Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Was it Worth it, Pam?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It was a rough week for two of the top lawyers in the Trump administration, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer pair ... Ever since Donald Trump’s return to office and the installation of his (second choice) Attorney General, we’ve been tracking the toxic combination of incompetence and cruelty at the Department of Justice. Pam Bondi, Trump’s hand-picked attack dog for Attorney General, finally reached the point of no return. She’s out, and Todd Blanche is in … for now. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss AG Bondi’s legacy, and why she may still be dragged before congress to answer for the DOJ’s mishandling of the Epstein Files. Meanwhile, over at One, First Street, Mr. Trump became the first sitting president to show up live and in person to oral arguments, in a woefully misguided possible attempt to intimidate “his” justices into buying his nonsensical theory about birthright citizenship. John Sauer, his Solicitor General, flopped and flailed, and revealed a fundamental flaw at the heart of the second Trump presidency: if loyalty is the only test, you might fail a bunch of other, more significant, tests. Finally, Dahlia and Mark unpack the thorny and confusing 8-1 decision from the High Court in Chiles v. Salazar, taking a huge bite out of conversion therapy bans, and what that means for LGBTQ youth and the First Amendment.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:09.3 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:14.1 | You sit here and you attack the president, and I am not going to have it. |
| 0:18.9 | I'm not going to put up with it. |
| 0:20.4 | When you're in politics, it looks no matter. I look at Pam, I would never say she's beautiful |
| 0:25.1 | because it's going to be the end of my political career. Sorry. |
| 0:28.6 | Madam. |
| 0:29.6 | President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country, ever, ever, never seen anything like it. |
| 0:41.4 | Thank you. |
| 0:42.0 | The Dow, the Dow right now is over, the Dow is over $50,000. |
| 0:48.5 | I don't know why you're laughing. |
| 0:49.7 | You're a great stock trader, as I hear Raskin. |
| 1:04.7 | There's a metaphor somewhere. |
| 1:09.8 | In the fact that for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president ambled into the Supreme Court to listen in on oral arguments. |
| 1:13.6 | This was in the case challenging the 14th Amendment's grant of birthright citizenship, |
| 1:18.3 | where he got bored when he realized, I guess, that he was losing, ambled out shortly after |
| 1:24.9 | Cecilia Wong, the ACLU lawyer, arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak, |
| 1:30.2 | and then posted something petulant on truth social about it. |
| 1:34.8 | Maybe he's just an emperor with increasingly thin robes, no real juice, |
| 1:40.7 | blinking in the face of seven justices who perhaps want to get off this particular |
| 1:46.1 | stretch of the roller coaster. Mark Joseph Stern popped up Wednesday immediately following the |
| 1:51.8 | birthright citizenship arguments with Professor Evan Bernick to dive deep into the text and the |
... |
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