The big theme is can Roberts duck these fastballs that are flying at his docket,

or is he going to have to accept that the court will become the political center of gravity again by June 2019?

There is a requirement of trench warfare, that is every single election change has to be fought in the courts, and it's draining the resources of voting rights organizations, and it is impossible to go after every single case.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law and the rule of law.

This week, we confronted the heartbreaking news that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,

parenthetically the reason I went to law school, will be stepping back from public life following a diagnosis of early stages of dementia, likely Alzheimer's.

The justice is 88. In a letter announcing her decision, Justice O'Connor asked that Americans continue the hard work to which she has

devoted herself absolutely tirelessly since her retirement, specifically civic engagement

and civics education for our children.

With the midterm elections looming just under two weeks away and the daily news of vote purges and voting irregularities and vote suppression, we wanted to check in this week with one of our shows voting gurus, UC Irvine's Richard Hassan, to talk about the difference between an Anthony Kennedy and a Brett Kavanaugh in the voting cases ahead and to review the voting rights cases that we a little bit elided in the end of the term coverage.

But first we turned to surprise the current term, which is actually happening, and we

short shrifted it a little bit this fall as a result of the Brett Kavanaugh news. And so we have

summoned our old friend Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the courts for Slate, to help us go back and

look under the hood of the 2018 term already launched.

And to tell us what is coming down the pipeline as we move forward.

So, Mark, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me back on.

Always a pleasure to be summoned.

And there's just a lot to discuss, even in terms of just the most recent actions

this week at the High Court, including voter IDs in North Dakota, which we will talk about

with Rick Hassan later. And Wilbur Ross in the census. Can you get us up to speed on what happened

this past week in terms of the census

...