Hear Me Out: Overconfidence Is Killing The Supreme Court

Slate Debates

Slate Podcasts

Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of Hear Me Out… supreme hubris. The Supreme Court is currently unpopular to a historic degree. That popularity is, of course, contingent on political opinion – and whether the court has bucked it recently. But most people agree that something’s wrong with the Supreme Court as an institution. And, according to Aaron Tang, it’s not partisanship… even though that’s a popular scapegoat. It’s overconfidence and egos running wild. Professor and author Aaron Tang joins us to discuss what’s wrong with SCOTUS, and how we might start to fix it. If you have thoughts you want to share, or an idea for a topic we should tackle, you can email the show: [email protected] Podcast production by Maura Currie You can skip all the ads in Hear Me Out by joining Slate Plus. Sign up now at slate.com/hearmeoutplus for just $15 a month for your first three months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If political opinion in this country is an unstoppable force, constantly changing, explosively
0:10.2	coming to a head, the Supreme Court may well be an immovable object.
0:15.3	Of course, that's in part by design.
0:17.3	Lifetime appointments will do that.
0:19.3	The Supreme Court is on the minds of many this summer, after decisions on a number of
0:23.5	hot issues that in many cases actually buck the popular opinion of the people.
0:28.6	Each of the nation agrees that the court is broken.
0:31.3	So what's the underlying problem and how do we fix it?
0:34.8	What is overconfidence other than the ability to say, yep, I know the answer.
0:38.0	All these other people, they got it wrong.
0:40.7	Legal scholar and author Aaron Tang joins us to argue that the problem here is not partisanship.
0:46.1	It's overconfidence.
0:47.4	Stay with us.
0:52.8	Welcome back to Hear Me Out.
0:54.7	I'm Celeste Headley.
0:56.0	So the Supreme Court of 2023 is historically unpopular.
1:00.3	That's probably not a surprise to any of you.
1:02.3	We have talked about the court rolling back LGBTQ plus rights, affirmative action, reproductive
1:08.7	rights.
1:10.1	Experts like those at the Pew Research Center believe that decisions like those I've
1:13.8	just mentioned have led to this deep drop off in public approval of the court.
1:18.9	The latest survey shows less than half of Americans have a favorable opinion of scotus.
	...

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