Hi and welcome to Amicus. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover the courts and the law for Slate.

There's a ton of ground to cover, but before we get to it, I'm going to offer up a tiny editorial note, which is something I don't usually do.

This podcast was launched out of a deep love and respect and regard for the U.S. Supreme Court,

an institution in which civility and reason and facts still truly matter.

And in that spirit, I think we've been at pains to be fair and polite and respectful with both sides in every case, even if we once

and a while felt arguments were without merit. And I'm saying this now because it is not possible

to be fair and polite in the current climate. And for the folks who think that it is our obligation

to always tell the other side, I need to stop and clarify. This is not the show that intends to give voice to enable to in any way help or normalize an administration that is demonstrably racist and misogynistic and, in my view, incompetent and cruel. And so if you want the show that gives equal time to the legal arguments being advanced by the Trump administration,

I think this is the time that I tell you you should probably look elsewhere. We make this show because we love the law. We love the courts. We love the Constitution. We love the presumption that

we treat each other well and that facts matter. And we are going to continue to probe deeply

both sides of legal issues that have two genuine sides.

But we're not going to give intellectual cover to what we think of is legal nihilism.

And so later in the show, we're going to take stock of the ever-growing pile of lawsuits

challenging the executive order on immigrants and refugees.

And we're going to talk to a lawyer involved in one of the first of those cases.

And we're also going to take a few minutes to consider what happens, constitutionally speaking,

if border officials opt to just ignore federal court orders.

But first, as you may have heard, there's a little bit of Supreme Court news this week.

Huh?

Supreme Court, remember them?

After almost a year with a vacant seat on the Supreme

Court bench, a seat that went vacant February 13th of last year, and a nomination that was

...