Litigation Update: Ohio v. Yellen

Listen & Download

In mid-March 2021, the state of Ohio's attorney general filed suit against Janet Yellen and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, challenging a provision of the American Rescue Plan Act that involves federal and state tax policies. Benjamin Flowers, Ohio's solicitor general, joins us to give a litigation update, review the background of the case, and more. 

Featuring: 

Benjamin Flowers, Solicitor General, Ohio

Moderator: Dean Reuter, Vice President, General Counsel, and Director of Practice Groups, The Federalist Society

---

This Teleforum call is open to the press and public. Dial 888-752-3232 to connect. 

Event Transcript

[Music]

 

Dean Reuter:  Welcome to Teleforum, a podcast of the Federalist Society's Practice Groups. I'm Dean Reuter, Vice President, General Counsel, and Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society. For exclusive access to live recordings of practice group Teleforum calls, become a Federalist Society member today at fedsoc.org.

 

Dean Reuter:  Welcome to the Federalist Society's Practice Group Teleforum conference call, as today, April 23, 2021, we discussed the newly filed case Ohio v. Yellen. I'm Dean Reuter, Vice President, General Counsel, and Director of Practice Groups at the Federalist Society.

     

      As always, please note that all expressions of opinion are those of the expert on today's call. Also, this call is being recorded for use as a podcast and will likely be transcribed and put on our website.

 

      We're very pleased to welcome a new guest to Teleforum calls today, Benjamin Flowers. He’s the Solicitor General of Ohio. He's going to walk us through the case with some opening remarks, probably 10 to 15 minutes or so. But as always, we'll be looking to the audience for questions, so have those in mind for when we get to that portion of the program. With that, Ben Flowers, the floor is yours.

 

Benjamin Flowers:  Great. Well, thank you for having me and thanks everybody for listening in. This is a case I'm passionate about and excited to speak about. The case is Ohio v. Yellen. It is pending in the Southern District of Ohio. And right now, we're at the preliminary injunction stage. So we’ve moved for a preliminary injunction. We just filed a reply yesterday, and we have a hearing scheduled for next Friday. So that's where we are. But let me say a bit of about what the case is all about.

 

      So I'll start with some first principles, and then I'll come back to the actual case at hand. And the first principles are maybe a bit redundant for Federalist Society members and the folks on this call. But just to lay them out, we all know about the 10th Amendment in our structure of government in general says that Congress can exercise only those enumerated powers that are conferred to it in Article I of the constitution. And conspicuously absent from that list of powers is any power to issue orders to state officials or to regulate the states.

 

      The reconstruction amendments make a few exceptions to that, but in general there's no freestanding power to regulate the states as states. And when the government passes a law that tells state governments to do something, to participate in a federal regulatory program, that's often called commandeering. And in a series of cases, most recently Murphy v. NCAA, the Supreme Court has made very clear that such commandeering, when the federal government tells the state government how to exercise its own state power, will be unconstitutional.

 

      The spending clause is another part of Article I that makes a little bit of an exception to this commandeering doctrine, but only a little bit. So the Spending Clause says that Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to pay for and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. For our purposes, all that matters is that they can lay and collect taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, which means that they can spend money to advance the United States interests.

 

      Now, there were some at the founding who thought all the Spending Clause allowed with that general welfare language was expenditure in support of things Congress did pursuant to its other enumerated powers. But that is not the view the Supreme Court has taken. And over the years, it's made clear that Congress can spend money on just about anything as long it doesn't violate some other provision of the constitution in doing so.

 

      And it can also put conditions on how that money is spent. So if Congress creates a program like Medicaid, it can give states the option. It cannot make them participate because of that anti-commandeering doctrine. But what it can do is offer money to try to incentivize the states to participate. And that's what I referred to as something of an exception to the anti-commandeering doctrine. They can't make the states do anything, but they can offer them a carrot and try to have them assist in implementing the program. And when they do that, they can, of course, have conditions for how the money will be spent within the program.

 

      So again, if we return the Medicaid, the federal government would be able to pass a law saying that money distributed under this program can be spent to cover certain procedures, or can't cover certain other procedures, and so on. But the court has recognized that the ability to extend that carrot can often function like a stick. It can leave states in a very tough spot where they have to decide to turn down money that their peer states are taking, perhaps putting them at a competitive disadvantage, harming their citizens, and so on.

 

      So the Court has imposed some limits on what Congress can do with the conditions it imposes in Spending Clause legislation. The first is that any condition that imposes has to be unambiguous. They have to provide the states with clear notice of what precisely it is that they are agreeing to. And the idea here is that Spending Clause legislation works like a contract. The federal government says, “States, you can participate in this program if you want, and we'll give you money to help implement it subject to these conditions.” And what the Court has said, like any other contract, the states need to have clear notice of what exactly they are agreeing to before they agree to take the money. They don't want states being surprised on the back end.

 

      Second condition -- these are not all the conditions, but they're the ones I'll focus on here. The second condition is that the conditions must be germane to the federal program at issue. So, for example, in the Medicaid example I gave, the federal government could impose limits on the type of procedures that can be covered with federal Medicaid funds. But they would not be able to say, “In exchange for accepting these Medicaid funds, you must agree to cut the grass weekly and all of the quads at the state universities.” I tried to pick a particularly absurd example there to illustrate how that works, but that's the idea.

 

      And then finally, the one that we've heard about most recently is the offer to the states cannot be coercive. This principle has been around for some time, but it was made famous or most famous, perhaps, in the first Obamacare case, which I’ll call N-Fib, the NFIB. And there, a 7-2 majority of the Supreme Court struck down the -- or held unconstitutional, I should say, the portion of Obamacare that expanded Medicaid.

 

      And the reason they found that it was unconstitutional is because Congress was coercing the states into implementing this program on the federal government's behalf. There it said, “You lose all of your Medicaid funds, including these funds you've been eligible for for some time, unless you agree to expand your Medicaid as Obamacare envisioned.” And the Court in a 7-2 decision, or 7-2 vote I should say, held that that was unconstitutional. They divided over the remedy. but we don't have to get to that for purposes of these calls -- this call, I should say. So that brings me to the end of the first principles part.

 

      And the gist is Congress is free to spend money. It's free to offer the states that money in exchange for their accepting certain conditions, but those conditions need to be unambiguous. They need to be relevant to the program that Congress is implementing, and the offer cannot be coercive.

 

      So with that, we can turn to the tax mandate which is what our suit is about. The tax mandate is part of the American Rescue Plan Act, which was the latest COVID relief bill passed by Congress. As many of us know, there's a tremendous amount of money being spent in that bill, and a tremendous amount of money offered to the states. The states can get almost $200 billion in funding that they can use for COVID relief, which includes not only shoring up their own budgets, but also aiding their citizens, helping small businesses in need, and so on and so forth.

 

      Ohio for its part stands to gain $5.5 billion in funding from that. And as you can imagine, that's a lot of money in today's economic climate where state budgets are not only stretched, but many small businesses have suffered quite a bit. Many individuals have lost jobs, and this money is something the state can use to help those individuals and those businesses.

 

      But at the 11th hour in the legislative process, there was an amendment that was introduced into the bill, and this amendment resulted in what I'm calling a tax mandate. Let me read the tax mandate, and then we can come back and break down what exactly it does. So it says, “A State or territory shall not use the funds provided under this section or transferred pursuant to Section 603(c)(4) to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in the net tax revenue of such State or territory resulting from a change in law, regulation, or administrative interpretation during the covered period that reduces any tax (by providing for a reduction in rate, a rebate, a deduction, a credit, or otherwise) or delays the imposition of any tax or tax increase.”

 

      So if we zoom out for a bit, we can't use the funds to do something. And what can't they be used for? They cannot be used to directly or indirectly offset reduction in net tax revenue. And a reduction in that tax revenue can come from any change in tax law, including even administrative interpretations that reduces the tax collected. So you can imagine that's a very, very, broad prohibition, for one thing.

 

      When you include administrative interpretations, that could mean that if a state tax official discovers the state has for the past five years been misinterpreting a tax law to charge people too much tax, correcting that erroneous interpretation of state law would, if it produces net tax revenue, implicate this statute. And the reason it would implicate it is because, remember, this applies to not only funds that are used expressly by the legislature to cover the effects of some tax cut or tax reduction, but to any use of the funds to either directly or indirectly offset the reduction.

 

      And the indirectly language is what caught our attention because we said, well, money is fungible. So if you take in a million dollars from one source and lose any money up to a million dollars lost from any other source, is in some sense indirectly offset by the money you took in. So this starts to look quite a bit like a prohibition on any tax cuts for the period in which the law remains in effect, which is also ambiguous, but depending on how you read it, probably about 2024.

 

      And it locks states into that, or at least forces them to pay a penalty if they do cut taxes in a way that cuts revenue. And the penalty is equal to the amount of revenue lost. So it functions like a double penalty. If you do cut taxes, you're not going to lose the revenue that you would otherwise have collected. But in addition, you must pay back to the treasury money that's equal in size.

 

      So we raised the few arguments to challenge the constitutionality of this, and those are the ones now pending before the Southern Districts. The first is that the statute is ambiguous. Secretary Yellen has been trying effectively since the law came out to explain what this means. It seems that everyone agrees that if the law is effectively a ban on cutting taxes for anything that takes money, that that would be unconstitutional. So she's consistently argued that it doesn't actually do that. What it instead does, in her words, it simply stops you from using federal funds to pay for those tax cuts.

 

      As we say in our reply brief, adding simply before a paraphrase of the statutory language, doesn't actually clarify anything. And when Secretary Yellen went to Congress to try to explain what it does, she conceded that it was a “thorny question,” and said given the fungibility of money, it's hard to know what an indirect offset would be. And we agree. And so we made the argument that it's unconstitutionally ambiguous.

 

      Remember, Spending Clause legislation has to give states fair notice of what exactly they're agreeing to. And in our view, this law doesn't come close to meeting that standard because no one can seem to define what an indirect as opposed to a direct offset is, or what an indirect offset versus no offset at all is. Any tax that reduces revenue would seem to at least arguably implicate this. And the narrowing constructions are, in fact, adding ambiguity.

 

      And their briefing in this Court, they said you can just ignore “indirectly” because they called it an adjective. I’m not aware of the canon that adjectives are to be ignored, but that's what they're advancing. And second, they say that it can be fixed to the regulations, that it's too early to say this is unconstitutionally ambiguous because they can promulgate regulations that clarify what exactly is allowed and not.

 

      We've taken the position that that actually isn't allowed. Number one, any regulation would be too ambiguous -- any regulation will be an implausible interpretation because there is just no way to make this statute unambiguous. But more importantly, it's contrary to our separation of powers to say that Congress, if it enacts the law that it lacks power to enact, an executive branch official can nonetheless enforce that law with narrowing construction.

 

      The next thing we say is that the law is unduly coercive. So the withholding of funds in NFIB was approximately 10 percent of each state's budget. And the amount of funds here is roughly to that or more in some states, and in Ohio it's 7.4 percent of our annual expenditure. And what we explain is that, given this economic climate and the many struggling businesses and the many struggling individuals that this money can go to help, the states just have no real choice except to take the money.

 

      It's a gun to the head, in the Chief Justice's words, because if Ohio doesn't take it, they're turning down money that their own taxpayers have helped contribute to. And, of course, they would put those taxpayers at a competitive disadvantage relative to their peers in other states who are taking the money. So we make the argument that it's unduly coercive.

 

      The government responds to that in a few ways. I can point to two here. One, they say that unlike the NFIB case, here the government is not taking away funds to which the state is already entitled or was already entitled—remember, there it was taking away Medicaid funds that they were eligible for before Obamacare passed—and that instead what the government's doing here is just offering new funds. And our response to that has been that while the question of whether it's preexisting funds or not maybe relevant to how coercive the offer is, you do not need to take something away to coerce someone.

 

      We all know this from everyday life. If you are wandering through the desert desperate for water, you would be equally coerced by someone threatening to steal your water as you would by someone threatening not to provide you with the water that they have. So we say that that is not the proper distinction. They also say that all the law does impose conditions on what can be done with the federal money, and that the coercion analysis simply doesn't apply to laws that do nothing except put conditions on how federal money can be spent.

 

      Now, we dispute the premise that the coercion analysis wouldn't apply to such laws. But more fundamentally, we've taken the position that these are not mere conditions on the expenditure of federal money. NFIB itself declined to let Congress use different creative phrasing to try to avoid a Spending Clause problem. And as we put it, the Spending Clause limits Congresses power, not it's word choice. And here, this prohibition on indirect offsets sweeps so broadly that it amounts to regulating things that are beyond merely controlling how the money is spent. They actually regulate the internal governance of each state.

 

      And then finally, and this is where I can stoutly argue that because the state's being coerced into giving up its taxing power, or at least a portion of its taxing power, it's effectively being made to implement taxation in the manner that Congress would wish, and that presents a commandeering problem under the 10th Amendment.

 

      And so, as I said, we finished briefing our case, or the preliminary injunction stage anyway, and have a hearing scheduled for a week from today. And we'll see what happens with that. Dean, I think I've wrapped up my initial presentation.

 

Dean Reuter:  Terrific. Well, thank you very much. I want to go right to the floor and see who might have a question or two. Let's check in with our first caller.

 

Larry Obhof:  Sure. This is Larry Obhof with Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick. And for people from Ohio listening to our former leader of the State Senate, I just wanted to say a couple of things. First, Mr. Flowers, thank you for doing what you're doing. I think that these line of cases across the country are important for federalism, that the federal government shouldn't be setting state tax policy. And I'm glad that you and Attorney General Yost have stuck up for the principles in the Constitution.

 

      My question is related to the ambiguity issue. I know that when you went through the list of potential issues here, that was the first one that you mentioned. And it sounds to me like the federal government has essentially also admitted that it's ambiguous. And I'm looking back at the clear statement rule that we see in Gregory v. Ashcroft, and Atascadero, and Pennhurst, and a number of those other cases, and I'm wondering if you plan on making an argument along those lines?

 

Benjamin Flowers: Well, we have made an argument along those lines. Our opening brief contains the ambiguity point, but in their response brief, of course, we got a little bit of a view of what they think the statute means. And we did take the position that they didn't really tell us what the statute meant. They just told us a variety of things that it did not mean, and that because they couldn't explain what exactly we're prohibited from doing, even in general terms, that the clear notice rule has been violated. So, yes, it's definitely one of the issues pending before the court.

 

Larry Obhof:  Great. Thank you.

 

Dean Reuter:  Let me follow up while we’re waiting to see if other people chime in here. Is there a tension between the ambiguity and the coercive elements of this? That is, can something really be [inaudible 18:59] what's required if it is ambiguous?

 

Benjamin Flowers:  You cut out for a second, but it’s about the tension between them --

 

Dean Reuter:  -- The possible -- go ahead. The possible tension between ambiguity and coerciveness.

 

Benjamin Flowers:  No, because they go to two different parts of the offer from the federal government. So when we're asking whether one is coerced, we're looking at what's being either offered or withheld that's making the state accept the offer. So that goes to this massive amount of funds and the current economic situation. And then in terms of ambiguity, that's sort of the other side of the equation, which is what are you being made to give up? What are you being coerced into giving up? And whatever you give up has to be clear. That's the ambiguity part. And you can't be coerced into giving it up in the first place. That's the coercion part.

 

      The government did raise an argument related to that. I would say they said that the penalty here is not as great as it could be because you don't have to pay back all of the money, just the money that's offsetting net tax revenue. And we think that's foreclosed by the Chief Justice’s opinion in NFIB where, in a footnote responding to Justice Ginsburg, he says the question of how severe the burdens are you're made to accept is a different question from whether you were made to accept them.

 

      And the analogy he gives is a demand for all the money in your pocket. It's coercive, and equally coercive, whether you have $1 or $500. And I think an argument can actually be made that when the penalties are not as severe as they could be, that in some way makes the law more coercive because it's harder to turn down the offer.

 

Dean Reuter:  Interesting. Here’s our next caller. Go right ahead, caller.

 

Mitchell Keiter:  Yeah. Hi, this is Mitchell Keiter from Los Angeles. Although it's not directly relevant to the legal issues in the case, it's interesting to note that the administration is trying to constrain not only the tax policy of individual states but also foreign countries, the idea that the administration is pushing that there should not be tax competition among countries and there ought to be a minimum tax, which is sort of similar to the way it's not respecting individual state policy. It's also not respecting sovereign countries’ individual tax policies.

 

Benjamin Flowers:  Yeah. So our challenge is limited to simply the tax mandate. We're not seeking to strike down the entire bill. We’re not challenging any other provisions. It's simply that. One thing that does remind me of is we make the argument, and some other states have made this argument as well, that the germaneness conditions of the Spending Clause may not -- the condition that the -- if the rule that the conditions must relate to the federal programs goals are not met, or that this is -- it's not only commandeering the states, but it's strictly intended to commandeer the states.

 

      And the reason we know that is because taxes and subsidies are the flip side of the same coin. What you can do with tax, you can do with a subsidy. But here, this leaves the states free to issue subsidies. You can issue a $500 subsidy to everyone, but a $500 tax credit would run afoul of the mandate. So it seems as though the mandate is intended -- it doesn’t only have the effect to do this, but it has the intention to promote a particular philosophy of taxation.

 

Dean Reuter:  This is Dean again. We don't have any questions pending. Does the bill give a rationale for wanting to limit the ability of states to use the money to indirectly or directly reduce or replace a reduction of tax revenue?

 

Benjamin Flowers:  The bill itself does not. Some individual legislators have said that the goal here -- and the federal government said this in their brief as well. They say, “We intend this money to be used on expenditure for various things, and taxation is not one of the things we'd like it to fund.” But of course, there's a debate about whether this is truly a limit on how we can spend the money or whether it's an unrelated condition that's accepted in exchange for the money.

 

Dean Reuter:  Right. Understood. Interesting. We're still waiting for other questions from the floor. Let me ask you, if I could, about how this whole bill interacts with the states and then local and county governments. Local and county governments often have their own tax structure. What happens if Ohio County or the City of Cincinnati wants to reduce its taxes and use some of this money to offset it? What are the implications of that?

 

Benjamin Flowers:  Frankly, I'm not positive. I do know a few things. I can say what I know, and then say what I don't know. What I know is political subdivisions and states are entitled to other money under the bill. So there's separate funding of them directly. I am not sure whether they are subject to their own tax mandate. I think there's a strong argument that the tax mandate here would not apply to anything they do because it says it applies to a state or territory. Now, it's possible somewhere in the bill, state is defined in a way that would include them, but that's just not something I'm aware of at the moment.

 

Dean Reuter:  And we do have one question pending, but another question occurs to me. And that is, what if a state passes something that's not directly related to tax revenue, but has the effect of diminishing tax revenue? So, for example, Ohio imposes an aggressive set of social justice measures, or even anti-social justice measures, and that causes businesses and people to leave the state, which causes a decrease in tax revenue. Does this bill purport to reach that issue?

 

Benjamin Flowers:  Certainly not expressly, but given the ambiguity in the statute, I think someone could try to make an argument because it does cover change in laws that reduce any tax by providing for reduction in rate, rebate, deduction, credit, or otherwise. So I think the argument would have to use that "or otherwise" to sweep in things like that. That'd be a very aggressive reading. It's not one I've seen the federal government endorse, but I suppose it's conceivable.

 

Dean Reuter:  So, theoretically, if a state like California implemented a new regime of environmental laws, and businesses decided to flee for Texas—just hypothetically here—and people left with them, and there was an overall net reduction in taxes, that might or might not --

 

Benjamin Flowers:  -- Well, keep in mind it has to be a net reduction from a change in law that reduces a tax. So the question here would be whether the fleeing is a reduction in tax to go.

 

Dean Reuter:  Very interesting. I mentioned another question from our audience.

 

Richard Samp:  This is Richard Samp with the New Civil Liberties Alliance. In reading through Janet Yellen's letter, she mentions that at some unstated point in the future, the Treasury Department would be issuing further guidance on this, which I assume sets up an argument by the federal government that your lawsuit is pretty mature because, for one thing, you don't have to submit any sort of certification that you're in compliance until after the other guidance has been issued. Does the Treasury Department in the response to your preliminary injunction motion raise that argument, and can you elaborate what your response is?

 

Benjamin Flowers:  Sure. They do raise the ripeness argument, standing argument, though not based on any doubt that the state will take the money. Keep in mind we're still at the pleading stage. What they say is that the state cannot show that any -- first of all, they said that the state has not yet done anything that would implicate the law. And second, that even if the state did that, it couldn't show that it would cause the net tax revenue reduction that would implicate the statute.

 

      And we actually have two responses to that, one factual, one legal. The factual one is that the state has reduced taxes and has some other potential tax cuts pending. So that takes care of that. And then given the ambiguity of the law, the uncertainty about what it means, the state would be harmed by the very realistic threats that this action could be brought. They have to act with this hanging over their heads.

 

      And that goes to a whole other set of harms that we say justify standing, including not only being put to a choice of your sovereignty or your life, your sovereignty or this badly needed money, which is the same choice that Spending Clause plaintiffs are always subjected to. But also the obligation to enact the budget, and Ohio’s is due constitutionally on July 1st, and to make other legislative choices is dangling over the legislature's head, uncertainty about what it means and the impossibility of providing some certainty about what it means.

 

      You mentioned the regulations. They do suggest that there will be regulations forthcoming. But as I noted in my maybe too long intro, there are two responses to that. The first is that even if they were able to regulate here, the interpretation would have to be a plausible interpretation, and it's very difficult to see how to make sense of this in any plausible way that's not just rewriting the statute.

 

      But more fundamentally, the Supreme Court has never said, and the Sixth Circuit has never said, that an agency can fix Congress's unconstitutional law after the fact of the regulation. And that really makes sense when you think about it. If Congress has limited powers under the Spending Clause, if it exceeds its powers by enacting a law that is, say, coercive or ambiguous, the law is contra to the Constitution, so invalid. It's odd to say to an executive officer to continue to enforce it and limit the application or clarify it in a way that brings it back into compliance with the Constitution. I hope that answered the question.

 

Dean Reuter:  Let me make a final call for questions. And I do have one more question. My final question is whether or not there were other suits being filed by other states, whether you're leading the process, what's happening elsewhere in the country?

 

Benjamin Flowers:  Yeah. There are similar cases pending all around the country with multiple states. I strongly suspect there will be some more states in the future. I know Alabama, West Virginia, and I believe Arkansas are working together. And if I'm not mistaken, they have quite a few joinders from other states on that one. That's pending in Alabama. There’s a case pending in Arizona brought by the state of Arizona. There's a case pending in Missouri brought by the state of Missouri.

 

      So, yes, there are other cases, and I expect there will be even more. And that, of course, creates the possibility of a circuit split, which creates -- or rather, increases the likelihood of Supreme Court review. So we're still at the beginning phases, and we'll see what happens. But right now, that's quite a bit of litigation about this going on all over the country.

 

Dean Reuter:  Well, we do have another question from the audience.

 

David Tryon:  Hey, Ben. This is David Tryon. I'm currently working down in the West Virginia Attorney's Office in the Associate General’s Office. So great to hear you --

 

Benjamin Flowers:  -- How are you? I'm hearing a lot of friends on this call. It's great.

 

David Tryon:  Yeah. Well, fascinating case. I appreciate you taking the point on all these, being  head or writing on the briefing schedule. So we're actually watching how you handle these things.

 

      So I just wanted to mention one thing that’s also interesting. You may want to comment about the difference on how the statute handles pension funds, provisions on pension funds, which does not include the “indirectly” aspect, and also the fact that the federal government is so averse to state cutting taxes, but within the same bill itself cuts some taxes.

 

      So that's interesting. And then further, I think that the fact that this is such an important issue that have been, I think, four amicus curiae briefs filed in your case alone. But I think those are all significantly -- show the significance of this issue that you highlighted. So I don’t know if you want to comment on any of those things. But I do have a question because this is going to be heavily watched by a lot of people. Is there a way that folks who are not parties to the case will be able to watch the arguments online?

 

Benjamin Flowers:  So at least in Ohio, in our case—I'm not sure about the other cases—I believe on the docket for our case there’s a public call-in line. I apologize if I'm wrong about that because I know I have my lines calling in. I didn't check for everyone else. But I believe there is a way to listen in to that. And then, of course, we'd go up to the courts of appeals. I believe every court of appeals offers audio or video recordings, so those would be available as well.

 

David Tryon: Okay.

 

Dean Reuter: Very good. Looks like, Ben Flowers, we've had our final question. I'll give you a minute or so to wrap up, if you have a final thought.

 

Benjamin Flowers:  I just want to thank you for having me on and for everyone's interested in these matters. I find them fascinating. It's good to know that other people do as well. And again, I appreciate your time.

 

Dean Reuter:  Of course, I look forward to having you back on as the case develops. I'm sure you'll stay in touch and let us know about significant developments, and maybe we'll have yet another call. But with that, thank you, Ben Flowers, for joining us today, personally and on behalf of the Federalist Society. I want to thank the audience as well for dialing in and for your thoughtful questions. A reminder to check your emails, monitor our website for upcoming Teleforum conference calls. But until the next call, we are adjourned. Thank you very much, everyone.

 

[Music]

 

Dean Reuter:  Thank you for listening to this episode of Teleforum, a podcast of The Federalist Society's Practice Groups. For more information about the Federalist Society, the practice groups, and to become a Federalist Society member, please visit our website at fedsoc.org.