This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lethwait.

For almost as long as I can remember, we've been

talking on this show about attacks on judges as attacks on democracy and on the rule of law.

And in recent weeks, we've tried to flag the dangers of President Trump's repeated accusations

that the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are endangering the country when they don't do exactly

what he wants. Just this past week, Chief Justice John Roberts insisted again that the court is not

political. Just a week after it, along perfectly partisan political lines, functionally decimated

what was left of the Voting Rights Act.

Look, judges are political except when they aren't, and courts can and should be criticized

for what they do without metastasizing into threats of violence. The line between law and politics

is porous and shifting. The line between criticism of judges and calls for violence against them is

similarly subjective, but the rule of law and democracy itself rise and fall on first naming

and then understanding the difference. Yet verbal, political, and sometimes violent attacks on

members of the judiciary have been mostly met with silence from the Trump administration, from sitting judges, and even dispiritingly, from the Supreme Court itself.

Targeted by the president, described as enemies by the attorney general, subjected to doxing violence, even death, the judiciary is now in uncharted territory. That silence is

obscuring a meaningful public debate about what constitutes a threat to a judge, what is mere

critical speech, what we mean when we talk about civility, and how much this particular

vocation is vulnerable because it has disarmed

itself from responding. Today we're going to speak to two judges, one current and one former,

about that which has largely gone unset until now. Most jurists are not comfortable having

this conversation. Many wish it never happened at all. So I want to thank

...