Politics Masquerading as Law
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2022
⏱️ 65 minutes
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Summary
Dahlia Lithwick interviews Rep. Adam Schiff about his work on the Jan. 6 select committee and his fears for our democracy. Next, Dahlia is joined by pre-eminent election-law scholar Professor Franita Tolson, who clears up any confusion about what happened in the shadow-docket order concerning Merrill v Milligan, which appears to have kicked away the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act’s Section II.
Slate Plus members will have access to Dahlia’s conversation with Mark Joseph Stern about shadow-docket shenanigans and Mark’s new beat: Madison Cawthorne, “everybody’s favorite insurrectionist-adjacent representative.”
Podcast production by Sara Burningham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | None of what we are doing is, I think, unprecedented. You're certainly hearing an unprecedented |
| 0:10.2 | amount of complaining by the former president and his enablers because they don't like what |
| 0:16.1 | we're finding. I've pointed to three decisions over the course of 20 years that shows this slow death of the voting rights act. |
| 0:25.9 | And this Alabama case has to be read in that context. |
| 0:32.3 | Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 0:34.3 | This is Slate's podcast about the law and the courts and the Supreme Court and the rule of law. I am Dahlia Lithwick. And it's been a pretty weird few weeks in Washington, D.C. and at the Supreme Court, the GOP is grappling with the fallout from the RNC's decision to characterize the events of January 6, 2021 as, quote, legitimate |
| 0:56.9 | political discourse as the January 6th committee pursues the truth of what that event really did |
| 1:03.2 | represent. Two stories, increasingly tough to reconcile. We are awaiting President Joe Biden's |
| 1:10.3 | nominee for a Supreme Court seat, |
| 1:13.1 | soon to be vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer, but in the meantime, we got an order on Monday |
| 1:18.7 | evening halting a major racial redistricting decision under the Voting Rights Act in Alabama. |
| 1:25.3 | That order happened on the shadow docket, and rather than |
| 1:29.3 | explain the reasoning behind it, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurrence that was signed |
| 1:35.1 | only by Justice Samuel Alito, used that concurrence to, you know, attack the dissenters. |
| 1:40.9 | Later on in this show, we're going to talk to voting rights expert guru consummate |
| 1:47.1 | explainer for Nita Tolson about what, if anything, remains of Section 2 of the Voting |
| 1:52.1 | Rights Act and to help us parse what it means when Chief Justice John Roberts, who has |
| 1:57.7 | certainly dedicated his career to constricting the VRA, sides with the courts |
| 2:04.2 | liberals to protect it. And after that, our Slate Plus members will get to listen in on my |
| 2:10.7 | conversation with Slate's own Mark Joseph Stern, talking a little bit more about that voting |
| 2:16.7 | rights decision, about the shadow |
| 2:18.6 | docket, and about Madison Cawthorn, everybody's favorite insurrectionist adjacent representative. |
... |
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