This is a case that I would expect that were he alive, James Madison, would sit by my side and agree with what we're saying.

Dear diary, today I witnessed one facet of a constitutional crisis.

Hi and welcome to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the law and the rule of law and the courts.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

I cover many of those things for Slate. It's been a busy few weeks for lawyers in America again. At the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas is suddenly signaling a desire to do away with longstanding doctrine that protects newspapers. And Chief Justice John Roberts has continued this new boomlet of siding with the court's left wing this week in a case about whether the Eighth Amendment bars the execution of someone suffering from dementia.

But the Supreme Court has absolutely nothing on the legal showstopper we witnessed before the House Oversight and Reform Committee at which Michael Cohen, the president's longtime lawyer, testified on Wednesday.

And it was, wow.

Later on in the show, we will take a very lawyerly look at that testimony with Leah Lippman, who teaches law at UC Irvine School of Law.

But first, we promised at the very top of last show that we would turn our eyes to emergency declarations. And we do that today, looking to the southern border where the president declared a national emergency two weeks ago. That was two weeks in human time. But I know feels like 12 years ago in human capacity to tolerate mayhem time.

This past Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to overturn the president's emergency

declaration.

13 Republicans joined with Democrats to try to block this effort to redirect funding to a border

wall without congressional approval.

The Senate is going to have to vote, likely in the next few weeks, on the very same question. And so far, three Republicans in the Senate have suggested they are going to vote against the declared emergency. A fourth, Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, has now stated he doesn't really support the declared emergency, but he is not telling us yet how he'll

vote. If just four Republicans joined Senate Democrats to block the emergency declaration, Donald

Trump will have to veto Congress for the first time in his presidency, but we wanted to get

beyond just the political showmanship. There is a really layered legal question here,

and we wanted to

probe it deeply. That question is essentially, does the president have the power to declare an

emergency under the broad sweep of the National Emergencies Act? And this past Thursday,

the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on that very question. And joining me to parse

what is genuinely a complicated set of legal doctrines is

...