Amy Coney Barrett Is Following in the Footsteps of John Roberts
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2021
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate Supreme Court reporters Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern join forces to dissect Amy Coney Barrett’s first term on the bench. They talk about how her confirmation hearings were shaped by Democrats’ desire to paint her as an enemy of health care, and how her recent decision upholding the Affordable Care Act has gotten her outsized praise. Then, they dissect her desire to be seen as an academic rather than a conservative, and unpack what we can expect from her in the years to come.
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Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.6 | This is the waves. |
| 0:05.5 | This is the waves. |
| 0:06.6 | This is the waves. |
| 0:07.7 | This is the waves. |
| 0:08.4 | This is the waves. |
| 0:09.5 | This is the waves. |
| 0:10.1 | This is the waves. |
| 0:14.1 | Welcome to The Waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:22.2 | Every episode, you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds. |
| 0:27.8 | And today you've got me, Mark Joseph Stern, a staff writer for Slate covering courts in the law. |
| 0:33.0 | And me, Dahlia Lithwick, I am a senior editor at Slate, and I cover the courts. |
| 0:39.0 | Today we're talking about Amy Coney-Barritt's first term, which just wrapped up this month. |
| 0:45.7 | Justice Barrett notoriously replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court, |
| 0:50.8 | solidifying a six to three conservative majority. And today we'll be talking about what |
| 0:56.6 | impact her votes had on the cases that the court decided and also the cases that the court |
| 1:03.1 | chose not to decide. You know, I'm sitting with two things, and it's sort of interesting to me. |
| 1:09.6 | One, last October, November, you and I were running around houses on fire, houses on fire. |
| 1:15.4 | She's going to do all these dreadful things. |
| 1:17.6 | And two, now we're sitting in the midst of a raft of mainstream media views that Barrett turned out to be really moderate and temperate and centrist, and maybe not all that |
| 1:30.7 | different from RBG after all. So maybe just in terms of table setting, were we wrong then or are we |
| 1:37.8 | wrong now? I don't think we're wrong at all. Let's recall at Justice Barrett, then Judge Barrett's confirmation hearings, the Senate Democrats chose to make it about the Affordable Care Act. |
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