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Hi, and welcome to Amicus.

Hi, and welcome to Amicus, Slate Supreme Court podcast. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover the Supreme Court for Slate.

This week, we wanted to dig down a little deeper into the growing morass surrounding Justice Antonin and Scalia's vacant seat at the high court.

Two weeks ago, as you've probably heard, President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill that seat.

And in the intervening time, we've heard an awful lot of this.

If you want to discuss the nominee just for a minute, even though Barack Obama calls him a moderate,

he's opposed by the NRA,

he's opposed by the National Federation of Independent Business, which has never taken a position on a Supreme Court nominee before.

The New York Times said it would move the court dramatically to the left.

But this is not about this particular judge.

This is about who should make the appointment. We're in the process

of picking a president, and that new president ought to make this appointment, which will affect

the Supreme Court maybe for the next quarter of a century. That was Senate Majority Leader,

Mitch McConnell, explaining why there can be no hearing and no vote. Since then, we've seen some fissures in this wall of

obstruction erected by the GOP senators with at least three indicating that a confirmation

hearing and vote should actually happen. And at least as of this recording, 16 Republicans in the

Senate, that's about 25 percent of the caucus, are at least agreeing to courtesy

meetings. Well, we wanted to try to have a rational adult conversation about the standoff

over the court and who better to do it with than Professor Jeffrey R. Stone, who is the

...