What Next | We Need to Talk About the Supreme Court

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last week’s big Supreme Court decisions walked back rights for individuals and the powers of the lower courts—and in aggregate made it ever more difficult to believe the court is anything other than another vehicle for delivering the outcomes favorable to Republicans and the conservative project. Guest: Mark Joseph Stern, Slate senior writer covering courts and the law. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Mark Ronson.
0:03.0	And I'm Ray.
0:04.0	To celebrate 150 years of Out of my Pige, we've teamed up to create something timeless.
0:10.0	A tribute to legacy, rhythm and craft with a very special connection at its heart.
0:15.0	A soundscape from two cities, two perspectives, and one shared vision.
0:20.0	Introducing our brand new song, Suzanne.
0:23.2	Susan, I need you.
0:31.2	Slate's Mark Joseph Stern always knew June was going to be a mess for him.
0:40.9	He reports on the Supreme Court.
0:42.8	He's gotten accustomed to the justice's habit of dumping one big decision after another
0:47.4	right before summer vacation.
0:50.1	But even for Mark, last Friday was a doozy.
0:57.0	Well... But even for Mark, last Friday was a doozy. Well, the Supreme Court declared on Thursday that it would hand down its final opinions of the term on Friday, which was a surprise.
1:06.5	Because you were expecting a lot of them, right?
1:08.0	Well, at least six. And we in the ScOTUS Press Corps thought that the court would split those between Friday and Monday.
1:16.7	So as to not overwhelm us and the public.
1:19.8	But then I think after this announcement on Thursday, the chief said, surprise, we're releasing all the rest on Friday.
1:26.3	I realized that that's maybe the goal to overwhelm us,
1:29.8	to overwhelm the public, to flood the zone with a lot of bad news, so that it'll be impossible
1:36.6	to absorb and it'll all get swept away in the news cycle by Monday, and the court will be able
1:41.1	to evade the public eye by the time July rolls around.
1:45.3	How many hundreds of pages of opinion did you get here?
	...

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