← Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
The Call Is Coming From Inside The Court
00:51:34
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is pulling back the curtain on a lot of mischief at SCOTUS, and one Democratic senator says the court’s right wing supermajority should be very worried about that.
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Dahlia Lithwick
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Dahlia Lithwick
I'm Dahlia Lithwick. This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law and the Supreme Court.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
What's dangerous for the right wing justices here is that there's a lot to look at. Justice Jackson has pulled back the curtain. Look at stuff outside the immediate four corners of the question in front of them that could go a lot of places.
- [01:39]
Dahlia Lithwick
This week as the dust starts to settle on the Supreme Court term that ended without ever really ending last month. And also the dust starts to settle on this great big catastrophic budget that is less a budget than a wealth transfer of wealth to the wealthy and also a transfer to Donald Trump's terrifying army of masked immigration thugs. We are trying to make meaning and also to find a path forward.
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And one of the people on whom we have come to rely for both meaning making and for a plan is.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of the great state of Rhode island, who has been warning us about what was happening to the courts and and to the Supreme Court long before it became fashionable to do.
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So, and who urged everyone to do something about all this long before that started to feel next to impossible. Senator Whitehouse is the ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He's co Chair of the Caucus on International Narcotics Control and serves as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Finance Committee. He served as Rhode Island's U.S. attorney and state Attorney General before being elected to the Senate in 2006. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, welcome back to Amicus.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Thank you. Wonderful to be with you.
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Dahlia Lithwick
And I wonder if you can start where I just started with your reflections on this SCOTUS term that just wrapped there was so very much and it was hard to think about it all in any big picture way because it was just a blizzard Within a blizzard. So I wonder if you have any sort of big themes you've pulled from the last couple of weeks of the term.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Let me say two things. The first is that I am not as hair on fire about the national injunctions decisions as a lot of people are. First of all, I think that we are more likely to win irrespective of what judge it is. It's the Republicans that need to go find Matthew Kaczmarek down in his little one judge sub district in Texas and go judge shopping and get nationwide injunctions through him. So our odds are actually better in that respect. They, I think, abused nationwide injunctions more. And then as a former litigator, anyway, you know, it piles up pretty fast when you're losing these cases. And once the government has lost its third or fourth case in different districts, you know, they're starting to run into Rule 11 sanctions and issues of bad faith or like instant summary judgment. When they try to create basically two sets of law enforcement, one where they've lost and one where they haven't. That's not a thing that judges are going to like very much. And so, you know, the talk about how you're going to have to go litigate in all 93 districts. No, I don't think so. I think once you've got two or three wins under your belt, the government is now in a real predicament because we have one national government. And when you get an order against the national government saying what you're doing is illegal, okay, maybe the injunction only pertains in that district, but the finding of illegality is on the part of the national government. And so I think there's lots of tools for lawyers to pound back at that. And so it wasn't a, I don't think a great decision, but I don't see it as all that, you know, epochal. What struck me the most was Justice Jackson kind of popping out of her shell. As you know, you and I have both been looking at this court for a long time, and it is a court that is completely surrounded, enmeshed in mischief up to no good. And what it is that's going on over there that is no good, I think is worth talking about. So things like the patterns in which you can pretty much bet for sure who's going to win a case based on which side is the fossil fuel industry or which side has the usual suspects in the flotilla of front group amici curiae all showing up. They may not get everything they want, but you pretty much know where the decision is going to go in advance. And I think it's like 100% statistical record, which is highly improbable. And then you look at like, who's behind those phony front groups, and you start to look at the way that they're funded and the way the Court doesn't do a good job with its own internal ethics. And so what the right wing justices want the Court to do is to be focused on the pure, narrow, little specific legal issues within the four corners of the case. And what Justice Jackson has started to do is start to start pop her head back up and look around and put the decision in the context of other decisions and patterns and predispositions that the Court has and starting to call out those patterns and predispositions. And I think that the Court has taken really unfair advantage of the Democrat appointees by expecting them to adhere to traditions of collegiality when they're violating really serious judicial principles and practices. And they're expecting Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson not to call out what they're seeing in front of them because that would be uncollegial. There's a flip side to the coin of collegiality, which is you're supposed to behave in a sufficiently respectable way that you're not abusing or taking advantage of your colleague's collegiality. And I think Justice Jackson kind of coming out of the box and starting to note those things in her decisions, that's obviously set off the right wing big time and it started to annoy the judges. But to me, it's the right thing to do. I mean, how long can you expect a Supreme Court justice to ignore what's happening right in front of them, right in their courthouse, and not write about it when it so evidently bears on outcomes?
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Dahlia Lithwick
So, Senator, I actually really wanted to ask you about your tweet storm about Justice Jackson from earlier this week, because I think that we're now having in SCOTUS watcher land this brewing and I think, slightly self defeating debate about this split on the Court's liberal wing. And it mirrors, I think, so many splits that you have endured in recent decades. It's always the pragmatists against the idealists or the institutionalists against the reformers. And as you say, right now it's embodied in Justice Jackson, who is more or less saying in dissent after dissent. And you're right, I mean, Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor don't always join some of them because they're very, very, very Strongly worded.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Pointed. Indeed.
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Dahlia Lithwick
Yes, pointed. And as you say, the blinkers are off. She wants to talk about the world as it is and not the four corners of the decision. But I think that the loop we're in, and again, it replic so many loops we've been in, which is that there's, you know, always someone within the institution who wants to say the house is on fire. And then there are those who say the mere act of saying the house is on fire is in effect burning the house down. You know, you are destroying the legitimacy and the credibility of the institution merely by saying that what's happening is illegitimate. And I, I'm just really struck, Senator, by, you know, we've seen this pattern, whether it was being angry at Merrick Garland for being too slow, being angry at the failure to pack the courts when President Biden had the chance. Like we keep seeing this play out. We saw it recently when you had colleagues in the Senate, Right. Who voted against shutting down the government. I just think there is this tendency to want to preserve institutions as an end in themselves, to say the court is the end in itself as opposed to the end in itself being calling this out because it is on fire. And I'm just trying to figure out how you pick your way through that because you're clearly on Team Ketanji Brown Jackson. When it comes to calling the court what it is.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
It's really hard to judge that objectively in real time. I think you have to do in real time what you think is the right and honest and supported thing, factually supported thing, and then history becomes the judge of whether you were right or not. But if you look at what has been going on at the court, if you look at, for instance, the court packing scheme that Leonard Leo ran, if you look at the ethics problems in a court, that is the only place in all of government where there's no independent findings, no fact finding, no nothing when legitimate ethics charges are brought. If you look at the creepy billionaire gifts program, which is just, you know, enough to make it would gag a maggot, the doctrines that they use that have demonstrably come out of fossil fuel funded doctrine factories and then suddenly are the law of the land through this court, the unbelievable patterns of who wins and who loses that are so predictable, this flotilla of front groups that is always showing up as amic and that almost in every single case that they show up, they're winning, the justices are taking the message from those front group Emeki. The discrepancies that Justice Jackson is pointing out between how the court treats the same doctrine, depending on who the party is at the receiving end. You know, you pile all of that up, and that becomes a pretty real condemnation. Literally none of that should be happening. So it would be one thing if Justice Jackson was losing cases, having to dissent in cases and in her fury at losing and having to be in dissent, was throwing barbs at the court. And there was no justification for that. That was just her venting her displeasure with not being on the winning side and with her colleagues not agreeing with her, that would be one thing. But when you pile up the evidence that we know that we have all seen in real time, you know, I think you gotta say that the balance has gotta be on her side in terms of which way history's judgment will fall about whether or not her calling out these patterns, these predispositions, these, you know, problems of procedural hijinks that she has now started calling out. So I'm on the side, as you pointed out of I give her good marks for it. I think it's easily justified. But ultimately, history will judge.
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Dahlia Lithwick
I also think there's such a Sheldon Whitehouse lens through which I see this, which is what she's trying to do, is make that which is not visible visible. And what she's trying to say is, here are the patterns that you don't see. And I think, you know, one of the things that is really so profoundly disturbing this term is that we have a shadow docket where decisions are coming down, including this week, unsigned, unreasoned. Judges are struggling to understand what the doctrine is. All we have is an order, and they keep pouring out. And yet the Supreme Court still so deftly stage manages, you know, its performance of doing justice. That one wouldn't be wrong if one thought the term ended at the end of June and that the last decision that mattered of any consequence was birthright citizenship, and that all this inexplicable stuff that is pouring out of the court, again, without argument, without briefing, without reasoning of any sorts, without knowing who is on what side. That's part of what she is railing against. It feels like a kind of classic Sheldon Whitehouse play to say I am pouring sunshine onto this institution because people say there's nothing I can do about it or I don't understand it because they can't see. See it.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah. And I do think you go back to the situation of decorum, and decorum clearly has its value, particularly in areas of political conflict, where if you can keep the decorum more orderly, you're less likely to, you know, engage in full on like physical combat on the Senate floor. So decorum has its value, but it's also possible for clever people to be taking advantage of the instinct and the tradition of decorum and behaving out of bounds in ways that you can hide because the tradition of decorum inhibits your colleagues from pointing out what you're up to. And I think what's dangerous for the right wing justices here, the Leonard Leo justices, the Koch brothers justices here, is that there's a lot to look at. And once Justice Jackson has pulled back the curtain to look at stuff outside the immediate four corners of the question in front of them that could go a lot of places. And nobody knows this better then the court packing crowd, the Leonard Leo and all the groups around him, the folks that have paid for all this. Lisa Graves counted like nearly $600 million that have been spent to pack the court. Everybody involved in that machinery has got to have like alarm bells going off. Oh no. Just as Jackson has pulled back the curtain. Look at all the stuff we've done that she might be able to call out if she keeps looking. And so they've launched the right wing attack machine, what I call the flying monkeys, to rip her up as much as they possibly can. As if she cared. But it's kind of their punishment. Don't do that. Don't do that. So the right wing has really gone kind of wild on Justice Jackson and I think all of that is of a piece with the stuff that she's pointing out.
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Dahlia Lithwick
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I want to ask you one last court question before we move on, and that is just at some point, the theory of the case was, look, John Roberts cares about his legacy. He cares about the court, he cares about the institution. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. He loves, you know, maximalist executive power. And he's not a big fan of voting per se. But, you know, at the end of the day, he doesn't want to have been the last chief justice in the history of the United States. And yet here we are sitting in a moment in which if his theory of appeasement of Donald Trump is to keep giving him everything he wants, is he just not the John Roberts that you and I believed him to be?
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
I really don't know. I think I've always been a little bit more skeptical of him than most people. I mean, I go back to the Obamacare decision in which everybody said, there, you see, John Roberts isn't political. He upheld Obamacare. Well, if you actually pay attention to the politics of that, he rendered the best political decision for the Republican Party that he could have if they had knocked down Obamacare. The Republican Party was screwed because it had no alternative and the decision would have exposed that and put them in a terrible predicament. Second, you were never, never, never going to get rid of the preexisting conditions change. So that put the insurance industry in trouble if it was repealed because they wouldn't have had the rest of the system to prop them up. All they had to do was to accept people's preexisting conditions, and that changes their whole actuarial program. So the insurance industry wanted that to happen. And then in the drama of Roberts Saves Obamacare, he was able to stuff in a dramatic diminution of the commerce clause power. He was able to drop in entirely new theories, which he loves to plant in advance, about limiting Congress's power to dragoon his word states by conditioning federal funding on things. Now that Trump is conditioning federal funding on anything he doesn't like, we're not seeing so much of the word dragooning any longer, but he really made political use of that opportunity. I've always been a bit skeptical, and I've been particularly skeptical when I've seen the court's response to the billionaire gifts program. There is literally no excuse for the court not having a proper ethics process. Every single one of 50 state supreme courts faces the same problem of how the Supreme Court polices its own ethics. And every single one has figured it out. This is not hard. And yet they simply refuse to do it. And the fact that he's willing to take away rights from women across the country with a non unanimous court, but he insists on a unanimous court when it comes to cleaning up their ethics, I mean, he could have put a proper ethics code before the court, had a vote, won it six to three, and we're done. And he didn't even try. So I guess I'm more of a skeptic than most. It's been a bit of an eye roll for me when people have made that argument. I mean, yeah, he wants to burnish his own reputation. Everybody in Washington does. He wants to look like he's a serious and sober jurist at the highest moral fiber. Okay, I get that. But if you actually look past that very immediate sort of self aggrandizement, then there just isn't much there to justify the feeling that he's much more than an operative of the far right and big business.
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Dahlia Lithwick
Do you think that one of the I'm using your word again patterns that you just can't avoid looking at? I'm looking at this statistic from Stanford's.
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Adam Bonica that came out this week.
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When lower courts block Trump administration policies, SCOTUS intervenes on the emergency docket. In 77% of the cases for the Biden administration, the number is zero. Right. Like we keep fighting about, you know, what's the denominator? What's the denominator in these emergency orders and the court's shadow Docket orders. But it feels to me as though there is this sort of willful blindness or blinkeredness in the court when they say, like, we are just now rendering a decision on the utility and constitutionality of universal injunctions without looking at the sort of huge pattern of Biden administration comes to the court, says, this is a problem. The court's like, eh, not so much. And then five months later, it's a catastrophe. And I'm wondering if there is any path other than the path that Justice Jackson is using or that you're using, which is to say, if you are just looking at cases as cases, as though this is a chemistry lab, you're missing the patterns. And there's no institution that can hold the court to the patterns because Congress isn't doing the work.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah. And the interesting thing about that is that there are plenty of cases that are brought in courts around the country where bias, prejudice and discrimination are the subject of the case. And the way lawyers prove those cases is with evidence of pattern. Right. In this big corporation, every time a white person applies for a promotion to this job, they get it 82% of the time. When a black person makes the same application, they get it 7% of the time. You take those facts of pattern to a jury and you win based on pattern evidence, based on that demonstration that there's more going on here and that you can conclude from patterns about intent and about bias. And so it is to me, actually fairly appropriate that when that's a common litigation strategy upheld over and over and over and over again, why not apply the same type of analysis to the court's proceeding? It's exactly what you would do if the court was a corporation and you were bringing a case against the court for being biased, for having prejudice, for being discriminatory, hoist with one's own petard, I think they call that.
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Dahlia Lithwick
Well, you're adding a sort of another layer to the. You know, if the big takeaway of the term was another victory for judicial supremacy, what you're adding to that idea is this important idea, which is a court that refuses to be held in judgment by anyone else, it certainly won't let you do it, and it won't let the public do it, and it won't let the academy do it and won't let journalism do it.
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And then it says outrage.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Now, when one of its own members.
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Dahlia Lithwick
One of its members is doing it.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
They want that collegiality thing where you don't look up at the pattern, you don't look up at the at the bias, you just pretend that each one of these is its own isolated, solitary thing. And there's no through thread, there's no narrative. And that's just, you know, it's preposterous at this point.
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Dahlia Lithwick
So it's not just a collegiality problem, as you're putting it. It's a sort of a magical thinking. You know, pay no attention to the pattern behind the curtain. You know, every single day is a brand new day of, you know, making justice in our chemistry, and there isn't an institution that is able to hold it in judgment. And what you're saying is that Justice Jackson is sort of breaking out from that.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah. And what if she does more, right? What if she starts doing research back into where doctrines like major questions appeared and who funded the right wing hothouse think tanks, where that doctrine was grown and fertilized and watered for all the years until it got Federalist Society through into briefs in the court and the court picked it up. What if she starts looking at that? What if she starts looking at the patterns of the flotillas of right wing front groups and how frequently what they want is done by the court and compare that to why the court isn't requiring those groups to disclose who's funding them when a certain amount of research, which I've done over and over again, show that they actually have common funders. And you could actually look at this as being a violation of the court's rules against multiple emiche all coming in without disclosing that they're the same people. The presumption of independence of emiche and this frequent flotilla flyer situation, you know, maybe she looks at that next. It's hard to know where she goes next. And I think that's why they're so spooked by her.
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Dahlia Lithwick
Can we apply the exact same schema to what's happening in democratic politics where we have a lot of voters who are just angry that collegiality and that, you know, the upholding of norms and protecting of institutions has become sort of the end game here as opposed to preserving democracy. And, you know, we just keep seeing reports of democratic voters who are just really mad at their representatives for not, you know, bringing anything other than like a tiny little cocktail napkin to the gunfight. And again, it feels like it maps directly onto this conversation we're having about the court, Senator, because it is this question of when you stop fighting to preserve the norms that are strangling you and when you just start to, you know, raw dog it out and fight and, you know, whatever happens, happens. And I wonder how you're navigating that in terms of the sort of internal warfare happening right now on the Hill about whether it's time to say the whole thing is cooked and when at all costs, and whether you just have to keep doing this kind of Zeno's paradox of tiny, tiny, tiny steps towards preserving institutions, but at the same time recognizing this is existential this time.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah, well, I think I come at this from a slightly different angle than most people on my side, as I think, you know, I hectored the Biden administration the entire time that they needed to have more fight, that there actually are villains in the story and they need to describe them as villains. And that things like capturing by billionaires of the United States Supreme Court is a pretty damn big thing. To not take an interest in the climate denial operation, blockading our solution to this, which is fraud, is a damn big thing. And not taking an interest in that is really a mistake. And the dark money enterprise that is corrupting our democracy badly needed to be money changered out of the temple. And they did none of that until that very last speech after he'd lost. That was the moment he chose to let the American public know about these dangers. Thanks a bunch. Where the hell were you in your inaugural speech? Where the hell were you in your State of the Union speeches? Why wasn't that your campaign kickoff speech? What the hell? I mean, we really missed in that campaign projecting that we were ready for the fight that needed to be had. So I think we're having to kind of live that down now. And we're also having to face the fact that the billionaires have built for the Republican Party a massive political infrastructure, 100 plus front groups, entire media outlets devoted to propaganda, the flying monkeys ready to be launched at people with death threats and to their children. I mean, it's a whole apparatus and against it, we basically have nothing. The Democratic National Committee has just now built its first war room. The Biden administration wouldn't let them do it for four years. They finally have just done it. Thank you, Mr. Martin, for doing that. So we're a little bit out of the game in the sense that when we had the chance and we had the need to fight and the public wanted us to fight, we tried to officer friendly our way through the election and it just completely didn't work. And we're losing these huge. I mean, when you've lost the Supreme Court to creepy billionaires, when you've lost the climate fight to the polluters and when you've lost the integrity of Congress to dark money operatives, those are three pretty horrible things to have lost. And so yeah, there does need to be some accountability for that. But the way to go about doing that is to win back offices, pick those fights. The public is behind us and build the infrastructure so that we're fighting back. I spoke last night on the Senate floor. Imagine Winston Churchill in like 1939, 1940 bombs are falling on London and his program is to be empathetic to the poor bombed Londoners and to support a really robust infrastructure program in Parliament to rebuild their homes. And that's it. But there's no radar along the coast picking up the incoming bombers. There are no Spitfires scrambling up into the sky to intercept them over the Channel before they get to England. There are no nighttime raids over the Ruhr Valley to bomb the weapons factories. There's no war room under the streets of London where you coordinate your countermeasures against your attacker. We need to think of ourselves in that mode and we need to have those resources and we need to be effective. We can't. Just like every day is a new day when they have this massive, well planned, semi covert, hundred headed hydra of an operation that is strangling the country for the benefit of the billionaires. Let's have that fight all day long. But recriminations internally, like, it just doesn't help. Circular firing squads just don't help. There is a villain, there is a problem. Let's get to work on that. Let's armor up ourselves. Let's be ready. We can do it fast. And I hope that our candidates, as we move towards 26 and then 28, will embody that message and that need for a cleansing and for a fight and for a restoration and a morning in America.
- [35:13]
Dahlia Lithwick
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Dahlia Lithwick
Let's return now to my conversation with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
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Can we turn to Emile Beauvais? Because this feels like another fight. That is astonishing, right?
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
It is.
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Dahlia Lithwick
In any other moment, this nomination and confirmation would be the story of the year, right? And it's barely. I don't know if people know it happened. And it just says so much about this moment that a person who is so manifestly unfit for this job could very likely skate by. A group of former federal prosecutors for the District of Columbia just urged the Senate in this letter sent on Monday to reject the nomination for Bove for this appeals court judgeship, calling him, quote, the worst conceivable nominee for, for, opposed. I mean, this is against, like Kaczmarit. This is the worst nominee. These are the folks who opposed the eagle Ed Martin nomination. Can you, before we say anything about the tactics here and how we got here, can you just briefly remind us what makes Beauvais worse than like Matthew Kaczmarek or Ed Martin?
- [38:47]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Well, he's been a Trump thug as a lawyer. When he was a prosecutor, he was such a problem in terms of abusive behavior, that there were actually proceedings about his abusive behavior and complaints from people who had to deal with the office all the time, the defense bar, about his abusive behavior. And when he got into the Department of Justice, he got up to real mischief, like cutting the sleazy deal, that he pretended, despite the admission of people involved in the sleazy deal, that it was in fact a sleazy deal, that it was not a sleazy deal. It was all on the up and up. So he basically is gaslighting the world about that New York mayor's prosecution that they pulled back temporarily for him to enforce Trumpian immigration policies in New York. And then he was behind Martin in that scheme to cook up a fake criminal investigation so that they could get a court order blocking funding, that they didn't want to go to certain groups because they were doing climate stuff. So, I mean, if you just look at that little saga, there were about eight different red flags of prosecutorial misconduct that went up through all of that. And they just kept going and going. Didn't matter. Go through another guardrail, Go through another guardrail. And so you have a guy who has very flagrantly and very recently abused the prosecutor of power at very, very high levels and is basically lying about it or refusing to answer questions about it, confident that Republicans in the Judiciary Committee aren't going to make him answer those questions, aren't going to put him under any obligation. So that's his background. If you look at the hearing, he looks more like a mob witness coming into the rackets hearings than he does an honest, sincere candidate for judicial office trying to make his best impression to senators. And the hearing was fixed from the very beginning to both encourage and allow him not to. To answer questions in ways that just aren't consistent with the law. So he was told in the opening statement by Senator Grassley that he wasn't going to be expected to answer questions where attorney client privilege or deliberative process privilege were involved. So that gave him the license to not answer questions. But even assuming those privileges were to apply, which they don't, for many of the questions that he refused to answer, they have their own rules, like somebody has to actually assert them. And he didn't actually assert them. He just said, that wouldn't be appropriate for me. And so the whole thing has just become a fog through which this candidate can get to confirmation without having to answer basic questions. And if you turn it to, when it's a Democrat and listen to what Republicans were saying about the need to get questions answered, and about the importance of oversight, particularly when a nominee is headed for a lifetime job. It's night and day. They're just completely oppositional to their own positions when it was a Biden nominee. So the whole thing just reeks.
- [42:24]
Dahlia Lithwick
Yeah.
- [42:24]
And you, I mean, I think you've pointed out, but it's really important to say this is even beyond, like, I don't recall. This is like. No, I don't have to answer that.
- [42:35]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah, wouldn't be appropriate. What's this line? Wouldn't be appropriate for me to answer that. Oh, really? You get to decide that.
- [42:41]
Dahlia Lithwick
Right. And it goes to your larger point, which is this is how you know the fix is in. This is why you have to look outside the four corners of this nomination. He's got the votes, and so he's just sitting there saying, nah, he might.
- [42:54]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
As well have sat there and answered every question of a Democrat by saying, go pound sand.
- [42:59]
Dahlia Lithwick
Yeah.
- [43:00]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
And he more or less did. Effectually.
- [43:02]
GMC Advertiser
So you won't answer that question?
- [43:04]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
No, I will not, Senator. Why? Because it is not appropriate for me to discuss.
- [43:09]
GMC Advertiser
It is appropriate for you to tell.
- [43:12]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Us whom you consulted before taking action on behalf of.
- [43:16]
GMC Advertiser
Of the United States of America.
- [43:19]
Dahlia Lithwick
It makes your larger point about systems failures and how we can't look at any individual process in isolation and think that the process is getting us where we want to go because it's part of a larger system that has been completely corrupted. Can we end with, I think, a maybe? I don't know. I want to say hopeful, but also, I think, important note, which is this week you started to say this. You delivered your 300th warning on climate in action. 300 is a lot of speeches. Senator. You began this series on April 18, 2012. And I think this has always been your approach to, you know, this is how you always approached climate. It became your gateway to your speeches about the court just sustained public education and attention. And you use your office to keep trying to make what I'm calling invisible, what maybe is more charitably called abstractions, really real. And I always find myself wondering, you know, in an era of TikTok influencers and Instagram reels, you just deeply believe, talk about an end in itself, that this kind of sustained public education and attention is, in fact bending the arc of the moral universe toward a better place, that this is what you do. And 300 speeches. I'm just going to say it again. That's a lot. And I'm just wondering why.
- [44:50]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
I think in a democracy, it's really important for Citizens to understand what's going on around them. And if you're in a position where you get a view of things before most other people do, you've got a job to explain that and to tell people and to warn people. And there's actually a real thirst for that. One of the things that we've noticed, I've got the best comms team in the Senate. One of the things that they've taught me, that we've learned together, is that think about Twitter, which was famously the home of the short, sharp snark. And just for the hell of it, we started putting out like 20 chapter tweets about the Supreme Court, essentially an essay in Twitter form. And we figured, you know, maybe you will read it and Ruth Marcus will read it and Jennifer Rubin will read it, and that's enough. But as it turned out, we like blow through a million engagements on those things. People liked the explainer about an issue that concerned them. And so we kept doing that. The most recent one we did even after it became X, even after the algorithms were torqued to suppress what we were doing. I did another 20 chapter tweet and it blew through a million again. So the appetite is still there. And the message that I want to Communicate through the 300 speech is here's how they did it. And if you know how they did it, if you know that it's essentially the same crew that captured the Supreme Court and turned it into their captured tool, polluted our political process with this foul dark money, and has run a climate denial op that has prevented us from solving a very solvable problem because it would have inconvenienced the fossil fuel industry to have to clean up its act, that those three things are actually kind of the same creature. And whether you're terrified about our climate future, or furious about our frustrated and corrupted politics, or agonizing about what the hell is going on at a Supreme Court that seems to be on cruise control for certain interests, that's actually a thing you could do something about. It was done. And so it can be undone. And behind the sort of gloom and doom of, oh my gosh, here we are, we have this country that's at the edge of, you know, falling away from democracy and mired in corruption. There's also the like look to the horizon. This was done. It can be undone. We have to understand what the problem is and go at it. But we have the tools to undo it. We have the public massively behind us. And so, you know, while I'm usually delivering fairly grim news about how the dirty deal went down. It's founded in an optimism that when you know how the dirty deal was done, you know how to go back and undo it.
- [47:56]
Dahlia Lithwick
This is the singular most important thing that we have to keep saying to each other, which is this can be fixed. It can be fixed. And it's massive structural reforms, the sorts of things that you, Senator, have written a book about and that you have given a lot of speeches about. But the notion that this is too hard is just not available to us right now. And nobody reminds me that more often or more bracingly than you. And thank you, Senator Whitehouse, for joining us. I know this has been a just rollicking hard season, but we're so grateful for your voice and for your work. Thank you.
- [48:36]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
And for yours, Dalia. You are wonderful. Thank you.
- [48:44]
Dahlia Lithwick
That is all for this episode.
- [48:46]
Thank you so much for listening. And thank you so much for your.
- [48:48]
Letters and your questions and your comments. You can keep in touch with us@amicuslate.com or by commenting on our page on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also find us@facebook.com AMICUSpodcast Coming up on today's episode of Amicus, Mark Joseph Stern and and I are breaking down what happened when a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked Donald Trump's unconstitutional birthright citizenship executive order. It's goodbye nationwide injunctions, hello nationwide class action. Also, another big decision from earlier in the week on the Supreme Court's emergency docket. This one lifted the block on Trump and Doge's big plans for mass fire of federal workers. You can subscribe to Slate plus directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can visit slate.comamicus+ to get access wherever you listen. That episode is available for you to listen to right now. We'll see you there. Sara Burningham is Amicus senior producer. Our producer is Patrick Fort. Hillary Fry is Slate's editor in chief. Susan Matthews is executive editor. Mia Lobel is executive producer of Slate Podcasts. And Ben Richmond is our senior director of operations. We'll be back with another episode of Amicus next week.
- [50:21]
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- [50:51]
Josh Levine
Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, the Queen tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title the Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor. Now it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Lynda Taylor, what what she did to others, and what was done in her name.
- [51:22]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their.
- [51:27]
Dahlia Lithwick
Own conclusions based on what their prejudices are.
- [51:29]
Josh Levine
Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.