Is The Federalist Society Over?
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Donald J Trump is signaling a split with the conservative legal movement’s kingmakers, The Federalist Society. Instead, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee is planning a radical (and radically lawless) remaking of American government in his image. On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Amanda Hollis Brusky, professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society & the Conservative Counterrevolution, and coauthor of Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right’s Radical Struggle to Transform Law and Legal Culture. Together, they explore what the split between the right’s legal project of 40 years and the man who hopes to be the next Republican President means for the law, the rule of law, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
In this week’s Amicus Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Jay Willis of Balls and Strikes to discuss the Supreme Court’s new ethics code. Spoiler: It’s not really new. As Jay says, think of it more like frat house rules published for the benefit of naive parents.
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Dahlia’s book Lady Justice: Women, the Law and the Battle to Save America, is also available as an audiobook, and Amicus listeners can get a 25 percent discount by entering the code “AMICUS” at checkout. https://books.supportingcast.fm/lady-justice
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Transcript
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| 0:25.0 | 2023. T's and C's eligibility criteria and geographical restrictions apply. So much of what Donald Trump wants cannot be accomplished through the law, which is why, as you know, |
| 0:42.0 | so many of these folks advising him |
| 0:44.6 | are not lawyers. |
| 0:46.4 | And so the question is going to be |
| 0:48.2 | how far can we push or stretch the law |
| 0:51.3 | before it's just lawless. |
| 0:54.0 | Hi and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 1:00.0 | This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the |
| 1:05.0 | Supreme Court and the rule of law. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover these things for Slate. |
| 1:10.0 | And this week the Supreme Court made history by announcing that it was for the first time going |
| 1:14.2 | to adopt a new formal ethics code that is neither enforceable nor actually new, but hey, just |
| 1:20.4 | big props to them for trying. This week also brought us a whole lot of kind of gasp-inducing news |
| 1:26.5 | about plans being advanced to remake the judiciary, the civil service, the Justice Department, policing immigration law in the event that |
| 1:35.1 | Donald J Trump achieves the presidency in a year or so. |
| 1:39.6 | As a constitutional and legal matter, this is all sort of alarming, but it's particularly alarming given |
| 1:45.7 | that the thing that we were starting to get our heads around to understand and |
| 1:49.8 | fear and cope with. Specifically, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, that may not be the thing |
| 1:56.5 | that is driving Donald Trump's constitutional Scooby-Doo van anymore. Indeed, if recent reporting is to be believed Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society |
| 2:07.2 | having reached peak influence and power are no longer conservative or radical or imaginative enough to satisfy Donald J. Trump. |
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