There is a great concern that, unless you have a very clear standard, you will turn many, many elections in the United States. Over to the judges.

The progressive agenda is dead on arrival because of the Supreme Court. So if you're talking about Medicare for All or Green New Deal or banning voter suppression or banning dark money

in politics or gerrymandering and you don't

have a plan to protect your agenda from the Supreme Court, then you really can't be taken

seriously as a candidate.

Hi and welcome to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the courts and the rule of law.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick and I cover some of that for Slate and this past week brought us,

in a smog of confusion and ambiguity, the Mueller report, kind of.

In fact, what we got was a four-page summary of hundreds of pages of Mueller report from the Attorney General.

And in the coming days and weeks, an almighty Wrangelfest in Congress will determine how much we see of the actual report.

You can rest assured we will cover what is actually in the Mueller report thoroughly and completely on the show once we know what it says.

But we need not rely on summaries or spin to talk about the proceedings of the U.S. Supreme Court,

which is what we are going to focus on this week with a dissection of the gerrymander cases heard on Tuesday coming up in a minute.

Now later on in the show, we're going to dig

into this issue of court packing, something that was completely unthinkable as a discussion

topic a year ago, but with Mitch McConnell's dogged focus on high-speed confirmations for federal

judges, Donald Trump has now seated about six of the federal appeals court bench, and the issue is starting to surface, believe it or not, early on the campaign trail.

Democratic candidates are talking openly about what to do about Donald Trump's Supreme Court if they capture the presidency and the Senate in 2020.

And so we will talk with Aaron Belkin, one of the architects of Pack the Courts, which is a newly minted effort to take very seriously the notion of straight up court packing on the left.

But first, we turn to the actual Supreme Court, as it exists today, which heard arguments this past Tuesday in two important gerrymandering cases, raising questions we have discussed a lot over the years on this podcast. The issue in the cases, whether there could ever be an unconstitutional political gerrymander is one we actually thought would be resolved. Definitely for all time last term, it was not. I'm not going to bury the lead here, the pair of cases.

One comes out of North Carolina based on congressional maps drawn by Republicans, the other out of Maryland, based on congressional maps drawn by Democrats.

This case may turn on Brett Kavanaugh, and I'm not even going to bury the bombshell.

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