This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

The lower courts are trying mightily to honor their oath, and they are holding Donald Trump accountable for every single

violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States. But of course, the Supreme

Court of the United States is doing anything bar.

If amicus were a daily podcast about the courts and the law, we would be hard-pressed to clock every norms violation, every injunction, every extrajudicial murder taking place in the Caribbean or the

Pacific throughout the past month. And on weeks like this, it's not even clear that an hourly

show could do justice to the havoc being brought at the Justice Department, the Pentagon,

to snap recipients, to lawful protesters on the streets of Chicago and Portland,

inside the FBI, and ICE, or CBP, or indeed among members of the federal judiciary.

So we try as best we can to make meaning of it all, to find trendlines and themes, to find exit

ramps and optimism and legal leverage and wins by increments.

And this week we are talking to one of the most stalwart defenders of the law and the Constitution and the vision of the founders that I have had the honor to know.

Judge J. Michael Ludig, whose piece this week in the Atlantic reminds us to take

seriously and also literally, and also very much to heart, the threats to democracy that are being

posed by Donald J. Trump. Later on in the show, we're going to be hearing from Rick Waldenberg,

the CEO of Learning Resources, the family-owned

business that sued the Trump administration for the so-called Liberation Day tariffs that are right now

walloping American businesses and farmers and consumers right in the pocketbook. His case goes before the

Supreme Court this coming Wednesday, and he, very much like Judge Ludig, is

very clear about the dangers of a monarchic president operating without guardrails and without an

internal breaking system. At some point, somebody needs to stand up. If everybody thinks that somebody should stand up just not me, nobody stands up.

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