The New Constitutional (dis)Order
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Donald Trump becomes president again on Monday, and as Joe Biden leaves the White House, we’re on the brink of a massive change in how the law is interpreted. Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing was one of a host of clues this week that we are in for a wild legal and constitutional ride. On this episode of Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick is joined by constitutional scholar Professor Pamela Karlan to pick through what we learned this week about what the law is and what it is about to become –– from Jack Smith’s report, to the new (presumptive) Attorney General of the United States’ apparent ignorance of birthright citizenship and therefore the 14th amendment.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome back to Amicus. I'm Dahlia Lithwick and this is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:13.0 | We are about two days out from Donald Trump's inauguration as 47th president of the United States of America. |
| 0:20.7 | And whether your mind right now is on TikTok or on how many. as 47th president of the United States of America, |
| 0:23.5 | and whether your mind right now is on TikTok or on how many push-ups Pete Hegsef can do, |
| 0:27.6 | or whether it's on the owner's box that is going to contain Elon Musk |
| 0:31.3 | and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos at the inauguration, |
| 0:35.6 | or whether it's on a ceasefire in the Middle East or the |
| 0:38.6 | devastation from fires in Southern California, the world as we understand it, is changing |
| 0:43.8 | in fundamental ways. And the law, as we have understood it, is also changing in fundamental |
| 0:49.7 | ways. We are on the brink of mass immigration reform, perhaps mass deportations, perhaps the use of the military for domestic policing, mass pardons for violent insurrectionists, and all this amid the end of fact-checking online and therefore of fact-checking everywhere. |
| 1:09.1 | On Friday morning, to prove that everything is always in motion, |
| 1:12.7 | the Supreme Court, in a unanimous per curiam opinion, upheld the TikTok ban that, at least |
| 1:18.9 | theoretically, goes into effect on Sunday, although President Joe Biden reportedly will not |
| 1:24.5 | enforce it, and President-elect Donald Trump says he's going to fix it, |
| 1:30.0 | whatever that means. Also on Friday morning, President Biden declared that he considers the |
| 1:35.6 | Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to be, quote, the law of the land, an affirmation that |
| 1:41.4 | does not have any formal force or meaningful effect. And so we enter this |
| 1:47.2 | weekend with an actual TikTok ban that may not be the law and an ERA that will not be published by |
| 1:53.3 | the archivist. The law is the law. It is also not the law. This is Schrodinger's constitution. |
| 2:00.6 | My jurisprudential co-pilot, Mark Joseph Stern, |
| 2:03.7 | is going to join me in a few minutes to talk us through the TikTok decision, but before that, |
| 2:10.0 | this week we want to take a breath and find our lane through all of the chaos and a way to |
... |
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