Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Immigration: Whose Call Is It Anyway?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2018
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week the high court is on its winter break, but the team here at Amicus wanted to talk about DACA, the travel ban, and issues around immigrants, refugees, and the law. We talk Americanism. Who is American and how? What do the courts have to say about who can be here and who cannot? What role do the courts play in figuring out who belongs here and who doesn’t? To tackle these thorny and sometimes super-wonky questions, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Stephen Vladeck who teaches law at the University of Texas. Vladeck’s teaching and research focus on federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, and national security law. He’s CNN's Supreme Court analyst, co-editor in-chief of the Just Security blog, and a senior contributor to the Lawfare blog.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The courts have actually succeeded in slicing off the low-hanging fruit, and now we're actually having a serious debate about how much discretion the president has an immigration policy. |
| 0:19.0 | Hi, and welcome back to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the Supreme Court and the law and the Constitution and all that good stuff. |
| 0:27.8 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts and the law for Slate magazine. |
| 0:31.6 | And this week, the High Court is out still on its long winter break. |
| 0:36.3 | But the team here at Amicus thought it might be a good moment to talk a little bit about America. |
| 0:42.8 | Just going to go with that. |
| 0:45.7 | And this sort of large, roiling conversations we're now having in the courts around DACA, around the travel ban, around sanctuary cities. |
| 0:55.1 | It seems as though there is this new urgency to figure out who belongs here, who doesn't, and who gets to pick. |
| 1:02.8 | And there is no one I'd rather talk about that with then Steve Vladick. |
| 1:07.1 | He teaches law at the University of Texas. |
| 1:10.2 | His teaching focuses on federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, and national security. He's also a CNN Supreme Court analyst and co-editor-in-chief of the just security blog. And so, Steve, you've been with us, but it's been a long time. So thank you for coming back to join us on Amicus. |
| 1:26.6 | Thank you for having me. So let me ask you that same framing question I just started with, |
| 1:32.3 | which is it seems as though there is a tremendous amount of litigation right now in this country |
| 1:39.4 | surrounding these existential questions about who is American, who gets to be American, who gets to pick, |
| 1:46.7 | who gets to sit in judgment of the kinds of folks that can come, either as refugees or as immigrants, |
| 1:55.1 | or even in some instances, as visitors. |
| 1:58.0 | So can you just talk in, you know, from way, way, way lofty heights of levels of |
| 2:03.6 | abstraction about this anxiety and how it connects in your view to what Trumpism is all about a |
| 2:11.0 | year in? Sure. I mean, it's funny. I actually had written a blog post, basically a week before the |
| 2:16.0 | inauguration in 2017, where I predicted |
| 2:19.8 | that, you know, despite all of the press attention about emoluments and ethical considerations |
| 2:25.2 | and other sort of, you know, hot-button policy issues, that immigration was really going to be |
... |
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