I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source stress testing the rule of law and the age of Trump.

What is breaking down or what's broken when the governor of Illinois says he's being invaded by the National Guard of Texas under President Trump's orders?

Or when the president is dueling with Oregon and California over policing

a public safety crisis that mostly disappeared five years ago in Portland, Oregon.

What does it tell us that a senior federal judge in Boston declared in a formal opinion

last week that the Trump team is bent on crushing free speech

by wayward prosecutions, if only for their power to chill and intimidate.

Questions keep coming.

Nancy Gertner is our guest to consider them.

You're overqualified, Nancy, by a celebrated career as a trial lawyer, then as a federal judge

yourself, and now retired from the court as a private practitioner, again, independent

and outspoken about a world that you know intimately.

For starters, what is your core test out there today of the risks to the rule of law?

I don't know where to begin, which is itself an indication of the problem.

It is a multi-front problem with the Trump administration.

It has to do with both what the Trump administration has done, starting with the least powerful among

us, which is what they've done to people who they believe to be deportable. They started off

in the classic poem from Germany, if you recall, which says first they started with the gypsies,

and I wasn't a gypsy, and so therefore I didn't pay attention. Well, first they started with the

border, and everyone was in concert with respect to the border

and people crossing into the border who were essentially unauthorized.

Then they moved to people who had pending orders of deportation.

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