SCOTUS Greenlights Trump, Gaslights America
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
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Summary
While the Secretary of Defense pursues lawless boat strikes with a laser focus on maximum trolling, the Supreme Court is working to undermine voting rights with a laser focus on maximum support for Republicans.
In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and co-host Mark Joseph Stern discuss the news that Trump’s extra-constitutional attempt to restrict birthright citizenship is heading back to the Supreme Court. They also discuss Thursday’s shadow docket decision supercharging racial gerrymandering as well as next week’s campaign finance case that promises to unleash even more dark money in the midterms. Next, Dahlia’s joined by Malcolm Nance, former naval intelligence officer, author and host of the Black Man Spy podcast to talk through the current administration’s riding roughshod over established military law, and the very nasty history of bombing shipwrecks.
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Transcript
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| 0:32.6 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:43.6 | I'm going to go ahead and confess right off the bat that weeks like this past one, President Donald J. Trump, performing naked racism on camera, |
| 0:56.0 | SCOTUS deciding that the Texas legislatures racial gerrymander is just cool, cool, cool, an inspector general finding that |
| 1:02.7 | Pete Heggseth's signal gate messages endangered U.S. troops, more ice roundups. It all feels |
| 1:09.6 | very destabilizing. It all feels very fact-free. |
| 1:12.8 | Except we know the facts. Donald Trump is in fact a racist. Texas did in fact enact a racial |
| 1:18.3 | gerrymander. Pete Higgs-eth gleefully endangers the troops. And ICE is grabbing innocent people |
| 1:24.9 | and even U.S. citizens off of the streets. So the question is which |
| 1:29.6 | institutions plan to stand up to all of that and which will capitulate and buckle. |
| 1:36.6 | Later on in the show, we're going to turn to Pete Hegsett's Memoir turned real war of lawless |
| 1:43.8 | boat strikes and the split-screen explanations |
| 1:47.1 | about the men killed in a double-tap strike because they were either, A, flipping a bombed-out |
| 1:54.7 | hull of a boat in order to get back into the narco-terrorism fight, or B, they were shipwrecked man being murdered by the U.S. |
| 2:02.8 | military. Now, we don't purport to be experts on U.S. military law on this show, but we have |
| 2:08.7 | been documenting since at least last February the ways in which this administration has blurred |
| 2:14.4 | the lines between domestic policing, unchecked powers accumulated as part of |
... |
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