How SCOTUS is Slanting the Midterms

Talking Feds

Harry Litman

News, Government, Politics

4.8 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Harry talks with Rick Hasen, one of the country’s leading experts in election law and a prophet of Chief Justice John Roberts’s decades-long project to tear down voting rights. Hasen explains why Roberts—after taking a slow and steady approach for so long—is suddenly masterminding an aggressive “two minute offense.” Hasen lays out the damage dealt to American democracy by the decision, the prospects for court reform, and the signals that Roberts knows time is running out for him and the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court. Mentioned in this episode: Professor Hasen’s analysis: https://slate.com/author/richard-l-hasen Professor Hasen’s 2013 New York Times piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/opinion/the-chief-justices-long-game.htmlHarry’s column about the history behind the Callais decision: https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/callais-caps-the-roberts-courts-comprehensive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:27.7	Welcome to Talking Fed's one-on-one, deep-dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues
0:40.2	defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. Less than six months
0:47.9	before the midterms, it already would be a time of constant ferment in the courts and political
0:53.8	branches to secure any sort of
0:56.1	marginal advantages. But this year, we are at a fever pitch driven by the president's unpopularity,
1:04.0	the razor-thin margins in Congress, and a slew of legal battles in the wake of the Supreme Court's
1:10.5	opinion in Calais, which, as I've
1:13.2	written in a recent substack that will link here, completed a three-part demolition of voting rights
1:20.2	in America. It's a critical time to check in with one of the leading experts on election law in
1:26.8	the country and a colleague.
1:29.1	Rick Hassan is a professor of law at UCLA where he directs the safeguarding democracy project.
1:36.4	He also maintains the really great election law blog and is the author of several books, most recently, a real right to vote how a constitutional
1:48.1	amendment can safeguard American democracy. Rick, thanks very much for joining Talking Fed's
1:54.2	one-on-one. It's good to be back with you. So I don't want to squander our valuable time with you with just a sort of snapshot of the royal state of affairs with all the litigation in the wake of Calais.
2:10.6	But let's talk about a little generally.
2:13.0	When it first came down, you savaged it deservedly.
	...

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