EP256 A Modest Proposal for Supreme Court Reform with Steven Gregory

Stephen Gregory of the Gregory Law Firm, an experienced attorney, mediator, and arbitrator, joined Mac Pierre-Louis of MacPierreLouis.com. The discussion was centered around Stephen’s intriguing ideas for Supreme Court reform, as outlined in his blog post titled “A Modest Proposal for Supreme Court Reform.”

Stephen Gregory, who has a diversified background in law, mediation, and arbitration, shared his insights on the current composition and functioning of the U.S. Supreme Court, while highlighting key issues such as the lack of diversity—geographic, educational, and religious—among the current justices.

Gregory proposes a “re-imagination” of the court by expanding its size in a way that diffuses the excessive focus on individual justices, mitigates potential improprieties, and lessens political and social pressures on the court, all while enabling the court to handle more cases efficiently.

For more insights from Stephen, visit GregoryLawFirm.us. See Transcript below.

Other Links Discussed:

https://gregorylawfirm.us/a-modest-proposal-for-supreme-court-reform

A Modest Proposal https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm

TRANSCRIPT

0:02 A Modest Proposal for Court Reform with Stephen Gregory of the Gregory Law Firm that is your topic for today.

0:12 Welcome to the Lawyers and Mediators International Show and Podcast, where we discuss law and conflict resolution topics to educate both professionals and everyday people.

0:22 Catch regular episodes on YouTube and any way you get your podcasts.

0:26 Just remember, nothing in these episodes constitutes legal advice, so be sure to talk to a lawyer, as cases are fact-dependent

0:38 Hey, welcome back everybody.

0:39 This is Mac Pierre-Louis, attorney, mediator, arbitrator, working throughout Florida and Texas.

0:45 And welcome back to the show.

0:46 It’s been a while.

0:47 I’ve been a little bit of a hiatus, but I’m glad to be back to talk with more interesting people with interesting things to tell.

0:56 And one of which is Mr. Steven Gregory on your screen.

1:02 He’s an attorney like me and a mediator like me and an arbitrator as well.

1:07 And so Steven, you have been a lawyer for, I believe, three decades.

1:13 And so you’ve basically done it all, lots of mediations under your belt, lots of legal work under your belt.

1:19 And so I wanted people to know more about you before we get into our topic about court reform, Supreme Court reform, particularly.

1:26 But can you please speak a little bit about yourself, where you are, where you practice, and let people get to know you.

1:33 I’m happy to do that.

1:34 You mentioned mediation.

1:37 I really got into mediation because prior to going to law school, actually I was in the investment business for about six years back in the 1980s.

1:51 And so I was very familiar with the financial services industry.

1:56 And I did, early on in my career as a lawyer, I did quite a bit of securities litigation And for that reason, I became an arbitrator for what was then called NASD, the National Association of

2:14 Securities Dealers.

2:15 It’s now called FINRA, the Financial

2:20 Revolution Authority, Financial Regulatory Authority, sorry.

2:24 And it includes mediation and arbitration.

2:28 After that, I pursued mediation training and I’ve mediated securities cases.

2:38 mediated accident cases. I’ve mediated quite a few domestic relations cases, as you do.

2:46 And you were just telling me that you were doing one today.

2:49 Exactly.

2:50 I was going to ask you, how’s your week gone?

2:54 Yeah, thanks so much.

2:56 Had a pretty interesting mediation this morning, actually.

2:59 We just got it settled for temporary orders.

3:02 So I’m very happy.

3:03 And I think those people are happy as well. But that’s my passion these days, which is helping people make peace.

3:10 And so it’s good to hear somebody else who’s doing it.

3:13 Not particularly in family all the time, like I do, but also in civil actions and in the business world.

3:21 So what about arbitration?

3:22 Tell me, what do you do in that regard?

3:25 Yes, I began doing, again, FINRA arbitrations, securities arbitrations. But since then, I have become an arbitrator for the – American Arbitration Association.

3:38 I’m also an arbitrator for the Better Business Bureau, which has, you may know, has a national program for arbitrating disputes over

3:50 cars that, automobiles, that may be subject to the lemon laws in various states and also warranty claims.

3:59 So in the American Arbitration Association,

4:04 well, I arbitrate virtually every kind of

4:08 business dispute and consumer dispute.

4:12 So where are you based when you’re doing all of this?

4:15 I live in Birmingham, Alabama.

4:18 I am licensed in Alabama as well as in Tennessee.

4:23 You probably know that with arbitration of disputes that are filed with resolution forums, such

4:31 FINRA American Arbitration Association, or in fact, the Better Business Bureau.

4:37 Arbitrators may actually find themselves arbitrating matters that are between citizens of different states, necessarily

4:49 between citizens of states where those arbitrators practice law because those are two different things.

4:55 Arbitration serving as an arbitrator is not the practice of law.

5:01 And as you know, and I’m sure you probably tell your parties this every time you mediate a case, you’re not practicing law when you’re mediating.

5:10 So we can do that in other jurisdictions.

5:15 And so some of my cases involve

5:20 parties from all over the country.

5:24 I mentioned the Better Business Bureau.

5:25 A lot of people probably don’t realize that the Better Business Bureau has a national program that

5:32 allows consumers to submit claims to an arbitrator.

5:36 Yep. If they have a car that they think has been, the dealers tried to repair too many times or whatever.

5:43 It’s a quick and easy way to resolution of those kinds of disputes.

5:50 Yes, I remember that when I was doing my arbitration training, I remember the the Better Business Bureau coming up quite a bit, actually.

5:58 Yes, so

6:01 one of the passions that you have is writing, and I learned earlier that not only are you an attorney and all these other

6:10 legal-related fields that you work in, but before that, you were an educator, and before that, you studied English and creative writing.

6:22 So tell me a little bit about that before we get into the topic of the day, because what we’re gonna be talking about is a thing you wrote recently on your blog.

6:33 talking about Supreme Court reform.

6:33 But tell me about your creative writing ’cause that’s a talent that I hope one day to acquire myself.

6:37 Oh, well, you probably already have a talent because I know you have the capacity for hard work.

6:43 I know you work hard as a mediator.

6:45 And writing is writing, as I used to tell my students, writing is mostly rewriting.

6:53 And so writing is work and just like any worthwhile endeavor you have to

7:02 work at it.

7:02 And yeah, I finished my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama in 1982.

7:10 I

7:13 have published some short stories and also a novel called Cold Winter Rain set in Alabama mostly.

7:21 It’s a sort of hard-boiled detective novel and able to deliver the total.

7:30 the main character is retired lawyer.

7:34 Okay, interesting, Cold Winter Rain.

7:36 Thank you for that, might check it out.

7:39 And yeah, so lots of similarities.

7:42 I have imagined education and you read educator and then licensed in two different states, so lots of different

7:48 similarities.

7:49 But with that writing skill, you think a lot about our country, our political system and what works and what doesn’t work.

8:02 So we were talking before the pre-show that you thought a lot about how the Supreme Court of the US should be reimagined.

8:12 So as you know, when people out there know that it’s been a controversial topic, the discussion surrounding court packing and whether or not the Supreme Court of the US should change, how many

8:25 judges should be on it, justices should be on it, whether or not

8:30 certain individuals, individual justices

8:35 have too much clout than they should, are

8:40 committing certain improprieties they should not.

8:42 And recently, just this summer, back in July in the US Congress, people were putting forth bills to try to impeach one particular justice, for example,

8:53 Justice Clarence Thomas.

8:55 And so this is a hot-button issue because the Supreme Court is always these days, especially on people’s minds, especially during a presidential election year.

9:05 And what you have done is wrote on your blog and I’ll share my screen so people can take a look at it if they want to read it.

9:14 GregoryLawFirm. us is your law firm website.

9:18 But on the blogpage where you write, you’ve written an article back on July 11th

9:29 a modest proposal for Supreme Court reform.

9:35 And I read it. Very interesting.

9:38 And so that’s what we’re here to talk about today is to give people the, I guess, audio book version between you and me and talk to people why do we need to reform the Supreme Court?

9:54 What is the problem with the lack of diversity and what is your solution as to how the court should be changed?

10:03 But let me give you the floor.

10:06 So tell us what problem exists, why do we even need to have this discussion to begin things?

10:12 I love the word you used in that introduction Mac and the word was reimagining.

10:19 I think there are so many things in, so many parts of our government structure that could be reimagined for modern times.

10:29 When the Constitution was drafted, Article 3 is the article of the Constitution that

10:38 creates the courts.

10:39 But at that time, the United States was an entity that was primarily – well, it was all of East Coast and had, what, 15 million people.

10:51 It served a very different population and very different kinds of disputes. At that time, as I recall, there were only six justices on the court.

11:03 The number of justices has been changed from time to time.

11:07 Has it always been nine?

11:09 It’s been six.

11:10 It’s been seven.

11:12 It’s now nine.

11:13 Some have proposed that it be expanded to 13.

11:19 My view of just expanding the court, sometimes that has been called court packing by those who want.

11:28 to use a negative term for it.

11:35 But it’s my view that that sort of change is not enough and

11:44 is really a re-imagining, is a restructuring that I think we need on the Supreme Court.

11:52 I think one of the difficulties we have today with the court, and you mentioned some of them, is that we have far too much focus on each individual justice.

12:04 And this focus, there are only nine of them, has led to some, let us say, potential improprieties on the court.

12:17 You mentioned

12:19 articles of impeachment for Justice Thomas. We all know that

12:25 because we’ve been told on the media so many times,

12:28 but Justice Thomas has accepted trips

12:34 and other gifts from one of your fellow Texans, a man named Harlan Crow,

12:42 a very wealthy businessman who has from time to time matters that come before the court, either through his business or otherwise

13:02 And what I want to try to do is to remove some of that focus on individual justices through a restructuring, a reimagining of how the Supreme Court works.

13:02 Yeah.

13:02 So before we get to the solution, your proposal, why don’t we talk about more of the problem you mentioned in your article, this lack of diversity, that one of the problems we have first off is

13:02 that all current nine Supreme Court justices are kind of models of each other.

13:28 are from the same geographic area.

13:30 They all believe the same kind of things.

13:33 And they don’t represent the true American people in terms of diversity.

13:39 Can you go

13:41 down and explain some ways there’s a lack of diversity in the court and how that’s a problem?

13:47 Thank you, yes.

13:49 One of the startling lacks of diversity on the court is that they are all from the same geographic area in the United States, more or less, they are all from the Northeast.

14:00 And they attended more or less similar institutions from the time they first started going to school through law school.

14:12 And speaking of law school, there are up until Amy Coney Barrett was nominated in to the court, all of the justices for many, many years and then either Harvard or Yale Law School graduates.

14:28 Ivy League Law School graduates.

14:32 Amy Barrett is a Notre Dame Law School graduate and she was a professor at Notre Dame as well, as you probably know before she was nominated to support.

14:42 Another way in which they are not so diverse is religious.

14:48 And

14:50 that stems as we all know from a case called Roe vs Wade and from the controversy over the issue of abortion.

15:01 That’s a very political issue, of course, and it has led to

15:07 presidents appointing justices who support either one view or the other.

15:14 And oddly enough, you have to think through this, but oddly enough, that has led to the fact that there are no Protestants really on the court and there haven’t been for a long time.

15:27 And of course, there are no

15:30 people from other viewpoints, religious viewpoints.

15:34 There are no Islamic justices.

15:36 There are no Buddhist justices.

15:39 But particularly, there are no Protestant justices, even though that’s probably 50 at least of the American public.

15:49 So Republican presidents have tended to nominate Catholics because of the institutional opposition to abortion in the Catholic Church, while Democrats have tended to appoint Jews.

16:10 And so at the moment, we have Catholics and Jews on the court.

16:17 And

16:19 it’s just my view that that can’t be particularly, or is it particularly healthy and doesn’t just another reflect the composition and the religious composition of the American people.

16:32 Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t stop and think about that, especially the fact that there are no Protestants.

16:39 I didn’t think about it, not even with Ketanji Brown Jackson, who got recently appointed.

16:46 I’m not sure what her religious background is or her affiliation, but

16:52 yeah, I didn’t notice it either

16:56 She is actually a sort of non-denominational protest that she’s, of course, the most recent

17:02 appointee.

17:02 And she

17:04 says that she’s a non-denominational protestant I think, and

17:11 there is that.

17:13 Yeah, so and the geography thing stood out to me, the fact that most of these folks are in the northeast of the US. and that’s where they hail from. So, if

17:26 there’s nobody from Texas or California on the court, then sure, the question is how well, will they really know what our lives are like?

17:37 And, or like you said, Montana or Hawaii, even, there’s just sort of lack of diversity there.

17:44 Okay, so we have lack of diversity.

17:47 There’s a big focus on individual justices that there probably shouldn’t be, especially when that wasn’t a big point at the time of the founding of the nation.

17:57 But now, here we are with television, social media, justices taking trips, being interviewed.

18:08 We have a problem from your perspective.

18:10 So now what is the solution to not use that dirty word Court packing.

18:16 What is the way you’d reimagine how the courts should look like where we still keep the integrity of the Supreme Court as it was originally envisioned to be a.

18:26 third branch of government that’s going to be equal to the other two, so without losing the value of the court, because we need the rule of law, but without having all the entanglements and all the

18:39 negatives that come with it, so what’s your proposal?

18:41 My proposal is that, as you know, we have 13 circuit courts, that’s the intermediate level of appeal, the intermediate level of court, the first level of appeal in the federal system, and so

18:58 the Ninth Circuit is by far the largest of the circuits.

19:03 I believe it now has 30 or so judges, and I think the smallest has six.

19:12 There’s quite a disparity among in the size of the circuit, so it’s not very controversial to consider splitting the 9th circuit into two or three circuits.

19:25 And in fact, it has actually been proposed.

19:27 And there you see it, even geographically,

19:31 it’s very large.

19:32 Well, I’m a nerd, so I need to see this visually.

19:35 And hopefully anybody out there who’s trying to get an education on this can follow along.

19:39 But yeah, I don’t really do much federal work.

19:45 And so I’m mainly at the state level.

19:47 But yeah, in the US, we have a circuit court system.

19:52 And I used to live in the 11th circuit when I used to live in South Florida.

19:56 And now I do most of my work while living in the 5th circuit and the Houston area.

20:02 But yeah, go ahead.

20:04 Exactly.

20:05 And you can see how small the first circuit is.

20:08 It’s essentially the northeast corner of the United States while the 9th circuit encompasses much of the west

20:19 And so it would be – I don’t think it’s controversial to consider splitting that circuit into two or three different courts.

20:28 And in fact, there have been proposals in Congress to do just that.

20:32 I think there is one pending even now.

20:35 So my idea would be to have instead of 13 courts,

20:40 you would have 15 circuit courts.

20:45 And then from there, that is conducive to appointing three of those judges from each of those circuits to serve on the Supreme Court.

20:59 So that you would have a total of

21:02 45 justices on the Supreme Court.

21:04 Now that seems like a huge step to go from 9 to 45, that’s five times as many.

21:11 Great.

21:12 But

21:14 if you think about, I like to think about this, like to think about.

21:18 What does the justice of the Supreme Court today?

21:22 what are they thinking about when they are driving into work in the morning?

21:27 What are they doing?

21:28 What do they do every day?

21:31 What’s on their minds?

21:32 Well,

21:34 we all know that they issue 70 or 80 opinions every year, but they receive 9 or 10 or even 11, 000 petitions for

21:47 writ of certiorari, cert

21:56 petitions as lawyers call them.

21:56 And they have to, somebody has to decide which of the cases to accept.

21:57 That seems like an awful lot of work for nine justices to me.

22:04 So one of the things that could happen if we expanded to court, as I talk about, is that some of that work could be divided among more judges.

22:16 But we also might see the Supreme Court accepting more cases.

22:22 and perhaps accepting cases that aren’t just on social or cultural or political issues.

22:29 It seems like so many of the cases that they accept and write opinions on these days are by nature controversial because they are political cases or they are social or cultural cases.

22:46 I’m sorry, to make sure I understand the first part is creating 15 circuits and each one will have rotating

22:58 three judges.

22:58 Each three would be appointed by the president like by the constitution, right?

23:03 And I’m quite not clear about how frequent the rotations are gonna be happening.

23:11 Yeah, I recall,

23:13 I suggested rotating them every five years.

23:17 Got it, okay so that judges or justices are appointed.

23:22 into the Supreme Court and then they just rotate back to their circuit court and continue to serve on that circuit court for their lifetime appointment.

23:33 I’m sure you’ve seen proposals to impose term limits on the Supreme Court and on other federal courts.

23:41 Well, unfortunately, the Constitution is an impediment to that because the Constitution provides that federal judges

23:52 serve during good behavior is the phrase and that’s been interpreted to mean for life.

24:01 Got it.

24:01 So lifetime appointment, also their pay cannot be decreased.

24:05 That’s correct.

24:06 And so you’re still keeping the guts of Article 3 courts intact.

24:15 All you’re doing is changing the number in a massive way.

24:19 So this can’t even be seen as what FDR was trying to do back in the post-New Deal era, right?

24:28 This is a complete re-imagination of it.

24:30 That’s right, what FDR was trying to do was to put enough judges on the court.

24:35 Who would pass, who would

24:39 find his New Deal legislation to be constitutional.

24:43 But also with the larger number of justices, they would serve in panels on each case that they consider. Just as the circuit courts do today, you know that the circuit courts meet in panels,

24:59 panels of three,

25:02 and those panels do the work of the court.

25:05 But sort of the magic of that at the circuit court level is a litigant doesn’t know which judges are going to be on his panel.

25:13 They are drawn randomly, just as you mentioned, we were talking earlier, the trial judges, in the federal courts are assigned randomly to new cases if they come up.

25:26 Yep.

25:28 So that prevents parties from influencing those judges ahead of time

25:34 because you don’t know who the judges are gonna be.

25:37 Yeah.

25:37 With our nine judges today, we know who they’re going to

25:41 be.

25:41 Correct.

25:43 Yeah, so we have 300 million people potentially trying to

25:48 put pressure on nine individuals. Now you’d be spreading this out and the people are still going to serve, but even though they have lifetime, they’re only gonna be serving for five years at a time.

26:03 They’re still gonna be appointed by the president like the constitution says, they’re pay still is not gonna be changed.

26:09 Although, would that be changed?

26:11 I’m guessing it wouldn’t be.

26:14 It’s an interesting question, pay for judges. As you know, another issue,

26:21 in addition to the lavish trips and other emoluments of being friends with someone like Harlan Crow.

26:34 Supreme Court judges write books.

26:37 They give lectures.

26:38 Some of them earn quite a bit of outside income.

26:44 That concerns me a little bit.

26:46 I’m not really sure that it means that they are in any way biased, but I don’t think it would be a bad idea to increase the pay of Supreme Court justices

26:56 and federal judges in general.

26:58 I don’t even think, and when I say this to people, most people are

27:03 very opposed to this, I don’t even think it would be a bad idea to increase the pay of senators and members of the House of Representatives because they’re really not paid all that much, considering

27:16 the fact that you have to have two houses, you have to live in Washington, DC, which is one of the most – It’s expensive.

27:24 I got family there.

27:24 Yes, I know.

27:26 Yeah.

27:26 So, you know, considering that what they’re paid really isn’t all that much.

27:33 Gotcha.

27:34 Yeah.

27:34 I don’t think you get much support there, you know, from the, from the populace on that one.

27:39 But.

27:41 Exactly.

27:42 But okay.

27:43 So what about the downsides?

27:50 I

27:51 was thinking, would this invite more corruption, meaning human beings being who they are?

27:52 Corruption both from, you know, regular citizens trying to influence these

27:60 45, or corruptions where people will, I guess, buy themselves a Supreme Court seat.

28:06 Is that something that’s more possible, to get it from a president?

28:10 Well, it is possible today, of course, we know that

28:16 judges, federal judges are first politicians.

28:20 they come

28:22 to the attention

28:25 of the president.

28:28 The president appoints not just Supreme Court justices, but all judges in the federal system.

28:34 Typically what happens as you know at the local, at the state level is that in the federal district courts, in order to be appointed to a position as a federal judge in the federal district court,

28:50 you probably have to have the ear, have to have the attention of one of the senators or both of them

28:57 in your state.

28:58 That’s practically, you know, how it works.

29:03 And so is corruption a potential problem?

29:06 Yes it is, but it is today too.

29:10 So

29:12 I’d be happy to see a little more oversight.

29:16 And something we haven’t talked about of course,

29:19 The Supreme Court today has only a voluntary

29:25 ethics guidelines, unlike the other federal courts which have mandatory ethics guidelines.

29:33 So it would not be a bad idea, I think, to have mandatory ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justice, justice as well.

29:42 Yeah Well, so the whole story of the Supreme Court is an interesting one because ever since law school,

29:53 ever since Marbury vs. Madison, right, with the

29:56 Supreme Court basically gets a final say.

29:58 They get to determine what the law is, what the truth is.

30:01 And I was thinking, could they slam this idea down?

30:07 Because Congress has a lot of power, they ultimately are the ones who make decisions about how the Supreme Court is to operate, how it’s supposed to be divided.

30:19 where it’s supposed to be located.

30:20 Congress ultimately has all this power.

30:24 But from what I’ve always gathered, we’ve never breached that.

30:28 We’ve always kind of seen.

30:30 We’ve accepted the nine justices model.

30:34 It’s what we’ve always known.

30:35 It’s, and it sounds controversial, even to me as first reading, it sounds controversial, you know what you’re proposing.

30:43 But how would you get Americans, I guess, on board?

30:47 Is it that things need to get worse before they get better?

30:50 Or, and then does this model exist anywhere else?

30:54 Like, how do we know it might work?

30:56 That is a good question.

30:58 How do we get other people on board?

30:60 How do we get the American people on board?

31:02 Well, you know, one of the ways we can do that is to talk about how the court is not so functional right now.

31:09 It’s a little bit, in my opinion, dysfunctional.

31:12 And I think sort of everyone recognizes that, and

31:18 you ask if other countries have this model.

31:20 Other countries have all sorts of models.

31:22 And I can’t tell you a specific example at the moment, but I’m glad you asked because that’s something I want to look at.

31:31 I do think that other countries have more, have larger Supreme Court or ultimate, if they don’t, whether they call it a Supreme Court or not, ultimate decision makers.

31:42 Yeah.

31:43 Well, you know, like I said before, the pre-show, you know, I’m from a country where we’ve had a very deep history of corruption at the top and that’s influenced my political thinking.

31:57 And I always believe that power should not be concentrated whenever possible because I can lead to really bad things, especially where it’s only a few people making decisions for millions of people.

32:11 So I’m definitely open to a proposal that’s going to spread power more, right?

32:18 The reason we have

32:20 not, you know, the reason we have a three branch government is because we wanted to do, you know, separate but equal kind of thing to spread it out.

32:31 So that is didn’t get concentrated in the hands of a monarch, like they had in England.

32:35 And so there’s benefits to diluting it while keeping it still intact and giving legit legitimacy.

32:43 And so perhaps the way to go is as you’re proposing, going from 9 to 45, and then focusing more on the court itself and not the individuals.

32:53 But definitely I wanted to give you the time to kind of explain and help flesh this out so that people can understand, you know, this reimagination.

33:02 So last thing, tell us about why the title A Modest Proposal.

33:07 Well, it’s, you mentioned, we talked about undergraduate majors and that sort of thing and uh, uh,

33:16 uh, Swift.

33:19 has a, wrote an article called A Modest Proposal, just called A Modest Proposal, in which he suggested that the way to

33:31 resolve the problem of poverty and hunger and starving children on

33:40 the British isles at that time was to eat the children.

33:46 Of course, a tongue in cheek suggestion.

33:52 My modest proposal is maybe not so tongue in cheek.

33:55 I’m not wedded to

33:57 45, so 30 might also work.

34:01 Got it, got it, got it.

34:03 So definitely an interesting conversation.

34:06 Thank you so much.

34:07 So then if people want to get in touch with you and follow you and what’s the best way they can stay in contact and reach out to you Well, my website, which you have mentioned, is.

34:19 GregoryLawFirm. us.

34:19 My email address can be easily found on the website.

34:25 Awesome.

34:26 All right, Steven Gregory, thank you so much for the chat today.

34:32 I look forward to hearing more from you again.

34:36 I’ll keep following your blog post and I understand you might be coming up with your own

34:42 podcast pretty soon as well, right?

34:44 We’re working on it.

34:45 It’s a nascent podcast, not anything like as mature as yours, but we’re working on it.

34:51 Well, thank you.

34:52 Yeah, well, definitely looking forward to having more voices on these topics.

34:56 All right, Steven, thank you so much.

34:58 What, everyone?

34:59 Thanks so much for tuning in.

35:01 Until next time, check everything out on Lmipodcast. com and on the YouTube channel.

35:06 All right, take care, everybody.

35:07 Thanks, Mac.