Lee Philip Rudofsky testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination for US district judge for the Eastern District of Arkansas along with other judicial nominees on Wednesday July 31, 2019.(Caroline Brehman / CQ Roll Call)
On September 12, Politico noted that Trump’s appointed judges were “on a tear” and listed “a flurry of controversial decisions by Trump judges in recent months that have been criticized as out of step with longstanding legal principles.” These decisions touched on everything from abortion, to Trump’s handling of classified documents to voting rights. Politico’s reporting was backed up by a strong analysis of the problem of Trump’s judges by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.
The courts are now a bastion of reactionary activism. The are pushing to not just roll back settled rights but also hamstring the administrative state. To take up this topic, I talked to Linda Hirshman, a former law professor and author of many books on the struggle for civil rights by women, African Americans, and LGBTQ people. Her most recent book is The Color of Abolition. As always, Linda brings an incisive mind to the issues at hand.
Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.