It's an extraordinary use of emergency power occurring in an extraordinary circumstance, a circumstance that this country has never faced before.

Does that agency have the power to at least say, look, the person next to you, they don't have to get vaccinated.

But if they don't get vaccinated, they should be wearing a mask or they should be getting tested.

And so they were wrong.

I mean, they were wrong in that part of the case.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus.

This is Slate's podcast about the law and the rule of law and the courts and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover some of those issues at Slate. And we have had a busy new year. We've had the anniversary of January 6th with the Justice Department and the January 6th committee working to unearth what really happened and who to hold accountable.

We've had voting rights on a collision course with the filibuster in the Senate.

And we had fast-track cases about COVID mitigation efforts that were heard last Friday decided this past Thursday night at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, that latter question, COVID and how the government may or may not respond to a pandemic

that is once again crushing health care systems, buckling supply chains, that's the topic of

this week's show. And part of me wants to just suggest that if you never caught the episode just a few

weeks ago with Richard Lazarus, you might give that a spin as well.

Because while Richard was talking about environmental regulations, he could just as easily

have been talking about health rules.

And he proved, I think, pretty prophetic on helping us see the roadmap of how government agency rules are likely to be dismantled by this current Supreme Court.

Later on in the show, Slate Plus members are going to have a chance to listen to me chat with Mark Joseph Stern about state efforts to bar January 6 participants from holding office, as well as the refusal of Neil Gorsuch to mask up this week at the High Court and questions around voting rights legislation

that are going to be stymied in the Senate. That segment is only accessible to Slate Plus members.

Thank you so much for being the support we need at the magazine right now. But first, to COVID.

So here are the numbers on Friday, according to the New York Times.

An average of more than 803,000 COVID cases have been reported every day in the United States.

That's an increase of 133 percent from just two weeks ago. Twenty-five states and territories

...