Our Guns Problem is a Democracy Problem
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Mark Joseph Stern to tee up the final weeks of the Supreme Court term. Several blockbusters are still to come, from abortion to gun rights to religious liberty to climate action—and then there’s the shadow docket. Mark and Dahlia break it all down with insights into what to expect and what to watch for.
Dahlia also spoke with former Attorney General Eric Holder this week, and he made the clear and urgent case that if you want gun reform, you need to work on democracy reform. Attorney General Holder will be back on Amicus in July to talk about his book for our summer reading series.
In this week’s Amicus Plus segment, as the Supreme Court investigates clerks over the Dobbs leak, and in the wake of the revelations of Ginni Thomas’ involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Dahlia is in conversation with Noah Bookbinder of CREW about how to fix judicial ethics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to Amicus. This is Slates Podcast about the courts and the law and the rule |
| 0:11.6 | of law and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick and I cover some of those things for Slate.com. |
| 0:19.5 | This past few weeks have been something approximating an absolute living nightmare of gun deaths |
| 0:26.6 | in America. The white supremacist massacre of African Americans at a grocery store in Buffalo, |
| 0:33.7 | the unspeakable carnage of murdered schoolchildren in Yvalde, Texas, and killing sprays in Iowa and |
| 0:43.2 | Oklahoma and just quite literally too many places to name. These atrocities are not met with the |
| 0:51.5 | sobriety and seriousness and horror that they weren't. They're met with almost winking |
| 0:57.6 | prophets of quote thoughts and prayers and pledges to armed librarians and doctors and |
| 1:04.1 | truly deranged plans to close all school exits but one. It is too easy in this moment to feel |
| 1:11.7 | these twin responses of grief and helplessness. The doom loop that is both the onion headline about |
| 1:18.6 | nothing to be done, about a problem that only happens in America and this monstrous indifference |
| 1:25.5 | of a political system that appears to have been designed so that nothing can be done. We wanted |
| 1:30.4 | to mark that sentiment but we also wanted to check it and this week I found myself interviewing |
| 1:36.9 | Attorney General Eric Holder for our upcoming summer book season that will open in July. His new |
| 1:44.2 | book is called our unfinished march, The Violent Past, An Imparaled Future of the Vote. It's about |
| 1:51.2 | gerrymandering and voting rights. It's written with Sam Coppelman and published this past month by |
| 1:56.0 | One World Press. The book is a direct refutation of that feeling of unresolved grief, a road map to |
| 2:04.4 | repairing the democratic systems that allow us to just languish in catastrophes that should be |
| 2:11.3 | resolvable. Here is Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States under President Barack Obama |
| 2:18.0 | from 2009 to 2015. In the first African-American to hold that position on what needs to be done |
| 2:25.4 | and more urgently what can in fact be done to stop a cycle of unbearable, |
| 2:31.3 | senseless gun violence that is eating the country alive. The thing we have to first understand is |
... |
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