← Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Trump’s Plan To Put A Chokehold On Voting
01:15:45
The SAVE act plus this week’s executive order targeting voting are the biggest proposed restrictions on the right to vote in Congress’ history.
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- [00:02]
Dalia Lithwick
Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Want to travel like a savvy jet setter? No, that doesn't mean monogramming your passport. It means making smart decisions every step of your trip, which means knowing your options. Smart Travel unpacks the facts, like which booking sites will actually save money, how to fly first class using points, and if that fancy travel card is a smart investment, all so you can save more on your next adventure. And be sure to follow smart travel from NerdWallet so you can start traveling like a pro. This episode is brought to you by Universal Pictures. Today's the day From Universal Pictures and Blumhouse come a storm of terror from the director of the Shallows the Woman in the Yard don't let her in. Where does she come from?
- [01:00]
Mark Joseph Stern
What does she want?
- [01:01]
Dalia Lithwick
When will she leave? The Woman in the Yard in theaters now. Hi, I'm Dalia Lithwick. Welcome to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.
- [01:22]
Wendy Weiser
The government has beclowned itself at every turn. Not just the derogatory language insulting the judiciary, but also the obvious mistakes, the extensive reporting showing that they got the wrong guys.
- [01:37]
Mark Joseph Stern
The only document that it clearly accepts under this to register to vote is a passport. So that is half of eligible American citizens could be disenfranchised with a stroke of a pen.
- [01:55]
Dalia Lithwick
The past seven days have been yet another year's worth of rock em sock em battles between lower federal courts and members of the Trump administration, including specific and really vicious attacks by the president on law firms that have done work to oppose him, and yet more impeachment efforts against federal judges amid the harrowing court hearings, the masked men grabbing international students off the street, and the generalized mayhem of an administration staffed largely by the kind of people who take glamour shots of themselves in front of renditioned migrants in prison. It was also the week where all the news oxygen was taken up by the national security hellscape of Pete Hexseth, disclosing in advance detailed plans to bomb Yemen on an unsecured commercial messaging app in a chat that included a journalist in the upside down of Trumplandia. On one hand, the timing of flights from Texas to an El Salvadoran prison camp greeted by film crews is a state secret. But on the other hand, details of precise timings and military hardware used to destroy an apartment building in Sana shared with a random journalist from the Atlantic ahead of the operation is all apparently not classified information. Don't even know what the emoji is for for that? While signal gates legal implications under the Espionage act and federal records keeping laws are unlikely to be investigated by Pam Bondi's Justice Department, we will keep an eye on those lawsuits that emanate from it. But that's not going to be the main focus of this week's show. Instead, we're going to talk in a few minutes about all the ways in which the Trump administration, with a big money bags assist from Elon Musk, is trying to ensure that, as he once promised, a gathering of voters, the 2024 election would be the last election they'd ever have to vote in if he won. An executive order this week tried to codify these efforts into one big dangerous wish list. And we're going to be discussing all the ways in which it is both not the law and also taking aim at so many freedoms all at the same time. But first, we needed to check in with our own Mark Joseph Stern about a filing on Friday morning from the Justice Department seeking to rocket their way to the Supreme Court's doorstep with that incendiary case we've been following for two weeks now, the renditioning of Venezuelans to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador without due process under a very thinly reasoned invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. So, Mark Stern, welcome back.
- [04:38]
Wendy Weiser
Hi, Dalia.
- [04:39]
Dalia Lithwick
And let's talk about this case, which I thought we had talked about exhaustively last week, but we had no idea when last week ended and Judge Boasberg was hearing an emergency hearing what was to come. So maybe we start right here and right now with what Judge Boasberg did at the beginning of the week.
- [05:00]
Wendy Weiser
On Monday, Judge Boasberg kept his temporary restraining order, in effect declining the government's motion to vacate it, saying that the Trump administration's invocation of the Alien Enemies act is likely unlawful. The way it has proceeded here, just snatching up these people on the basis of thin to no evidence and sending them off to an El Salvadorian prison with no due process that that is likely unlawful, that the individuals targeted here some opportunity to contest their classification as alien enemies. Otherwise, of course, any person, including a citizen, could just be snatched up and deported. And Judge Boasberg also at the same time pushed the administration to reveal more details of its alleged defiance of his previous court order, in which he told the government, turn around the planes that are going to El Salvador. And the government refused. Boasberg said, I need the information. The government declined. It cited, quote, the mandate of the electorates as a reason for Trump and his administration not to turn over the details, saying that it was constitutionally protected and that Boasberg as a judge simply had no right or authority to access that info. So we've got still two parallel tracks. First on the merits, whether any of this is legal, and second, on contempt, whether the administration already violated Boasberg's order. And I just think it's fair to say that this is putting Boasberg in a fairly bad mood and making him less and less inclined to believe the factual and legal representations that the Justice Department is putting forth to his court.
- [06:40]
Dalia Lithwick
Just two quick notes Mark and I wrote about what it suggests when the totality of your argument is we won the election, so suck it. We have a mandate. And that is probably, I guess, the best encapsulation of this really creepy, like the law is my person argument that's being advanced. But we should also note that both Mark and I listened in at oral arguments at the D.C. circuit where the merits piece of this was argued. As Mark says, we still don't know what's going to happen with that contempt piece of it. But the merits of whether Judge Boseberg could in fact enjoin this conduct went to the D.C. circuit. And that was fascinating, I think, in no small measure, both, because Judge Patricia Millett was pretty mad at the Justice Department, but Judge Karen Henderson said nothing.
- [07:36]
Wendy Weiser
Yes, Judge Henderson was the swing vote on this panel. And so we were all eagerly awaiting her thoughts during arguments, and yet she was essentially silent. Um, she is a George H.W. bush appointee. She's certainly a conservative. So it was alarming that she kept mom, especially when Judge Justin Walker, the third member of this panel and a very far right Trump appointee, just prattled on about how wrong Judge Boasberg's order was and about how all these people had to file for habeas petitions in Texas where they would lose, that it was the wrong venue, that the plaintiffs had jumped the gun, that Judge Boseberg got out over his skis. And so it was really Judge Millette versus Judge Walker being petulant and defending the government with Henderson in the middle. And I think it's fair to say we were a little bit surprised by how this came down, Dalia, because Millette, to me, was arguing like a judge who knows she's going to lose and is trying to persuade a future court. Right. Maybe the full D.C. circuit, maybe the Supreme Court. I mean, there was that extraordinary exchange where she said correctly, even the Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies act during and after World War II, they were at least given notice and a hearing at which the government had to prove they were Nazis. These alleged gang members that Trump is trying to send El Salvador, they got nothing. They got no such process. And yet when the order came down on Wednesday, there was Judge Henderson right alongside Judge Millette in a 2 to 1 order siding against the government, affirming Judge Boasberg, saying that he was well within his rights to restrain this scheme from continuing. And Judge Henderson and Judge Millet both wrote separately, making different points, which we can talk about. But I would say that the thrust of the two opinions together is, let's get real, the law does not allow this. All of these claims about exigent circumstances and national security are all window dressing around the fact that Trump is acting way beyond his statutory or constitutional authority. And if courts have one job, it's to step in at moments like this and put some real restraints on what appears to be a brazenly illegal plot.
- [09:49]
Mark Joseph Stern
Yeah.
- [09:50]
Dalia Lithwick
And I think maybe worth noting, just because it's becoming a theme that this was a two to one DC Circuit opinion with the two women. Yes, one improbably right, as you say, Karen Henderson, not just a, a Bush appointee, but reliable consult, conservative vote throughout her tenure on the bench, was having none of it. And, you know, not, I think, unworthy of notice that as you say, Judge Millette said things like the Nazis got better treatment. She said, there is nothing that you are saying to the Justice Department that would prevent me from being scooped up and stuffed on a plane to El Salvador to which there was no answer. And the kind of continued dripping contempt that we heard back from the Justice Department about how the person who really had suffered most on that Saturday hearing in front of Judge Boasberg when he asked them to turn the planes around, was him. He was having a rough day that day. Like, sucks to be me having to, you know, defend this quickly, but I think worth just flagging. Not just that gender split, but also I don't think that the Justice Department lawyers, and we've talked about this so many times on the show with their absolute disrespectful. You don't need to know anything. You don't want to know anything. Judges know nothing about national, national security. We have an absolute claim to the power to decide what makes America safe. We're going to repurpose, melt down the Alien Enemies act and have it mean something different. We're going to repurpose those World War II cases and have them mean something different. I don't think they're winning points with judges who are on the fence?
- [11:29]
Wendy Weiser
No, not at all. I think taking this utterly antagonistic position in court, you know, degrading and insulting Judge Boasberg and really the entire judiciary by saying, you know, not only did you get this wrong, but you're not even qualified to consider these issues. They're unreviewable. You're breaching your own authority by considering this case. Judges don't like hearing that in general. I think judges don't like being told, you're in kindergarten and where seniors and you have no idea what's what, and so you need to shut up and sit in the corner. And I think some of that came through, especially in Judge Henderson's opinion, which, again, you know, here, I think it was one of those opinions that's maybe written for a higher court, maybe for the Supreme Court. And it's notable not only because Judge Henderson is a George H.W. bush appointee and a conservative, as we said, but she has staked out very extreme positions against the rights of undocumented immigrants in the past. In the notorious case where the first Trump administration was trying to deny abortions to pregnant undocumented minors in custody, she had sided with Brett Kavanaugh against the minors, and she argued that undocumented immigrants are not persons under the due process clause with any constitutional rights. She actually said it was like, very alarming, sort of Dred Scott 2.0, that people who enter this country unlawfully have zero constitutional rights and aren't even people for the purpose of due process. And yet this was too much for her, you know, and she came at it not with empathy for the victims of this dragnet, not with any kind of personal suspicion toward the Trump administration, but with a purely sort of textualist and originalist lens of what you're arguing is unpalatable bs. She traced the history of the Alien enemies Act of 1798. So that's a whole lot of history that we have. She whipped out founding era dictionaries. She poured over the text sort of word by word. She said, this is about foreign nations invading United States territory, which it is indisputably. A Venezuelan gang is not a foreign nation, and it's not invading United States territory. And it really is that simple. And so, at a bare minimum, at this preliminary stage, the D.C. circuit has absolutely no remit to overrule Judge Boasberg. And, you know, I just. I really appreciated Judge Millett's separate opinion where she goes all in on due process. And she has some great Zingers. And I encourage everyone to read it, and it's one for the ages. But I think that Judge Henderson's opinion, while drier, may be just as, if not more important, because it lays the legal roadmap for invalidating this invocation of the Alien Enemies act by saying, hey, guys, you can do this, but not here and not in this way. This just does not work.
- [14:16]
Dalia Lithwick
I'm just going to note the profound irony of the Trump administration continuing to take the posture that for purposes of the Alien Enemies act, this is a war, right? This is a military invasion by a Venezuelan gang that becomes a war at the same time that they are defending the Pete Hegseth League by saying, oh, those were attack plans, not war plans. So yet again, upside down, war isn't war, but not war is war. And here we are meant to just suck it up. The other unbelievable irony is that while they make the claim, invoking this week, which they finally did, the administration invoking the state secrets privilege, that these flights to Venezuela, every single part of them, including that which was captured on film, is state secret and detailed attack plans are not, in fact, classified information. And so, perhaps coincidence of all time, the judge who was assigned to the case now challenging Signalgate as a violation of federal records keeping statutes is none other than, wait for it, Judge Boasberg. And so he will be in the unenviable enviable. I don't know what position of having to. To simultaneously hear the case that says that on the one hand, that which was filmed and taped and tweeted by the administration is in fact a state secret and that detailed attack plans are not.
- [15:57]
Wendy Weiser
It is not the position he probably woke up wanting to be in. But there's no one I would trust more to handle it. Judge Boasberg has already issued an order instructing the government not to delete any of these records. And I think quite properly. So the Federal Records act is fairly clear that these records need to be preserved, that this conversation was in fact conducted in an illegal way through an improper channel in the first place, and that destruction of the conversation, whether through a preset automatic erasure like Signal has, or willfully now moving forward, that that would also violate federal law and federal record keeping requirements. I know that sounds a little bland. Federal record keeping law is not the sexiest area of jurisprudence, but this stuff is really important. It's not just a frivolous suit. Congress has decided that this information needs to be preserved. It could be subject to litigation, it could be subject to research, to historical projects. In the future. It cannot just be cast away into the graveyard of the Internet. And I think Judge Boasberg is right to reach that preliminary conclusion. And I certainly hope that he holds the government's feet to the fire now that he has both of these cases before him. As the government argues out of one side of its mouth that secrets aren't secret and out of the other that things that are clearly not secret are secret.
- [17:17]
Dalia Lithwick
Let's end for now, Mark, with a beat on the Justice Department. Surprising nobody ever running to the Supreme Court Friday seeking emergency relief on this renditions case, which, as you and I just noted, Judge Boasberg issued a ruling at the beginning of the week. The D.C. circuit came down with theirs in the middle of the week already. The Justice Department wants the Supreme Court to weigh in.
- [17:45]
Wendy Weiser
Yes. So the Justice Department has said, please, scotus, you must save us. It has asked for an immediate stay and for the court to vacate these orders blocking its rendition of these Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. It argued, and I'll just quote, the administration detained designated TREND members identified through a rigorous process, a rigorous process which we know meant identifying people who maybe Venezuelan, falsely claiming that their tattoos were proof of gang membership and throwing them on a plane to El Salvador before they could even file an objection. That is a lie. I think we should note that we've reached the stage at which the Trump administration is actively lying to the Supreme Court. Further, the application says, quote, that the lower court's order is forcing the United States to harbor individuals whom national security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization bent upon grievously harming Americans. Those orders now jeopardize sensitive diplomatic negotiations and delicate national security operations. Not true. Demonstrably false. Like, I don't think Boasberg could have done more at this point to make it clear that what I just read from this application is bogus. These individuals are not threatening the United States. Many of them, at least, have been misclassified as members of trend. There has been no process to either identify them or sort out those who are actually gang members from those who are innocent. There is no evidence that they harm the homeland when they are being detained on an ongoing basis. And I think it's worth pointing out here, the plaintiffs are not asking for release into the country. The plaintiffs are not saying we want to walk free out of a detention center. All they are saying is we want to stay detained here rather than being sent to a prison in El Salvador. It is a very rare case in which a detained immigrant Says, I want to stay detained. But that is the situation we have here. I will be cautiously optimistic and say I don't think the Supreme Court will take up the government's invitation. At least Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett may side with the liberals to say no here. This case is still in very early stages. There are some jurisdictional questions about whether it can even be appealed this way. And beyond that, the government has become itself at every turn. Not just the derogatory language insulting the judiciary, uh, but also the obvious mistakes. The extensive reporting showing that they got the wrong guys, that they have no real process for identifying who's a. Who's a dangerous gang member and who's an innocent person. That looks terrible on the record to justices who are being asked for pretty extraordinary relief to weigh in at this early stage. And I also think, as we've discussed on this show, Dalia, the government did itself no favors by repeatedly criticizing Judge Boasberg for his orders and. And the President going out and calling for Judge Boasberg to be impeached. I mean, that is what trigger John Roberts to issue that very rare and unusual statement that got the attention of the nation on this case and sort of pushed the Justice Department into a corner. It has become even more petulant and insult comic like sense. And I think, again, there is a real chance that Barrett and Roberts will say, we're not bailing you out of this one. Partly because the law is so clear and partly because the government has given the Supreme Court no reason to believe it's acting in something close to good faith.
- [21:14]
Dalia Lithwick
Yeah. And let's also maybe just re up the argument that the ACLU's Lee Gallant made multiple times at the arguments before the D.C. circuit panel, which is just demonstrably true. As you say, with every passing day, we get more fantastic journalistic work that simply supports the idea that these were lawful asylum applicants. Going through the process correctly, that El Salvador turned a bunch of people around, including six women, that they could not detain there that time after time after time, these quick and dirty assessments based on nothing but a tattoo in some instances, is just not due process. And what Galler said, and I think it's really important to understand this, is that this is a factual record that does not exist, and that Judge Boasberg is working as fast as he possibly can to develop that record. But now is not the time for the Justice Department to say, we can decide on the basis of these not facts and mistruths, that on principle, the ACLU is wrong and that's just way too early days. It's why we don't run these emergency cases up to the court before we have any kind of facts on the ground. Thanks, Mark.
- [22:28]
Wendy Weiser
Thanks Dalia.
- [22:29]
Dalia Lithwick
Mark, we're gonna see you in the Amicus plus Rumpus Room bonus segment later after this episode plus subscribers can tune into our conversation about the legendary conservative litigator who has just stepped in to Def Big law where progressives have feared to tread. You can subscribe to Slate plus directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can visit slate.com amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. We're going to take a short break. Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details and private messages. McAfee helps stop stop them. Secure VPN keeps your online activity private.
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Dalia Lithwick
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Dalia Lithwick
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- [23:33]
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- [24:26]
Dalia Lithwick
I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can.
- [24:38]
Wendy Weiser
1, 2, 3 Will that be cash or credit?
- [24:43]
Mark Joseph Stern
Credit.
- [24:43]
Wendy Weiser
4 Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do you get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.
- [24:57]
Dalia Lithwick
Now let's turn to a huge development the that received, I think insufficient attention this past week, but really ought to be setting off the democracy bat signal. President Trump's executive order entitled, quote, preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections, which claims presidential authority to unilaterally modify voting rights across the land. I want to start where I start with every single executive order. It is not a law law. The president cannot sign a law usurping states powers to run elections. And the fact that it was covered as such throughout the mainstream media is just hugely problematic. That said, this EO is a terrifying look at the administration's plans to rather than preserve and protect elections, suppress the vote in broad strokes and disenfranchise millions of people. This executive order also puts to rest the notion that everything cataclysmic that is happening every single day is just going to be secured by waiting for Democrats to turn it around in the midterms. Joining us to discuss this executive order is Wendy Weiser. She's the Vice President for Democracy at the Brennan center for justice at NYU Law School. Wendy oversees the Center's work on voting rights in elections, redistricting and representation, federal reform, abuse of power and the courts. And we wanted to have her on the show for a while now to talk about the looming threat that is the SAVE Act. But this week's executive order made it all really exigent. Wendy, welcome to AM and thank you for having me. And I wonder if before we deep, deep dive into the Executive Order itself, can we just start with the fact that the executive order is not a law, it is a directive to agencies about priorities and how to implement them. But nothing should have changed, right, as a result of state voting procedures or practices just because this thing was signed. And and yet am I wrong in saying it felt like the media was kind of breathlessly describing it in terms of ordering the states to do this and requiring election officials to do that. This feels a little like kind of peak obey in advance messaging.
- [27:10]
Mark Joseph Stern
I really love that you started with that. That has been something that has been of brave concern to me. And it's not just this executive order, but on a lot of these, and particularly on this one, the President is is purporting to order all sorts of people to do all sorts of things that are not within the scope of the President's powers. The president can't rewrite laws passed by Congress. The President can't order independent agencies to do stuff. The President has no role to play in state administration of elections. So these are strongly worded suggestions, hoping that maybe people will treat it as though it's a law, but it is not.
- [27:48]
Dalia Lithwick
So that's a super helpful way to maybe lead us into, if you can, and I know there's a lot here. Summarize for us what some of the kind of issue areas are, maybe in order of how concerned you are about them, although maybe you're equally concerned about all of it, but sort of. Can you walk us through the different kinds of things this purports to do?
- [28:13]
Mark Joseph Stern
Sure. And I think there's a lot of detail to get into here. But first and foremost, what the Executive Order purports to do is it tries to require Americans to provide a passport or one of a few other citizenship documents to register to vote. And it does that indirectly. It orders a federal agency called the U.S. election Assistance Commission to change a federal voter registration form. It also has some provisions that are trying to put pressure on states to adopt citizenship documentation requirements as well. That's one of the most significant changes of what it tries to do. There are many, many things wrong with it. It would be disastrous. As a matter of policy, it is completely unlawful. But that's sort of the first category of what it does. It also purports to give Elon Musk and DOGE access to sensitive voter registration data. And it does that by ordering DHS and DOGE to coordinate and review state public voter registration lists. And it purports to authorize them to request and even subpoena non public voter lists. That's very alarming. Also outside the scope of their authority. We can talk about what's wrong with that as well. Third, it actually requires that same federal elections agency to decertify all of the voting machines in the United States today and to make changes to the guidelines for certification and to make changes that many states can't meet. It would upend voting across the country and require hundreds of millions of dollars of new costs. So I'll just start with those three categories and we can maybe delve in.
- [30:00]
Dalia Lithwick
There before we do. I guess it's also worth saying that that whenever we do a voting rights show, Wendy, we always say, you know, voting is, you know, this essential right because it's the key to all the other rights. In that sense, it's a kind of a cornerstone. But I think it's useful to think about this as a kind of reverse engineering because it's an encroachment on so many kinds of rights that we're going to talk about and that you just mentioned a few of and one piece of it that just feels exigent is states rights. Right. This is a massive federal intrusion into states rights. And as you said, it's an attempt to give kind of king like powers to the President. And correct me if I'm wrong, and I'd love for you to parse this for one second, but elections are largely controlled state by state. Rules are passed by the states that the Constitution gives some power to Congress, not the President, to oversee federal elections. But doesn't this just turn into just a huge seismic project 2025 power grab that comes sort of under the guise of trying to do away with voter fraud?
- [31:10]
Mark Joseph Stern
This is in many ways an attempted presidential takeover of elections. Elections in the United States are in fact managed by states and pursuant to to laws that are passed by states. Congress actually does have the authority granted by the Constitution. It's a broad authority to regulate federal elections. They can create a whole new rules for federal elections. The President does not have any authority with respect to presidential elections. And Congress has in fact used that authority before to improve voter registration. In fact, that's why we have a federal voter registration form. That's why we have this federal agency, the U.S. election Assistance Commission. And the President is also trying to intrude on Congress's power. So he's both taking power that the states have and trying to take control over election apparatus, trying to regulate what records they keep, how they manage their elections, how they share that information, and then also trying to change the rules that Congress passed for federal elections.
- [32:18]
Dalia Lithwick
And again, we'll do the details in one second, but I think Brennan has been running the numbers on if this thing in its entirety again a law were allowed to pass in full the numbers of people who might be barred for voting. And I would just love for you to do the math for us really quickly because I think it's a way of explaining that you can kind of be in the weeds about voter ID or be in the weeds about vote fraud. But what this is is just a massive, massive purge of eligible voters.
- [32:51]
Mark Joseph Stern
The requirement that's purporting to just require documentation is actually a significant vote suppression measure that could block millions and millions of eligible Americans from voting. That is its principal effect, blocking millions of eligible Americans. And so I will go through some of the numbers. First, the only document that it clearly accepts under this to register to vote is a passport. Only about half of Americans, just over half of Americans actually have, have a U.S. passport. So that is half of eligible American citizens could be disenfranchised with a stroke of a pen, to the extent that it allows birth certificates or other documents to vote to. We've actually run studies with the University of Maryland and other data analysts and found that more than 9% of voting age citizens, that's 21.3 million million American citizens, don't have a passport, a birth certificate, naturalization papers readily available. So that is even if there was an expanded group of citizenship documents that were allowed, and that's not even clear under this executive order, that is 21.3 million American citizens who don't have those documents readily available on the birth certificates, 79% of married women actually change their names. And so that their names, their current names are not going to match the names on their birth certificates. So to the extent that a passport or a birth certificate are required to register to vote, it's going to be especially harmful for married women.
- [34:36]
Dalia Lithwick
And this was the reason we wanted to talk to you about the SAVE Act. And I'm going to give you a second to explain what that is. But one of the things that was really chilling about the SAVE act is that it was gonna have this effect, right? It was gonna have a massively voter suppressive effect for women who had changed their names for trans voters. I mean, this was kind of the purpose. So maybe can you just walk us through what the SAVE act does and doesn't do? It's still on the table. And then just explain, I think your very first skeet was, oh my God, this is so much worse. So I'd love for you to sort of explain the SAVE and then just explain how this is different and how in some sense, it almost obviates the need to do the SAVE Act.
- [35:25]
Mark Joseph Stern
Well, the executive order is an attempt in many respects to actually pass the SAVE act with the stroke of a presidential pen. Again, the President doesn't have the authority to pass a law with a pen, but that is. So it's trying to, by executive order, accomplish what Congress is currently considering. And what they're considering is a bill that would require a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers to register to vote in federal elections. So just like what the executive order is requiring as it relates to the federal voter registration form, and it would actually go even farther than that. So in addition to just disenfranchising up to 21.3 million people, it would also completely upend voter registration, it would end mail registration, it would end voter registration drives, it would end online registration, and make it much harder to do automatic voter registration because it requires voter registration. To happen in person, you need to show those documents in person to an election official so you can't mail it in. So rural voters, voters with disabilities, older voters, are also going to face special burdens in addition to those millions and millions of Americans who don't have these documents readily available. This is not in the past. Congress is still actively considering this. Congressional Republicans have actually listed this as one of their top 10 priorities for legislation for this year. They plan to bring it to the floor in the next week or two. So it could be very rapid that we're seeing it at least go to the floor in the House. I think it is possible to beat that bill back. I think it is wildly poorly drafted and unpopular in how it completely upends elections and undermines women in particular, but it is actively moving right now.
- [37:22]
Dalia Lithwick
Yeah. And so you're making this point that I think is really important, that for everybody who was organizing and educating themselves about the SAVE act, this is a sort of pincer move, which is an attempt to say we can do it in Congress or we can do it by executive order. And it's the same play and it requires the same level of response. I do feel like I should have given you the chance. I think every time someone cites the statistic that you're more likely to be hit by lightning in the United States. Right. Than to have a case of vote fraud. I feel like every time someone says that, someone at the Brennan center, like, gets a pair of wings. But I would just love for you to, for those listeners who still think that there is this scourge of horrific vote fraud and foreigners voting and Mickey Mouse voting 40 times times, just remind us what the data shows about, quote, unquote, illegals, buses of migrants, all the stuff that Project 2025 and Heritage and Trump spew as though it's true. What's the real numbers?
- [38:24]
Mark Joseph Stern
So you've got that exactly right. We have multiple layers of protections in American elections to ensure that only citizens vote. To the extent that there are outliers or exceptions, they are caught and prosecuted. It is very, very rare. It is so rare. As you said, you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to find a non citizen who voted or to find any kind of individual voter fraud in American elections. The benefits of a non citizen voting to that person are very small. The penalties are extraordinary. They could face jail time, $10,000 in fines, deportation, and being barred from the United States. It is very direct. And there's a record, there's a record that you did it a written record that you signed. So if you get caught, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble. It's no wonder that this doesn't happen.
- [39:16]
Dalia Lithwick
Wendy, one of the things that you mentioned as an underreported source of concern is that we're gonna be able to doge state voter registration and voting records to ferret out fraud. This is sort of a piece with a very longstanding effort to scoop up voting, including that 2017 Vote Fraud Commission that was trying to get people's private data. And huge backlash ensued. But I guess I would love for you to unpack what the dogefication of the voter rolls would do and why. In addition to everything else that is worrying about this, this is just a massive unleashing of data incursion on privacy. And like, it's just rife for abus.
- [40:09]
Mark Joseph Stern
It is very alarming, the idea that Doge and Elon Musk can get access to voter roll data. Voter rolls contain sensitive personal information. They have your dates of birth, driver's license numbers, in many cases, Social Security numbers, voting history, address history, a bunch of other sensitive information. This information is in many cases typically protected by state privacy laws. There are federal privacy laws laws for a reason. They are decentralized, maintained by the states, subject to other protections so that they don't get out centralizing it. Giving access to one person or one agency could risk not only violating people's privacy, but actually abuse of that data for purposes that this was not intended to be used for. It's important to know the federal government does not have access to state parole data. These are state records. They are part of the state election apparatus. Federal agencies have no role and authority to manage, audit or oversee state elections, and we don't want them to. Our elections are managed at the state level and for good reason. There is no law that authorizes a federal takeover of any election information or election apparatus. But if they do have that, in addition to what it could do to your privacy, what other purposes that information could be used for? We know how this information has been attempted to be used by election deniers in recent elections. And that's another thing that's concerning. In both 2022 and 2024, a lot of these election denier groups tried to challenge hordes of voters and disrupt elections using fake analyses from the voter roll. This could tee up similar efforts at a grander scale, maybe with the cooperation of the federal government. These were all beat back by courts, but they were very disruptive to the voting process and deterred a lot of People from voting, they could do even worse with that. They can manufacture information that could be used to suggest there's been widespread voter fraud or to try to interfere in the public trust in elections. So in addition to what it could do to people's private information, it could have a lot of disruptive effects on trust in elections and the actual conduct of elections as well. As you noted back in 2017 then, President Trump set up a voter fraud commission co chaired by Kris Kobach and Vice President Pence again also to try to manufacture find evidence that the 2016 election was filled with rampant voter fraud. That commission eventually shuddered in ridicule and was unable to identify any fraud or misconduct. But it too tried to gather up voter roll information from all of the states. And there was widespread pushback and anger at that effort to try to centralize that information. And it was a bipartisan pushback. Election officials from both political parties pushed back and refused to cooperate with that unlawful request. One election official from a Republican official in Mississippi actually suggested that they could go jump in what was called the Gulf of Mexico rather than turning over that sensitive voter data that was protected under state law. And a lot of state courts, in lawsuits that we helped to bring, actually found that those states couldn't turn over those records because they were protected by privacy laws. So this is something that was attempted before. They're trying it again. And people got really mad back then and I hope they'll get really mad again now because this is really not good for America and for Americans.
- [44:11]
Dalia Lithwick
Wendy, you've said a couple of times and I'd love for you to spool it out for me, that we have this decentralized state based election system for a reason. And it's very clear and we just keep hearing that one of the reasons it's really hard to steal elections is because there is this not just decentralized, but in some cases sort of rickety, you, you know, good faith, localized election system. Can you just give us the quick and dirty on why it matters, that this is a power that's located in the states and why, even though that seems counterintuitive, it's actually very rights protective to have it not be a huge federal system as it is in so many other countries.
- [45:00]
Mark Joseph Stern
You know, there are costs and benefits of having centralized and decentralized systems, but if you're going to have a centralized system like they do in other countries, you would need to have a lot of other protections in place. The other countries that have centralized systems have completely independent systems that are not controlled by any political party and that are outside of the political process. They are professionalized systems with many, many layers of protections in place and a history of managing electricity that is not our history. One of the risks of having a centralized system is that it provides one target. If somebody's trying to disrupt elections, undermine elections, hack into a system where you can get the entire election at once. Our distributed system, where actually elections are really run in thousands and thousands of local election jurisdictions, subject to rules that are set by The States in 50 different states in D.C. act actually create so many targets that it is very difficult for somebody to attack, nearly impossible the entire system in any significant way, no matter how well resourced they are. So it does provide a lot of security from attacks and disruptions and effort to engage in election subversion. And it has some downsides. Those downsides are compensated for by the power that the Constitution gives to Congress to create national rules for federal elections. It is Congress that can create some baseline national rules to protect federal elections. They've done that before. They should do that every time Congress has passed rules regarding elections, they've improved the voting process, expanded access to voting. If we go back to that SAVE act that is currently pending, if that passed, it would be the first time in our nation's history that the Congress Congress passed a law suppressing votes restricting access to voting. That would be a dramatic step back that has not ever happened before.
- [47:11]
Dalia Lithwick
More in a moment with Wendy Weiser.
- [47:14]
Wendy Weiser
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- [47:32]
Dalia Lithwick
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Mark Joseph Stern
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Dalia Lithwick
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- [48:14]
Dalia Lithwick
And just before we head back to our chat with Wendy Weiser, I wanted to recommend a recent episode of Slate's news podcast what next? Mary Harris talked to former congressman, former lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, Adam Kinzinger about Signal Gate. Kinzinger gives a really good explanation of why this was absolutely classified information. And he also talks about how even when he was actually operating on the ground in Iraq, he didn't know who his own targets were. You can find that by searching for what next wherever you listen. Now back to Wendy Weiser and Trump and the Republicans. One, two punch to disenfranchise voters. So you mentioned the kind of Doge guys pawing through, you know, private state information. And this kind of Rick Hassan's word for it is always the fraudulent fraud squad, right? These guys who run around with their like Encyclopedia Brown microscopes trying to find fraud where it doesn't exist. The other piece of this that I think we should touch on is the voting machines because we know that among the claims that keep arising is that there's just massive, massive corruption of voting machines. This is where having a decentralized system is a little tricky because nobody understands how some other states voting machines work. But what does this executive order purport to do about the quote, unquote, rampant fraud in voting machines around the country? Country?
- [49:48]
Mark Joseph Stern
The first thing that it very expressly purports to require, because again, the President has no authority over this federal agency, and I will say this is an independent Federal agency, the U.S. election Assistance Commission, that is established by Congress as a bipartisan agency with the express purpose of making sure that any action that that agency took has to be bipartisan, has to have at least three of the four committee commissioners, two from each party, have to agree to each action to guarantee that every decision is bipartisan. But so putting aside the fact that this is not bipartisan and this is not within the ambit of the President's authority, it very clearly purports to order that agency to not only decertify all voting machines, but to update the certification guidelines to ban bar barcodes or QR codes from being part of how ballots are encoded. 21 states use some form of barcode or QR code as part of how they record the votes for tabulation. And that would be eliminated because of some conspiracy theory about those barcodes and QR codes. It also requires them to decertify all voting machines and to require those voting machines to meet this other guidelines. It's called the voluntary Voting Voting system guidelines, the 2.0 version of that. Currently, no state in the country's voting machines meets those guidelines. And in many states they're not allowed to use voting machines that don't meet federal guidelines. So if those were the guidelines that were required, then those states would immediately not be allowed to use their voting machines. So that would be extraordinarily disruptive. Replacing voting machines in just seven of those states that use those barcodes or QR codes would cost at least 100 million. That's just the seven that we costed out. If we counted all 21, that would be a lot more. This would be extraordinarily expensive, extraordinarily disruptive, all in service of a conspiracy theory. One of the possible endgames of this requirement is to try to force states to have to count ballots by hand rather than by voting machine. That's something that we did a long time ago. It is infinitely less accurate. It would be extraordinarily disruptive. It would make it a lot easier to interfere in elections. So that's something to monitor and try to prevent. It's something we've seen pushed by election deniers and jurisdictions across the country. Election officials have been very alarmed. There have been an increasing number of of people in election offices that are trying to adopt that kind of a position. And that would be really, really disruptive to vote counting in the United States.
- [52:48]
Dalia Lithwick
There's another thing I just wanted to touch on if we could. And that's just the post office and mail in voting and voting deadlines. Because this also feels like one of those things that will fund for a. Let's just stipulate we can say this before and after every question, question. President doesn't get to change voting deadlines in the states with a stroke of a pen. But beyond that, voting by mail is post Covid. We know this. Right. Essentially important. These deadlines are left for the states to determine. And I think that there's been a real attempt to send all of that through the wood chipper without much evidence or forethought or planning. It would also have really, really destabilizing effects on how people vote, Right?
- [53:36]
Mark Joseph Stern
Absolutely. And one of the things that you're referencing that this executive order purports to do is it's trying to pressure states to change their laws by removing federal funding from states that don't change their voting deadlines. There are 18 states where if you send in your mail ballot before the voting deadline, but it is received after election day, they will count that ballot because you submitted the vote on time. It was the post office that was the cause of that delay. And in 18 states, the states count that ballot. There were conspiracy theorists and those who were trying to disrupt the voting process, that were trying to prevent those states from doing that, from throwing out the ball, those votes, they failed. This is an attempt by fiat, by the stroke of the presidential pen again, to try to change all those state rules that states get to decide with this executive order. And what does that mean? That means in each of those states, there are literally tens of thousands of ballots each year that come in within that window. That some states have a couple of days that are sent in on time and are received after election Election Day. That means tens of thousands of votes in each election that states wanted to count, that their state legislatures have required their election officials to count, would be supposedly at risk. By this executive order, again, the president has no authority to set voting deadlines in the states, has no authority to change voting laws, and has no authority to threaten the withholding of funds appropriated by Congress pursuant to statutes in order to condition those funds on changing state laws.
- [55:30]
Dalia Lithwick
One of the things I keep hearing is a lot of these measures would hurt Trump voters as much as anyone else, right? If you are going to have to go to the post office to get your passport, and as you suggested, a lot more folks in red states who don't have a passport than in blue states, this may impact all sorts of people who might be, you know, voting by mail became a thing that went from a blue advantage to a red, you know, at least marginal, I think, improvement. So is there a way in which this is shooting itself in the foot because it will suppress the vote more for the Trump supporter voter than anyone else, or is that overblown?
- [56:16]
Mark Joseph Stern
This executive order and the SAVE act would impact Democrats, Republicans, Independents. They're gonna be supporters of all political parties who are going to be impacted and disenfranchised in great numbers. How is that going to net out? We know that those who don't have citizenship documents readily available are disproportionately people of color, disproportionately younger voters. Those who don't have citizenship documents where their names come currently match are disproportionately married women. Those who might be impacted by the lack of availability of vote by mail or by mail voting deadlines for absentee ballots are rural voters, but they're also voters with disabilities. They're also older voters. So we're seeing demographics that might skew one way or another across the board being affected it. So I don't think it's accurate to say it's going to hurt Republican voters more, but I do think voters from all Political parties are going to be damaged, and that's going to be millions of American citizens that are eligible to vote. One of the reasons why Congress set up a bipartisan agency to deal with the federal voter registration form and put in place all of these procedures, limited its authority and put in place all these procedures to make sure, sure that no one party could control election decisions was precisely this mistrust that if a member of the other political party had control over the election apparatus, they might actually set the rules to advantage their party and go after the other party's voters. And so that is something like an important reason why you don't want to have somebody like a president or like an executive officer have such significant control over elections as President President Trump is trying to claim here.
- [58:20]
Dalia Lithwick
Do you want to talk for a minute about the sort of looming threat of investigation above and beyond just the privacy violations embodied in the eo? Because I think that there also is this threat that some kind of, like, creepy it. It comes under the very vague rubric of like fraud is going to be investigated. And that also, I think, hasn't gotten enough attention. Attention.
- [58:48]
Mark Joseph Stern
One of the things that I find most concerning in this Executive Order is that, well, at first it prioritizes the prosecution of election crimes. The president actually can set election prosecution priorities. How will they enforce these particular priorities and are these ones that are justified? That's a different. But. But in order to prioritize that prosecution, it purports to to direct the Attorney General to enter into cooperation agreements with the states to get information from the states. And if the states don't cooperate in sharing that information that they are not required to provide to the federal government. It directs the Attorney General to make election integrity enforcement decisions targeting those states. And it also directs federal agencies to withhold grants to states and local governments for law enforcement. So if they're not cooperating with this quixotic quest for election fraud, they could lose all their grants for law enforcement and police in the states. So that's, you know, yet another attempt to extort federal policy from the states by threat, threatening actual not only enforcement actions, but also withholding of funds. Again, these are not powers that the President has. The president cannot condition federal funds on states or anyone complying with conditions that the President sets himself. That is not allowed, but that is part of what they're trying to attempt to do here.
- [60:30]
Dalia Lithwick
I think it's also really important to situate all this, the Executive Order and the SAVE act, in the context of moves to restrict and undermine voting rights. Around the country. Because it almost seems like a sidebar that the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a redistricting case this week, LA vs Calais, where they signaled once again that the majority of them seem to be poised to do away with whatever's left of the Voting Rights Act. And that almost seems quaint compared to these wholesale restrictions of votes and voter purges that are proposed in the Executive Order and in the SAVE Act. But it's also a part of the picture. And then the other piece of context I think we need to bring to this is what is going on with state Supreme Court races right now, which used to be these kind of snoozy propositions, right, where a bunch of earnest state Supreme Court candidates would refuse to say anything political in deference to promises of judicial independence. And now suddenly we're talking about the race to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court's liberal majority. That election is going to take place on Tuesday. It is already the most expensive judicial race in American. Elon Musk's political action committee is offering a hundred dollars and dangling million dollar prizes to any voters who sign a petition in opposition to quote activist judges, which is just a neat way to scoop up scads of voter contact details. Musk is literally saying out loud that he is doing all this because he doesn't want the current state Supreme Court to ever again get involved in a case where it could strike down congressional lines that currently give Republicans in Wiscon a 6 to 2 advantage in terms of House seats. So all of this supercharges redistricting just by pouring gobs of money into state races to accomplish the thing that they don't seem to want to do in tiny bites anymore, they're going to just chomp up what is left of these elections with pure money.
- [62:34]
Mark Joseph Stern
So this has been a multi prong and multi year election attack on the right to vote. And they are going at it from every angle. The right to vote is protected by many, many different entities and parts of government. The federal courts used to enforce constitutional protections, voting rights, the Voting Rights act and some of these other voting laws that we talked about. Those have been systematically rolled back those protections. And as you mentioned, the Voting Rights act has been really mangled beyond recognition and shrunken to a really insufficient degree. State courts have in many cases stepped in and provided protections for voting rights which are protected under state constitutions too, and state statutes, and helped to stop some of the shenanigans that were attempted in 2022 and 2020. And they are poised to do so going forward, not in all states, but that is another layer of protection. And so now they're going after the state courts and trying to stack those courts and trying to prevent them from being a bulwark against these efforts to rig elections to undermine voting rights. State legislatures is another place where there's been a lot of effort to sort of mobilize and not only take control of state legislatures, but then to use that to push vote suppression agendas. We've been tracking year after year, the just increasing number of bills and then laws that have been put in place in states to restrict access to voting. Things that maybe 15 years ago were completely non existent. Now we're seeing them every single year at really escalating rates. So we're seeing the right to vote attacked in many different directions at once. And we also have seen this mobilization of vigilantes and other people who are, as I mentioned, trying to challenge voter rolls or trying to threaten election officials or bring lawsuits across the country, providing another front of attack on voting rights. So it has been relentless. There have been some areas of protection. Voters are an area of protection, and courts have, in some cases, stood up. We ultimately do need Congress to come forward with stronger Voting Rights act and stronger national protections for voting rights. In the meantime, we need to beat back the SAVE act, which would be the worst vote suppression bill that this Congress has passed in its history, the only vote suppression bill, and would be really, really devastating. We can beat this back. This is something that is really poorly conceived, would devastate elections, would disenfranchise millions, and would just completely upend how elections are run. So I do think we can beat that back, but that's not enough. This fight is relentless, and maybe this.
- [65:51]
Dalia Lithwick
Is the place to end, which is, you know, here's House Speaker Mike Johnson talking last May about why the SAVE act is so urgently needed.
- [66:05]
Wendy Weiser
We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it's not been something that is easily provable.
- [66:13]
E
We don't have that number.
- [66:14]
Dalia Lithwick
I guess the trick here is always the same rhetorical trick, right? Which is you generate panic about a crisis that doesn't exist, and then you say the only thing that will solve it is the sweeping author, authoritarian solutions. And they just so happen to devalue, you know, women and minorities and the young. And by the way, they just substitute fact with your feelings. And I think we don't always take these campaigns seriously because they're rooted in such falsity. But I think that what's really important in this moment, both in terms of thinking about the executive order, the SAVE act, you know, attempts to buy state supreme courts, is that it really puts the lie to the idea. Idea that that's okay as long as we have voting in America, we have democracy. And we forget. We had Kim Lane Shepley on the show reminding us a few weeks ago, an expert on authoritarianism. They have elections in Hungary, right? They have elections in Russia. The mere fact that there will still be elections at the end of these interventions doesn't mean that we have free and fair voting. And so give us your best argument for the people who are like, hey, it's okay, we're gonna sort this out at the midterms, or, hey, we're gonna sort this out in 2028, especially given. And I think maybe this is something to factor in. We are really seeing, I mean, as you and I are taping, the Elise Stefanik nomination has been pulled for the UN in no small part, as the President has said, because it's a razor thin margin in the House. Don't wanna give away her seat. Elections matter more than ever. But that's not a reason to take.
- [67:57]
Mark Joseph Stern
Them for granted while our voting rights are under attack. They haven't been taken away. And people should not be demoralized. You should not slow down. Actually, mobilization does make a difference. You still have power and you should be using it. And now is the time to be using it. Not just voting, showing up at town halls, having your own shadow town halls, writing to your editor, writing to your friends, taking to social media. This still matters. We still can stop this. We cannot take our eye off the ball of ensuring that our elections are free and fair in the face of creeping authoritarianism. The people, the elections, are the principal way in which we can hold power accountable, that we can change the course of the country. And so always the first attack is on the elections. Try to make sure they're not free and fair, try to keep people from voting, try to rig the redistricting lines. We need to continue to fight for free and fair elections. And the first thing we need to do is stop, push back these very aggressive attacks on elections and on election integrity. Make no mistake, the SAVE act is not an election integrity bill. It does nothing to improve election integrity. It is a vote suppression bill. The main thing it does is target millions and millions of eligible American citizens. It does not target ineligible. They are not being caught up in this. It is a vote suppression bill, pure and simple. But we cannot stop there. There have been attacks on election officials across the country. There are attacks on judges across the country. There are efforts to put in place vote suppression measures in states across the country, including measures to require a birth certificate or passport to vote in state elections pending currently right now and almost half the states in the country right now. If the SAVE act passed, all of those could immediately become law as well. So we cannot take our foot off the gas pedal. We need to be out there in the state houses, we need to be out there in front of the White House, and we need to make sure that everybody in Congress knows that we will not tolerate a boat suppression bill from this Congress, especially at this time.
- [70:37]
Dalia Lithwick
Wendy, I love that framing because it perfectly reframes what, as I said, the cliche about voting is. It's kind of the gateway to every other right. And I love what you've said in this conversation because you've reminded us that taking away voting rights quickly encroaches on states rights, congressional prerogatives, your right to your privacy and your information, your right to vote, you know, as you see fit in the best way for you. So it's really like a perfect inversion of the idea that losing your right to vote affects nothing else. It affects and creeps into every other component, including like creepy conscripting of states to give information up and lawless investigations. Wendy Weiser is the Vice President for Democracy at the Brennan center for justice at NYU Law School. She oversees their work on voting rights and elections, redistricting and represent federal reform, abuse of power and the courts. And she has had an extremely busy week parsing this executive order. Thank you so much for your time, Wendy. This has been enormously helpful.
- [71:50]
Mark Joseph Stern
Thank you, Dalia.
- [71:52]
Dalia Lithwick
And that is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for your letters and your questions. You can keep in touch@amicuslate.com we love your letters and you can always find us@facebook.com amicuspodcast and now we want to accidentally add you to our top secret Amicus Group chat. Mark Joseph Stern and I are stepping over into the bonus rumpus room of dreams right now and we're going to talk about the unlikely ally who stepped up to defend one of the law firms being targeted by Trump's retribution rampage that is waiting for you. You after this episode, 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 may listen. That episode is available for you to listen to right now, we'll see you there. Sarah Burningham is Amicus's senior producer. Our producer is Patrick Fort. Hilary Fry is Slate's editor in chief. Susan Matthews is executive editor, and Ben Richmond is our senior director of operations. We'll be back with another episode of Amicus next week.
- [73:17]
E
I'm Leon Nefak and I'm the host of Slow Burn. Watergate. Before I started working, working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie all the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the COVID up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute. The movie in real life, it took about two years.
- [73:51]
Dalia Lithwick
Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment known as the Watergate Incident.
- [73:58]
E
What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the President? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more extensive than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [74:35]
Wendy Weiser
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 Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name.
- [75:06]
Dalia Lithwick
The great lesson of this for me.
- [75:08]
Mark Joseph Stern
Is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are.
- [75:13]
Wendy Weiser
Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.