Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Preview: A Shattering Blow to Fair Elections
Slate Daily Feed
Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices seem to be in a big rush to dismantle voting rights for non-white people. On Tuesday night, the right-wing supermajority handed down an unsigned shadow docket order that greenlights racial gerrymandering in Alabama and dramatically undermines voting rights protections nationwide. In this Opinionpalooza bonus episode exclusively for Slate Plus members, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern examine the details of the case. They also explore how we got here, and what this court’s jurisprudential arrogance and voracious appetite for power means for democracy itself. By approving racially discriminatory maps, the high court’s MAGA wing has exposed its willingness to rewrite long established legal rules in darkness—without transparency or accountability. This order also reveals a disturbing disregard for extensive factual findings from lower courts—and flips the legal terrain for voting rights from protection to peril.
This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court. The best way to support our work is by joining Slate Plus. (If you are already a member, consider a donation or merch!)
This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock weekly bonus episodes of Amicus—you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I am Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:11.1 | Welcome back to an unscheduled midweek episode of Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court in which Mark Joseph Stern and I |
| 0:22.6 | come together on this Opinion Paloosa season with yet more bad news from the U.S. Supreme |
| 0:30.2 | Court. Hi, Mark. Hi, Dahlia. And welcome to our Slate Plus members who are going to have access |
| 0:36.2 | to this conversation and to all of our Opinion Pallusa episodes in full. |
| 0:41.0 | If you want to hear the whole thing, go to slate.com slash amicus plus. |
| 0:44.8 | And thank you for supporting us on this end-of-term roller coaster. |
| 0:49.5 | Okay. So here it is, Mark. |
| 0:50.9 | On Tuesday evening, the Supreme Court handed down an unsigned per curiam shadow docket order, putting in place Alabama voting maps from 2023 that would badly disadvantage the state's black voters and relying on its updates. See, I'm putting that in quotation marks, in Louisiana v. Calais, |
| 1:12.6 | to make it all but impossible to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps ever again. |
| 1:18.6 | Mark, you wrote on this just a week ago and said that this case would actually dare the U.S. Supreme Court and the right-wing |
| 1:27.0 | justices on the court to say what it really thinks about black people's voting rights. |
| 1:33.4 | What were you trying to warn us about in that piece and what has indeed come to pass since then? |
| 1:39.8 | So my piece a week ago, what a long week it's been, said that this would sort of give the Supreme Court's Republican-appointed justices an opportunity to say whether or not they have truly abandoned the field of voting rights and fully annihilated voting rights for racial minorities and given states, particularly southern Republican legislatures, |
| 2:03.0 | a free hand to entrench white supremacy through brutal racial gerrymanders. And the Republican |
| 2:08.7 | appointed justices have done exactly that. In this barely reasoned unsigned shadow docket order, |
| 2:14.9 | the Republican appointed justices have allowed Alabama to impose at the |
| 2:20.3 | very last minute, as people are already voting in an ongoing primary election, a map that |
| 2:26.5 | eliminates one very diverse opportunity district for racial minorities that's currently represented |
| 2:32.4 | by a black Democrat and just carve it up |
| 2:35.4 | in a way that gives white voters total control over that district and they are certain to elect |
| 2:40.3 | a white Republican instead. And so this badly dilutes the political representation of black |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 25 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.