This Will Be Trump’s Best Term at the Supreme Court Yet

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

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Politics, Government, News

4.6 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are joined by Vox’s Ian Millhiser to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court term, which officially starts on Monday. The term begins with a slew of wildly significant cases that feel all but decided in the Trump administration’s favor already. That feeling of inevitability could perhaps be ascribed to the ongoing assault on democracy coming from the high court’s shadow docket, which will now spill over into cases argued on the merits. Dahlia, Mark, and Ian examine the effect of all this sloppy law on the public's perception of the court, and look ahead to upcoming cases on voting rights, campaign finance, conversion therapy, transgender rights, tariffs, and presidential power. They explore how the court's decisions reflect a shift towards a more partisan and less transparent judicial process, and ask whether there’s any hope of restoring the rule of law and healthy constitutional democracy in the future. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the law and the courts and the Supreme Court.
0:11.3	I'm Delia Lithwick.
0:12.7	And I'm Mark Joseph Stern.
0:14.5	Welcome to the United States Supreme Court's October 2025 term.
0:19.4	Which starts now.
0:22.0	We will hear argument this wording in case 23.
0:24.7	Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
0:28.9	They're back.
0:30.0	The nine justices will start hearing arguments at one first street this coming first Monday
0:35.3	and October.
0:36.6	And to be clear, in a lot of ways, the nine never quite left the bench.
0:41.0	They took their laptops on their vacation, some of them on their book tours, so they could
0:45.7	continue to issue their emergency orders on the shadow docket virtually all summer long.
0:52.0	Those unargued, unreasoned rulings really are perfect for remote work, aren't they, Dahlia?
0:58.0	They are. Can I have a mojito with that?
1:00.4	But there are a bunch of big cases that are coming down the pike this term.
1:05.4	And while we really want to promise you this isn't a curtain-raiser episode in the traditional Supreme Court opening
1:12.8	night jitter's sense of those words, we do need to look ahead to what is coming on the merits
1:18.6	docket to try to place it firmly in the context of what is happening all around us, both on the
1:25.1	shadow docket and in the world, the stuff that doesn't make headlines.
1:28.7	And to remind you all that the Supreme Court made and continues to make the bed that American
1:34.2	democracy must now lie in. And yes, to be clear, that bed is on fire. And there is just nobody
	...

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