The End of an Era, and the Cult of the Constitution.

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

Slate Audio

News Commentary,, Government, News

4.6 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2019

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a week marked by rising rancor, when racist rhetoric ricocheted out of the president’s twitter feed and into a chanting crowd at his reelection rally, the end of an era almost slid under the radar. Dahlia Lithwick reflects on the passing of Justice John Paul Stevens, and the more than symbolic shift from his jurisprudence, his character, to our current state of affairs at the high court and beyond. You can read more here. And Dahlia is joined by Professor Mary Anne Franks of the University of Miami Law School to talk about her book, “The Cult of the Constitution”, how growing up among christian fundamentalists helped her write a book about constitutional extremists, and why there’s still hope for America’s faulty founding document. Slate Plus members get bonus segments and ad-free podcast feeds. Sign up now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's no plausible and tellable reason for us to continue to tell ourselves as fairytale.
0:10.1	They're especially not in this day and age, and we have seen the consequences of not confronting
0:15.2	this, of pretending as though our founding was anything other than what it was, and it
0:18.8	is long pastime for us to do something in terms of actually facing it and trying to reckon
0:23.8	with it.
0:30.6	Hi and welcome back to Amicus Slates Podcast about the Law, the Rule of Law, and the
0:35.6	Supreme Court.
0:36.6	I'm Dialithwick, and I cover those things for Slate.
0:40.2	This week amidst all of the tweeting and the Jeffrey Epstein and the Michael Cohen and
0:45.7	the New Illegal Asylum Orders, the American legal world actually lost a giant in the
0:51.6	person of John Paul Stevens, former Justice of the US Supreme Court, who died at age 99
0:57.2	from complications following a stroke.
0:59.9	The tributes and the remembrances in recent days got overshadowed by some of the most
1:04.9	rancorous behavior Washington has ever seen, and that's too bad.
1:09.6	Just reading the accolades offered up by his former clerks who revered him and his colleagues
1:15.2	at the High Court, who all seem well aware that his death represents the absolute end of
1:21.6	an era.
1:23.0	It's served to remind all of us about the dying values of civility, soft spokenness,
1:28.8	temperateness, generosity.
1:31.5	Justice Stevens always, always opened his questions at oral argument with, may I just
1:35.7	ask?
1:36.7	And that was right before he would slice an argument into gentle, symmetrical ribbons.
	...

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