Supreme Agony
Call Your Girlfriend
Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow
4.7 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2018
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After a week of upheaval in legal doctrine, the Supreme Court issued another shocking decision: Justice Anthony Kennedy is stepping down. Legal writer (and icon) Dahlia Lithwick explains why Kennedy has never been a centrist, reviews some of the landmark cases Kennedy decided, and previews the likely jurisprudence to come. (Hint: it’s about as scary as you think.) A small silver lining: progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her Congressional primary thanks to grassroots support. Plus, we're working on our protest signs and fundraising with friends.
READING LIST
Dahlia Lithwick on the “fan fic” that Kennedy was a moderate
If all goes well in November, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Flippable / Indivisible / Sister District / Run for Something / Swing Left
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend, a podcast for long distance festies everywhere. |
| 0:05.4 | I'm Amina Tusso, and I'm Anne Friedman. On this week's agenda, we process the horror that is |
| 0:13.5 | the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy and his mixed record. Plus, we talked to Dahlia |
| 0:18.8 | Lyswick about how we got here and what the future of the Supreme Court looks like. And as always, |
| 0:24.7 | we implore you to vote, donate, get out to the midterm elections. |
| 0:54.8 | Hey Anne Friedman, how's it going? |
| 1:00.7 | Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. I feel like we should give some of the backstory about this |
| 1:07.2 | week's episode, which is that we were going to record something that was like kind of lighter and |
| 1:12.8 | more fun because we needed a break from the news. And then we had a technical malfunction, |
| 1:19.2 | so we had to pause and then during the pause, Justice Kennedy retired. And so we're back. |
| 1:24.0 | Literally during the pause, Justice Kennedy retired. And that's kind of set in motion, |
| 1:30.6 | this fight over the future of the Supreme Court. And it's giving Yall's terrible president a |
| 1:37.9 | chance to put another very conservative person on the court and really put a conservative stamp |
| 1:45.9 | on the American legal system for generations. Really, I don't know why I'm laughing because I'm |
| 1:53.6 | honestly like depressed and dejected about this. I'm someone who also has that impulse sometimes |
| 1:59.8 | where I laugh when something horrible happens or I find myself grinning when there's bad news |
| 2:05.2 | just because I don't know what it is. Like when my body doesn't compute an emotion or the depth |
| 2:09.7 | of an emotion, it just like reaches into the grab bag and I'm like, why am I laughing? |
| 2:13.6 | I know. I think sometimes the laugh is like a weird like spin on a cry, you know, where like it |
| 2:20.4 | just all of it feels, all of it feels bad. Well, so anyway, Justice Kennedy is only 81 years old, |
| 2:27.5 | which in like just his years, he like odys at least nine more years to be fair. |
| 2:32.9 | Right. You know, he he is a conservative, but he's been like a very critical swing vote for some |
... |
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