Lawyers are Tackling our Democracy Problem Via the Take Care Clause
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2019
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dahlia Lithwick pans back this week to assess what’s holding and what’s buckling in terms of norms and institutions, two years and change into the Trump presidency. She’s joined by Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy, a new kind of litigation shop looking at global trends toward authoritarianism and trying to resist those trends in the United States.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There is a legal principle that underpins all of this. |
| 0:09.2 | It's in the Constitution twice. |
| 0:10.8 | The founders charge the president with taking care that the laws be faithfully executed. |
| 0:16.9 | The central crisis of the Trump presidency is that at root, the president is violating that oath and that central demand. |
| 0:30.6 | Hi, and welcome to Amicus. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. And I cover the courts in the Supreme Court and the law for Slate. |
| 0:38.8 | And we are two years now and change into the Donald Trump presidency. And this week, we thought we'd take the whole show to do something along the lines of an all-purpose general democracy checkup. |
| 0:52.2 | We talk so often on this show about whether our institutions are |
| 0:55.4 | holding or buckling, the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the Supreme Court |
| 0:59.3 | itself. But these questions seem to take a lot for granted. And so instead of talking about |
| 1:06.6 | the constitutional trees, as we do rightly on this show, we thought we'd pan back and have a look at |
| 1:12.1 | the whole constitutional forest. What do we mean about institutions? What do we mean about holding? |
| 1:17.2 | What do we mean about buckling? To do this, we invited Ian Bassin. He served as Associate White |
| 1:22.6 | House Council from 2009 to 2011 under President Barack Obama. And after Donald Trump was elected, Ian and Justin Florence and a bunch of other lawyers scrambled to create a new kind of litigation shop called Protect Democracy, of which he is executive director. |
| 1:39.1 | Protect Democracy has become a kind of fascinating model of cross-ideological, cross-party organization that uses, among other things, litigation, to protect democratic values and norms. |
| 1:52.0 | The border emergency case we talked about with Stuart Gerson last week, well, that's a protect democracy suit. |
| 1:57.7 | And one of the things they track are underlying threats to democracy as measured by six metrics and whether there is any real objective danger of sliding into authoritarianism. So two years in, we wondered if threats to the media, for instance, threats to the courts can be evaluated in any kind of aggregated way. |
| 2:17.9 | Is it time for worry? |
| 2:19.4 | Are the institutions doing their jobs? |
| 2:21.9 | That's a lot of stuff to talk about, but there's no one better situated do it. |
| 2:26.6 | So, Ian Basson, welcome to Anicus. |
| 2:29.2 | Thank you for having me. |
| 2:30.3 | Did I more or less get the brief correct? |
... |
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