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Kate and Leah recap the week’s legal news, including argument calendars for the next SCOTUS term and President Trump’s attempted federal takeover of Washington, DC. Then, it’s our third annual State of The Uterus episode. Melissa and Leah talk with Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen, founder of ClutchKit, about the current status of reproductive freedom three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Finally, Leah talks about the authors of After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe, But Not Abortion.

Favorite Things:
Leah: Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancies in America, by Irin Carmon; track list and cover art for Taylor Swift’s forthcoming The Life of a Showgirl; Ben Platt’s cover of Diet Pepsi; Melissa’s appearance on Nicole Wallace’s podcast, The Best People; “Redistricting Texas Now is Illegal and the U.S. Department of Justice is the Reason Why,” by Ellen Katz; and Laura Loomer’s weird deposition in a case against Bill Maher

Kate: Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart; Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler; Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab; The Retrievals; “The Chadha Presidency,” by Josh Chafetz; and “Trump, John Roberts and the Unsettling of American Politics,” by David Dailey

 

TRANSCRIPT

Melissa Murray [AD]

 

Show Intro Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they’re going to have the last word. She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

 

Leah Litman Hello and welcome back to Life of a Supreme Court Show Podcaster, also known as Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it.

 

Kate Shaw I mean, our announcement of today’s episode is probably going to get like a hundred million downloads. I am quite sure.

 

Leah Litman We will break the internet.

 

Kate Shaw We will break it all. Probably not, but we do have a great, although sometimes dark, show in store for you today. We are your hosts for this segment. I’m Kate Shaw.

 

Leah Litman And I’m Leah Litman.

 

Kate Shaw And as is now typical for our summer episodes, we’re going to start by talking through the most important breaking legal news of the week. We’re then going to bring you a segment that is the latest installment of what is now an annual tradition of doing a retrospective on Dobbs and what that decision has wrought over the last year. For that conversation, we’re gonna joined by two fantastic guests. And this year, we’re pairing that retrospective with a conversation Leah recently had with David Cohen and Carole Joffe, who are the authors of a terrific recent book titled After Dobbs, How the Supreme Court Ended Roe, But Not Abortion.

 

Leah Litman But first, as my introduction suggested, there’s some news. And the news is this. TS12 will be dropping the day before our live show in Chicago. It is epically titled The Life of a Showgirl. And if you thought live shows during Pride were on another level, just wait Chicago until you see a live show after a Taylor Swift drop.

 

Kate Shaw I’m so glad the end of the sentence you translated T.S. Twelve because ninety five percent of our listeners will know what that means. But for the five percent, Taylor Swift has announced that she is releasing her twelfth studio album in consultation with Leah before the day of our Chicago live show. I try to make the.

 

Leah Litman I try to make the show accessible to the cage-shaws of the world.

 

Kate Shaw I am well aware. I am not the Kate Scholls of the world when it comes to Taylor Swift, although I am when it come to most things.

 

Leah Litman OK, but now to the actual news we want to slash have to cover. We got some oral argument calendar.

 

Kate Shaw Right, this is not usually news, but this year, the court was very delayed in releasing its argument calendar for the upcoming October and November sittings. So we now know exactly what is going to happen in the first two, well, we don’t know. We now know what is exactly going to be argued in the two months of the Supreme Court term, which we are on the cusp of. Again, these calendars are released really late. Georgetown Law’s Debbie Schrager went back 18 years to track the release date of October argument calendars, which before now was never later than July 26, though three weeks, essentially, late this year. And we might have some idea what took the court so long, and it’s not great.

 

Leah Litman So the court jammed the re-argument in Louisiana versus Calais into its October calendar after not bothering to getting around to actually issuing the order telling the parties what question the court wanted argued until earlier in August. So they rushed this bad boy onto the calendar. And this is the case in which the court asked the parties to brief and argue whether section two of the Voting Rights Act which requires legislatures to draw districts where minority voters have political opportunities is unconstitutional racial discrimination. A decision invalidating the Voting Rights Act or the major portion of it that remains would eliminate several majority minority districts that are currently held by Democratic representatives. And that could clear the way, would clear the way for more extreme Republican gerrymanders and disenfranchising minority voters.

 

Kate Shaw So the question that this long delay and then announcement in the very first stretch of the October term raises a question, did they rush the argument in this case to increase the odds of a decision that would enable more anti-democratic racial gerrymandering before the 2026 midterm elections? We cannot rule that out, right? The chief justice himself explicitly reminded us recently in the argument over the birthright citizenship executive order that the court can go fast when it wants to go fast. So let’s play that clip here.

 

Clip Three years, four years, we’ve been able to move much more expeditiously. I think we did the TikTok case in a month. Presuming, I gather an important part of your answer is that people can litigate differently and one will go to Massachusetts, the other one will go to Houston, and you’ll get conflicting decisions fairly quickly. Is there any reason why this Court, and I gather that’s your your safety net is that at the end of the day, whatever how long the day is, this court can issue a decision and it will bind everything else. Is there any reason in this particular litigation that we would be unable to act expeditiously?

 

Leah Litman And let’s just look back and compare how the Supreme Court has chosen to handle the timing of the following cases, the case restoring Donald Trump to the ballot after states disqualified him for his participation in January 6th in the Stop the Steal movement. They went quickly there, managed to get that one out before Major Primary Day, Donald Trump’s immunity appeal, which they took their sweet time on, turning away Jack Smith’s earlier request to hear the case and then delaying scheduling the argument for a few weeks. Once they did opt to take it. The TikTok ban case, they went quickly there. Birthright citizenship, where they decided to take their sweet time and just not reach the merits on the government’s applications. Any unifying principle you can see here, Kate?

 

Kate Shaw I mean, you know that I don’t want to reach for the conclusion that when Expedition helps Donald Trump or the Republican Party or both, they can hustle, and when Delay helps him and the Republican party, they take their sweet time, but honestly, surveying the cases that you just walked through, it is really very hard to come to any other conclusion.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, you’re not reaching for the conclusion, it’s like slapping you in the face.

 

Kate Shaw It is essentially undeniable. And it’s a really important part of, you know, I think, the shadow docket, not just the cases that the court decides without full briefing and argument, but the timing decision it makes about when it’s going to hear argument in what kinds of cases and how quickly it’s gonna decide those cases. So in the vein of the shadow Docket, we did get another shadow Dockett order this week. It had been like three weeks since we had a shadow Docker order, and I was like. Why would that was lightness? Like, SCOTUS has not delivered anything insane in a couple of weeks. I mean, granted, the country is on fire. That is true. But SCOTus decided that we had had a little bit of a peaceful stretch, and so they needed to get back on their bullshit. So here’s what happened. Remember how, when the Supreme Court decided free speech coalition versus Paxton? In that case, we warned that while that case was about the state of Texas limiting minors’ access to porn and the court said that was okay. Because while porn, that was essentially their reasoning, the decision opened up the possibility that the court would allow government to define other forms of speech as somehow troubling or concerning, and the court would allow states to limit access to that other kind of content as well, well, they might have just done so. Because SCOTUS denied an application for emergency relief, which had the effect of allowing Mississippi to enforce a law requiring parental consent to use social media that the Fifth Circuit had allowed to go into effect. So. As of the end of the term. It was just porn subject to lower First Amendment protection. And it is now, at least on a temporary basis, social media too.

 

Leah Litman We should say we don’t know whether the Supreme Court will ultimately find the law constitutional. So the court didn’t explain why they decided this application the way they did, except for Justice Kavanaugh. Of course, it’s always Justice Kavanagh wrote a separate cab currents that really isn’t illuminating much at all, except for what he might not have wanted to reveal. So he wrote separately to say he thought the law was likely unconstitutional. But he was going to let the state of Mississippi enforce it anyways. Always the great concur, providing so much clarity and analysis to the law.

 

Kate Shaw Did you, when you read this order, were you like, oh, his clerks hate him, like, who lets you off?

 

Leah Litman I read this and I was like, he just shoots from the hip, right? He is the embodiment of the vibes junkie, right, that, like, I feel like I am talking about when I talk about the justices. Because in this writing, he made one thing clear. In most cases, a likelihood of success on the merits is not enough to obtain relief on the shadow docket.

 

Kate Shaw Because he said that the challengers to this law were likely to succeed on the merits, but that they hadn’t shown that the equities favor them, but he didn’t say anything about what they had shown or why or what the deficiency was. So the only conclusion back to sort of the earlier, you know, Occam’s Racer that we were offering is that, you know sometimes likelihood of success in the merits is not gonna be enough to get relief, but sometimes it will be. So which cases will those be?

 

Leah Litman Well, you know, surprise, surprise. Those were the Trump administration is asking for emergency relief, right? In those cases, the court just seems to equate likelihood of success on the merits with an entitlement to relief on the shadow docket, right? But that involved the Trump Administration and this merely involved Mississippi. Like this cab currents, as you say, you know, made you wonder to his clerks hate him. It’s like DEF CON 10 levels of cluelessness. And I just could not. And weaving in the news I want to talk about with the news, I don’t want to to talk about a question I have for you, Kate, is this. Do you think Justice Kavanaugh experiences talking to his female colleagues, the way the Kelsey brothers experienced talking to Taylor Swift, by which I mean the boys think they’re talking to Isaac fucking Newton because The girls know words like fortuitous and esoteric. So when Justice Kagan or Jackson say things like stare decisis or analogous, or do things like legal analysis, does Justice Kavanaugh say, oh, big words, big word.

 

Kate Shaw I mean, I think when Justice Barrett uses those words, he’s more excited. I’m not sure that he says moved when Justice Jackson and Justice Kagan, but they do in fact all know many, many high level vocab words and, and he does not. All right. So on from Justice Kavanaugh, because in other news and you know, obviously more serious news, Donald Trump has decided since we last released an episode of this podcast. To essentially seek to take over the District of Columbia. That’s an overstatement, but only slightly. So the ostensible pretext for the emergency that Trump claims justifies his assertion of unprecedented authority over the nation’s capital is a crime wave in DC. Of course, this is actually exaggerated to the point of obvious falsehood. Crime rates are actually down in DC, There was one crime in DC that seems to have set all of this in motion, because DC is where one Mr. Big Balls, a character we have talked about previously on this show, a former, but then maybe once again, Doge Staffer. He was recently attacked by multiple individuals who may have been involved in an attempted carjacking. And it seems as though in response to this, the administration literally decided to call in the National Guard.

 

Leah Litman So a brief bit of background for what’s happening here. Washington, D.C. Is a federal enclave. That is, it is property of the federal government. Congress in 1973 passed a law, the Home Rule Act, that creates the current D. C. Government. And that is D.Cs local government. And that has three branches. And that law gave a bunch of authority to both the mayor of D.c., you know, the executive, and the D. C. Council, the legislature, both of whom are elected. And The federal government still has control over federal institutions in DC, like national parks or monuments, but ordinary law enforcement is done by DC officers.

 

Kate Shaw And a key thing to emphasize is that the federal government has substantially more power and authority over DC than it does over other places like New York or Los Angeles. So technically the DC National Guard, unlike other state national guards, is commanded by the president and it may undertake federal missions without being federalized. The fact that the DC national guard is controlled by the President is one of the reasons that it was so conspicuous and so concerning when President Trump did not call up the So the president has this power, but the D.C. National Guard is actually quite small.

 

Leah Litman And so the president tried to do something else and rely on a provision in the Home Rule Act that also gives the president power to use the DC Metropolitan Police Department for federal purposes whenever he determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist. That authority lasts for 30 days when he informs Congress. And again, it gives him control over them. For purposes of doing like federal presidential priorities, but doesn’t mean and shouldn’t mean. He tells them how to do things like enforce DC law. We’re gonna come back to this power in a second because surprise, there are questions about whether it is being lawfully used.

 

Kate Shaw The press conference in which the president announced all of this was filled with all sorts of gems. And so we’re going to do a rapid response to some of these clips. So without further ado, let’s play them.

 

Clip Our secret weapon here in D.C. Is U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

 

Leah Litman Oh, so you’re going to fight crime with box wine. Sounds amazing. The franzia force.

 

Kate Shaw The residents are quaking.

 

Leah Litman Right, you can respond to the next one.

 

Clip And I found an old statute, very old, early 1900s, that said, if you so much as touch or even think about destroying a statue or a monument in Washington, D.C., you go to jail for 10 years with no probation, no anything.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, I mean, this brought to mind an observation I made a couple of minutes ago, like where was this kind of energy on January 6th? And speaking of, there’s another clip along the same lines. We’ll play that one here.

 

Clip Let me be crystal clear, crime in DC is ending and ending today.

 

Kate Shaw I mean, the question, the announcement that crime in DC is ending and ending today, particularly considering many of the things emanating from the White House.

 

Leah Litman And kind of along those lines, like NBC News broke the story that President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics was among the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The White House has said he was just a bystander who wandered over after seeing coverage of the news. But I guess this means our little sprinter slash marathon runner may have the opportunity to vote to confirm someone that he ran away from. Have fun for him. This is, of course, a reference to Josh Hawley.

 

Kate Shaw I’m so happy they will be reunited in this way. Okay, one last clip, which is part of Leah’s beat, which is unitary executive watch.

 

Clip We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. History, in modern recorded U. S. History. Thanks to this team behind me and President Trump’s priorities.

 

Leah Litman So just to be clear, this is the unitary executive where crime can be both down and up. It is so unitary, right? Like that is Cash Patel saying, crime is down. And yet the entire premise of the attempted takeover of DC is that there is an out of control crime wave and it’s just a Schrodinger’s executive as ever.

 

Kate Shaw Indeed. But he meant that it was down, he was projecting forward 72 hours.

 

Leah Litman I see.

 

Kate Shaw It was all going to be down in response to this overwhelming show of federal force. I did not.

 

Leah Litman I did not realize he had those powers of foresight.

 

Kate Shaw He does. He does. Anyway, as part of this big police push, Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi does think she has finally found the deep state. And what I’m referring to here is the administration’s arrest and initiation of a criminal complaint against a federal employee who was captured on video throwing a sandwich at one of the federal officers deployed to police D.C. From the video, it does not appear that anyone was harmed by the throwing of said sandwich. Did not stop the administration from trying to levy felony charges against the thrower of the sandwich. The White House also posted a genuinely insane and really chilling video of the arrest of this individual who is a veteran and a lawyer from the Justice Department offered to turn himself in. I mean the video if you haven’t watched it is honestly fascist in esthetic and to my mind It’s also. Kind of laughable and pathetic. I mean, this was like an international lawyer in a residential neighborhood who was offering to turn himself in. And this kind of show of force, like dozens of heavily armored, like tactical gear police officers from various places, I think various agencies is appalling. It is wasteful. It’s dangerous. This is what we mean by masculine energy. Like this is what it takes. Like two dozen full, like, tactical gear forces from wherever they heal. To arrest an international lawyer who threw a sandwich? Like, I mean, this is just a confirmation of, I feel like the real weakness at the heart of this project, but also I think the escalation of potential danger that this kind of increased police presence and federal police presence in particular creates like on the ground.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, and we should say that the government, you know, carried out the arrest here after initiating a complaint against the individual. But in order to actually go through with this case, you know, they would have to get a grand jury to indict him because they would like to charge him with a felony. And related to this are reports that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., led by box wine, fighting crime lawyer, the administration’s secret weapon, Janine Cure-o! Has twice been unable to secure an indictment against a DC woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE arrest. And I guess I want to just pause and think about how it sometimes, maybe even often, feels like you are shouting into the void and not doing anything or able to do anything. But this kind of messaging and protest and organization can help. It can inform citizens about how to exercise the power they do have. And to resist the administration’s abuses of authority. Like you go grand jury, you know, grand juries are supposed to be okay with inditing ham sandwiches and such, but please do not indict the thrower of this sandwich, who is the hero we need.

 

Kate Shaw Do we know if it was a ham sandwich?

 

Leah Litman No, no, I don’t.

 

Kate Shaw But I’m saying it would be sort of, I don’t know, poetic in some way, if in fact it was. And in fact, he was not indicted by the grand jury. So we will see. So as promised, we wanted to return to the authority the Home Rule Act gives to the president to use, that is really to borrow the DC Metropolitan Police Department for federal purposes. So after that announcement, a couple of days later, the DC Attorney General filed suit, actually on Friday morning, arguing the administration is exceeding its powers by trying to do much more than the statute allows the president to do. The lawsuit maintains the president has attempted to seize control of the Metropolitan Police Department when the statute just allows him to require the mayor to provide the services of the MPD for federal purposes, but not to direct how they police local crime. The lawsuit also notes the president claimed Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi was taking command of the M.P.D. And that the two of them purported to appoint the D.E.A. As Interim Commissioner of the NPD. Bondi also tried to appoint someone else to supervise, command, and control of MPD’s entire operations, all this beyond the authority conferred by the statute.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, so the lawsuit raises multiple grounds on which the administration’s actions might be unlawful. Some are the ones you just ticked off, that they are trying to exercise powers that the statute just doesn’t provide. The DC Attorney General’s suit also challenges whether the president even has a basis under the law to request the services since crime in DC is down, not up. And for this proposition, it cites one USA Dick, Ed Martin’s press release, which I loved. Um We are recording on Friday. We even tried to record late to avoid the prospect of late breaking news. But it is still possible there will be some late breaking developments in this case. Because as of the time we are recording, the district judge who drew the case, Judge Reyes, has been undertaking a hearing. And we don’t yet have a resolution from that hearing just yet. Although, in the course of those proceedings, she indicated. She is not going to rule or review Trump’s determination that there is an emergency or whether the officers are being used for federal purposes and what that means. She is instead narrowly focused on what the statute actually allows the president and attorney general to do vis-a-vis the Metropolitan Police Department, that is what powers they have. And at the hearing, she said that section one of the order was obviously illegal and spent really a lot of the hearing searching for ways to construe the remaining sections and get the parties to agree on construing the remaining sections as. Mere requests for services, you know, rather than directives to rescind certain local orders and policies that apply to the DCE police. Naturally, about 30 minutes after we finished recording, womp-womp, the parties came back to the hearing and informed the judge that they had reached an agreement. Under that agreement, the federal government said they were going to rewrite Bondi’s order. Or else, you know, they kind of understood that the district court was going to issue a temporary restraining order, at least as to section one of the previous order, which had appointed the DEA administrator as commissioner of the DC Metropolitan Police Department. So as a result of that agreement and the rewritten order, the DC Chief of Police remains the head of the D.C. Police and requests from the federal government of the DC Metropolitan Police go through the mayor. Bondi then issued a revised order, and the revised order does the following. So it directs the mayor to provide for the assistance of the DC police with the enforcement of immigration law, as well as assistance with locating and detaining people who are unlawfully precedent and complying with requests for information from the federal government. It also appoints the DEA administrator as the attorney general’s designee for the purpose of issuing. Let’s say, commands slash directives slash requests to the mayor with respect to the MPD services. And it directs the mayor to enforce DC local law as it relates to unlawful occupancy of public spaces. So it’s unclear whether some of these sections or all of these actions are worded or will be carried out in a way that complies with the Home Rule Act. The revisions definitely address some of the purported legal deficiencies like purporting to replace the DC police commissioner or directing the enforcement of law. But it’s hardly clear. It does address all of them, you know, in particular the directive about enforcing DC municipal regulations and the DC code. It’s unclear whether those would amount to federal purposes.

 

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Kate Shaw So stepping back, even though the US federal government has more power over DC than it does over other places, thereby allowing the president to do things there that he couldn’t do or is limited in his ability to do elsewhere, this kind of militarization is chilling and it could normalize a practice, whether or not the law limits his ability to do it in other places in the eyes of the public. And indeed, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative Comer, has made pretty clear that the plan is militarization coming to a city near you. Let’s play that clip.

 

Clip And it’s out of control. So the president had to send in the National Guard. And I think that you’ve seen just in the last 24 hours a huge decline in crime. And we’re gonna support this. We’re gonna to support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington DC. And again, it’s unfortunate, but we spend a lot on our military. Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime in other countries. We need to focus on the big cities in America now and that’s what the president’s doing.

 

Leah Litman I think we should understand the specific targeting of DC is part of a larger project that extends further back indeed to the Black Lives Matter protests. Remember when Trump called in out of state National Guard units in response to the protests and then demanded the destruction of Black Lives matter plaza. This is also a very pointed reminder of the importance of DC and how it is not some, you know, simple partisan hack but basically essential for democratic governance. And if you’d like to learn more about these legal issues, you know, would commend to you Steve Vladeck’s post-federalizing DC on his sub stack one first.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, so that’s a great post. And I do want to echo what you just said. I think any conversation about actual democratic reform when we’re someday on the other side of all this has to take very seriously and maybe have at the very top of the list DC statehood. If you needed evidence of just the kind of democratic abomination that the lack of real representation in DC creates, I think the spectacle of the federal government doing what it’s done in the last few days in DC. Is that evidence. Okay so on last week’s episode Melissa and Imani who was in guest hosting noted that the DC Circuit or at least a panel of the DC circuit has decided to join the Supreme Court’s war against the federal district courts. This is what Leo was alluding to up front when I said it had been a nice couple of weeks with no Supreme Court interventions but this DC circuit really did step into the breach. So as they noted on that episode just before they started recording a 2-1 DC circuit panel. With Judge Katzis and Judge Rao in the majority, both appointees by President Donald Trump, granted a writ of mandamus, this is a huge deal, to vacate Chief Judge Boesberg’s order finding probable cause that members of the Trump administration were in criminal contempt of his orders. So having had a little bit of time to digest that insanity from the DC Circuit, what, Leah, did you make of it?

 

Leah Litman I mean, where to start, you know, as you noted, the writ of mandamus is extraordinary. The legal standard is it is only where a party has a clear and indisputable right to relief. The basic analysis of Judge Katsas and Judge Rao suggests no such standard is satisfied here. Also, a party is not supposed to have any alternative means of indicating their rights. You know, Judge Katz has indicated that the administration basically… Did not violate the order, and that it was clear and indisputable that they did not. But that reading just rested on a highly implausible set of inferences where you basically divorced the entire temporary restraining order from all of the proceedings during the hearing. You divorced the minute order from the judge’s articulation of the hearing, the idea that the judge adopted one definition of removal that makes no sense in that context, and then would promptly change. His mind 30 minutes later after, again, the entire focus of the hearing was about transferring custody of the men to El Salvador, not physically removing them from the United States. Judge Rao basically said, well, this order is additionally problematic because basically it gave the government a choice to avoid identifying possible contemnors by actually curing the contempt and reasserting custody and control, as if that somehow made it more coercive, not less. Like. It’s just embarrassing stuff, I think. Yeah.

 

Kate Shaw I actually think if you didn’t know anything about the proceedings, they sort of wrote as if no one was going to actually fact-check or law check anything that transpired in the district court. And it suggested a kind of unreasonable district judge that was just like unrecognizable if you had followed anything from the very beginning of this case before Judge Boasberg. I actually kind of couldn’t believe. They, not that this is a great thing, but there is often this sense of solidarity and clubbiness among federal judges that I think can be a real problem. But I was actually shocked that they would so grossly distort the record of a respected district judge in this case because I guess they want so badly to protect the Justice Department in this administration. It was really, really appalling. But don’t worry. That same panel has now come back and vacated a lower court order that had blocked the Trump administration from destroying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Because the Supreme Court allowed them to do it with the Department of Education, so why not make some fish soup of the CFPB as well, right? Oh yeah, for sure. So they basically concluded that the various decisions to abolish the CFPD are not amenable to judicial review.

 

Leah Litman So we’re going to have to boil down the reasoning. You know, the total number of pages in this opinion is more than 100. But a key part of the reasoning is essentially the idea that the government didn’t say, right, it didn’t write down, it didn’t announce that it was shutting down the CFPB. Instead, the government said it didn’t have the authority to do that and merely issued stop work instructions, canceled contracts, declined in return funding, fired employees, and terminated the lease for its headquarters. Like, this is actually some of the reasoning. Nor did the positive shutdown prohibit any legally required work,” end quote. OK, but it just effectively gutted their ability to do the legally required work. The reasoning continues, quote, the plaintiffs point to no definitive statement regarding an agency shutdown, but seek to infer one from various specific acts to downsize, end quote, literally within hours of the D.C. Circuit releasing this opinion. Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi said, watch this, she posted on F. That in a two-to-one ruling, the D.C. Circuit sided with my Justice Department attorneys in our effort to dismantle the CFPB. Unitary executive, right?

 

Kate Shaw Just… I mean, yeah. So that’s Bondi waving the flag of victory in ways that seem to render problematic some of the reasoning in the opinion she is crowing about. But back to that opinion itself for a minute, so Judge Katzitz goes on, quote, the positive shutdown decision is insufficiently discreet to qualify as agency action. To begin with, no statute or regulation authorizes the CFPB to shut itself down. So the positive decision is not derived from any authoritative text that might help structure judicial review.

 

Leah Litman He is clearly restating the substance of plaintiff’s legal claim. Like you’re right. No statute or regulation authorizes the CFPB to shut itself down. And that’s the problem, my guy. And like, it doesn’t matter that they’re not doing it in one fell swoop, right? It’s called death by a thousand cuts. And you know, the majority also went on to say like, well, even if they plan to shut down the agency, they’d have to do some other things in order to actually accomplish that, you know. Beyond just writing a memo. And it’s like no duh, but you don’t have to wait until the administrative state is literally blown up before doing anything about it.

 

Kate Shaw Or do you? OK, some other quick news to cover. One, the administration is trying to do some kind of review of the Smithsonian. So Trump sent a letter to the Smithsonian Institution requesting a, quote, comprehensive internal review of several of its museums to bring the organization into line with Trump’s vision for history and culture. Quote, this initiative aims to ensure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.

 

Leah Litman The letter goes on, quote, within 120 days, museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying historically accurate and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public facing materials, end quote.

 

Kate Shaw Naturally some of the targeted museums include the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National museum of the American Indian really raises the question like what pray tell is the non-divisive language these institutions are supposed to use to describe slavery and genocide?

 

Leah Litman I guess we will find out.

 

Kate Shaw Guess we will.

 

Leah Litman So last bit of news we will leave you with are just notes on some of the pending shadow docket applications that we are waiting for the justices to act on any day now because we live in a timeline where the court doesn’t even stop for the summer. We wanted to highlight these two shadow dockets requests that are from the Trump administration.

 

Kate Shaw So one pending application concerns the National Institutes of Health and a lower court ruling that had blocked termination of NIH grants that the government found politically objectionable.

 

Leah Litman And the other is about the California Los Angeles roving patrols of ICE, and specifically the lower court decision that had blocked ICE from rounding up people for speaking Spanish and having brown skin, i.e. Racial profiling. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to let them do some of that.

 

Kate Shaw All right, that’s the news we’ve got for you. Stay tuned for our annual Dobbs retrospective and then a discussion Leah had with the authors of the great new book, After Dobbs.

 

Melissa Murray [AD]

 

Leah Litman It is now that time. It is our annual Dobbs retrospective, The State of the Uterus. We committed to doing this every year because we did not want this, by which I mean Dobbs and its fallout, to recede from memory. Rebecca Traister, on our very first Dobbs retrospective slash State of Uterous, warned us that media might begin to think more stories about the same fallout became old or stale. When the reality is consequences for women were going to be, are going to be generational, systemic, and staggering.

 

Melissa Murray I think the other challenge too in this moment where it seems like there’s so much going on that it’s hard to focus on the fallout of Dobbs because it just seems like it was a zillion years ago even though it was only a couple of years ago but so much has happened since then and so it’s really important to just stay in the moment and remember it and to help us do that this year on the Dobbs retrospective. We are delighted to be joined by two fantastic guests, Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and new to the pod, but true to the pot, Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen, who is a former clerk to Justice Ginsburg. She has served on the board of Planned Parenthood of New York for almost two decades. She now works with Banyan Global, and she is the founder of ClutchKit, a reproductive health kit that we’re going to learn more about on today’s episode. So, welcome to the show, Alexis and Lisa.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen Thank you.

 

Alexis McGill Johnson Good to be here.

 

Melissa Murray Lisa, before we even get into this, can you explain to us what is Clutch Kit? And I get it, it’s for those clutch moments, but what are those clutch moment and how can you help?

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen Right. After the Dobbs decision, we decided to really provide women and men, but you know my first priority is women across the country with a kit that has the tools in it to prevent unwanted pregnancies. It turns out in our country we have an extraordinarily high rate of unintended unwanted pregnacies, higher than any industrialized nation, and we thought if we could give women the tools to unwanted pregnancies so that they had them in there. Room with them that we could at least start to help in that way. And these are tools like a tin of condoms, emergency contraception, the morning after pill, and pregnancy tests that are over the counter in all 50 states, legal in all fifty states, but hard to access. And you know, there’s some 8,000 zip codes that are considered contraceptive deserts. And so the idea here was to give women the tools. Should they ever need them to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

 

Leah Litman So thinking about this last year, we learned about the first known, or at least reported, deaths that were due to abortion bans that included Candy Miller, Neviah Crane, Amber Thurman, Jocelli Barnica, Portia Nguzmi. And we learned some of these deaths because of ProPublica reporting. Some of those stories reported on findings of the Georgia Maternal Mortality Committee. That is, the committee concluded that these women’s deaths were attributable to abortion bans. And perhaps in response to that reporting, CNN later shared that Georgia actually disbanded the committee. And Washington Post confirmed that as well. And then the Texas Maternal Mortality Commission announced it wouldn’t review cases from 2022 and 2023. Free. The White House also shut down the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System at CDC because, as Talking Points Memo explained, it had questions about race, among other things. So I guess I would put it to you first, Alexis. What does it say that the deaths of these women did not move the needle in this country when it comes to protections for reproductive freedom, women’s legal rights, like the reported death did in Ireland. And that there are instead these efforts to suppress the information.

 

Alexis McGill Johnson To me, what it says is that the focus on consolidating power and control over our bodies is so compelling that they are willing to actually hide the information rather than consider the implications and the value of our lives. I was actually stunned to hear, I was at a press conference with Chanette Williams, who’s Amber Thurman’s mother. This year while we were fighting the defund bills. And she said that she learned that Amber died because of an abortion ban through the ProPublica reporting. So at the time of her death, it just was, you know, she had some complications, everybody was doing everything they could, and it turned into the most awful sinister situation. But she did not actually know that the abortion ban was the cause of her death at the time.

 

Melissa Murray Why Amber couldn’t get the emergency abortion that she needed. Exactly.

 

Alexis McGill Johnson Right, exactly. I mean, in all questioning the, you know, going out to the park, not being sent home, kind of raising the questions, but not really putting all of those pieces together until the incredible reporting happened at ProPublica. And then having to be re-traumatized, learning that it was preventable, right? It was an unnecessary loss. And, you know, her grandchildren will have to, she and her family will have live with that forever. So, I do think that… This storytelling has continued to be important to keep a level of understanding the implications. We are kind of structured out of power in a lot of ways. And I think that sometimes the storytelling can’t rise to the level of structural change. And so we have, but we still have to continue to do it so that we can build more energy towards that.

 

Melissa Murray We’ve also learned not just of these women who have had tragic and regrettably preventable deaths because of abortion bans. We’ve, also, learned of studies that have documented the continuing health care fallout from DOB. So the Washington Post reported on the increase of infants who have been abandoned in the state of Texas. Texas is a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion banns. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. And Texas also ranks next to last. For women’s health and reproductive care, according to the Commonwealth Fund. So women are having babies, and those infants are being abandoned because women aren’t able to care for them. There was a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, pediatric section that reposted an American Journal of Managed Care study that found that Dobbs led to a 7% increase in infant mortality and a 10% increase among infants with congenital anomalies. We already lived in a country that had and a staggeringly high maternal mortality rate for a developed country. And this is apparently only increased. ProPublica found that sepsis rates in second trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% after Texas enacted its near total abortion ban. And the same study identified an increase in the number of in-hospital deaths of pregnant or postpartum women, an increase that was even above the deaths that occurred during the height of the COVID-19. And another ProPublica study on Texas found that after Texas made performing abortions a felony, the number of blood transfusions during emergency room visits for first trimester miscarriage care increased by more than 50%. And those are just general studies on top of the continued stream of reporting on these individual cases of women who are dying in parking lots being sent home, septic, all of these things. And I guess, Lisa, how do we How? This broader empirical story in a way that humanizes it, that makes it relevant to the American public. I mean, all of this is happening, and it seems like no one is paying attention, that we’re still having the same conversation about abortion. And that conversation seems to be happening only with a certain select number of people, when in fact these bans are affecting all of us.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen It’s a terrific point. And while we do believe that storytelling is incredibly important, it’s been a cornerstone of many different civil rights movements, especially those based in equality. It is not resonating with, certainly not this administration. This administration is maybe pro-birth in a way, but not pro-life. They are… Very focused on. I mean one of the reasons that we took a look at contraception is because you’re talking about stories that have been publicized in different journals and studies but you know there’s a very much of a below the radar movement happening which is very pro-birth and it’s attacking contraception both in terms of financial attacks so cutting Medicaid, cutting Title X, cutting all kinds of support to high quality clinics like those that Alexis oversees, the federal contraceptive coverage in the ACA is being cut. All of these affect women’s ability, even just to get proper contraception in the beginning, legally, legislatively. And then as you were saying in terms of like marketing, And I think that they’re crushing… Accurate information. So these stories are being pushed down. They’re erasing even terms like gender and sex, reproductive health. You know, the reproductivehealth.gov website went down, a website that a lot of women went to for trusted information. They are not teaching sex education in schools. There is this effort to sort of squash information and squash education. And market a very different, you know, women should be having babies approach. Do you remember there was a talk around a $5,000 bonus? The baby.

 

Melissa Murray The baby bonus. Yes. Was it in the big beautiful bill or was it just the billionaire bonus? I can’t remember.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen I think it was not in the big, beautiful book that it was talked about. It’s so weird because of course, and that’s kind of what’s going on here. It’s this very underhanded approach to get women, I think, to have more babies and not really allowing the stories and the risks associated with that come to the forefront.

 

Melissa Murray Well, it’s not even just not being clear about the risk associated with bringing a pregnancy to term in your quest to have more babies. It’s after the baby is born, completely dismantling any kind of infrastructure of care that would be available to support those who have to raise these children. And the point about suppressing information is such a great point. And it’s so relevant for you, Alexis, because that’s the origin of Planned Parenthood. Margaret Sanger, Maryware Dennett, They were all about. Disseminating information to women who were hungry to figure out, how do I limit the size of my family so I’m not on death’s door when I deliver my 10th child? That was the origins of the birth control movement.

 

Alexis McGill Johnson Absolutely, right. And I mean, for all that we can and should understand about Sanger’s full and complicated legacy, she does stand very strongly as an Avenger in ensuring that women had access to basic information around reproduction and could make choices about when and how they would continue their family or start their family, what have you. And that is still obviously the work that we continue today. I do think it’s important to put all of these into context of what, you know, we’re 202 days I think into tyranny, maybe a little bit longer depending on when we start those conversations at least the contemporary tyranny if I might say. And the first thing that authoritarian governments do is they focus on cutting off the rights for half the population, right? They focus on stopping access to reproductive. Care and information because it’s a way to control the population, you know, just in the last couple of days, you knows, essentially a federal takeover, police takeover in DC. Like there, there are these, these, like we have to be looking at this in the context of this is not just, just a, a post-Dobbs moment, right? It is actually emblematic of the broader things that are happening to stop information, you know accurate information sharing to challenge our ability to advocate, to Lisa’s point, on freedom based on our identity and equality. And there are structural systems that are supporting those things. And so I look at the incredible and horrific set of stats that you started with, and it is very clear that abortion bans have made pregnancy more dangerous. And we are also fighting to be able to help people connect the dots to a bigger picture. Of what the opposition is trying to advance, because it was never intended to stop at banning abortion.

 

Leah Litman So we should note that when, Alexis, you reference Sanger’s complicated history, Alexis is referring to the narrative that has been amplified in right-wing conservative circles that Sanger pushed birth control on racial minorities as a way to suppress birth rates of minorities. That’s not exactly true, but she has some kind of ties to problematic movements. But it does raise a question, Alexis. There are all of these ostensible claims to be pro-birth or floating pro- birth policies but Are they pro-birth for everyone?

 

Alexis McGill Johnson You know, I think it’s not clear. I mean, I spent a lot of time trying to think about what is their end game.

 

Melissa Murray I’ll say it more plainly, Leah’s being very politic. Do they want black people to have more babies?

 

Alexis McGill Johnson I mean, yes, they need a labor force. I think there are a bunch of strange bedfellows in the opposition that have come together, right? Some people are just only there for the deregulation. Some people who are only there pro-birth misogyny. You know, and I think that I think there there are those who’ve been obviously animating around The white population declining and more of Earth are very explicit about that. And you see the white nationalist contingent in part of this coalition too. And I think a lot of the cutting off the social safety net that will impact black and brown communities, the ICE raids, all of that is connected to also how to control a sad population, build more prisons and funnel into a labor force, however that. That looks whether that goes all the way back to the 1800s or whether that is a new contemporary form. I think that’s real.

 

Melissa Murray So Lisa, we’ve been focusing on abortion and the policies that have restricted abortion and really shaped the nature of women’s lives today. But you have rightly pointed out that it’s not just abortion that’s in the crosshairs here. It is also contraception, which is part of why you developed Clutch Kit. Can you tell us what the landscape for contraceptions looks like? Because I think a lot of people think that access to contracept ion is sacrosanct, and that’s not going anywhere. And I think that’s not a great place to be. I think it’s as endangered as everything else.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen Great point. I think that the effort to restrict access, suppress access to contraception, is being done sort of below the radar because contraceptions is so popular. It’s, you know, 90% of Americans believe that access to contraception should be increased. That’s 95% of Democrats, 90%, of independents, I think, and 85% of Republicans.

 

Melissa Murray So that’s like a bipartisan issue. The only thing that’s gotten more bipartisan support is the transparency on the Epstein files.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen Ha ha right exactly.

 

Melissa Murray It’s like contraception and the Epstein files, these are the two issues that Americans agree on. There are two issues that Americans agree on.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen We really agree. Exactly. Okay, great. Look, and that agreement, actually, is part of what we were thinking when we started ClutchKit, that it would be great to sort of bring people, the pro-choice and anti-choic or pro-life side, together in a place where they may be able to agree, which is the accessibility of contraception. But if you look at Project 2025, there’s some direction in there around the decreasing access to contraception. And if you at the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs, again, there’s so reasoning in there that gives you pause with respect to a right to contracceptions, based on the same rights, the same constitutional underpinnings, as you know, as Roe and Casey were. So there’s that, okay, underneath. And I do think that it’s been a very concerted effort. I mean, it’s amazing to me to watch even the promotion of legislative efforts around making emergency contraception more difficult to access, requiring prescriptions, putting age restrictions on it. You have to have like parental consent to get contraceptions. I think part of this is because people don’t know the difference between abortion medication. And emergency contraception. Abortion medication, obviously this group knows, terminates an existing pregnancy. Emergency contraceptions or the morning after pill delays ovulation, so there’s never a fertilized egg. There’s never pregnancy. But if you look at the way information gets out throughout our country, there’s widespread confusion. Around whether or not emergency, whether emergency contraception is the same thing as abortion medication and what’s legal in different states. It’s especially high in red states. I mean, the numbers are staggering in terms of women who do not know the difference and don’t know what’s illegal in their states. And I think that’s in part purposeful. So I do think that this, there’s a very thoughtful attack going on to decrease the accessibility of contraception, which, as you know, is one of the, it’s a huge factor in gender equality. You know, women will never achieve equality without contraceptions, without reproductive health. Those are key pieces to gender equality.”

 

Melissa Murray Claudia Goldin won a Nobel Prize based on that insight alone.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen Exactly. One of the things that was interesting to me when I was thinking about starting this project, it’s both a for-profit and a non-for-profit, where we distribute kits to those who are underserved. A friend of mine, whose company owns Plan B, which is the dominant brand of the morning after pill, asked me, what do you think the most often purchased item is, along with the morning-after pill, when somebody goes to a pharmacy? I guessed condoms, and I was wrong. It’s a bottle of water. Because women are taking it in the parking lot, because there’s a time limit within which to take that pill. It’s much more effective the sooner you take it after unprotected sex. And unprotect sex obviously can be a failure to use contraception, the contraceptions broke, or you’re a victim of rape and incest. One statistic that I think is horrifying is after Dobbs, there were 65,000 pregnancies brought to term due to rape and incest. 26,000 of those were in Texas alone. If those women who’d been victims of rape and incest had had a clutch kit or the morning after pill in their room, they would not have had to go through nine more months and additional months of trauma-related experience.

 

Melissa Murray We’ve been talking a lot about Texas on this podcast because of the redistricting effort. Do you not think those two things are disconnected? Part of the effort to redistrict is not just to give Donald Trump an expanded majority in the House. It’s also to keep the Texas legislature from passing policies that women in that state would want.

 

Leah Litman I took that as part of Alexis’s reference to being structured out of power, right? And why there is this gap between the power of storytelling and the political results that you can and should expect would follow from it. But Lisa, I’m glad you talked about contraception within the broader scheme of women’s equality and gender equality, because I think something else we wanted to talk about is just, in the last year, we have seen the Trump administration escalate. Its anti-women agenda, which is really like a violent anti-woman agenda. They dropped the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act case against Idaho. That is, we’re no longer pushing the position that hospitals had to be able to provide stabilizing care to patients whose health and safety and possibly life required it. You know, they. Formally rescinded the guidance that had said, EMTALA requires hospitals everywhere to be able to do that. The big, beautiful bill attempted to defund Planned Parenthood. The Supreme Court allowed states to do so in Planned Planned versus Medina. And perhaps in part because of the various Trump administration policies attacking women’s health care and the social safety net, we learned that according to The Washington Post, like more than 200,000 women over 20. Have stopped working or applying for jobs since January, with particularly pronounced drops for Black women and women between the ages of 25 to 34, leading economists to express concern that this is going to be a longer term setback for women. So maybe this is just like another version of the question I feel like I keep coming back to. But how do we get the country to see women as people and to care about. This broader effort, which is to turn back the sexual revolution, feminism, the idea that women get to do things that men do too.

 

Alexis McGill Johnson I mean, it’s like coming on all sides, right? I feel like the Bobbin and Weavin over here is like, here comes the court. Now, you know, it was like, I feel like Neo in The Matrix sometimes. Look, I think it’s a great question around, you know, like they are so actively codifying inequality. And the way they are doing that, like I think about it, like, the way that they are able to do that is there is a fundamental old. Lack of value of our humanity that undergirds this because you don’t take away rights from your peers. And so the way in which a minority, a vocal minority of lawmakers in all of these states are able to do this is just through gerrymandering, it’s through taking over the judiciary, it is the system that they have built. And I would say contraception is incredibly popular, abortion is also popular, right? Like, we should be looking at this not. Completely as if it’s not cut through, right? People, you know, there are a lot of people who fully understand what has happened and they just feel powerless to do anything about it. There’s no state where banning abortion is popular. There’s not state where banning contraception is popular, there’s no State where criminalizing providers or patients is popular and so their ability to do this without kind of any accountability from their constituents is simply because the constituents don’t have the levers of accountability. They are hoping for. I think this Medicaid defund will be the first opportunity for us to kind of you know claw back a little bit more structural power in Congress next year because I think there are so many people actually didn’t even understand how much they were relying on access to Medicaid or that what they were getting was being paid for through the Medicaid insurance program. They thought it was like AppleCare or BadgerCare you know in Wisconsin And, in fact… It turns out that the same dollars that were being used to support their families, right, because this is, again, doesn’t stop abortion or contraception, but like hospice care for their mother-in-law or mental health for their children, the kind of full spectrum of how we and many caregivers as women rely on these resources are being stripped away and impacting families, I think is a vulnerability that we can exploit in this moment and should. To help people both understand the role of government, social safety net, and also what it means to advocate and really build power. We’ve settled into like a state by state fight, which is critically important. I think it has been the many iterations of democratic policies, strategies of focusing just on the federal level and just on the Senate and just the judiciary has not served us for building like a powerful popular movement to stop. And so we are somewhat kind of working backwards, whether that’s through the ballot initiatives that have helped us bring together coalitions of progressives and independents and majority constituencies in states where we have direct democracy to allow us to kind of demonstrate that this is not a popular agenda. And there are places like Texas where we will not be able to do that because they have continued to lock themselves into power. But I do think that it takes these these local and state fights to connect them together to actually really stop this. And it’s gonna take time, right? Like this is not happening overnight. We’ve been laying out a plan in 2040 to think about where we need to be and what that needs to look like. And we have to be really disciplined and thoughtful about how we hold the coalitions together to get there.

 

Melissa Murray Can I go back to piling on Texas? Can we do that some more? Yes. It’s not just that we’re seeing this violently anti-woman agenda. We’re actually seeing what I might term anti-women entrepreneurship in that there are all of these efforts to push the envelope even further on what you might do to women. So for example, a Texas judge recently fined a New York doctor $100,000 for prescribing abortion pills to a Texas resident. A Texas man is suing a doctor in California for providing his girlfriend with anti-abortion drugs. And that Texas man, is not only seeking damages, but also an injunction for, wait for it, all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States. Judge Matthew Kaczmarek’s gonna have a field day with that standing issue, like absolutely bonkers. All of this is going on.

 

Leah Litman Right and like that phrasing also gestures to we are also continuing to see the rise of fetal personhood. You know the idea that fetuses are rights bearing individuals entitled to rights under the constitution in ways that might require abortion or other health care services to be restricted on a nationwide basis. You knew there were allusions to fetal personhood in the most recent Republican Party platform which discussed the issue of abortion and deception under the guise of. Life. There was a Second Circuit decision laying the groundwork for challenging New York’s reproductive freedom protections. We have also seen leadership at the Office of Legal Council within the Department of Justice signaling some interest in fetal personhood, remarking about the prospect of certifying a nationwide class of unborn children in the context of the Birthright Citizenship Executive Order as fascinating, a non-too a subtle nod to fetal personhood. You know, we have also seen. You know, talking about like building out Dobbs and its consequences. There is now a request to overrule Obergefell versus Hodges at the Supreme Court via the infamous Kim Davis. You know, I don’t think we have any doubts that they are coming for and attacking LGBT rights. I do want to assure our listeners I don’t think this is the case in which they are going to do it for any number of. Reasons, right, it doesn’t cleanly present the issue. She raised the First Amendment defense, there’s sovereign immunity in there, right. Even Justices Thomas and Alito previously said this case did not present the vehicle to overrule Obergefell. But anyways, like that is just to give you-.

 

Melissa Murray They’re like, try harder. They’re like, try harder. Find a different case. Not this case, but a different one.

 

Leah Litman Exactly. So anyways, wanted to kind of note that. Lisa, I guess we have talked about Clutch Kit, but in an effort to try and end this episode on a hopeful note, I would love to hear more about the origin story of Clutch kit, because I feel like we are going to end by encouraging people to be. Pro-women entrepreneurs, pro-gender equality entrepreneurs and think about ways they can help out. And so if you wouldn’t mind kicking off that discussion with the origin story of Clutch Kit, that would be great.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen Sure, it is really sort of a fun origin story. If you all remember, it happened on the night of Trump’s first inauguration. If you remember, there was not a huge crowd, but the next day at the Women’s Rights March, there was an enormous crowd, couldn’t even move for those of us who were marching. And I had brought my four kids down to Washington, D.C. To march. And the night before the march had a little dinner where I’d invited Justice Ginsburg, my former boss and Gloria Steinem to dinner, the two 80-year-old matriarchs of the women’s rights movement. And Gloria Steinim often brings a few additional folks, some people who are speaking at the women rights march the next day. And one of them was the actor that plays Hermione Granger in Harry Potter. Emma Watson. Emma Watson, we were sitting next to each other and she said, right, what if we just take this whole issue away from the politicians and give every woman out there a kit when she goes off to school, give every women a kit with all the tools that she may need, whether it’s period products or UTI or STI or you know, sexual health and wellness tools, whether it’s abortion medication or contraception. So the kit was huge by the end of the night. We were having so much fun thinking about what every woman might need in her lifetime. And then fast forward, when the Dobbs decision came down, I was walking with a friend talking about the decision. And she said, what are we going to do? And I said, you know, I’ve always had this idea. It was Hermione’s idea but I think I wanna do it and just narrowly focus it on the prevention of unintended or unwanted pregnancies. And she said, we have to do it. And that weekend, we pulled together a team who brought different strengths to the project and kicked it off. And it’s been really, really exciting. We sold out in the first tranche and now we’re working on partnering with organizations around the country. To help distribute the kits to those who need them. And look, it’s not the full answer. Alexis Miguel Johnson and Planned Parenthood provide the huge wealth of services to women’s health. It’s a small piece of that, but we’re really excited about being able to do something just when people are feeling angry and upset about jobs. You know, people have been able to, our new effort is to try to get these kits on campuses and people are helping us do that by making donations to their alma maters in the form of clutch kits. Like if they’re making a donation to Dartmouth, for example, they might make a donation of clutch kids to Dartmouth. So we’re getting them onto college campuses and into campus bookstores as this fall’s effort that back to school rolls around.

 

Melissa Murray Listeners, if you’d like to know more about the Clutch Kit, you can go to theclutchkit.com. Kits are available for purchase. And as Lisa just said, you can make a tax deductible donation to provide Clutch Kits to underserved communities or your favorite college community, wahoo-wah. All of that can be found there. Alexis will give you the last word. You have been in this fight for a long time. And the fight gets grimmer and grimmer. But weirdly, you get more optimistic and more dogged in your insistence that we will prevail. So what is giving you hope right now, and what are you doing to stay hopeful?

 

Alexis McGill Johnson Thank you for that. I do. I believe that is the job of a movement leader to beat everybody with a hope stick.

 

Melissa Murray You are on some hopium, girl, and I love it for you.

 

Alexis McGill Johnson I am some hopi. Yes. Yes, I am. And just even listening to Lisa talk about the clutch kit, I mean, you know, I want to live in a world where we are all carrying around medication, abortion in our bags with hot sauce, you know because that’s actually… You know, that’s actually also part of change, right? Just to go back to Leah’s first questions, like how do we do this when we’re out of structured, out of power? You know one way is the kind of traditional strategy, you know that serves us in a working democracy, a functioning democracy where you build power, you elect people, you change policy, you advocate, and you know, you continue to hold people accountable. The other is you change behavior and you change culture. And that if the behavior change is that everybody’s going back to school with a clutch kit or community with a clutch kit or come see Auntie Alexis because she’s got medication abortion for you and you can call her, that is also a way of helping demonstrate why these policies are harmful and rendering them meaningless. You know, the decriminalization strategy that we’ve seen around marijuana, right? For example, I think has been really powerful to kind of give people. An understanding of how behavior and culture also shifts policy, even when there are federal policies that still criminalize. So I think we have to be thinking a lot more boldly, a lot more clearly, and speaking directly to the people who have been harmed, who understand And you know that it’s going to be a long road to actually get. Back to the galley of many states, but there are gonna be places where people are going to be making different choices, and how do we support them? How do we fight for the 18 states in DC who have shield laws protecting providers who are writing prescriptions for medication abortion? What does that mean, the implication for how we see the work? How do continue to? Blanket the United States with Clutch Kits and, you know, access to contraception and emergency contraceptions so that people can get the care that they need. Like to me, those are the places where we should be putting some thought leadership into while we are also doing the work that we need to do to fight on the policy side. So I would say my hope is just coming from the brilliance of the entrepreneurship in the space. It is movement entrepreneurship. It is… Leadership that is showing up because they are not going to accept the fact that our future state is dependent upon us flying people across the country to get worse, like that makes no damn sense to anybody. And so I think, you know, we got to be in it for the long haul. And, and I think that is also part of it. And I love that you all are committed to doing this every year, because they had a long term plan to get to project 2025. That didn’t happen overnight. And if we don’t have the same kind of North Star, South Star, depending on your where you’re situated in the world, you know, then we’re not actually going to have a focused goal to build and organize power and community around. And so I just believe, because I know the next gen is not having it.

 

Leah Litman Lisa and Alexis, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise, the work you are doing, and reasons to be hopeful. We really appreciate it.

 

Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen Thank you both so much, we love Strict Scrutiny.

 

Leah Litman And listeners, stay tuned for our next segment, which is a conversation with the authors, David Cohen and Carole Joffe, about their new book, After Dobbs.

 

Melissa Murray [AD]

 

Leah Litman For this part of the episode, I’m delighted to be joined by David Cohen and Carole Joffe, who are here to talk about their recently published book, After Dobbs, How the Supreme Court Ended Roe, But Not Abortion. David is a professor of law at Drexel Klein School of Law, and Carole is a Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Welcome to the show, David and Carole.

 

Thanks.

 

Carole Joffe Thank you.

 

Leah Litman So David, I guess I will start with you. You describe the book’s goal as unearthing the real story of what happened after Dobbs. And you begin the introduction with the observation that by any account, quote, with the data we have so far, Dobbs has not had the devastating impact on overall national abortion numbers that many predicted, end quote. In fact, you report that in some places, abortions have increased. What does your book capture about the post-Obs abortion rights movement that other media accounts have been missing?

 

David Cohen What I think we’ve captured is that on the ground, what’s happened from abortion providers, supporters, and advocates is that they have found ways in a lot of places of the country that we didn’t expect, but they found ways to still provide care. Whether that’s through moving clinics across state lines, building these robust transportation networks, or new delivery models for pills, abortion providers have come through in astounding ways post-Obs.

 

Leah Litman Carole, do you want to add anything?

 

Carole Joffe Yes, I would just add that Dobbs’ decision was no surprise. Providers knew it was coming and they prepared a long time in advance. And that’s what we wanted to capture, how they were preparing. We did not expect to see the numbers rise.

 

Leah Litman So I guess I have two follow-up questions to that. And Carole, maybe I will put the first to you, which is, one, is there a risk of overstating the good news? How might you respond to anti-abortion Republicans who seize on the book’s assertions to argue that Dobbs wasn’t that bad or no big deal?

 

Carole Joffe I mean, that’s a very reasonable question. I think we take pains in the book to say, yes, it is surprising. People who we did not think would get abortions did. However, many, many people have been left out. We’ve all read about the horrific treatment in hospitals. ProPublica has told us about some deaths. I believe there actually have been more that have not been reparted as such. So it is a surprising development, but in no way would David or I claim that, you know, everything’s cool.

 

David Cohen The realities is that people have started traveling so much more, and as much as that still gets people care, that’s really disruptive to people’s lives. It takes a lot to travel across states, many states, to get an abortion, right? It takes time and money, time off work, you need people to care for your kids, you have to deal with immigration checkpoints. So for a lot of people, yes, they are getting abortions, but it’s very disruptive. And let alone… The people for whom they’re not able to get abortions. We know maternal mortality is up, infant mortality is right, is up. Sepsis rates are up. So this is not a good state of affairs. It’s just abortion providers have made it much better than we ever thought it would be given the devastation of Dobbs.

 

Leah Litman So that actually tees up to what was going to be my second follow-up question, David. So I guess I will put this one to you, which is, how much of this story is a story of the incredible commitment and investment and additional costs that abortion providers and health care providers have had to endure to overcome the increasingly hostile landscape for reproductive freedom? And how much of this situation that you describe of continued but unstable or additionally costly access to abortion is a story about medication abortion or a precarious situation that might not hold for.

 

David Cohen I mean, it’s all of the above that, you know, everything that just described is the reality, right? Abortion providers have been doing this long before Dobbs, right? We know before Dobbs under Roe, abortion was legal everywhere, but inaccessible in a lot of ways for a lot of people because of all the regulations and laws. So abortion providers still had to make it work in that environment. So they’ve been used to doing this. And now they’re just making it work and a very different environment. But they’re making at work in a lot of places. Abortion medication is a big part of the story, but it’s not the only part of this story. Yes, pills are cheaper and more available than before, but it is also about setting up travel networks. But this all takes time, and it takes money. And so yes, that’s the part that, you know, can it continue this way forever into the future? It’s hard to imagine it so unless there’s just a continued outpouring of support and money.

 

Carole Joffe And besides the providers themselves, and by providers in our book, we’re talking not just about clinicians, we’re taking about support staff, medical assistants, people who answered the phones, who by the way, right after Dobbs were getting hundreds of phone calls that could not possibly be answered. But besides the provide in the clinics, the people working in the abortion funds, especially what has a sort of a new occupation, patient navigator, they have worked like crazy. I mean, just an incredibly, incredibly effective. In our book, we tell the story, actually, a doctor in the Midwest told us the story. Patient was scheduled to come. It’s the Midwest, it’s winter, there’s a snowstorm. Within hours, the patient was rescheduled in a clinic in Las Vegas, had a flight, had a hotel. I mean, just unbelievable stuff that is, as David said, is both extremely costly and exhausting.

 

Leah Litman Kind of getting at the, can this situation hold or how long will it hold for? You finished this book before the election in November, 2024. So I would be curious about your thoughts about whether Trump’s reelection has affected how you think about the stories in the book or their implications for what comes next or what message we should take away from the book. Maybe Carole, we can start with you. Well, we we actually

 

Carole Joffe asked our press to give us two blank pages, because we knew we couldn’t finish the book without a postscript on the election. So we touch on it. And obviously it was very disappointing to everybody in the pro-choice world, including us. Thus far, the Trump administration has not done the worst things, and I’ll leave it and David.

 

Leah Litman I feel like this is oftentimes something we are saying in this podcast about the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court might not have done the worst thing, and yet it’s still quite bad and you should still be paying attention and be concerned. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

 

Carole Joffe But even bracketing the, quote, disaster scenarios, I mean, certainly some very sobering things have happened. To me, as someone who has studied abortion provision forever, one of the most worrisome things is Trump’s announcement that he will not, and his administration, his Department of Justice will not enforce the FACE Act. The FACE, the freedom of access to clinic entrances. This is what has protected providers from the worst kind of violence since 1994, I believe. And the announcement that that won’t be observed, coupled with Trump’s immediately upon taking the presidency, releasing some quite violent and aggressive protesters, anti-abortion protesters who were in jail was another signal that it is open season. On abortion providers. So the worst hasn’t happened.

 

Leah Litman On that point, you know, that like, releasing people who had been violent anti-abortion protesters, one thing we talked about actually on our episode about another book, The End of Roe, was the interplay and the overlap between anti-abbortion protesters and January 6th insurrectionists, and that many of the individuals who had been involved in the January 6 insurrection had actually been. Quite regulars outside of abortion clinics as well.

 

David Cohen Yes. And I think, you know, he thought they were all in the same mix. He called it the weaponization of the judiciary. Right. This was all in same thing to Donald Trump, like the January 6 prisoners and the face prisoners all about weaponizing the judiciary against the conservative movement. So he released them. Right? It’s super concerning. The other two things that we are on high alert for is the Department of Justice implementing the Comstock Act in a way that it hasn’t been implemented in over a century. To go after abortion providers in all sorts, you know, whether they’re mailing pills or instruments or equipment. And then also the FDA rolling back access to Mifepristone, whether it’s taking away the allowance for mailing Mifepristone or taking away its approval altogether. Those two things haven’t happened yet. Providers are fully aware that it might. Um, but they are pursuing, they’re going forward anyway, but they certainly know it could happen. You know, the one thing I do take a little heart in is the fact that he has done all sorts of crazy, lawless, unpopular things for the first, you know, half year of his presidency, but he hasn’t done these things yet. Um, so is he going to do that very soon in the next few months? Never. I certainly don’t know, but people are on alert for that.

 

Leah Litman So speaking of next actions, David, in part because of your previous work, I wanted to ask you about how certain statements or predictions the Supreme Court made in Dobbs have held up. In particular, the promise or Brett Kavanaugh’s deepest hope that overruling Roe would get the courts out of abortion cases. How do you think that one has held up after Dobbs?

 

David Cohen Yeah, as a lot with Coach Kavanaugh. He does not know much what he’s talking about. You know, he just threw that into his concurrence to placate the dissenters, I guess, and those of us who are raising alarms about what might happen. Certainly the courts are not out of the abortion business. They are in it more than ever. I mean, we’ve got state courts that are involved in so much. We’ve got federal disputes over federal law and state law. We’ve all sorts of issues around the FDA. And then we’ve got issues around Texas and Louisiana going after an abortion provider in New York. Look, this is not over, and it’s partly not over because neither side is going to accept this situation right now, right? The anti-abortion side is furious that abortion numbers have gone up, that pills are everywhere. The abortion rights and justice movement is furious that people are stuck in states that don’t have legal abortion. And so, yes, this, this not over.

 

Leah Litman And Carole, could I ask you to talk about one particular implication or effect of Dobbs, which has been, to my mind, the increased criminalization of pregnancy care and miscarriage management? We have seen, for example, some threats to prosecute women for experiencing miscarriages. So is that another aspect of ways in which the law or courts are still inevitably going to be involved in this space post-obs?

 

Carole Joffe Absolutely. I mean, we know there’s been hundreds of arrests of pregnant people, you know, in the recent past. You know, we, I think the media has, the mainstream media, I think has actually done a good job of telling the American people of what it means to be pregnant after Dobbs, I mean, recently West Virginia. I mean, there’s talk that if you have a miscarriage, you have to call up and tell somebody so they won’t prosecute you. At UCSF, where I’m a professor, we recently did a project called Care After Roe. And we asked doctors and nurses, both in quote, red states and blue states, tell us how things have changed. And it was chilling. Somebody, a nurse practitioner in Colorado, told me of a woman who flew from Texas. She told the practitioner, I had a miscarriage. I’m not sure it’s actually finished. I’m just confused. I don’t dare go to my local OBGYN. So this person got on a plane, flew to Colorado. They did the ultrasound. Yeah, you’re fine. So, I mean, this is insane, you know, what should have been done, should be done at your local hospital or your local doctor’s office. Now you fly. I mean it’s, it’s not even for an abortion, just to make sure. And you know and I think this story is one of just thousands happening all over this country where now anybody who’s pregnant is potentially a suspect, potentially capable of committing a criminal act in the eyes of a state.

 

Leah Litman So some of what Carole is describing, David, is to my mind, part of what the book documents is this chaos and confusion, which is so pervasive in the post ops legal terrain. You know, patients are unsure whether they can travel, whether they should travel. Providers are unsure if they will be prosecuted and under what circumstances. And the laws are changing and in flux. There has also been a horrifying increase in anti-abortion. Extremism, you describe that as one of the most prominent effects of the Dobbs decision. So how do you think the legal instability and lawlessness, is that part of the broader strategy of anti-abortion advocates? And whether it is or is not, what steps can we take to keep providers and patients safe?

 

David Cohen Um, so I think the most important step, because I do think it’s part of their strategy, right? The chaos is the point, right. I think most important is reminding people everywhere that abortion is legal in, um, all the states where it remains legal, right, 38 states where remains legal at some point in gestation. Um, and then in the other 12 states, people can get care, whether it’s through Traveler pills by mail, right? People need to know that because there are too many people, like the abortion providers we talk to that form the basis of this book, people will call up and say, is abortion legal where I live? Are you doing something illegal? And they’re not doing something illegal to the providers. They are providing legal care. And so people need to know so that they aren’t confused. But one of the things that I think is so great is that providers, you know, they shouldn’t have to, but they have become experts in following the law and adjusting almost on moments notice, right? Because they have to know if an injunction is in place or not in place, what they can and can’t do, and then adjust accordingly. And providers around the country have been doing that to provide the most care they can at moments noticed.

 

Carole Joffe In terms of, David said providers have to be up on the law. I mean, in our book, we describe a bizarre situation where literally it’s not changing only by days, but by hours. Planned Parenthood of Utah in the morning could not provide abortions by the afternoon. The people who stuck around and waited in the clinic at three o’clock, they could. I mean, it’s crazy in this case, it had a- quote, positive ending for those who stayed. But that’s what it means to provide abortion in the post-Dobbs era. You keep looking at your watch and waiting for a call from your lawyer.

 

Leah Litman So I think both of what you’re saying was going to tee up my next question, which is, I’m curious to get both of your perspectives on what you observed about how abortion providers understand and talk about the law and how they are engaging with the law in the post-Dobbs world. So Carole, maybe we can start with you on that question.

 

Carole Joffe I mean, you cannot provide abortion in this country even before Dobbs, without being very attuned to what the law is. The lawyers are also a hero of our story, I believe. The lawyers from ACLU, from the Center for Reproductive Lives, from local lawyers who work with them. I mean these are people who tell them what they can do and what they cannot do. End. I think there’s cynicism about the law. There’s certainly cynicism about state legislatures who passed these laws knowing nothing about the medicine involved, but thank God for their lawyers.

 

David Cohen Yeah, I mean, one of the things that’s really poignant is that one of doctors that we interviewed in Alabama said that her life’s training, suddenly she’s a felon, right? Not because what she’s doing is any different or her training has fallen by the wayside and now she’s not providing safe care, right. She’s providing exactly the care she was trained for years for and suddenly overnight she’s felon. And so that’s their relationship with the law, knowing that the things they do are contingent upon the state legislature, state courts, the Supreme Court, most of whom have zero medical training, suddenly deciding, no longer, sorry, you can’t do it.

 

Leah Litman So the later chapters of the book raised this question that in some ways was kind of on my mind in the lead up to Dobbs. So I’ll say the question and then kind of explain how I related to this and how this almost gave me PTSD about the lead-up to Dobb. So the subsequent chapters asked the question about whether the Rage donations that have funded almost all of the post-Dobbs work will continue into the future. And the reason why this. Raised my alarm bells is because in the lead up to Dobbs I felt like I was hearing a lot from men on the left about how overruling Roe was going to be this gift to the Democratic party and allow them to win elections for eternity because people were going to be so outraged. And I never felt that way, you know, in part because I have a more dour outlook on how this country values women. Um, but I want to hear more about whether you think the reproductive rights movement can sustain the momentum for funding and whether there is any kind of long-term strategy that could enable it to do so. Um, David, I don’t know if you want to take this one first.

 

David Cohen Yeah, this is the real tricky point looking into the future, right, because there was a huge influx of donations and time, right? Both of those together, volunteer time and donations. The year, year and a half after Dobbs, but then we got hit with the election last year, right? And so donations dropped off. Abortion funds reported lower amounts, practical support groups. And so There was less money flowing into all the systems that we put in our book that talk about why people are still able to get care. Now, the good news is that the abortion numbers that were released in the middle of this year in 2025 reflect that abortion numbers continue to go up in 2024, even with a drop-off in funds. So I don’t know if there’s some lag there, but I think it’s something we’re going to monitor because without the money, without the time, All the things we document in the book are precarious because they take an over, you know, it’s already costly to run an abortion clinic. It’s already costly to have the legal defense systems in place that are needed. And now to do that with 12 states banning abortion and the need for travel, it costs a lot more. So we need that support and that requires everyone contributing. Carole?

 

Carole Joffe Well, I would just say that Dobbs did not do for the presidential election, which some people fantasized. On the other hand, it did win some elections in red states. I mean, one of the, I think one of the more confusing, frustrating things to, you know, pro-choice partisans is people in a state, let’s say like Missouri, would vote. For abortion to be legal and available and also vote for a senator and a congressperson who wanted to ban abortion. So there is an impact on elections. Most of the abortion measures did pass. It did not obviously achieve what people hoped it would achieve.

 

Leah Litman So the question I wanted to end with is, what’s the one thing you hope people take away from your book as these next chapters unfold? And related to that, is there any way our listeners can support the work that clinics providers are doing and that patients need? Carole, do you wanna?

 

Carole Joffe Well, this will sound lame, give money, vote at every level of the ballot, not just the presidential, vote for your local city council person. They will decide whether a clinic can be, you know, established in a certain downtown zone. And if you’re able, do clinic escorting and help. There’s a lot of help that’s needed.

 

David Cohen Yeah, I think on top of that, I mean I think the one thing that I like to say people should take away from this book is that, yes, the Supreme Court matters, but it’s not the end all be all of anything. There are people on the ground who are resisting this conservative Supreme Court with their daily actions. They may not be out there making the news because they’re providing health care, right? They’re too busy just dealing with the patients who are coming in and saying, as one person said to us, fuck the Supreme court. We’re doing it anyway. Right, we’re just gonna keep providing care. Patients are going to get care and we’re going to provide it. It’s a resistance movement on the ground to this conservative Supreme Court. And I think it’s important for people to always be thinking about how to resist this Supreme Court on the grounds. And Carole gave us a bunch of ways and I think thinking locally in this regard, your local fund, your local practical support group, your local clinics, they need your support.

 

Leah Litman Well, that is unfortunately all we have time for today, but wanted to thank Jordan Thomas for their help in preparing this episode and David Cohen and Carole Joffe for joining to talk about their recently published book, which again is After Dobbs, How the Supreme Court Ended Roe But Not Abortion. Thanks, David and Carole, both for the book and for joining us to talk about it.

 

David Cohen Thank you so much.

 

Carole Joffe Thank you very much for having us.

 

Leah Litman And finally, let’s end with our favorite thing. So on the topic of Dobbs-related material, I just want to give another plug for pre-ordering Erin Carmon’s book, Unbearable, Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America. Obviously, my list of favorite things includes Taylor Swift’s track list for… TS12 and the cover art for The Life of a Showgirl. I just cannot wait. Also wanted to plug Ben Platt’s cover of Addison Rae’s song Diet Pepsi. I live. Melissa made an appearance on Nicole Wallace’s podcast, The Best People, which is delightful. This is a belated hello and shout out, but meeting stricties in the airports. So hello, Kyoko, who I met in the Detroit airport when we were about to take our summer vacation. Wanted to highlight my colleague Ellen Katz’s paper, short paper entitled Redistricting Texas Now Is Illegal and the US Department of Justice is the reason why. And then finally, this is an odd one, but Laura Loomer’s deposition in a case against Bill Maher. This is long. Worth it if you need to go down a very distracting rabbit hole. I know we’re going long, but I really want to give you a flavor. So can you humor me and we can reenact just like a few exchanges?

 

Kate Shaw I really we we really should have Melissa for this. I know I will do my best. Let’s go.

 

Leah Litman Okay. Do you want to be counsel or do you wanna be Loomer?

 

Kate Shaw In the last, I don’t want to be anything in the army’s exchange. I don’t ever want to think about it. How about I’ll be loomer and you be counsel in the first.

 

Leah Litman Okay, okay. Now, be the First Amendment warrior you claim to be and admit that you were saying that the Vice President of the United States

 

Kate Shaw This is coercion.

 

Leah Litman Coward.

 

Kate Shaw Not a coward.

 

Leah Litman Coward.

 

Kate Shaw Not a coward.

 

Leah Litman This is, of course, very atypical of her depositions.

 

Kate Shaw Okay.

 

Leah Litman Are you still loomer?

 

Kate Shaw I’ll be loomer in the next one, too. Sure. Okay. I have not had many boyfriends. You know, I care more about my work than I do about having a romantic partner, and I waited to find somebody who would accept the fact that I want to be very successful.

 

Leah Litman Just for the record, my only question was, did you give that interview? And finally the big one.

 

Kate Shaw I’ll be counsel,you be Loomer, is that okay?

 

Leah Litman Okay.

 

Kate Shaw Exhibit 30 is your response to her. Can you read that out loud to me?

 

Leah Litman Hey Marjorie, remember when you destroyed your family so you could have sex with the Zangief cosplayer? Tell me again how you and the Arby’s in your pants.

 

Kate Shaw Can you explain to me what it means to say to her that the Arby’s in her pants?

 

Leah Litman Well, RB’s objection, that’s her lawyer.

 

Kate Shaw Answer the question.

 

Leah Litman Arby’s sells roast beef.

 

Kate Shaw Right, and can you tell me what, why you were talking about the Arby’s in her pants?

 

Leah Litman Well, it’s just an expression. I’m saying she literally, it so ridiculous. I’m thinking she literally put Arby’s in her pants.

 

Kate Shaw You’re literally saying she put an Arby’s sandwich in her pants, is that right?

 

Leah Litman Right. That’s correct.

 

Kate Shaw Why are you laughing?

 

Leah Litman Because I just think it’s so funny.

 

Kate Shaw What is your basis for saying she put Arby’s in her pants?

 

Leah Litman Again, scene, would recommend, our listeners check out the transcript.

 

Kate Shaw I think she, I think we cut it off. I think she, she doubles down. Oh, yes. I was literally saying sandwich in the pan. Anyway, do read the whole thing for yourself. Okay. I love that that brought you joy this week, Leah. I just have a few to add. I was on vacation last week. I read Gary Steingart’s new novel, Vera or Faith, which is really good and has a constitutional amendment plotline that is fascinating that I’m not going to like spoil right now, but it’s like actually for the lawyers in the crowd. Really, really smart and, you know, sort of dystopic. I have previously talked about having late in life discovered Octavia Butler, or actually read Octavia Butler, I sort of knew about her before, but I read Parable of the Sower last summer, and I just read the sequel, Parable of the Talents, which is also dystopia and terrifyingly prescient. I read on your and Melissa’s recommendation, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, which was fantastic. Listen to season two of The Retrievals, which I highly recommend about pain during cesarean sections. And then an academic article. That is up on SSRN now. Josh Chaffetz is the Chadha presidency about an incredibly damaging Supreme Court case that is responsible for a lot of our current predicament, which is INS versus Chadha. And finally, David Daley had a great opinion piece in the New York Times about how we should all be blaming one person in the main for the gerrymandering insanity that we are now in, and that person is John G. Roberts. All right, a little housekeeping before we go.

 

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Leah Litman Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked Media production hosted and executive produced by me, Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shaw, produced and edited by Melody Rowell. Michael Goldsmith is our associate producer. We get audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landes. Our music is by Eddie Cooper. Production support comes from Madeleine Herringer, Katie Long, and Ari Schwartz. Matt DeGroot is our head of production, and thanks to our digital team, Ben Hethcote and Joe Matosky. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny on YouTube to catch full episodes. You can find us at youtube.com slash at Strict Scrutiny podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Strict Scrutiny in your favorite podcast apps. You never miss an episode. And if you want to help other people find the show, please rate and review us. It really helps.

 

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