Attorney General Kris Mayes’ podcast has proven to be unpopular.
Mayes co-launched and co-hosts the podcast, “Pantsuits and Lawsuits” with fellow Democrat, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. The podcast — which Nessel called “the gayest AG podcast in America” at the outset, a nod to the two women being homosexual — has virtually no listenership or viewership. Mayes uses resources from the her office to run the podcast.
The attorneys general launched the podcast in February. The primary focus of their podcast has been criticizing President Donald Trump and his administration, though the podcast was marketed as a serious dive into legal topics.
Mayes has filed or joined 26 lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Among their earliest episodes were critical conversations on Trump attempting to end birthright citizenship, the mass firings of federal workers, federal agency funding cuts, and restrictions on abortion.
A June episode focused on the 10-year anniversary of the legalization of gay marriage with the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Michigan was one of the leading plaintiffs defending traditional marriage and the prohibition on gay marriage, along with Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
The succeeding episode contained an interview with April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, the former being the woman who sued for the right to marry her partner, Jayne, and adopt children in the state of Michigan.
There is one case the Supreme Court could take up that would revisit this decision: Davis v. Ermold, the case of the former county clerk in Kentucky who refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges. The Supreme Court has not yet announced whether it would grant review of the case.
A federal judge overturned Arizona law banning gay marriage as unconstitutional in October 2014, months before the Supreme Court decision.
Another episode discussed President Donald Trump’s desire to abolish the Department of Education (ED) and slim down other federal agencies. The special guest for that episode was Becky Pringle, president of the major teacher’s union, the National Education Association.
“The Trump administration is in the full throes of rampaging through our federal agencies right now, which we think threatens to impede the education of our kids across America in K-12 classrooms and higher education as well,” said Mayes.
In another more recent episode, the pair defended the Democrats’ multitude of lawsuits against the Trump administration as cost-saving for taxpayers. Mayes says she has recovered $1.5 billion in federal funding for programs the Trump administration sought to cut across healthcare, education, infrastructure, and public safety.
In a follow-up episode, Mayes and Nessel interviewed Melissa Palepu, a human trafficking and child abuse specialist within Nessel’s office. The two spent an hour discussing human trafficking and criticizing the Trump administration extensively for not releasing the Epstein files.
Mayes and Nessel focused their sixth episode on the greater “Make America Healthy Again” movement, led largely by Trump appointee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The episode had a featured guest, Will Humble with the Arizona Public Health Association (formerly Arizona Department of Health Services where he was a leader on Arizona’s COVID-19 response) to back their opposition of the Trump administration’s direction on public health.
The latest episode of “Pantsuits and Lawsuits” focused on the two pair’s complaints of their inability to work with the Department of Justice (DOJ). The two interviewed Barbara McQuade, one of the U.S. attorneys dismissed en masse by Trump in 2017.