From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, April 9th.

We continue to ask, is this what democracy looks like? Are we moving from democracy to autocracy, bit by bit,

executive order by executive order, court ruling by court ruling, are we moving from

DEI for diversity, equity, and inclusion, to DEI for disappearances, erasures, and inequality?

Back with us now is University of Pennsylvania law

professor Kate Shaw, who is also co-host of the Legal Affairs podcast, Strict Scrutiny. Kate, we

always appreciate that you come on and apply your strict scrutiny with us on the law and the courts

and this year on that spectrum from democracy to autocracy

that really the courts are playing such a key and complicated role in. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you so much for having me back, Brian. And the court rulings keep on coming, including

increasingly now from the Supreme Court. We had ones just in recent days, I'll tell the listeners, from the

High Court on the deportations of Venezuelan migrants without due process, on the suspension

of teacher training grants, on the firing of so-called probationary workers. Then there was a lower

court ruling yesterday that said Trump violated the First Amendment,

freedom of the press, by barring the Associated Press from some presidential events

because they wouldn't bend to his dictate to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

And there are others.

There are so many we could get to in this segment with you, Kate.

Can you start

with that last one I mentioned, though? What court said what about the free press and the First

Amendment? Sure. So, yeah, that was the most recent of the rulings that you just mentioned, Brian.

So that was a ruling just yesterday out of a D.C. District Court. Interestingly, a decision

...