Fundamental Rights Doublespeak
Slate Daily Feed
Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2022
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On the great legal history episode of Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick is joined first by David Gans, director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center. While GOP Senators used the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings to take potshots at important ideas like unenumerated rights and substantive due process to score points with their base, the talking points became entrenched in political discourse. Does it matter? Of course it does.
Later in the show, Dahlia is joined by Rund Abdelfatah co-host and producer of NPR’s podcast Throughline. The podcast explores the history behind current events. Dahlia and Rund talk about Throughline’s episode Pirates of the Senate to take a closer look at the history behind the filibuster, and explore why so many of our ideas about the filibuster are just plain wrong.
In our Slate Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Mark Joseph Stern on the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation, a case creating a new constitutional bar against malicious prosecution, and more shadow docket shenanigans.
Podcast production by Sara Burningham and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to Amicus. |
| 0:18.6 | This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:22.4 | I am Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:23.5 | I cover those things for Slate. |
| 0:25.7 | And since our last show, Judge Katanji Brown-Jackson has not only sailed through to confirmation, |
| 0:32.7 | but she managed to do so with some Republican votes. |
| 0:37.0 | And on top of that, polling suggests she may prove to be the most popular Supreme Court nominee slash confirmed justice in modern history. |
| 0:47.2 | Now, history may also recall that the effort to smear her largely failed in the long run, but boy, oh boy, the stupid was strong |
| 0:57.6 | throughout this process. |
| 0:59.9 | Constitutionally unsound rulings like Griswold v. Connecticut, Keelow v. City of New |
| 1:06.3 | London, and NFIB versus Sebelius, confused Tennesseans and left Congress wondering who gave the court permission to bypass our system of checks and balances. |
| 1:19.2 | So you would be okay with the Supreme Court leaving the question of interracial marriage to the states? |
| 1:24.6 | Yes, I think that that's something that if you're not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh |
| 1:30.3 | in on issues like that, you're not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too. |
| 1:34.3 | I think that's hypocritical. |
| 1:35.3 | When the Supreme Court creates a right that is not even mentioned in the Constitution, |
| 1:40.3 | the independence and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself is called into question. |
| 1:46.0 | Griswold versus Connecticut. |
| 1:47.0 | You can list a whole host of issues when it comes down to whatever they are. |
| 1:52.0 | I'm going to say that they're not going to all make you happy within a given state, |
| 1:58.0 | but that we're better off having states manifest their points of view |
| 2:03.2 | rather than homogenizing it across the country as Roe v. Wade did. |
... |
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