Bulldozers and bulwarks are the twin themes of this week’s show, as Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joyce White Vance, a longtime federal prosecutor and clarion voice in defense of the rule of law, despite its flaws. As Pam Bondi’s Justice department chases down the President’s opponents, Congress walks away from its constitutional duties, and the highest court in the land struggles to find a presidential demand too outrageous to rubber stamp, it’s no wonder many Americans are exhausted by the attempt  to toggle between hope and despair. Lithwick and Vance discuss the many challenges to the integrity of the justice system and ponder what ordinary people can do to bolster vital democratic institutions under siege. Vance's new book, 'Giving Up is Unforgivable,' serves as a manual for citizens who understand that surviving this moment (and thriving after it) is a massive team project. It’s okay to huff a little hopium sometimes, but only if it’s the good stuff. 

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Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued in defense of the Voting Rights Act in the pivotal Supreme Court case,  Louisiana v Callais this week. Nelson joins Dahlia Lithwick on this episode of Amicus to probe the implications of the case for voting rights around the country, and the role of the Supreme Court in a democratic system. Nelson warns that while the consequences of losing Section 2 would be catastrophic, t many Americans are unaware how much of their democracy is undergirded by the rights accorded in the 14th and 15th amendments, and effectuated by the Voting Rights Act. Their conversation delves into the historical context of voting rights, the importance of precedent, and the unfinished, but essential, struggle for racial justice in America.

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Troops on America's streets, threats of “plenary powers”, and extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean have prompted members of the military past and present to say that we are in the biggest civil/military crisis since the Civil War. On this week's Amicus, how SCOTUS' immunity decision in Trump v. United States helped deliver us to this scary moment. Dahlia Lithwick speaks to Yale Law School military justice expert Eugene Fidell and former JAG Maj. General Steven J. Lepper about the impossible position the military's been put in by Trump and SCOTUS and how bad that is for all of us. The Crisis in Uniform: The Danger of Presidential Immunity for the U.S. Military.

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Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are joined by Vox’s Ian Millhiser to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court term, which officially starts on Monday. The term begins with a slew of wildly significant cases that feel all but decided in the Trump administration’s favor already. That feeling of inevitability could perhaps be ascribed to the ongoing assault on democracy coming from the high court’s shadow docket, which will now spill over into cases argued on the merits. Dahlia, Mark, and Ian examine the effect of all this sloppy law on the public's perception of the court, and look ahead to upcoming cases on voting rights, campaign finance, conversion therapy, transgender rights, tariffs, and presidential power. They explore how the court's decisions reflect a shift towards a more partisan and less transparent judicial process, and ask whether there’s any hope of restoring the rule of law and healthy constitutional democracy in the future. 

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The week ended with a Grand Jury Indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for what looks to be a pair of unprovable crimes. Indeed the  US Attorney overseeing the case declined to bring the indictment for that very reason. He’s gone and Donald Trump’s personal insurance lawyer brought the case. Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick discuss what that means for the Justice Department.

Then Yale Law School’s professor Justin Driver reminds us that Supreme Court cases don’t just turn into vapors after they come down in June. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision from 2023 has fundamentally changed what college campuses look like and has opened the door to Trump Administration attacks on anything that even looks like racial justice efforts on elite campuses and throughout the country. Any one decision causes legal cascades that can and will be used against us.

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Dahlia Lithwick talks to First Amendment law professor Mary Anne Franks to explore the inversion of free speech in America this past week, and to trace the ways our assumptions about the First Amendment helped to tip us into this upside-down. Dr. Franks, author of Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment, explains the contradictions inherent in free-speech absolutism, the role of government in suppressing dissent, and the impact of media and entertainment on public discourse. What are we to make of a movement that screamed “jawboning” and “censorship” for a decade, but when handed power enthusiastically enacts actual governmental speech suppression and censorship? And what does the First Amendment mean if the powerful are consistently afforded maximum power in the “marketplace of ideas”?

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There is a “stuckness” to American political life right now, which has become a seemingly inexorable centrifuge of polarization, victimization and power grabbing. The constitution is brandished as sword and shield, and also as though it is the word of God. Americans, it seems, have lost the ability to think creatively and expansively about the constitution, and our ability to amend it. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is in conversation with Jill Lepore, whose new book “We The People: A History of The U.S. The Constitution is a thorough and bold excavation of a central, but utterly neglected part of America’s constitutional scheme: the amendment process. In her book, and in this interview, Lepore challenges Americans to rekindle their constitutional imaginations and really think about what the act of mending, repairing, or amending has meant through the nation’s history, and could mean for a country on the brink. 

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In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick discusses the recent deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C. and its implications for checks and balances in the U.S. legal system. She is joined by Elizabeth “Liza” Goitein from the non-partisan Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, a leading expert on all things Posse Comitatus, the Insurrection Act, and the Pandora’s box of domestic military deployment in policing, and the legal frameworks governing it all. Together they explore the dangers of the administration’s current actions in the nation’s capital, and whether the president can act on his threats to expand them to cities that didn’t vote for him around the country. 

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Women were prosecuted for experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth even before the Supreme Court swept away the protections of Roe v. Wade. But these prosecutions have ramped up since, in both red and blue states. The stakes are ramping up too, with legislators introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide, potentially subjecting patients to the death penalty. This week, Mark Joseph Stern talks with Karen Thompson, the legal director of Pregnancy Justice. They discuss what happens when the state decides a fetus, or even an embryo, has equal or greater rights than pregnant people. As fetal personhood legislation moves ahead in more and more red states, this concept is also seeping into the law in blue states. Women have been jailed because their pregnancies ended in a way the state disliked. Grandmothers have been prosecuted decades after pregnancy loss thanks to investigators using forensic genetic genealogy to hunt them down. As Thompson explains, a frightening frontier in the battle for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights is here, and it demands our attention.   

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