This is Sirens, a new series brought to you by the ladies of bombshell, where we dissect the institutions of American power.

Join us as we sound the alarm on technology, governance, and national security issues,

and maybe lower some men to their deaths. I'm Aaron Simpson, and thanks for joining us for a mini episode, which features our full-length interview with Laura Dickinson of George

Washington Law School. If you already listened in the main feed, first,

thank you. And second, you can probably skip ahead to the 12-minute mark. Otherwise, just sit back and listen.

And now it's time for warning signs. Today we have with us, Laura Dickinson. Laura is the

Lyle T. Alverson Professor of law at the George Washington University Law School.

Hi, Laura. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. Prior to her work at the DW Law School,

Laura was actually special counsel to the general counsel at DOD and served as a senior advisor

at the State Department. Earlier in her career, she was a Supreme Court clerk.

So she's a wonderful person to help explain some of these issues that we want to talk about today.

This segment sort of first started when we were looking at the Supreme Court ruling or at least announcement around the president's pocket recisions of foreign aid and kind of what the

spending powers and the role of the executive there might be.

But we quickly realized that this was part of a larger story around separation of powers.

And as Laura very well knows, and certainly our listeners probably do too, national security

has always been a

tricky area for the judicial and legislative branches, but we've also seen the Trump administration

rely on emergency powers for everything from tariffs to national guard deployment. So this question

around the role of the executive, whether there's any restrictions on the executive,

is really back to the forefront for many of us. So we want to use this discussion to talk about

the continuation of this trend and recent executive actions and the court response. And also

thinking about how we calibrate those authorities when national security is invoked for nearly everything.

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