jaywalked yesterday, and there’s no law against jaywalking—you jaywalk on Monday, and there’s no law against jaywalking—but then they pass a law on Friday and say, “Hey, schmuck, you jaywalked.” And you go, “Yeah, but that was Monday. You didn’t have a law on Monday.” I’m certain of that. And that’s when you hold up your cat.
So that’s what happened in my case. And it took me a long time to figure this out. What happened in my case was I was sentenced based on a law that was not in place at the time I lied to the bank. And the result of that is the personal story.
It was a three-judge panel led by Stephen Breyer, who recently retired from the Supreme Court. At the time, he was on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, and he led this panel.
Now, Stephen G. Breyer, Chief Justice of the First Circuit, went on to become Associate Justice of the Supreme Court—just retired. He is well known in the corporate press for being a “liberal judge,” a “liberal justice.” He always sides with the liberals. That’s what they always say.
But this was a three-judge panel. The other judge on the panel, Bruce Selya, who recently passed away—he was known as the most far-right conservative judge. If you read the corporate press, he was the most conservative of all of them. And then there was another guy, kind of down the middle.
So we’ve got a guy they would call liberal. A guy they would call conservative. And a guy they can’t predict—which is the complaint about Amy Coney Barrett: she’s not predictable. She might actually be a real Christian. She may actually be a person of actual faith, as opposed to someone who uses the Bible as a cudgel. And that’s really pissing off some of the MAGA people.
The signs were there. I mean, she had two Black kids from Haiti. I’m just saying—she adopted them because they were caught up in earthquakes and shit like that. I mean, she’s kind of a hippie. A Jesus-hippie kind of person.
Here’s my point. You saw the limit on Congress I showed you, right? It contains the word shall. “No ex post facto law shall be passed.” That word shall is a mandate in the law.
It doesn’t matter where those three judges go to church—or if they go to church. It doesn’t matter how many kids they have. It doesn’t matter whether they vote Democrat or Republican. It doesn’t matter. Shall. No ex post facto law shall be passed.
So in my case, once I saw I had that issue, I had to ask: what’s the remedy? If I win my appeal, my sentence gets declared unconstitutional, and I get to walk out of prison. That’s pretty good. Let’s make that argument.
So I do—representing myself—and I win. And I did that knowing I was going to have another sentencing hearing. But they wiped the first one from the books. As a matter of law, the first one didn’t exist. The court didn’t have jurisdiction because they used a law that wasn’t in place at the time of the crime.
So I’m at risk of getting more time when we have the afresh proceeding. Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
And the reason I filed my appeal knowing that risk existed was because I trusted the judge. I was certain the judge wasn’t going to do that. I got to know this judge during my trial, where I represented myself. He got to know me. And he said when he first sentenced me that if he could give me the benefit of the doubt and give me less than three years, he would.
However, when I went back two weeks later, after I was released, the government asked for more time. They asked for 54 months. They were pissed. Pissed that I appealed. Pissed that I won. Pissed they had to do this again.
And the only thing protecting me was the Constitution—and that judge I trusted.
And I trust Amy Coney Barrett.
She’s not like Clarence Thomas, citing witch trials and shit like that. I trust her. I think she’s a good person. She’s half Irish, half French. The Irish half doesn’t get mad—it gets even. The French half doesn’t get mad—it gets existential. If you’re half Irish and half French, you get mad, write a poem, and burn down the café. Something like that.
Here’s where it gets messy—when politicians try to control the outcomes of judicial proceedings before they’ve even happened.
The word shall is a mandate. There’s no wiggle room. If you jaywalk on Monday and there’s no law against jaywalking, it doesn’t matter how conservative or liberal the judge is—the judge is never going to see you. Because there was no law in place.
The only way the judge sees you is if something unconstitutional was done to you—like what happened to me. And then an opinion gets written. That makes it better for other people. Less likely it happens again. And if it does happen, they’ve got an opinion they can march into court with.
That’s why Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to the Constitution.
Certainly in our lifetime, we’ve never had a president who does this much unconstitutional stuff—federal government, local police, legislatures—they do unconstitutional stuff all the time. Most laws on the books are unconstitutional.
But it’s not unconstitutional as a matter of law until a judge says so.
So when Trump violates the due process rights of an immigrant, we get an opinion that says, “You can’t do that.” And that helps others.
My case made things better for prisoners. And Trump’s going to create a mountain of new opinions that clarify what we the people said in the Constitution.
And people like Amy Coney Barrett will write those opinions.
They’ll say: presidents can’t do this. That’s the job of the legislature.
And now the legislature has a political problem. Because they’ve been skating along—voting in blocks instead of representing you. So if you want your right to representation restored, you need a president to overstep his bounds. To ruin the separation of powers. To crown himself king.
Then the courts will step in. And because Trump’s made enemies of every judge by attacking the system, the courts will step in and say, “No. Presidents can’t do that.”
Now you, the citizen, have a cudgel. You can hammer your representatives: “Fix this. Do your job.”
And what happened last week to U.S. Senator Alex Padilla—tackled mid-question, cuffed and frog-marched out—that was a violation of your right to representation in the legislature.
Every one of you.
Congress watched and said, “I’m not saying boo ‘til 2029.” Always about the next election.
But because of Trump, everybody is learning. Everybody is watching. We see it all now. Nothing is hidden. And the only question left is: can you handle what you’re seeing?
Because being a citizen now requires more of you than it did when I was a kid. But you also have more power.
That’s why the slogan of this show is: your guiding hand in uncertain times.
There will be a time when we’ll need certainty about the NFL—but today is not that day. Today, you can feel good about this one person: Amy Coney Barrett.
She’s just a mom from Indiana with seven kids who got a call one day asking if she wanted to be on the Supreme Court.
And now she wears a bulletproof vest to go to work.
To uphold a contract. A little contract that we the people wrote for the legislature, the president, the courts to follow.
And if she can put on that vest every day to enforce that contract, the least we can do is pick up the phone and hammer our representatives and say:
This is wrong. Fix it.
My name is Mark Whitney. This is America’s Coach. To reach out, email coach@americascoach.com.
We’ll see you tomorrow.
SHADOE STEVENS
Keep Banging!
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