Samuel Alito and The Billionaire
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2023
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is a part of Opinionpalooza. Slate’s coverage of Supreme Court decisions. Thank you to our Slate Plus members for making this episode available to all listeners. The full version of this episode is now exclusively available to our Slate Plus members. If you want to have access to bonus content like this, go to slate.com/amicusplus to become a member.
Amicus is coming at you again with an emergency episode. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Mark Joseph Stern to process ProPublica’s latest reporting on a growing theme of conservative supreme court justices with a penchant for luxury travel at the expense of billionaires (who also happen to be close friends with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society). Dahlia and Mark also examine Justice Samuel Alito’s eye-popping pre-buttal of ProPublica’s piece about his Alaskan fishing trip with billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer, which Justice Alito chose to publish in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Dahlia’s book Lady Justice: Women, the Law and the Battle to Save America, is also available as an audiobook, and Amicus listeners can get a 25 percent discount by entering the code “AMICUS” at checkout.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Leite's podcast about the Supreme Court, the law, |
| 0:10.5 | the rule of law. I'm Dialithwick and with Mark Joseph Stern, we try to cover those |
| 0:16.1 | things for sleigh.com. And in this Supreme Court opinion pollusa, month of June, boy oh boy, |
| 0:23.6 | are we being inundated with much much more than just opinions? The coverage is urgent |
| 0:29.6 | and vital, so we are proud to make these extra episodes available to all of our listeners. |
| 0:34.7 | We are not keeping it behind the paywall purely for the years of our wonderful sleigh plus |
| 0:38.8 | members, wink wink. Though we always thank them for making the work possible by supporting |
| 0:44.6 | all the work we do here at sleigh. So we are popping into your noise canceling headphones |
| 0:50.4 | today, even before Thursday's decision dump, because a set of deeply strange and problematic |
| 0:56.1 | events occurred on Tuesday night late and while they don't directly have to do with the pending |
| 1:02.3 | cases, they certainly have a good deal to do with who gets their issues in front of the court |
| 1:08.8 | and who decides how those decisions come out. And if you do follow such matters, that brings us to |
| 1:17.3 | the new revelations Tuesday night in pro-publica, but the fact that just a Samuel Alito took a luxury |
| 1:24.5 | vacation subsidized by one Paul Singer hedge fund billionaire who had a case before the court, |
| 1:31.4 | Justice Alito neither recused himself in the case nor disclosed the gift of travel. It re-raises |
| 1:38.2 | these questions we've been asking on the show all year about why some justices just don't think |
| 1:42.9 | it's necessary to disclose their luxury junkets and also whether it's ever a good idea to post |
| 1:50.4 | your pre-buddle of a pro-publica story in the pay-walled opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. |
| 1:57.2 | Mark Stern, hello. Hi, Dahlia. I got a little ahead of myself, but would you kindly sketch out |
| 2:04.8 | the story as reported around midnight Tuesday in pro-publica and really just give us your everything. |
| 2:13.4 | It's so funny because this is the story of course and pro-publica did amazing work here, but like |
| 2:18.1 | because Alito ended up jumping in with this absolutely deranged op-ed, that feels like it's a |
... |
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