Playing Chicken With the Constitution

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Politics, Government, News

4.6 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2025

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ever since March 15, when three flights carrying hundreds of men who had been afforded zero due process left United States airspace and landed in El Salvador, American democracy has been hurtling toward an internal conflict that the federal judiciary would very much prefer to avoid, but just keeps getting more unavoidable. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Mark Joseph Stern is joined by Leah Litman for the first half of the show. They discuss how, faced with a Trump administration that claims the ability to rewrite the Constitution on the fly, denies the ability to follow court orders, and dangles the possibility of extending its lawlessness to renditioning American citizens to a foreign prison, the federal judiciary this week did what the Supreme Court failed to do last week: explicitly call out the regime’s lawless actions. Aptly, Leah’s new book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, comes out on May 13 and they discuss how the highest court’s enabling of Trump and MAGA more broadly has brought us to the constitutional precipice. Next: In the six months since the re-election of Donald Trump, abortion and reproductive rights have been squished way below the fold, news-wise, obscured by an ever-mounting pile of terrifying headlines. But outside of the public glare, the legal landscape of reproductive rights has been shifting. Dahlia Lithwick talks to Mary Ziegler about her book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction. Together, they examine how notions of fetal and embryonic personhood are fueling punitive actions against women, physicians, and those who provide or seek healthcare related to reproduction. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. Service Now puts
0:06.6	AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration for your employees,
0:12.7	supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools for your service
0:17.6	agents to make customers happier. All built into a single platform you can use right now.
0:23.3	That's why the world works with ServiceNow.
0:26.5	Visit ServiceNow.com slash UK slash AI for people.
0:30.8	Last year, Amazon was the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable energy.
0:44.3	Meaning all and more of our energy comes from wind farms like this one. Guys, what happened to recording that the solar farm?
0:48.3	To learn more, visit about Amazon.com.
0:54.5	U.K. forward slash sustainability.
1:01.2	Hi, I'm Dahlia Lithwick.
1:07.3	This is Amicus.
1:08.5	Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.
1:12.7	And I'm Mark Joseph Stern, Slate Senior Writer. This week's show features Schrodinger's Dahlia,
1:20.4	wherein she is both here and not here. For the first part of the show,
1:25.4	I'll be talking to Leah Littman, University of Michigan law professor,
1:29.5	co-host of strict scrutiny, and author of the brilliant new book Lawless.
1:34.3	We're going deep on the developments in two high-stakes cases that stem from those rendition flights to El Salvador.
1:41.7	One is the conflict over Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, who is still
1:45.9	imprisoned overseas. The other, a dispute in Judge James Bosberg's Washington, D.C. courtroom,
1:51.8	where articles two and three of the Constitution are also on a collision course. In one corner,
1:58.9	are two federal judges trying very hard to get the executive branch to follow
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.