The first amendment, it's really meant as a disruptor.

It's the people and journalists acting as surrogates for the people, disrupting and

interrupting government officials and holding them to account.

Hi and welcome back to Amicus Slates podcast about the courts and the Supreme Court and the law and the rule of law.

I am Dahlia Lithwick. I cover those sorts of things for Slate and this week was an off-week for the highest court in the land

but it was nevertheless busy having decided just at the end of the last week to hold a hearing on an evidentiary matter in that very same sense

as case we talked about on the last episode and the Justice Department is by the way pushing aggressively to

stop the lower court altogether and go right to the Supreme Court with this.

Last Friday also saw the filing of another stunning thing, a surprise motion in the High Court itself,

seeking to substitute Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for Matt Whittaker as Acting Attorney General.

That was filed by Tom Goldstein among others. He's a friend of this show.

But the weirdness extends so far past the Supreme Court itself you can't believe it.

We have a court in California that entered a temporary restraining order,

halting President Trump's brand new asylum rules at the border.

We have a battle between Senators Jeff Flake and Mitch McConnell over the confirmation of Trump judges.

Jeff Flake is now saying he's going to block those judges until there is legislation protecting the Robert Mueller investigation.

These and other things are just a few of the items for which we are thankful this holiday week.

We will never sleep again and the legal news continues to boggle the mine.

But now to that extraordinary lawsuit filed by CNN challenging the White House's decision to

bar CNN's Jim Acosta from the White House following a contentious press conference just two weeks ago.

After an initial loss in a federal district court and then White House threats to bar and seemingly torture

Jim Acosta indefinitely the whole thing was summarily settled on Monday night.

...