Hi, I'm Molly JongFast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.

We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you today.

Peter Shamsheri and Michael Lerop of the podcast 5'4 stopped by to tell us what they are seeing from the Supreme Court this session.

But first, we'll talk to author and historian Mary Ziegler about the coming year in reproductive

rights.

Welcome back to fast politics, Mary Ziegler.

Thanks for having me.

One of the things that I think is so interesting is the first Trump administration.

They tried to do a lot of stuff and they had no legal framework, but it didn't much matter because they couldn't, you know,

they just kept losing in court, right? Because they had no legal framework. They were unable to make

the sale on a lot of these policies and they never really got up to the Supreme Court. Now, over the last

four years, I feel like Trump world has found all of

these different ways to sell some of their ideas and they're kind of these Victorian era laws that

were never taken off the books. Is that right? That's right. I mean, so I think there was

obviously a moment when people in the anti-abortion movement believed that they could get policies

at the federal level like the ones that they were getting at the state level, especially if

Republicans controlled the Congress. Right. And, you know, a right to conception acts, 15-week bans. And I think

increasingly people in the anti-abortion movement realize that voters would hate that and that as a

result, Republican politicians and competitive districts are not likely to go with that route.

So these zombie laws became really compelling because, one, they didn't require lawmakers to do anything.

And two, they sort of allowed lawmakers to pass the buck and say, we're not actually passing these laws.

We're just allowing prosecutors who are nominally independent discretion to enforce the law.

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