Today on the pod we’re talking about the state of the U.S. Supreme Court, an institution that’s supposed to be a check on the executive branch, but one that’s taken a reputational battering in the past few years. It was once one of the most respected facets of American life. Not any longer, and not just according to liberals either; many conservatives are increasingly dismayed by what they see as political pandering by the justices to President Trump. The court is polling at near historic public opinion lows.

President Trump, of course, appointed the last three sitting court justices. The court is now a 6-3 three conservative majority, and has been under increased scrutiny for its handling of cases brought by the administration, and also its relationship towards longstanding legal precedent (most notably, of course, the court overturned Roe v Wade, which gutted 50-plus years of precedent enshrining abortion rights in the country, in 2022).

Top of mind for many of you this week will likely be same-sex marriage: In a recent podcast interview, Hillary Clinton predicted the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually overturn same-sex marriage, and Clinton’s portend is obviously of deep concern for many Americans, not least because this current incarnation of the Supreme Court has recent form for overturning precedent.

To get a handle on the likelihood of the court garroting LGBTQ rights (even further) and to understand what the court has been up to while we’ve all been swimming upstream against tidal waves of (mostly bad) news this summer, I called up my old colleague Cristian Farias. Cristian is a lawyer and a fantastic legal journalist who writes for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, amongst others. Cristian and I go way back; we worked together at The Huffington Post during the heyday of new media, when the cold brew was in abundance, and there were Cliff bars in every office kitchen. (Hopefully no one is triggered by this!)

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I ask Cristian about the current panic around same-sex marriage and whether the court will actually attempt to gut the decade-old precedent set by the Obergefell decision ten years ago. There’s also been a lot of chatter about the overreach of the court, particularly in the way its been issuing rulings via the so-called “shadow docket,” which allows the court to intervene in emergency cases without offering a lengthy opinion offering its reasoning…something Cristian argues is borderline tyrannical.

We dive into all this and more on the pod. As always, you can drop me a line [email protected]. Or you can just comment under this episode.

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