This is Amicus Slates podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

The Supreme Court is making advances for religious extremists that are pretty unprecedented.

This is the Department of Labor's monthly prayer service.

They say separation between church and state, they told me.

I said, all right, let's forget about that for one time.

Christian nationalism is about advancing traditional power structures in our society.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited a self-described Christian nationalist pastor

to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon.

Do you know that God also is a God of war?

We are one military, one fighting force, one nation under God.

We face an essential test.

Whether our nations will be and remain Western nations with distinct characteristics,

Christian nations.

Religious freedom, as it's promised in our Constitution,

church state separation is an American original. We should be so proud that it came from us.

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a couple of shadow docket orders that barely caused a ripple in the headlines, understandably.

America's newly minted war on Iran that, please remember, is an undeclared war and therefore absolutely unconstitutional, dominated, and will continue to dominate the daily news.

But one of those shadow docket rulings

is really worth a second look on its own terms and also because it is part of a pattern of

Supreme Court jurisprudence that mirrors, amplifies, and in some ways laid a path for the ways

in which the second Trump administration is conducting itself. On Monday, the court's

...