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Hi and welcome to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the

U.S. Supreme Court and the rule of law. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and at least some part of that is my beat at slate.

So last week, as we were trying to make sense of this return to the Trumpian firehose of nonstop alarming announcements and pronouncements and creepy nominations,

we reminded you, our listeners, to call your senators.

This week, we decided to take our own advice, and we called ours, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

of Rhode Island, who's here to answer some, I think, kind of urgent questions that are

barreling down toward us in this lame duck session. Questions about judicial confirmations, about the independence of the Justice Department,

about the Supreme Court, and about whether outside advisors are really going to be okay stripping billions of dollars,

...