Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, The Queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer.

She was also given the title The Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor.

Now, it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of

four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done

in her name. The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions

based on what their prejudices are.

Subscribe to The Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.

Thank you. Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court. What's dangerous for the right-wing justices here is that there's a lot to look at.

Justice Jackson has pulled back the curtain to look at stuff outside the immediate four corners of the question in front of them, that could go a lot of places.

This week, as the dust starts to settle on the Supreme Court term that ended without ever really ending last month,

and also the dust starts to settle on this great big catastrophic budget that is less a budget than a wealth transfer of wealth to the wealthy,

and also a transfer to Donald Trump's

terrifying army of masked immigration thugs.

We are trying to make meaning and also to find a path forward.

And one of the people on whom we have come to rely for both meaning making and for plan, is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of the great state of Rhode Island,

who has been warning us about what was happening to the courts and to the Supreme Court long before it became fashionable to do so,

and who urged everyone to do something about all this long before that started to feel next to

impossible. Senator White House is the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works

Committee. He's co-chair of the Caucus on International Narcotics Control and serves as a senior

member of the Judiciary Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Finance Committee. He served as Rhode Island's U.S. Attorney and State Attorney General before being elected to the Senate in 2006.

Senator Sheldon White House, welcome back to Amicus.

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