Hi and welcome to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme

Court and the rule of law and the Supreme Court which is not really hearing arguments

right now but Slate plus members stick around. There'll be a roundup of jurisprudential

goings on with the courts and we'll do it with Mark Joseph Stern. If you're not a Slate

plus member yet you are going to want to check it out I think with a free two week trial

at Slate.com slash Amicus plus. Needless to say it's a great way to support the work

we're doing here at the magazine. We are podcasting these days from wherever we are sheltering

in place which makes me super grateful and so a shout out to the producers and our guests

and the engineers and yes our ad people who are working doubly hard to bring us out to you where

you are hopefully sheltering in your own place, taking precautions, washing your hands a lot

and you're probably full of questions. Well full of questions is what we try to do best so this

week we wanted to talk to an old friend of this podcast Ian Basson. Ian served as associate

White House Council from 2009 till 2011 and he is co-founder of Protect Democracy across ideological

project that has used litigation and policy advocacy and a whole range of civic action tools

to protect core democratic values in the era of Donald Trump. In many many ways all of these lawsuits

and other efforts have really served as bull works against attacks on encroachments on basic

democracy and in his visits to our show Ian's always been a clarion voice of about equal parts

alarm and reassurance and in many ways he's where I go to find my set point when I'm feeling destabilized.

So as we enter this first really awful few days of coronavirus and everyone is anxious and

we've been thinking about this tension between the need for strong federal measures and the ways in

which the Trump administration says always been pretty opportunistic to use power to a road democracy

way before this emergency happened and how we balance that tension between needing strong federal

...