You cannot have a function in democracy where representatives are choosing which way to

vote on a given issue at a fear for their lives.

You cannot have a function in election where election officials are carrying out their

jobs under fear of violence.

I am welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the

Supreme Court and the rule of law. I'm Dylith Wicke and I cover those things for Slate.

We are finding ourselves right now in a really troubling moment for democracy, both home

and abroad. The news from the Middle East is devastating and the speaker's fight in

the House of Representatives certainly suggests that democracy as we understand it is failing

utterly to meet the moment. So it seemed like a good time for Amicus to turn back to

one of the godfathers of democracy preservation, my good friend Ian Basin. Ian has been stopping

by the show in these moments of wobbling democracy, often to point our listeners to what is

holding and what is teetering and maybe most importantly what we should be focusing our

attention on and what we should be doing. Ian is co-founder and executive director of

Protect Democracy. He previously served as associate White House counsel where in addition

to counseling the president and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional

law, his responsibilities included ensuring that White House and executive branch officials

complied with the laws, rules and norms that protect the fundamentally democratic nature

of our government. Ian's writing on democracy and authoritarianism and American law has appeared

in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, this very magazine, the Los Angeles

Times and the Atlantic among other places. And at the beginning of this month, Ian was

announced as a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, better known to us as the genius

...