This is Brian Laird's Daily Politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Tuesday, June 4th.

I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom filling in for Brian Lair. We are turning now to a

renewed push by advocates for expanding rights in criminal justice, voting, reproductive freedom,

environmental safety to focus on state courts instead of aiming for a Supreme Court decision.

Journalist Ayal Press writes about this progressive

embrace of federalism in this week's New Yorker, and he joins us now. Welcome back to the show,

A.L. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. Now, taking the Dobbs decision as an example of where

the Supreme Court rolled back rights, reversing Roe v. Wade, which, you know,

had ruled that the right to abortion was a federal constitutional right. Now reproductive rights

are dependent on the laws and constitutions of individual states. And that's where abortion rights

advocates are focusing their efforts. Is that right? In the 50 states instead of one federal court?

Absolutely. You know, and in that on that issue, you know, the Supreme Court was explicit about it, right?

It said, we're going to leave this up to the states to fashion their own laws on abortion.

And we see these battles playing out very vividly across the country now in state courts,

but also politically, because one of the points of my piece and the issues that true my attention

is that the state constitutions generally are just

much easier to change, to amend. You know, to amend the federal constitution, you need three

fourths of the states, the legislatures to approve it. It can take decades. It can stall and

never happened and never happened. With states, you often just need a single popular

vote, a referendum. And we're seeing those referendums, particularly around abortion right now,

because supporters of abortion rights are rightly thinking, you know what, we've got a popular

...