Becoming Justice Gorsuch | 1. Man With a Plan
Slow Burn
Slate Audio
4.6 • 25.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Neil Gorsuch may not be the most well-known justice on the Supreme Court, but he might just be the key to understanding how and why the current court has come to wield so much power over our day-to-day lives. In our first episode, host Susan Matthews examines Gorsuch’s early years, what he took away from his iconoclastic mother’s rocky tenure in the Reagan administration, and how his worldview was shaped by his time on a liberal college campus and in 1980s conservative circles. Plus: the controversial court case that might have gotten Gorsuch noticed by just the right people at just the right time.
Want more Slow Burn? Join Slate Plus to binge every episode of Becoming Justice Gorsuch—and every season of Slow Burn, including Becoming Justice Thomas. You’ll also enjoy ad-free listening to all of your favorite Slate podcasts. Visit slate.com/slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen.
Season 11 of Slow Burn was written and reported by Susan Matthews. It was produced by Sophie Summergrad and Joel Meyer. It was edited by Mia Lobel, Hillary Frey, and Evan Chung. Original music and sound design by Hannis Brown. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of Slate Podcasts.
Our legal editor is Mark Joseph Stern. Special thanks to Dahlia Lithwick, Sara Burningham, and Patrick Fort. Episode artwork by Natalie Matthews-Ramo.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In January of 2009, Alphonse Madden was driving a semi-truck along an Illinois highway, hauling a shipment of meat. |
| 0:09.0 | He wasn't sure where his next fuel station was, so he decided to pull over onto the side of the road to double check. |
| 0:16.0 | That's when things started to go wrong. |
| 0:18.0 | The brakes on the trailer froze, And so I was stranded, essentially. |
| 0:24.3 | That's Madden talking about what happened to him, at a press conference in 2017. |
| 0:29.6 | The night he got stuck was one of the coldest of the entire winter. |
| 0:34.5 | The temperature outside was 27 degrees below zero. The trailer was one of those super long |
| 0:41.6 | shipping containers hitched onto the back of the truck. It was the trailer's brakes that were |
| 0:46.5 | jammed up, making it several tons of dead weight. If Madden kept it attached to the truck |
| 0:52.5 | and tried to drive, the trailer could skid out across the lanes, with no way to stop it or slow it down. |
| 0:59.0 | Imagine being on the road behind that. |
| 1:01.5 | So he called into his dispatch center to report the problem. |
| 1:05.6 | I contacted the company's road assist. |
| 1:08.6 | They arranged to send a repair unit. |
| 1:16.4 | I assumed that the repair unit would take no longer than an hour to arrive. Madden settled in to wait, but there was another problem. |
| 1:24.9 | The heat in the truck's cabin wasn't working. Soon, the temperature inside had dropped |
| 1:30.9 | to negative seven. In the cold, on the side of the road, Madden fell asleep. He woke up at |
| 1:43.2 | 1.18 a.m. when his cousin called him. His whole body was cold and his cousin told him he was slurring his speech. When he sat up, he heard the skin on his stomach crackle. |
| 1:54.7 | And then the sensation of not filling my feet at all prompted me like to panic. I wanted to panic. But he didn't panic. He called |
| 2:04.0 | his dispatch center and told them what was going on. He asked them what he should do. |
| 2:09.3 | They responded by telling me to simply hang in there. As I sat there physically suffering in the |
| 2:15.2 | cold, I started having thoughts that I was going to die. |
... |
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