Hi and

welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover some of those things for slate. presidential debate as anything beyond an all-out whooping by Vice President Kamla Harris.

One huge legal misdirection emerged from the cluster of indecipurable rantings about abortion that we heard from Donald J Trump.

The former president praised the genius and the heart and the courage that his Supreme Court

justices had deployed in stripping millions of American women of

their fundamental rights in Dobbs and then took all credit for what has come

since.

Look, this is an issue that's torn our country apart for 52 years.

Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative,

they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people

could vote.

So I guess this was what we all wanted, apparently, and I guess it's what every single scholar

wanted, but there's a very telling rhetorical turn that we really want to single out here.

And that is the idea that sending abortion back to the states is somehow a democratic fix for the distinctly undemocratic act of upending 50-plus years of

precedent by a conservative supermajority at the court that was constructed by presidents who had lost the popular vote.

After Dobbs, activists and advocates tried really hard to sound the alarm about the ways in which

voting and abortion rights are inextricably connected and they tried to

point out how Justice Alito's fatuous, oh go fix it at the voting booth guidance in Dobbs, was

cynical gaslighting. Those warnings are now

crystallizing as we see state elected officials working very very hard to

stymie and block efforts by organizers to actually put abortion on state ballots so actual people

can decide because it turns out they don't actually want actual people to decide abortion questions. In the two years since Dobbs,

...