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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We wake up today and to a world where according to Dahlia Lithwick from Slate, Chief Justice John Roberts has lost control of the Supreme Court. She says, "Texas' bounty scheme for banning abortions worries the chief justice, but his Conservative colleagues think it's just fine." She says, "The court on Friday handed other states a roadmap for how to ban abortion without even deciding the Texas case."

It's a world in which Jim Newell from Slate says, "The Democrats could have gerrymandered away a seat from the Republicans in Congress but didn't do it," a world in which Newell wrote a feature called This Week in Mark Meadows and "A world in which" as Newell put it, "Dr. Oz joins a robust list of nutso enate races already under away." Oh, and it's a world in which Chris Wallace suddenly announced that he's leaving Fox and going to CNN of all places. Reportedly, he couldn't take Fox's increasingly off-the-rails conspiracy theory radicalism anymore.

That's quite enough to get us going for today with both Jim Newell, senior politics writer for Slate, and Dahlia Lithwick who writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts their podcast, Amicus. Dahlia, and Jim, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dahlia: Hi, Brian.

Jim: Hi, Brian.

Brian: Jim, be patient for a few minutes while I ask Dahlia about some of her reporting first. Dahlia, for one thing, this Texas abortion ban, regardless of the legal analysis, is having real effects on countless Texas women and families right now because five justices allowed it to stand while other judicial challenges continue. Would you start so that we're grounded in humanity and not in the law with the real-world consequences of this interim decision right now as you see them?

Dahlia: Yes. Thank you for framing it that way, Brian. I went back this morning and counted how many times the word 'woman' or 'pregnant' appeared in the opinions of the justices in the majority and other than citing the statute itself. It's not there. There's no recognition that this is affecting real people.

It's 103 days since this law has gone into effect. It has, for all intents and purposes, stopped providers from giving abortions to pregnant people in Texas at six weeks, that's before many, many people know they're pregnant and 90% of abortions would typically happen after.

The stories we're hearing are chilling and horrifying about folks if they can get the resources headed to Oklahoma where there's now four-week waits at clinics in Louisiana, other states where they're trying to go to get services that they can't get, and just really, really heartbreaking tales of victims of rape, in abusive relationships, of incest who are just, if they can get the money and they can take the time to travel, traveling huge, vast distances to get services that are supposed to be protected in the constitution.

Brian: On the 5-4 majority, letting the law stand for now on Friday while those other federal court challenges take place. Do you know the rationale for that? I'm sure you've read through the decisions that whatever writing the justice is handed down.

If the current Supreme Court standard is no state might place an undue burden, the undue burden standard from the 1992 case, undue burden on a woman's right to an abortion, a six-week cutoff seems like it's an undue burden to almost every person in the state who would've sought an abortion before. How did they rationalize their way out of that?

Dahlia: The issue of whether Roe and Casey were good law was not on the table. It was not a part of this opinion. Really, the only thing the court was trying to figure out is if this incredibly circuitous, I think Justice Elena Kagan at oral argument in SB8 said some genius was her way of describing this system whereby there's no state enforcement and only individuals have a cause of action, any American has a cause of action to sue. That was the issue.

The court didn't get to the issue you're raising that was certainly raised in the Dobbs case, the Mississippi ban. Interestingly, this entire thing until you get to Sonia Sotomayor's dissent doesn't even ask questions about how if you have a viability standard that is currently set at 24 weeks, maybe 23 weeks and you have a 6-week all-out ban, it absolutely nullifies Roe v Wade. The first person who writes the word nullification is Chief Justice John Roberts and he's in that 4 you're describing in the 5-4.

Brian: I'll get to Chief Justice Roberts who you wrote about at length in just a minute, but listeners, is anyone listening from Texas right now or know people in Texas and want to call in on the real-world effects of the abortion ban there that the Supreme Court allowed to stay in effect on Friday, at least for now? 212 433 WNYC 212 433 9692 or anyone else for Dahlia Lithwick who covers the courts and the law for Slate and Slate senior political writer Jim Newell on his pieces about Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff on the January 6th Committee, Dr. Oz, and the nutso Senate races, as Jim Newell put it, that are underway or other things that I mentioned in the intro that Jim Newell from Slate is writing about. 212 433, WNYC 212 433 9692.

Before we get to Chief Justice Roberts, Dahlia, just to pin down the other half of the ruling on Friday for people who may be confused, the ruling that came down allowed abortion providers to challenge the near-total abortion ban from Texas in federal court. The State of Texas had hoped the court would say the law wasn't even reviewable and yet you say they provided a roadmap for other states to ban abortions. It's almost a contradiction. How so?

Dahlia: It was really interesting I noticed when the decision came down in the first hour or two on Friday morning, there was real confusion about whether to call this a win for the abortion providers or a win for Texas. It was very, very confusing. In fact, confusing that really what you ultimately had was an 8-1 decision to allow the providers to go ahead and sue some people. It looked as though I think initially, this was a big, big win for the providers.

It really required going back and reading and understanding that 8-1 decision was to allow four state actors licensing agents, I think the Neil Gorsuch majority opinion calls them executive state licensing officials. Those people can be subject to suit. The abortion providers can go ahead and sue them to try to get this law enjoined, but in fact, it does nothing to stop the State of Texas from continuing to have a law that says that anyone in the country can haul a provider or someone who "aids and abets," a provider, or somebody who drives the Uber to take someone to a clinic to procure an abortion. All of those people are still in the crosshairs.

I think part of what was confusing was even though there is this tiny wormhole by which the providers could presumably stop some people from enforcing this law. The fact is it does nothing to set aside the law in its entirety and thus does really nothing to protect providers.

As I understand it right now, this is going to go back to Judge Pitman. He's the district court judge who has care and custody of this case. He'll try to figure out what kind of injunction he can craft. Then it goes back up to the Fifth Circuit which was very, very quick to uphold this law and did it by short-circuiting the district court. I think in a deep, deep sense, what the court looks to be doing is saying, "Sure, providers, you're going to live to litigate another day, but best of luck on the next round."

Brian: Chief Justice Roberts, as you point out, concurred in part and dissented in part and Friday's ruling and the language you quote from his dissent is stark saying if the Texas law stands, 'the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.' The constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery. The Bush-appointed John Robert said that?

Dahlia: He did say that and we should be really clear that only a week earlier when they were hearing the big 15-week Mississippi case, that's the one that really now looks as though it may lay the groundwork to outright overturn Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey. John Roberts was a skeptic. He was not on the fence.

I don't think anyone believed, Brian, that John Roberts secretly liked Roe v Wade I think that it's been clear for a long time that he holds his nose and says, "This is the law of the land," but it was really interesting to see the John Roberts who showed up a week earlier in the Mississippi case, looking like he was pretty much ready to move that viability line that you described from 24 weeks to 15 weeks with a stroke of a pen.

That John Roberts, writing in this case, saying the entire credibility, legitimacy, and supremacy of the US Supreme Court is on the line. That if the court allows this to happen, you quoted the word mockery, if the court allows this to happen, it will be open season, states will be nullifying other fundamental constitutional rights willy-nilly. You can sense this panic in his opinion, that not one of the five more conservative justices is swayed by that or even bothered by that.

Brian: Just to finish the set before we take some calls and also bring in Jim on his reporting, what did you mean, and this was the headline of your piece this weekend, Chief Justice Roberts has lost control of the court?

Dahlia: Well, I think after Amy Coney Barrett was seated in what had been Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat at the court, there was a sense that John Robert, who had been the median justice since Brett Kavanaugh came onto the court, would still have some outsized role in modulating what that 6-3 conservative supermajority did.

You may recall last spring toward the end of the term, there were a lot of articles that said, "Oh, this isn't a 6-3 court. This is a 3-3-3 court. Even though Brett Kavanaugh is now the median justice, Amy Coney Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Roberts are going to really pump the brakes on doing radical things quickly."

I think we really saw that put to rest this week. I think it is clear that John Roberts, the best he can hope for is to sometimes pick off a vote or two from Kavanaugh and Barrett, but that he may be on the dissenting side with the three liberal justices. That really does mean, I think, that stories about how he is still somehow in the role of the conservative wing of this court is absolutely I think riddled with holes now.

Brian: Patricia in Westfield, you're on WNYC. Hi, Patricia.

Patricia: Hello. Thank you. This is a very important discussion. I don't understand why was Roe v Wade was not cauterized. Women fought so hard to have this right and yet they must have known if it wasn't cauterized, we would be back where we are today.

Brian: What do you mean by cauterized?

Patricia: Where it couldn't be tampered with, where nobody can say, "Well, we're going to--" Yes, codified, sorry, where we're just going to change it because whoever gets into office, they can change it. Why is that not done? Why was it not done?

Brian: Dahlia, that's what people generally think the Supreme Court does with its rulings, right?

Dahlia: Well, I think Patricia makes two good points. One is, it has not been codified into law. There is a bill called WHPA, the Women's Health Protection Act that has been passed in the House. It's going to come up for a vote in the Senate. I don't think anyone believes it's going to survive a filibuster and so the attempt to codify Roe in the Women's Health Protection Act may-- it's very doubtful that we'll succeed.

I think the second part of the question is the essential one, which is this has been the law of the land since 1973 and justice after justice, including many very conservative justices, have upheld it and have said, "This is a fundamental constitutional right and not to be tampered with." Even justices like Chief Justice Roberts, who say, "Look, I may not have voted this way in 1973 but this is the law."

I think that the answer is that we all believed, I think to our peril, that it had some kind of super precedent status, that's the word that had been attached to it, and so it didn't need to be codified. Now we're in between a rock and a hard place where it doesn't have super precedential status. It may not even have precedential status. At the same time, efforts to really enact it into law look like they're doomed to fail in the Senate.

Brian: Robert in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Robert.

Robert: Hey Brian, thanks for taking my call. Real quick before my question, I just want to say that Dahlia has an ongoing therapy session on her Facebook page every single day with just the coolest, smartest, nicest people, thankfully I'm there. There really is just a great moments every day to just lament about how awful things are. Thank you Dahlia for that.

Dahlia: Thank you.

Robert: My question that has the Supreme court justice ever used the word stench?

Brian: [crosstalk] Oh, Sotomayor did. Wasn't that in the Mississippi case, Dahlia?

Dahlia: It was. It was an oral argument in the Dobbs case which is that 15-week ban that the court heard a week ago. I'll have to go back and look. I'm sure it's been used before, but I think she very powerfully made the point that maybe is shooting through this whole conversation, which is that the court looks to be behaving in a partisan political manner. It looks like what the court is doing is because of power and not law.

The polls reflect that. We're seeing Gallup polling numbers that are the lowest since Gallup has started polling and what Justice Sotomayor raised both in the oral argument in Dobbs and even in her dissent, which is a scorching dissent in the SB8 case, is the real specter of the court losing all public respect and legitimacy.

Maybe here, I'll just say, if you go back and you read The Federalist Paper, that's the only power the court has. It has neither the purse nor the sword. It doesn't have an army. Congress could turn off the lights in the building. When the public says, "You know what? This court no longer operates as a judicial body, it is now operating as a Uber powerful juristocracy," that's the only power the court has, is that the public exceeds to its legitimacy. That's the panic you hear when you hear Sonya Sotomayor say the word stench.

Brian: Now along with Dahlia Lithwick who covers the courts and the law for Slate, and apparently runs a group therapy session on Facebook, Jim Newell, senior politics writer for Slate. Jim, thanks for your patience.

You are looking at the 2022 elections and the January 6th Committee among other things, but do you think however far the Supreme Court goes toward undoing its precedents on abortion rights that that could affect control of the House in next year's elections, white suburban women swing voters aghast at this direction or anything else?

Jim: I think that's an unknown. I think that theory does get thrown around a lot, that Democrats are in such a hole that the only thing that could get them out of it is some huge landmark event like overturning Roe, which is not to say that Democrats want to see the right to an abortion happen, but it could be one of those things that really wakes people up.

I think that's really untested. This is just something that magazine writers have been debating for 20 years, like Woodrow, ultimately we're down to Democrats' political benefits if it was repealed because then the way Republicans have treated the court is such a motivating issue, is something you need to change for so long. Would that then be the democratic party that are the ones who are voting based on the court and are taking this much more seriously than I think a lot of Democratic strategists have thought they would? It remains to be seen. I think most Democrats would obviously prefer to not have Roe v Wade overturned.

Brian: I wonder if this connects to the article you wrote just recently called 'Why Democrats' agenda is so popular, but Democrats are not.' Is abortion rights an example of that because there is a solid, solid majority in the United States for basic abortion rights.

Jim: I think that it depends on how you phrase things, but yes. Obviously keeping Roe v Wade on the books is popular leading to the right to an abortion. It is popular, but that's something that, as Dahlia was saying, it's probably not going to get through of the Senate, the codification of Roe. That's something that's a little bit on the back burner.

In my article, I was talking about the agenda that Biden's already passed or trying to pass, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, Build Back Better Act, which has a lot of components to people like it as universal Pre-K tapping the call of drugs and insulin, addressing climate change. A lot of things that individually pull pretty well. The [unintelligible 00:19:41] itself, it still has majority support although it's polarizing a little bit.

You also see Biden's approval rating in the low 40s and well underwater at this point. I think that the thing that's coming down to is 70% of people in some of these polls are saying they think the economy's in bad shape. If you're the party in power when 70% of people think that then you're going to have a whole lot of problems at the polls.

There's almost a disconnect between what Democrats are trying to achieve through Congress, which are these long thought goals, they're still pretty popular, and then the economic problems that people are facing every day, whether it's supply shortages, or gas prices, grocery prices, worker shortages, just going into any store, whatever, and you just notice that shelves are picked, and there's not enough people to help. I think these are things that people are running into every day. People are starting to feel like the Democrats in power are not really touching this.

Brian: Let's go to Elena in Westchester. Elena, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Elena: Hi, good morning, Brian. Thank you for the discussion today. If you could have your guests speak regarding the recent report, the Presidential Commission for reform of the Supreme Court, which was submitted to President Biden. I appreciate listening about that.

Brian: Jim, you want to take that? That's in the political arena?

Jim: No, I would pass that off to Dahlia if she can take it.

Dahlia: I'm happy to take it and it's a really good question I think because it goes to in some sense the issue that you and Jim are discussing, which is how excitable the public is around the increasing stench of the court, the politicization of the court. Folks may recall that when candidate Biden was running, and people were very, very aggrieved that Mitch McConnell was ceding Amy Coney Barrett after voting had already begun in the 2020 election, which was in violation of the rule that was used to keep Merrick Garland off the court in 2016.

He was asked whether he would entertain the notion of court-packing which is expanding the size of the court and he said he would certainly ask smart people to think about it. He convened this blue panel commission that turned in their big monstrous hundreds of pages of reporting on court reform generally not just court-packing but also term limits for the justices, the idea of stripping jurisdiction, creating new ethics and transparency rules.

The gravamen, the bulk of the report really is just a massive book report. It was not tasked with making recommendations. The scholars did not make recommendations. They essentially laid out the size of the field and said, "These are the things to think about if you want to do court-packing. These are the things to think about if you want to create term limits," but there was no recommendation.

I would also note that even though the commission was bipartisan, several of the commissioners immediately after the report was voted on and handed off to Biden wrote very fiery op-eds saying, "By the way, we should pack the court."

I think that the upshot of everything I'm saying is this is not going to create a sense of urgency in Biden to do something and certainly not to do something now. If the purpose of this commission was to kick the can down the road, it did that very elegantly and the report is certainly worth reading. I don't think it creates a sense of urgency in voters or in the president to do something about either the composition of the court or the increasing sense that it's not legitimate.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute. Oh, go ahead. Jim. You want to weigh in on that? Go ahead.

Jim: Yes. I just want to add one more thing. When I was talking about how if Roe is overturned, you could flip the switch on who's more motivated by the court. I think that court-packing or some other changes to the court, like Dahlia was saying, they don't quite have the support that they need right now. I think if they overturned Roe or there are a couple of other landmark 6-3 conservative court cases, then I think you could start to see a discussion about packing the court enter into the democratic mainstream more where they're not quite there yet.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute with Dahlia Lithwick and Jim Newell from Slate on Friday Supreme Court, abortion rights, Texas ruling and more Monday morning politics, and more of your calls 212 433 WNYC. Stay with us.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Jim Newell, senior politics writer for Slate, and Dahlia Lithwick who writes about the courts and the law for Slate, and hosts their podcast Amicus. Ron in Boston, you're on WNYC. Ron, thank you for calling in.

Ron: Thank you. Hi, I am not currently in Texas although I was born there. Before I was born, my mother was pregnant in Austin. She discovered actually at her due date at nine months that she was carrying an anencephalic child, a baby essentially without a brain and there was no chance for this child to live. Under the laws of Texas at the time, she was not permitted to have an abortion. When she finally did give birth, she hemorrhaged and almost died. Thank God, she didn't and that's why I'm here.

What I wanted to know is under SB8, would she had been permitted to have an abortion at that point? If not, it seems to me it's an extraordinary violation of freedom of religion. My religious conviction says that the preservation of the mother's life, in that case, is an absolute moral, religious ethical obligation, and to force a family, under those circumstances, to abide the possible life-threatening situation of carrying this child under those terms is an affront to my religious beliefs.

Brian: Ron, do I understand correctly that you're a rabbi?

Ron: I am a rabbi, yes.

Brian: Dahlia.

Dahlia: First of all, that's an amazing and touching story. Thank you for sharing it. I do feel that one of the things that needs to happen to change the conversation we're having is that people need to be very, very open and painfully open and vulnerable about their own lives and so that's appreciated. I think there is some dispute. We know that SB8 has no exemption on the six-week ban, no exception, not for the victims of rape and incest.

I think there is an exception for acute catastrophic health outcomes for the mother which may or may not have worked in your case. I think that there is a general feeling that it is going to be virtually impossible to get, certainly as late as you're describing, a procedure in Texas.

I think what I would commend to you is a really good conversation. Actually, Katherine Frankie at Columbia University talked about this on our podcast at Slate Amicus about this question of religious liberty and how it became the case that only the religious views of some religions have shaped the abortion debate and the religious views of many, many religions which, like yours, would actually say that a six-week all-out ban is fundamentally antithetical to their views have been completely silenced in the debate.

It's a really fascinating conversation that I can't possibly summarize in 20 seconds. I would say that part of the problem we are seeing now is that this is essentially a theological conversation that is happening under the guise of a secular constitutional conversation and it's also theological only with respect to some theology. I think you've identified all of those problems and more.

Brian: Why wouldn't banning abortions be the imposition of one religious view on women of all the religious denominations that approve of abortion rights in the first place? That was not the basis on which Roe or any other abortion case was decided?

Dahlia: No, none of these cases ever have been decided explicitly around religious liberty. They have nothing to do with the religion clauses. They are rooted in the privacy clauses, the 14th Amendment, the idea that one has bodily autonomy and the right to make decisions about your family. It actually has absolutely nothing to do with religion although all you need to do is listen to oral arguments to hear a lot of that religious language of fetal personhood, that the minute you have a fertilized egg that is a person for purposes of theological analysis, but that is not what we are talking about when we talk about Roe v Wade. Nobody's religion was supposed to matter.

Brian: Jim, changing topics. On January 6th and the January 6th Commission, you have a feature that you call This Week and Mark Meadows. For people who don't know, he was Trump's chief of staff. During the January 6th insurrection, remember Trump was still president at that point and Meadows has defied a congressional subpoena to testify about it, but he also turned over a lot of documents to the House committee investigating the riots, including his role potentially and Trump's potential role. What do you make of him cooperating and not cooperating at the same time? How should the public understand this?

Jim: Well, I can't make sense of it except outside of him trying to create a swirl of controversy just when his book is coming out. In doing so, he is putting himself in legal trouble in time. He's having the worst of both worlds, I would say, in that he's cooperating a little bit, but then stopping cooperating and then making himself vulnerable to criminal contempt of Congress charges.

I think that it's just been very strange watching him go back and forth on this because he also got into hot water earlier when some excerpts from his book were coming out where he revealed that Trump had tested positive for COVID a few days ahead of a debate. When a Trump spokesperson tweeted out that this was a lie, Mark Meadows retweeted that. I don't know exactly what's going on, except that he likes to live in this world of chaos.

I think this week, we're going to see the January 6th Committee because Mark Meadows stopped cooperating, advanced criminal contempt charges, and then I think we're going to see a House vote on that. Depending on who wins the House in 2022, it's going to be a race against the clock here to see how quickly the House committee can get through this report especially with all the legal cases they're having to work through.

Brian: What questions might Meadows or his documents provide answers to? Is it to what degree did Trump actually direct this, to what degree did Trump or Meadows coordinate with groups like the Oath Keepers that might have been planning violence from the start? What questions are they looking to Mark Meadows to really answer?

Jim: I think they're looking-- They alluded in this report there was released yesterday that there was just waves and waves of text messages sent throughout the day including to a media personality who had encouraged Trump to issue a statement on January 6th, a member of the family encouraging Trump to put out a statement.

Brian: You mean to call off the protestors, the rioters [crosstalk]

Jim: Yes, to encourage him to leave because Trump was reticent about doing that. There were some texts that he may have to members of Congress who were involved in this whole Stop The Steal operation following the election, texts from Meadows to certain rally organizers potentially.

I think that Meadows is someone who was just constantly on his phone, interacting with everyone, and was the nexus for everything that happened both after the election, throughout the state legislative process during the state certification of elections, and then also in January 6th. They want to get as much as they can from him.

Brian: By the way, listener tweets in response to our rabbi caller. "I may be seeking a religious conversion. I have never heard a more compelling argument to join the Jewish faith." Another listener tweets, "If women were truly equal in the eyes of government, their right to bodily autonomy would already have been codified in a constitutional amendment." Lisa in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. The first to get it out of the way I am a 100% abortion on demand that Roe v Wade was too limited [unintelligible 00:33:45]. That said, I think this is the wrong conversation to be having right now, maybe a forest for the trees description.

How do I want to put this as succinctly as possible? One of the things that is going on in Texas is what is being called vigilante law and how the law has been or how achieving what Texas wants to achieve has been put in the hands essentially of bounty hunters. While this is novel for state law at the moment, it is more of the tip of the iceberg that we have been seeing for quite some time and I will briefly bring back the discussion.

When people were talking about what happens if Trump refuses to leave office, there were calm voices, including on WNYC, saying, "Don't worry, he can't, the US marshals will just escort him out of the building." There were discussions about the impeachment and how the Senate failed to impeach him. Well, now the stories are coming out that many of the senators who might have voted to impeach him were terrified for their family's lives because of death threats.

We are seeing death threats against poll workers and against election officials. Now we have vigilantes in Texas against abortion rights. Trump never needed to have the army support his actions if he created and fomented more of the emotions.

If he has a nationwide armed militia then saying calmly about what the Senate can do or what the House can do, wait until you see armed people going and killing or threatening to kill Supreme Court justices, legislatures, this is no longer a calm considered, "Let's just to wait and see if we can vote into law or vote this out of law." What is happening is a nationwide coup on a city-state, federal county level that includes ongoing armed insurrectionists and bounty killers or bounty hunters, and people have been killing abortion doctors and blowing up abortion clinics for decades, is just part of the ongoing wave of tearing apart the structure of the country.

Support of the constitution and support of abortion rights are just two of the things that are there. Discussions about what happens to women who can't get abortions and how terrible that is back to the children at the border, the cruelty is the point. This same authoritarian bureaucracy right-wing movement is very anti-autonomy for women.

It's all part and parcel of the same thing. When you focus on the Supreme Court for abortion rights or voter integrity, you are missing the horrible wave of violence and violence threat that is only getting worse.

Brian: Lisa, thank you for connecting the dots in that compelling way. I do think we talked about the violent threat a lot as well. I want to throw Lisa's comments to both of you because it overlaps with both of your beats.

Dahlia first for you as somebody who covers the courts and the law, the other thing about this Texas abortion, we touched on it, but we could go more into it, is how it allows citizens, she calls them vigilantes, certainly bounty hunters, which she also called them, to try to enforce the anti-abortion law for personal monetary gain, getting around the authority of the state which should leave everybody gobsmacked. Has it ever been done before in this country and what else would you like to say in response to Lisa's call?

Dahlia: No, I think Lisa's call nails it. I think that when SB8 first was proposed, I wrote a piece saying, "We are all vigilantes now," and making a version of Lisa's point, which is, if you look at stand-your-ground laws and castle doctrine, and if you look at exactly the line of laws she's describing where we are now passing laws in the states that allow people to take it upon themselves to enforce election law if they don't think election is being conducted fairly.

We're seeing laws being passed that allow people to take it upon themselves to bring suits if they think that somebody is using the wrong bathroom. It is all of a piece with a larger sense of exactly what you just said, mistrust of the state that the state cannot enforce laws and therefore we spike it back to, and I think vigilantes is the right word, individuals to enforce the laws themselves.

I find it chilling, which is why when Gavin Newsom proposed this weekend to do a copycat SB8 law where Californians can be subject to citizen enforcement of gun violations, part of my friends have said, "Good, it's great to see the same stratagem and plan used against gun owners." The idea of conscripting everyone in the country to be a vigilante and to self-enforce laws is chilling for the reasons that Lisa says.

The very last thing I would note is that one of the cases that the court is now going to decide that was argued earlier this term would massively expand gun rights and the ability to carry guns in New York City. It's not really a hypothetical to talk about, "Oh, maybe someday armed vigilantes are going to be just determining from themselves what laws they want to enforce and how."

I think we are creeping up on a moment where they're going to be a lot more guns in a lot more and a lot more people feel empowered to enforce the law themelves and I find it as chilling as Lisa does.

Brian: Is California Governor Gavin Newsom serious? Does he want that same bounty hunter enforcement for gun laws in California that Texas now has for abortions?

Dahlia: He initially tweeted it and it seemed like he was just trolling but in the hours after, he did release a statement saying this is what he's going to ask lawmakers to do, to have the exact same mechanism so that anyone in the country can go ahead and sue somebody in California who violates certain gun laws. It doesn't look like he's just trolling.

Brian: Jim Newell, a last word for this segment.

Jim: No, in response to Lisa's comments, this intersects most with what I do just looking at state legislatures and state governments where the whole apparatus of elections, there's efforts on the Republican side and from Trump's team to put in place people who are more loyal to the Trump vision. We're willing to do his bidding. We didn't talk about a lot of the Senate races that I wrote about but all the Senate primaries about loyalty to Trump and who will-- when Trump asked for the dirty work to be done, who will do it.

Congress is something I see every day. When we talk about this whole scheme I think that's what keeps me frightened, is just looking ahead to 2024 and seeing the extent to which Trump was able to get all these if he runs again if he's able to get his will if it's a close election. We can end on that very terrible note, I guess.

Brian: With this little addendum, is Dr. Oz loyal to Trump since you wrote an article about him?

Jim: Yes, Dr. Oz has decided that in order to win this election he will be loyal to Trump. We've talked a lot about abortion rights here. He was outspokenly pro-choice but nowadays is running in a Senate Republican primary Pennsylvania. He is an ardent pro-lifer. We have yet another race where just someone's jumping in and they're going to play the hits.

Brian: Jim Newell, senior politics writer for Slate and Dahlia Lithwick, who writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts their podcast, Amicus. Thank you both very much.

Jim: Thank you.

Dahlia: Thanks, Brian.

 

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