This week’s episode attempts to understand the ways in which the law of Trump unfolds along two tracks at the same time. First, Mark Joseph Stern joins us to talk about the Supreme Court’s decision to let Trump fire the heads of independent agencies, undermining a 90-year-old precedent in an unsigned, two-page decision on the shadow docket. This is a case in which Donald Trump’s agenda perfectly aligns with the wishlist of the conservative supermajority that controls the court. But if the court keeps giving Trump free passes to break the law now, why should we expect him to respect the court when it tries to draw the line later?
Then Dahlia Lithwick talks to the University of Chicago’s Aziz Huq about the idea of a “dual state,” a legal arrangement in which seismic changes happen in ways that are not perceptible to the bulk of the citizens. Drawing from the work of a Jewish lawyer who witnessed the dual state operate in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Huq explains that authoritarians can seize the levers of the law to persecute disfavored groups, without disturbing the idea of the rule of law for the great majority of the nation.
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