← Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Who Gets Left Out of Originalism?
00:40:26
How and why an incomplete history of our country gets told in the courtroom.
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- [00:02]
Katie Milkman
This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast or wherever you listen.
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Mark Joseph Stern
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Gregory Oblovsky
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Maggie Blackhawk
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Gregory Oblovsky
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Mark Joseph Stern
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Maggie Blackhawk
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Mark Joseph Stern
I'm Mark Joseph Stern and this is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, law and the Supreme Court.
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Maggie Blackhawk
That's a simple story I can tell myself. And now I can put native people in that bucket or not in that bucket. I can put black Americans in that bucket or not in that bucket. That's just not actually where we're at anymore, I think as a country.
- [01:42]
Mark Joseph Stern
The official history of America's founding is often told as a whites only story, a heroic tale of wealthy white men forging a new nation with no mention of the people they excluded, displaced or oppressed. That version was always more mythology than fact, and always incomplete. In recent years, academics and journalists have tried to correct the record by including people who were cut out of the frame. We saw this much needed update with the 1619 project, and we're seeing it play out in the courts as well. In June, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out Justice Clarence Thomas for relying on the views of a few dead white men to determine the meaning of civil rights, on arguing that any honest originalist must look to quote a broader and more inclusive survey of historical sources. As an example, she cited the Colored Conventions, a series of meetings held throughout the 1800s during which black Americans expressed their own interpretations of the law. This dispute between Thomas and Jackson made me wonder who gets left out of the story that originalists like to tell about the law. Well before there even was a United States, there were Native nations, some of which were very much on the scene as the Constitution was being debated and ratified, what did they think about it? And does asking that question risk squeezing Native nations into a system they never really consented to? To answer those questions, I talked to two leading professors of Indian Maggie Blackhawk, professor at NYU School of Law, and Gregory Oblovsky, a professor at Stanford Law School. In our conversation, we talked about the challenges historians face when trying to explain complex history to courts that might not want to hear it. We explored what Native people thought of the Constitution and whether it's even possible to know. And to the extent we do know, how useful is that history really in shaping the law today?
- [03:48]
Maggie Blackhawk
So let's take us back to actually, you know, 1776, 1789, and what constituted this nascent body that came to adopt a document. And that population was essentially a semi dense population clinging to the Eastern seaboard for its life. And so when you ask the question of what did Native people situate themselves with respect to the Constitution, you're asking the question of what did Native people in what became the state of Oregon thought of a document and a people with whom they've never had contact. And so the idea that these folks had an opinion of a document that was formed, a government that was an experiment that was adopted by small groups of people across the Eastern seaboard, for some Native people, it was incredibly relevant. Those folks may have had a stronger impression of what was happening to the government of the colonists. But we should avoid two moves when thinking about early American history. One is imposing the idea of a nation state ahistorically in a presentist MANNER so the US did not go from sea to shining sea in 1789. And also essentializing Native people down to this idea that we can think about what Native people thought as a singular group, because the creation of an Indian as a racialized category and then a legal category under the nascent United States was a process. And it was a process that took a really long time and had fits and starts and was never really inevitable. And it also was formed in deep conversation with different kinds of Native people at different points, and even non Native people. And so in many ways, the frame of what did Native people think of the Constitution? That question, I think, is we need to unpack that question before we can answer it. And the answer, of course, is some Native people thought nothing of the Constitution. And some thought very much about it because they thought they may have been included in that polity.
- [06:01]
Mark Joseph Stern
It's way too easy, especially for those of us who went through grade school civics to just conceptualize the founding as this mythic event where, you know, there was one nation state that arose and then an empty continent that that nation state slowly filled or rather quickly filled. Of course, there were a bunch of other nations on that continent, and as you say, many of them had no exposure to the colonists whatsoever. And I also want to draw on a point you made that there were Native people who were on that eastern seaboard who were having regular exposure to the colonists who were witnessing this experiment, maybe with skepticism, sometimes having the experiments sort of foisted upon them. And, Greg, in your research, you have shown that those individuals, they did have views about what was going on and what was happening to them and what they were being told with regard to the new political order emerging and then the new Constitution. Could you tell us what those views were?
- [07:08]
Gregory Oblovsky
This was part of a longer struggle in the early, you know, throughout the 18th century in which various powers were competing to dominate the continent. And Anglo Americans were merely one of those powers that was struggling to dominate the continent. And much of the continental interior, including much of what came to be supposedly the United States, after the end of the American Revolution, was still very much Indian country. That is legally and practically a space owned and governed by Native peoples. And so the question that Native peoples who were enfolded within the United States found after the nation's creation is what would the relationship look like with this new purported government that was attempting to assert authority over this large swath of territory over which it had very little practical control? The federal government and the new United States claimed authority over much more territory than it could actually practically govern. Right. That large chunks of what became the United States were Native territory, whether whether the United States liked it or not. So the challenge of the Native communities that were, you know, I mean, I think Maggie's point to draw our attention to particular Native communities is important. Right. So we're thinking about, you know, Muskogee and Cherokee peoples in the Southeast and Haudenosaunee folks in the. In upstate New York or what became upstate New York. And these were nations that had long been at the center of these competing efforts to dominate the heart of the continent. And so what they had faced during and after the American Revolution was. Was chaos, Right. That there was a sort of loose set of legal norms that had evolved under the British Empire to try to navigate relationships between sort of British imperial authorities and Native peoples. And. And that these Native communities that helped shape these norms themselves. Right. It was not simply a British imposition, but something that had evolved over Centur of encounter and collision and conflict. And what Native communities face was suddenly the United States, particularly these expansionist states, seem to be repudiating all of that and were aggressively claiming authority and land. In fact, the state of North Carolina basically says we, we don't recognize the Cherokee Nation's land ownership at all. We're going to sell off and give away all these lands. And and so there was sort of a crisis that engulfed much of eastern North America during and after the revolution. And so the question that Native peoples faced was would the Constitution remedy this, this crisis, this confusion, this chaos that the war had unleashed over much of the continent.
- [09:58]
Mark Joseph Stern
We'll be back after a short break.
- [10:03]
Katie Milkman
This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics of behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like can we learn to make smarter decisions? And the power of do overs. The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the best selling book how to Change. In each episode, Katie talks to authors, historians, athletes, Nobel laureates and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones to avoid costly mistakes. Listen and subscribe@schwab.com podcast or find it wherever you listen.
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Maggie Blackhawk
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Mark Joseph Stern
Gatorade is it in you.
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Gregory Oblovsky
Now?
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Mark Joseph Stern
More of my conversation with Greg and Maggie just to stay with you for a minute, Greg, you wrote that the United States wanted Native nations to quote, ratify the new federal government, even though of course there were no Native delegates to the Constitutional Convention or Native people. Part of those conversations, what exactly does that mean and how did it work out?
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Gregory Oblovsky
So what it meant was that they, they sent letters, emissaries, various ways of communicating with Native communities that they developed again through these long standing practices. There were sort of diplomatic conventions and customs that they were following and the federal government, this new federal government told them that this new constitution would in fact remedy many of the problems that they had been experiencing. They said that now the United States would be stronger and it would be able to police its own citizens. Right. I mean, I think one of the important things to stress is just how much violence is being committed by very loosely organized Anglo American militias against Native peoples in the aftermath of the revolution. And white elites are sort of horrified by the actions of these militias because they see them as disorderly and as prompting further conflict that the United States couldn't afford. So what these emissaries kept telling Native communities is all these problems happen because we, we didn't have an organized central government in the way that we needed to. And so now we have remedied that problem. We've now made this council that has increased powers. We will now be able to police the actions of these borderland white residents more effectively. That was the way it was pitched. How Native peoples felt about this, I mean, to the federal government and these emissaries themselves, they, they expressed hope that that promise would be fulfilled. I have a quote from a letter that the Cherokees sent to George Washington which said, quote, we now hope that whatever is done hereafter by the great council will no more be destroyed and made small by any state. So you see this idea that we now have a strengthened federal government that will be able to step in and police its own citizens more effectively, but in their private conversations or conversations that are not without sort of white observers present, to the extent we're able to gain access to them, there's a great deal more skepticism and uncertainty about this new government and whether it'd be able to actually live up to the efforts that it was trying to pitch Native peoples on this new document.
- [13:55]
Mark Joseph Stern
So I think it's clear from what you just said that from the very beginning, the constitution was at best a double edged sword for Native people. And Maggie, in your work, you point out that in the document that was ultimately ratified, Indians are the only people subordinated by name and are explicitly excluded from aspects of the constitutional framework. And yet, at the same time, as Greg said, the Constitution was in theory meant to preserve some measure of tribal sovereignty, or at least to shield tribes from state incursion. So I'm just wondering how we square this idea, seemingly embedded in the Constitution, that Native people are both a subordinate class and a nation unto themselves.
- [14:38]
Maggie Blackhawk
To think that this constitutional moment was so pivotal, I think is to misunderstand it as a document that formed a nation state that included an excluded Native people. What you can see in the concept of Indian, and this is, you know, the, the legal shifts that were happening at the time, the idea that the law of nations, that natural law could be more positivist, could be wrested from the sovereign and declared by, you know, everyone, at least rational, civilized people. The effort to create this category of Indian was an effort to press that positivism, that law making sense, away from Native people. To say there are classes of people in the world and not just racialized, but it's religion, it's Christianity. But to say there are certain people who can, who have governments, who can make these laws, who can be within these legal frameworks where we can make treaties and have conversations, and Indians are not part of that conversation anymore. They weren't before as full throated participants, but they're even less going to be at the table moving forward. And you can see that through treaty practice as well as the constitutional practice that formed in the US after that. But the, the idea that there is like a singular Constitution, the fact that this Constitution shifted thinking in North America, I would just be hesitant to have those frames in the way that we read history, because in many ways the simple stories that we're telling on the left are allowing the simple stories on the right to continue about Native people are savages, at war with one another. Who, you know, this is Justice Alito, of course, you know, they're just constantly at war. And we came, they were violent and we brought civilization to these areas. We actually made it better. Whereas the idea that Native people were there was this moment that everything went into decline where the Constitution actually codified sovereignty. I think the Constitution existed at a time where Native people were seen as more on par with the United States in their ability to govern. And that says a lot about colonialism over the 250 years since that. We can't even imagine Native nations self governing now, even though we have, you know, hundreds of them recognized by the United States, governing land masses that are larger than several states today. The fact that we can't imagine that we're trying to capture that imaginary within that constitutional framework, rather than trying to say the Constitution codified Native sovereignty because that gives that Constitution too much in the sense that it doesn't create, diminish or continue Native sovereignty. That is something that exists within the polities themselves, separate from that document. And it also reads that nation state into an inevitability.
- [17:33]
Mark Joseph Stern
So, Greg, I'm. I'm super interested in your reaction to that because Maggie is giving us this really rich, important, multifaceted history. And yet the Supreme Court, when it practices originalism, doesn't really care about rich, multifaceted history. The Supreme Court has been very selective in what history matters and probably does not have an open mind to this effort that seems obviously true and important to blow up a narrative of the American nation state just marching forward and expanding across the continent and taking control. And a lot of your work seems to be an effort to affirm that the Constitution does include protections for Native people and Native sovereignty. You make these arguments, of course, rooted in your own historical research, that in fact, states shouldn't be able to abridge the rights of Native people and of tribes, that the federal Constitution does have important protections that courts should vindicate. And I kind of wonder if all of this sort of counter history, almost, that Maggie is describing makes you fear that that project is futile, or if this is just the reality of living in a world where you have to make one set of arguments to courts and then completely different set of arguments when you're doing much more honest history in the academy.
- [18:55]
Gregory Oblovsky
Well, I reject the idea that we have to sort of tell deceptive stories. Right. It's just a question of highlighting different aspects of the history for different audiences. Right. And it's not that one is truer than the other, but there are ways to tell the stories more effectively for different audiences the way that we all think about these sorts of questions. So Maggie and I are in deep agreement about the broader history. Right. And part of the challenge of writing about how Native peoples talked about the Constitution was precisely pointing out that it's only a handful of groups that are going to be particularly interested and focused on this moment. And this moment has to be understood in this longer historical that actually it's Anglo Americans who are fixated on it. And we need to think about this in this much broader, longer, deeper history. But you're also right, Mark, to suggest that as important as trying to shift those narratives, both for the broader public and I think for lawyers, is to try to sort of sneak some of that history in for legal audiences. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, the coin of the realm in front of the Supreme Court and for originalists are these sort of carefully policed ideas about what counts as relevance. And I think we have to both sort of push back about what counts as relevance and what should be considered, but also construct effective arguments within those frames, because there are very effective arguments to be made. I think when you can make those arguments, when the history is. Is so clear in my view, and compelling, then I think it's really beholden on us as scholars to present that evidence and put it in front of the court. So again, I reject the sort of either or frame. I feel like we can have multiple conversations for different audiences and tell effective, true stories across multiple spaces.
- [21:00]
Mark Joseph Stern
We'll be back after a short break.
- [21:04]
Katie Milkman
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- [23:21]
Mark Joseph Stern
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- [24:14]
Maggie Blackhawk
The reason that Native children are removed or removed, the reason Native people cannot self govern today, the reason we have have a massive administrative apparatus to run Native governments just like we run Puerto Rico, just like we run American Samoa, is because we colonize people. We have debates over how governments should be run. We have visions over who can self govern. And those dynamics, those constitutional dynamics still function. Will the Supreme Court hear that argument? No. Will the Supreme Court be less likely to hear that argument if we keep telling the Supreme Court that it's right about its originalism, that it's right about people just debating like that? We structure even these podcasts into conversations about whether Native people debated the Constitution or not. I think that's irrelevant. We should instead be having podcasts about the idea that the Constitution was limited, that we imposed it on all sorts of people, that the nation state was never taken for granted, such that we can't actually lean on fixation. We can't ever have a moment where we agreed, even in a majoritarian sense, as to what constitution North America would have. And instead we had a broader sense of, I use the frame of borderlands constitutionalism, which is again, a deep historical method that looks at time and place and discourse, doesn't essentialize the people that are making this Constitution, but are seeing unwritten Constitutionalism as a dynamic that formed across the history of the United States and had in it the voices of Native people. Not in an up or down, not in a ratification or not sort of a way, but in the sense that we have ideas about natural law. We have values and principles that drive that Constitution. And those values and principles were definitely shaped by Native people. They were shaped by people all over the west, the places that were forced into US Government, pushed back and resisted and shaped what became the US in many ways, we are more of the expanded forest people and land masses than we were this Eastern seaboard who set those measures apparently or supposedly allegedly at that time frame. And so I do think that there are. I think that we are in agreement, of course, about the history, but we're not in agreement that these simple stories, again, even the idea that there are, you know, lies that we're telling the court or not, I do think there are simple stories that are misleading. And I do think not holding these scholars and these opinions to rigorous empirical account is going to be a deep problem because it allows them on the right to just simply show up and say, ah, oh, this person lied. We don't have to actually engage with anything they said. Let me just, you know, share this around with all of my friends instead of we actually can sit down and rigorously force them to engage with things rather than giving them something that fits that simple story because they, like catnip, will go, ah, yes, I understand people debating the Constitution. That's a simple story I can tell myself. And now I can put native people in that bucket or not in that bucket. I can put black Americans in that bucket or not in that bucket. And that's just not actually where we're at anymore, I think, as a country.
- [27:39]
Mark Joseph Stern
Greg, I'm wondering if you have any reaction to that.
- [27:42]
Gregory Oblovsky
I too, am skeptical about the two easy stories that get packaged and sold. Right. I mean, I think doing good history is complex history, right? And it is messy and it defies sort of simple, easy characterization. I also feel like, however, law is a separate discipline in its own way, and it has, you know, the intersection of where law and history collide, you know, presents lots of challenges. Not just, I mean, I just think it's true across. Not just if we're thinking in a left right divide, but I think really in a disciplinary divide. I think it's really important to bring the professional standards of historians to bear on work. Serious historical research that is being done by historians and being done within the context of legal debate and discourse. Right. Like, I think the question of what counts as good history is a question that historians have, have debated and, and have a set of standards. Right? And so I think it's really important to stand by those standards. At the same time, I think what is also important to recognize is that lawyers are interested in a different set of questions from historians. And that, I think, is one of the challenges that you face when you have to translate historical work into the frame of black letter law. I find that frame sometimes very constraining for many of the reasons that I think Maggie just articulated. Right. It is, it is artificial. I mean, I remember when I first started in law school, I was already had already started my doctorate in history. And it was very frustrating to sort of have to think the way that lawyers thought all the time. I was like, but where we need more context, like, why are we fixated on these three words? Like, there's this whole body of other material that we need to bring to bear. I continue to find it frustrating for many of the reasons that I articulated, but it is also important to try to meet lawyers and legal discourse where it is and challenge it on its own terms. And again, I still don't think that these two projects are mutually exclusive. I'm not an originalist. I think there are all sort of jurisprudential problems with originalism, historical problems with originalism. But I also think we're in a world where originalism has a lot of currency and sway. And so if we are going to engage, I mean, the issues are really significant. Right? The stakes are really high as we're being constantly reminded every day. And so I, I have always felt that I think it's really important to try to meet these arguments head on while also trying to push back in other ways in other venues. And, and that's at least how I see the sort of role of, of scholars here, because I think it's. You know, one of the things I got pressed on early on was that historians had really ceded the ground to originalists. And there's the real danger that if we do not try to try to have arguments about the evidence where it is warranted, then the danger is then that the overly simple stories become law. Right. And we can push back, we can fight against them all we want. But I think it's really important to do the kind of work that Maggie and I have both done of trying to provide better history, in our view, to inform these sorts of decisions, because, again, the stakes are so high. These are real people's lives that have really significant consequences for folks.
- [31:38]
Mark Joseph Stern
So it sounds like you're saying originalism is an untenable project in your view, but it is the coin of the realm at the Supreme Court. And so historians who are able to come forward with true stories and evidence of the Constitution's meaning should do so, but that we should also remember that this is an incredibly simplistic framing of the Constitution and the Founding, and it's one that we should really try to unlearn if we want to take, you know, early American history seriously and constitutional meaning seriously. And so I learned, and this is obviously a big question, and Maggie, I'll, I'll turn back to you. What is the solution to unlearning this simplistic frame? I mean, you, you, you talked about Borderlands constitutionalism and drawing back from this view of a single Constitution that governs everyone equally, acknowledging that different peoples were governed and treated very differently under the Constitution. Is that a good entry point into just unlearning all of this false or skewed history and taking a much more holist and truthful approach to how America as a colonial power has governed under our Constitution?
- [32:51]
Maggie Blackhawk
Yes, in a certain sense. And I Think we can even press a bit farther. I didn't unpack this nuance, but we've never specified in this conversation that we're talking about the Constitution of the United States. So in many ways our language is so imperial that we don't actually see its operation. So calling something American, for example, which is the name of two continents and not an nation state, it again erases certain things. It makes them inevitable. Just like calling something the Constitution erases the idea that there are other forms of government and law and organization on the other side that we don't recognize. So in many ways the idea that we are now debating in the context of the colonies today is whether or not the US Constitution extends there or not. And the worry, of course, that everyone posits is that if we don't have the Constitution extend there, then there's no Constitution there, there's no law there. So by separating the idea, by really engaging with our history in greater depth, we start to see the mechanics and the constitutional problems that arise in the context of governing other people as separate polities. And we understand that in many ways our constitutional vision today not only obsessed with the four corners of the document in a way that not even the, you know, the late 19th century necessarily was right. Even US citizens, even theorists in the late 19th century, didn't see the Constitution as this singular document. They saw it as a manifestation of all of the values and principles of a nation state over time. It was even rooted in a strange historical concept in it's nationalism, right? It is the idea of what is all of the history, the common law, the values that have built up in a country over time. So if we can unpack all of that right. And start to read it back into the past, we can start to understand that some of our short sightedness like the idea that whether or not equal protection applies. So we don't have those debates about Canada. We don't worry that our equal protection clause doesn't apply to Canada. Or at least before that. I used to make this joke with my students and I can't anymore about the US invading Canada. So this is always the exercise in the first few classes for federal Indian law where you say, okay, well the US invades Canada, do they want citizenship or not? And the whole room just sits there and goes, okay, but do Indians want citizenship or not? I'm like, let's just talk about this like Canada do. That's very complicated. That's a very complicated answer. So again, we can start to understand when you invade other countries that have their own forms of government and use your military to govern them unilaterally, set up a constitutional framework that mimics and studies and employees all sorts of colonial administration that's been long developed over generations of empires. And you govern those people unilaterally. The constitutional principles and dynamics and problems you encounter in that environment are very different than when you have a nation state of people who were, who are subject to the same law.
- [36:12]
Mark Joseph Stern
So if all we ask is, did Native people debate the constitution and what did they say? Then we're acting as if the institutionalization of colonization isn't a problem and isn't at the heart of this entire enterprise. Isn't even there or isn't even there.
- [36:26]
Maggie Blackhawk
Wasn't there then, isn't there now? And that's, that's all sorts of problems for all of us.
- [36:31]
Mark Joseph Stern
It's present at every step, and it's so omnipresent that it almost feels invisible when it's not surfaced in scholarship and advocacy. And yet there is also this other problem lurking that we been discussing where the courts need a particular kind of story to be told to them. And I'm curious, Greg, you've already spoken to this some, but, you know, you are in the academy. You are also writing these briefs. You have a bird's eye view of how this is playing out in the field of Indian law scholarship. Do you see any solution to this sort of dichotomy that has one true story and one simple story? Do you see the two sides uniting? Do you see the courts grappling more broadly with this history of colonization? Or do you think that the courts are just not capable of understanding that and incorporating it in a sophisticated way into jurisprudence because they are a tool of colonization as well?
- [37:32]
Gregory Oblovsky
So I think there's two ways to answer this. I mean, one is just what we expect courts to do with history more generally. Right. I have a whole article that's sort of about maybe we should use history lessons. Right? Because. Because history is always complicated and messy. And so this idea that it's going to yield clear doctrinal answers to questions that you ask of the past is, is just hard and not very practical. I mean, the whole premise of originalism was, oh, it turns out that it's kind of a mess when you use these other tools. And so we have this clean tool that will give us right answers to legal questions, but in the process, they turn to history to give answers that it's not always capable of giving and demanded exactitude of it that it cannot provide. And So I, I think courts are never going to be good at history, whether they're, you know, liberals, conservatives, whatever, just because that's not what they are equipped to do. They are equipped to do law. And so holding them to the professional standards of historians is unreasonable. And so, you know, I think think they should get out of the practice of doing history more generally. Right. And go back to using what had been our long standing jurisprudential tradition of using lots of different sources of, of thinking about legal analysis to come up with what they think is the legally correct answer. We've talked about the problem as the Constitution to some extent, but the problem in some ways is the United States. Right. The problem is that this nation state, as Maggie has been pointing to, is built on, on other people's homelands. And that is the central and in some ways irresolvable contention. At least irresolvable so long as we insist that there is a nation state of the, the United States.
- [39:16]
Maggie Blackhawk
I was at this wonderful political science conference on American political development recently and I, they of course, asked a very similar question of, you know, what do we do? You know, of course, you know, you want to gesture always to this is a nation state built on, built on native homelands. And then, you know, essentially keep going. And my hope is to resist sort of the land acknowledgement method of empiricism, to really dig deep on what can be done empirically. So in many senses. So political scientists, especially scholars of the discipline of American political development, which is more historically minded, they study institutions and the formation of government, state formation historically. And so to take the land acknowledgement vision of we mistreated Native people, that we built a nation on native homelands. It misses all of the state formation that it takes to expand. I do think there's something that we can do that isn't just hand waving. We hurt the Indians. What do we do about that? Normatively, I think that there's actually lessons to be learned from descriptive, rigorous, empirical history that avoids these simple spirits stories.
- [40:31]
Mark Joseph Stern
I think that is the perfect note of optimism on which to stop. Maggie, Greg, thank you so much.
- [40:38]
Maggie Blackhawk
Thank you.
- [40:39]
Gregory Oblovsky
Thanks so much for having us.
- [40:43]
Mark Joseph Stern
And that's a wrap for this episode of Amicus. Thanks so much for listening and thank you so much for your letters and questions. You can keep in touch@amicuslate.com or you can find us@facebook.com Amicus in our special bonus episode, available exclusively to Slate + members, we welcome Christian Ferris to the Amicus Rumpus room. We talk about Trump demanding a new census that excludes undocumented immigrants the FBI tracking down Texas Democrats who fled to break quorum. Plus the Justice Department asking the Supreme Court for permission to racially profile potential migrants. To hear that, join State Slate plus, we hope to see you there. Sara Burningham is our senior producer. Our producer is Patrick Fort. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of Slate Podcasts, Hilary Fry is Slate's editor in chief, and Ben Richmond is our senior director of operations. We'll be back with another episode of Amicus next week. Until then, take good care.
- [41:58]
Gregory Oblovsky
Hi, I'm Josh Levine.
- [42:00]
Mark Joseph Stern
My podcast, the Queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor.
- [42:04]
Gregory Oblovsky
She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title the.
- [42:11]
Mark Joseph Stern
Welfare Queen, and her story was used.
- [42:13]
Gregory Oblovsky
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.
- [42:23]
Mark Joseph Stern
Find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name.
- [42:28]
Maggie Blackhawk
The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are.
- [42:36]
Gregory Oblovsky
Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.