There's gift I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

but it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

I guess. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so for that one change me a little.

Enjoy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

The seven deadly sins of Trumpery we independently derived them from the evidence but then once I had them I'm like oh this is just uniquely American flavored autocracy.

Hi and welcome back to Amicus this is Slates podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court and the rule of law and this week's show is actually about that latter topic about which I have been known to fret.

So I'm Danielith Wicke I cover the courts for slate and it is less than six months out from the midterm elections a year plus out from January 6 2021.

A day which maybe should have lived on an infamy but somehow manages to either be forgotten or dismissed or liken to just hapless tourists lost on the way to the capital gift shop or just last week in the mouth of Senator Ted Cruz likened to a peaceful protest in comparison to abortion rights protesters who are at the homes of Supreme Court justices.

On January 6 of 2021 you had tens of thousands of people peacefully protesting and yet the corporate media and Democrats slander them with the the made up term insurrectionist and yet in this instance that they are not willing to call off their goons even now even now as this has the potential to escalate and escalate further.

Of course it's not just about January 6 and it's not just mass shootings rooted in the quote great replacement theory that Tucker Carlson keeps talking about and saying he never talks about.

This is not just the Pennsylvania election this week in which a Trumpist election denier cruises to victory not just Clarence Thomas whose wife apparently was trying to set aside the Arizona election results in 2020.

Not just vicious racist claims that yes life begins at conception but migrant babies do not deserve infant formula.

It's not any one piece of this breakdown and corrosion of democratic institutions it's all of it and trying to wrap your arms and your head around all of it is really pretty tricky on your best day.

It's almost impossible if you're trying to do all the other things like feed your family answer even a tenth of your emails say keep your job.

Change the pillowcases get tested for covid look none of this is super conducive to a contemplative survey of the big picture larguess this week is norm ison and he's going to help us paint out the big picture by numbers.

He's going to talk about the new volume he's edited and co-written it's called overcoming Trumpery how to restore ethics the rule of law and democracy.

Now later on in the show slate plus members will have access to my conversation with Mark Joseph Stern where we'll talk about the stuff that we didn't get to in the main show including the Supreme Court's most recent intervention in campaign finance reform.

And then we'll score another one for Ted Cruz plus a fifth circuit decision finding the SEC to be well incapable of functioning and new abortion laws out of Oklahoma that will make abortion illegal anytime post fertilization.

If you're not a slate plus member but you'd like to be head on over to slate comm slash amicus plus membership comes with all sorts of perks including add free versions of all of slate shows and never hitting a paywall on slate dot com and the biggest perk from where I'm sitting today is that you would be supporting all the journalism we do here at slate for which we are truly grateful that slate dot com slash amicus plus.

Okay onward our guest today norm ison has been contemplating the systems and patterns that define democracy in the rule of law certainly since I've known him and his brand new anthology is called overcoming Trumpery how to restore ethics the rule of law and democracy.

And one of the things he notes is that a defining feature of a style of governance that he calls Trumpery by the way which survives Donald Trump the man and which exceeds the harm of the Trump years one of the defining features is a total disdain for the rule of law.

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