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Leah, Melissa, and Kate dive into the raging legal battles over redistricting ahead of next year’s midterms, Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s massive oopsies in her prosecution of James Comey, developments with L’Affaire Epstein, and other assorted legal quagmires and outrages from the Trump administration. Then, Kate chats with University of Minnesota Law Professor Jill Hasday about her book We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality. Check out Leah’s review of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book, Listening to the Law, for the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

 

Favorite things:

 

• Kate: Lux, Rosalía; The Unraveling of the Justice Department, Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser (NYT); Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy; The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, Jonathan Mahler
• Leah: Mature, Hilary Duff; The Pop-Tarts Bowl; Cupcakin’ Bake Shop in Berkeley
• Melissa: Judith Browne Dianis & Alexei Navalny win the inaugural Kettering Democracy Prize; Meghan’s Moment, Kaitlyn Greenidge (Harper’s Bazaar); Meet the Veteran Who Chases ICE on a Scooter, Isabela Dias (Mother Jones)

 

Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2026! 

• 3/6/26 – San Francisco
• 3/7/26 – Los Angeles

Learn more: http://crooked.com/events

Buy Leah’s book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes

Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky

 

TRANSCRIPT

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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.

 

Kate Shaw Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We are your hosts for this first segment today. I’m Kate Shaw.

 

Leah Litman And I’m Leah Litman.

 

Melissa Murray And I am Melissa Murray. And per our last episode, or really just per usual these days, we are going to spend the first part of this episode talking about some legal news, including new developments in the redistricting fight. We’ll also give you an update on reproductive rights and wrongs, as well as the latest on the Comey James prosecutions, and of course, Lefair Epstein. And some worms, there will be worms. I just said we would cover developments in LeFaire Epstein, like, you did not have to get…

 

Leah Litman There are actually many worms to cover among the worm coverage. The main winner, though, is going to be George Soros. Always. If none of this makes sense to you, congratulations. You are less online than Fifth Circuit judges. And don’t worry, we consume the content for you and are about to report back. Once we get through all of that news, we will feature a conversation that Kate had with Professor Jill Hasday about Hasday’s recently published book, We the Men. Actually both parts of today’s episode are kind of about

 

Kate Shaw We the men just very different

 

Leah Litman That’s the theme. On point.

 

Melissa Murray It seems like the whole last year has been about we, the men. In any event, we will end the episode, per usual, with our favorite thing.

 

Kate Shaw Okay, let’s dive right in. First up, the news and first item of news are developments out of DC. Last Thursday, Judge “Jeb” Boasberg issued a ruling in a criminal case allowing federal prosecutors in DC to commence a prosecution based on an indictment issued by a local DC grand jury rather than a federal grand jury. Although the ruling applied specifically to that criminal case, it might have implications for other prosecutions in the District of Columbia, which, as we’ve discussed, stands in an unusual posture with respect to Congress and federal law.

 

Melissa Murray As Judge Boasberg noted in the ruling, DC’s unique law gestured toward an exception to the federal grand jury rule. And that exception would essentially allow indictments from both federal and local DC grand juries. Now, this is meaningful because it would allow federal prosecutors in DC to circumvent federal grand jurees in favor of local grand jures whenever they may want to do so. And that might actually be a very concerning development given that federal grand juries. Have proven more skeptical of this administration and its prosecutorial efforts in.

 

Leah Litman The District of Columbia. Judge Boasberg conceded that such a possibility was, quote, troubling, but maintained that it was for Congress rather than the courts to change the laws that apply to prosecutions in the federal district. That’s not all the Judge Boasberg news we have. As you likely know, months after Judge Boasberg’s plan to begin contempt proceedings against the administration in the Alien Enemies Act case was appealed to the D.C. Circuit. The circuit returned the issue to Judge Boasberg, who held a hearing last Wednesday. At that hearing, Boasberg outlined the next steps for the contempt investigation, including seeking testimony from DOJ personnel such as Erez Rouveni, the former DOJ lawyer who had worked on the matter and filed the whistleblower complaint detailing what went down at the DOJ during the deportation in Brollio. Sounds big. Yeah. Boasburg also indicated he will call Drew Ensign, the DOJ official who relayed Roseburg’s initial order to stop the flights to DOJ Brass. When the government pushed back on reopening the contempt issue, Boasberg was not having it. As he retorted, quote, I intend to proceed just like I did in April seven months ago. This has been sitting for a long time and justice requires me to move quickly.

 

Melissa Murray So, this totally reminded me of a scene from, I think it was season four of The Crown where Queen Elizabeth is meeting with Margaret Thatcher after Margaret Thatchers basically slashed all social services in Britain. And the Queen says to Margaret Thatchar, well, you’ve moved very quickly, Prime Minister. And then Margaret Thatschers says to the Queen, like completely looked her in the face and goes, that is because I am in a hurry. That’s the whole Judge Boasberg energy. So he’s that. Yeah.

 

Kate Shaw So he’s Thatcher here. He’s totally Thatcher. That is because I’m in a hurt. Well, NBC Circuit made him wait a long ass time, and he’s ready to go. And I think it’s going to be hard for them to stop him at this point. So I think that this is probably actually moving forward.

 

Melissa Murray Testimony is going to be wild, like calling those people in.

 

Kate Shaw But that is not all out of D.C., so elsewhere in the D. C. Federal courthouse last week, in a 61-page ruling, Judge Gia Cobb temporarily blocked the Trump administration from maintaining more than 2,000 National Guardsmen in D. C., concluding that the city was likely to succeed on its claim that the deployment was unlawful. As Judge Cobb noted, the deployment, which has been in effect since August, likely exceeds the president’s power over the local D. C. National Guard and impermissibly undermines D. C.’s rights to self-governance. She also noted that these concerns regarding overreach and home rule were exacerbated by the fact that a significant portion of the troops are from other states and that the deployment kind of seems to be semi-permanent. Judge Cobb did pause her ruling for three weeks allowing the administration time to either remove the troops from D.C. Or, and or, I suppose, appeal.

 

Melissa Murray Decision. The next bit of news we wanted to cover with you is the latest in the mid cycle redistricting flap and let’s just say things have gotten a little messy. So for those of you who are not up to speed we should let you know that Donald Trump realized that he might actually lose control of the house in the Midterm elections in 2026 because if you’ve noticed the price of eggs has not gone down at all. And the tariffs have made everything about a zillion times more expensive. So it’s bad news all around. And just as President Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him a few extra thousand votes in the 2020 presidential election, he turned to Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find some new congressional seats for Republicans. And so, Governor Abbott launched an unorthodox mid-cycle redistricting effort in the Lone Star State. Now, we say this is unorthodox because redistricting typically happens right after the decennial census. And Texas, per that practice, actually redistricted after the 2020 census and wasn’t due to redistrict again until after the 2030 census. And since we’re not in the future yet, that hadn’t happened. And so if you’re counting any of this, the new census is actually five years in the offing. And Governor Abbott basically said, know what? Let’s do some boy math here. Let’s just do some redistricting. Team right now.

 

Leah Litman And then the boy math really took off because after Texas decided to redistrict five new seats for the president, California governor Gavin with the good hair Newsom decided that Democrats should experiment with this thing called having a backbone and fighting back. So he launched a ballot initiative that would allow California to do mid-cycle redistricting too and counteract the Texas Republican gains with some California Democratic gains. And California voters were all for it. In a special election where the only issue on the ballot was Proposition 50, the redistricting proposition. California voters overwhelmingly said, yeah, let’s fucking go. Boy math. Exactly. That set off a redistricting arms race. Republicans in Missouri and North Carolina forged ahead with mid cycle redistricting plans and Virginia Democrats have taken steps toward passing new district lines there. And the president.

 

Kate Shaw Has pressured other red state legislatures to get on the stick and redistrict him a more favorable map. But actually, kind of an interesting development. Some of those red state legislators may be taking a page from California and showing a different kind of spine of their own are not just rolling over. So as the New York Times reports, amid a lot of pressure from the president to redraw district maps, Indiana Republicans so far are actually saying No. The president has predictably responded by threatening these recalcitrant legislators with primary challenges, so we will see how that story develops.

 

Melissa Murray [AD]

 

Melissa Murray And of course, the courts have been really busy with these redistricting-related cases. So there are challenges to the GOP-led redistricting effort in Missouri and North Carolina that are currently pending, and California Republicans have filed suit challenging the validity of Proposition 50. That’s the redistricting ballot initiative that recently passed. And just last Tuesday, a three-judge panel in Texas enjoined Texas’s new congressional that. That is the map that Texas Governor Greg Abbott decided to boy math after the president asked him to find five new seats. And when the court actually issued their ruling, they didn’t just issue a straight-up ruling. They spilt some tea, a lot of tea, and the tea was hot. As Judge Brown, a Trump appointee, explained, although the Texas redistricting push had been in litigation as a partisan effort, in fact. Texas legislators weren’t keen to redistrict until they received a letter from the Department of Justice advising them that multiracial coalition districts in blue cities violated section two of the VRA. Basically, this is like a Kavanaugh fever dream turned into a real life legal argument. So recall that in his cab currents in Allen versus Milligan, Coach K mused at the process of creating multiracial coalition opportunity districts. Or single block opportunity districts that sought to optimize representation among minority voters was okay under section two, but like affirmative action, there was an expiration date and Coach K mused that maybe that expiration date is.

 

Kate Shaw Right now. So the Trump Justice Department took that logic and ran with it, writing a letter advising the Texas legislature that times up on coalition districts and opportunity districts and that the legislature should redistrict for the purpose of dismantling those districts. And the Texas Legislature was, as they say, down to redistrict. DTR. Exactly. The new DTR Yes. Well, it’s only one.

 

Melissa Murray One DTR. The other one was DTF. It was a different thing.

 

Leah Litman Right. Very different.

 

Melissa Murray Very, very different. Anyway, Judge Brown. What is it? What?

 

Leah Litman Well, I mean, this particular redistricting, just saying.

 

Melissa Murray Anywho, Judge Brown, who wrote for the two-judge majority, was so shady to the DOJ in this opinion. He waspily noted that even the Texas AG’s office, who he called ostensibly the president’s allies, thought the DO J letter was, quote, ham-fisted and a mess. He also notes that the DO j made significant factual errors as to the composition of districts in question. And to the legislature’s rationale for redistricting back in 2021 after the 2020 census. According to the DOJ letter, the Texas legislature redistricted in order to create opportunities slash coalition districts for minority voters, which as Kate just mentioned, the DOG says is impermissible. However, As Judge Brown explains it, in separate litigation concerning the validity of the 2021 map, Texas legislators averred that they were actually doing a partisan gerrymander, not a racial gerrymandered when they drew the 2021 one map. Oh snap, sometimes it be’s your own people.

 

Leah Litman I loved this opinion so hard, it read Harmeet Dhillon, the author of this letter for filth, the opinion made clear that DOJ dug its own grave here by being so loud about how the mid cycle redistricting push was all about race and more particularly about erasing districts where minority voters could form majority political coalitions. I vaguely recall a wise man once saying, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the bases of race, you fuckheads. Indeed, Judge Brown recited that Chief Justice Roberts banger in full as a block quote near the beginning of his opinion, albeit without the fuckheads part. But the DOJ letter like wildly misrepresents the relevant precedent as well. The Fifth Circuit had never said that these coalition districts were unconstitutional. It just said the Voting Rights Act didn’t require them. Like reading, it’s real hard for these people.

 

Kate Shaw The thing that is so just wild and delicious about all of this is that if DOJ had just kept its mouth shut and Texas… Stay in your lane.

 

Leah Litman I mean again as a Stringer Bell said do not take motherfucking notes on a racial gerrymander.

 

Kate Shaw And yeah, DOJ was not up to speed and did that. And we should stop and say we’re still in the context of this incredibly distorted landscape in which the Supreme Court has handed down this set of guidelines that make partisan gerrymanders, you know, at least non-justiciable, maybe affirmatively great. But again, given all of that, it is wild. I mean, this is probably obvious to our listeners, but that’s just a f***ing f***. An intolerable and abhorrent state of affairs, and yet that’s where we are. And so if the Justice Department hadn’t suggested that actually race not partisanship was the reason to redraw these lines, it seems pretty clear, actually crystal clear, that there would be no legal objection that a federal court would entertain to these lines. And yet the Justice department, essentially telling on themselves, brought this potential legal peril on Texas. Raising the potential that California’s redistricting efforts, which are quite clearly partisan, will stand while these Texas efforts fall because California’s maps were, you know, I think top to bottom redrawn for explicitly partisan reasons, and justice has really complicated the story about the reasons that Texas has drawn their lines.

 

Melissa Murray I mean, it’s not just they complicated it. Like, this is an entire self-own. Ruscio literally says, just call everything a partisan gerrymander. And again, we’ve talked about this on the podcast so many times because race and partisanship are so closely aligned in many of these southern states. You can get away with racial gerrymandering by just saying you’re doing partisan gherrymandering unless you want to write a fucking letter talking about the racial gherymandering you really want to do. Like, it not hard. I mean, like. The boy math was really math-ing here, in any event. Back to what might happen with regard to California. So California’s Proposition 50 initially had some language saying that California would only redistrict in response to Texas’s redistricting, but before the measure actually made it to the ballot, that language was withdrawn. So here’s some more great boy math. If Texas’s new map falls, California’s new redistricting can still continue. So Again, the self-owning is just like, wow, this is like a classical liberal property owner dream. Like you are owning everything. You’ve owned yourself fully and entirely. And I’m not sure that SCOTUS will let Gavin Newsom have a big win like that, but just on its face right now, massive, massive self-owned. Where is this all going? This was a three-judge panel that heard this case about the Texas maps. And so the typical process now would be that there isn’t an intermediate appellate court decision. It just goes directly to the Supreme Court. And lo and behold, Texas wasted no time running to the court with an emergency petition for none other than friend of the pod, Circuit Justice Samuel A. Alito. Which brings us to a dissent from Judge Jerry Smith, a longtime judge on the Fifth Circuit who was the third judge in this three-judge panel. Suffice to say that- quote, judge. Let me just suffice to say that this was unlike any dissent that I have read in my entire life as a living, breathing person walking this earth. Seriously, Judge Smith was seriously on one. He took the majority to task for what he viewed as their malfeasance in slow walking the majority opinion in order to avoid having to grapple explicitly with the terms of his dissent. He accused them of simply announcing the majority opinion before he had an opportunity to review it and fine tune his dissent. And to be fair, I can see why that wrinkled. Like typically there’s an exchange of these drafts between chambers before everything is finalized. But again, there’s a huge deadline looming because the Texas congressional candidates have to declare their candidacy before I think it’s December 8th. So time really is of the essence and this was a very complicated case. With a lot of record evidence. So it wasn’t, I think, yes, a lot of time was spent on this, but I think it was because a lot of time had to be spent on it, even as that deadline loomed. So maybe there’s no reason to assume bad faith, but I can still understand why you would be annoyed at not having the opportunity to present your dissent fully and have it entertained and reviewed and incorporated into the majority opinion.

 

Leah Litman But, and now we get to the rest of The Descent, which reads like a Fox News conspiracy fever dream. So I will quote directly as cannot make this shit up. Near the beginning of the opinion is this quote, the main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom, end quote. Didn’t have that on my bingo card. If you want to read this control of sorrows and just try to guess how many mentions there are It’s more than ten and not just George not just words also. That’s why I said Just sorrows. Okay. So next quote plaintiff’s top expert Matt Baretto is a sorrows operative his CV confirms that he expects to receive 2.5 million dollars in his sorrows piggy bank. I want to start continue Quote, I suppose someone will say that in making these comments about the Soros connections, I’m expressing a political view, not the proper role of a federal judge, end quote. Some might, sir. I did wonder, like, is this boy law? I mean, like how wild is it that apparently the reconstruction amendments are the fault of George Soros? Like, I honestly did not have- Got in a hot tub time machine, went back to 1868, was like, let’s do this. The conspiracy is Jews control the weather, didn’t realize it was also about time, did not realize that in the year of our Lord 2025, I would read an opinion that said it’s the Jews fault. And yet, and yet.

 

Kate Shaw I do wonder that.

 

Melissa Murray Also, Gavin Newsom, not just Laura. Right, right.

 

Kate Shaw That footnote that some will say, I’m expressing a political view, did you wonder whether a law clerk like sort of tried, mustered their courage and came and said, boss, you might want to think about some of this. I mean, and that’s what he did. He sort of dropped a footnote, maybe. I’m not sure. But can you imagine being in a chamber that produces this? I mean there is also, this is like the least noteworthy thing in the opinion, but there is a fawning nod to one Sam Alito, who Judge Smith references in a against activist judges. And it’s pretty clear that this is a descent that very much knows its audience.

 

Melissa Murray The other thing I will say about this, it’s like, it does read a little bit like have an upbeat poetry because it’s, like, there are all these, like little stops with, like Oh, hold it like that. It’s like, I just sent asterisks, asterisk, astarisks. And then there’s another beat, I descend. I mean, someone really needs to put this to ether and make it a judicial.

 

Leah Litman Yes, yeah. So I have to say, Jerry Smith at 78 years young is not really in the running for a future Supreme Court seat. So this is not an audition, which immediately made me wonder how his colleagues on the Fifth Circuit, who are running to be America’s next top scotist justice, will top an opinion like this.

 

Melissa Murray This is the Janice Dickinson moment where he went full Janice Dickinson and showed these kids how it’s done.

 

Leah Litman Because after Smith posted this, whatever we’re calling it, the best his Fifth Circuit colleague Andy Oldham could muster was a passing shot at Blue Sky, referring to, quote, a uniform law that apparently has fewer adopters than Blue Sky. And sir, that’s just not going to cut it, like you got to step up your game.

 

Kate Shaw Kate, do you know who Janice Dickinson is? I just Googled her. She was on America’s Next Top Model. Was she a judge? Was she judge? And was a model before that, a business woman.

 

Melissa Murray Supermodel, as she says. Is that right? That’s what she says, that’s what she says!

 

Kate Shaw Okay, well I now know that.

 

Melissa Murray It’s self-evidently correct. Just like George Soros and Gavin Newsom orchestrated all of this.

 

Leah Litman So of course, after we recorded, Sam Alito had to go and be a messy bitch. He is from New Jersey, so he does love the drama. Okay, here’s what happened. As we noted, Texas had already rushed off to the Supreme Court, and specifically to Sam, the circuit justice for the Fifth Circuit, asking for a pause of this lower court ruling which blocked Texas from using their extremely racially gerrymandered maps and limited them to using their old, also extremely gerrymander, but partisan gerrymaner maps. So Justice Alito requested a response to Texas’s stay application by Monday, end of the day. But then, and this is the messy part, the guy granted an administrative stay. This was wholly unnecessary and I will try to explain why. So administrative stays by the court time to decide whether to grant a full stay, a stay pending appeal. And an administrative stay might be necessary or it might really be impactful, when it truly pauses a decision or order that affects the day-to-day status quo. So just to take an example, an administrative state of a decision blocking the president from firing someone, that would change the day to day action because it affects whether the person the president tried to fire will be in their job until the Supreme Court decides the stay application. Similarly, the case about the roving ICE patrols, granting an administrative stay there, that would allow ICE to conduct roving patrols up until the court decides whether to grant a stay. Again, like day to day on the ground, things are going to happen. Same with the SNAP case. Granting the administrative stay meant the government didn’t have to distribute SNAP benefits over the days up until court would have decided to grant the stay. Those aren’t the circumstances here. The question here is whether Texas can conduct a set of elections under these maps. Until candidates have to file papers to run, you know, later in December, there aren’t elections that are being conducted. So the administrative state doesn’t really do anything, you know again, on the ground day to day. Now a stay, a stay will do something. A stay will determine what maps Texas will use in the upcoming midterm election. But the administrative stay, again, there aren’t elections unfolding between now and December 8th. So an administrative stay just seems unnecessary, you know, unless the court planned to allow the administrative state to remain into effect until after December, in which case it would just be a stay. But given the quick deadline that Justice Alito imposed on the briefing, that doesn’t seem like it’s in the works. So could this be the very first administrative stay issued just to be petty? As I said… Sam is a messy bee from New Jersey who loves the drama and I will leave you with that thought as we return to our episode discussing what the Supreme Court might do on the actual stay pending appeal, which will determine what maps Texas will use in the upcoming elections.

 

Melissa Murray Anyway, what is likely to happen in this case? I think some real tomfoolery, obviously. I think it’s very likely that SCOTUS will stay this case in light of its pending deliberation in Louisiana versus Kelly, remember that case. And then perhaps there is another subsequent stay invoking Purcell. That is the case that addresses whether or not changes to voting district maps can happen with an election looming. The Texas congressional candidates have to file their paperwork again by December 8th. I don’t think they can hold it for Calais.

 

Leah Litman Can I put out a marker? So like, Calais is formally, right, a Voting Rights Act case, right? Like there the state, right? Was forced to draw a district because of the Voting Rights Act, right. This is just like a straight up 14th, 15th Amendment racial discrimination claim. But like the very idea that they could or might say that the districts in Louisiana drawn to comply with the Votting Rights Act were impermissibly motivated by race, but these Texas districts… right? Where Harmeet Dhillon told them change the racial composition of these districts were not. I mean, that would be like…

 

Melissa Murray No, but Leah, it’s completely different. This was Mark Elias’ point. They purposefully use conservative logic in crafting this argument. They sort of flipped it on its head, which, again, a win here may signal a big loss in Kelly. Yes. Well, we can.

 

Leah Litman We already got some signals that that was well.

 

Kate Shaw Well, I’m just saying you’re suggesting they can’t distinguish the two and it’s obvious that drawing districts to enhance black voting power is problematic and diminish black or minority voting power, is, you know, completely permissible under the 14th.

 

Leah Litman That was the project of reconstruction, right? Exactly.

 

Kate Shaw So, there’s a principle distinction to be drawn between the two. I’m worried about Purcell, but I just actually think even, I think it would be very hard on their own practices to just like hang on to this. Now, Kalei, they made the decision super fast. So then it will be- Purcell is so-

 

Leah Litman You can’t invoke Purcell because this is a redistrict. There were already a set of compliant maps in place, right? Like the idea is just anyways, sorry, I’m already going nuts.

 

Kate Shaw Well, it was fun while we had it, that opinion, and we will see what Hash, yeah, both of them. That’s definitely true. Fun in different ways. See what Hash Skotis makes of them, but we should move on to developments in the Comey retribution case. And this also connects to DOJ just absolutely bungling the whole litigation thing. And we are talking, of course, about the recent developments just in the past week involving the prosecution of former FBI director James Comey. In a remarkable 20-plus page ruling last week, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick pretty much confirmed what we all strongly suspected, which was that interim United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsay Halligan, is not a prosecutor despite her job title. The Magistrates Judge said that when Halligan made her solo appearance before the grand jury in September to seek an indictment accusing Comey of lying to and obstructing Congress in 2020. She made at least two fundamental and highly prejudicial misstatements of law. The judge also pointed out that the grand jury materials he had ordered her to turn over appeared to be incomplete and likely did not reflect the full proceedings. I mean, this actually isn’t even the craziest thing at all that happened last week. No, no. Just a setup. But we’re gonna warm up because this standing alone in normal times would be completely gobsmackingly insane. So let me just tell you about the two fundamental and prejudicial missstatements that were the topic of this opinion. It seems that Lindsay Halligan told the grand jury that Comey does not have a right to not testify at his trial. And, you know, an obvious response to that, Ms. Halligan is that the Fifth Amendment does say no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. I understandable you didn’t have to work that deeply in your insurance practice with this principle, but it is a pretty foundational one.

 

Leah Litman The second highly prejudicial misstatement is even better. So Halligan also basically suggested that the grand jury didn’t have to decide whether to indict Comey based on the evidence actually presented to them. It could instead indict him based on government’s assurance that the government had better evidence that might be revealed at trial. Basically, trust us, guy’s guilty, and if you want to hear the evidence slash see act two, then you’ve got to indict, like girl, like that’s just so insane.

 

Melissa Murray That’s not it. This was all a warm up, like literally an amused bouche for the main Lindsay Halligan course. So on Wednesday, at a hearing before Judge Michael Nachmanoff, who is the presiding judge in the case, Judge Machnamoff went after the prosecution, asking the government’s lawyers about all of the apparent irregularities that occurred during the grand jury phase. And let’s just say, the government responses were illuminating. Halligan admitted that she did not show the final indictment to the grand jury, which is to say the grand jury didn’t actually know or sign off on the charges for which it was apparently indicting Comey. And that’s not it. Apparently they didn’t know because the full grand jury didn’t vote on the indictment before it was presented in open court. And I’m just gonna say, that seems bad. Real bad.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, so if you’re not a lawyer, it might be a little hard, you know, for this to immediately register how shocking it is, you, know, a little context. So grand juries are not like trial juries. They are larger, like 12 to 23. And there’s no judge and no defendant or defense counsel in the proceeding. Like the prosecution has the room to themselves and that kind of power is checked by explicit procedures, like having the whole grand jury review the charges before voting to approve an indictment. And the idea that a U.S. Attorney would only show the indictment to the four-person is insane, but apparently that is what happened here. And there’s even more messiness because the full grand jury was shown a previous version, but there’s also some ambiguity in the notations about whether the full grand jury even voted to indict on the other two remaining counts that the four The person says they did.

 

Melissa Murray [AD]

 

Kate Shaw And that is actually somehow not all. So at another point in this hearing, one of Ms. Halligan’s subordinates, Tyler Lemons, ended up in the hot seat. So Lemons is an assistant United States attorney in North Carolina, but was brought in to work on this case when it seems like none of the line prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia would do so. So Lemmons, under questioning, acknowledged that there existed something called a declination memo. So a memo giving the reasons why the U.S. Attorney’s Office, prior to Halligan arrival, was not going forward with the prosecution of Comey. But then Lemons explained that someone in the Deputy Attorney General’s office, so that’s Todd Blanche’s office had instructed him not to discuss in open court the existence of this memo, whose existence he did acknowledge because the very existence of the memo was privileged information.

 

Melissa Murray Again, boy math, boy law. At this point, Comey’s lawyer, veteran SCOTUS advocate, Michael Dreeben, got up and basically said, your honor, would you like to be the mayor of Clown Town? Because that’s what this is. I’m kidding. Michael Dreeben.

 

Kate Shaw Michael Dreeben would never say that.

 

Melissa Murray He would NEVER say that! But I think he was thinking it, I’m sure he was.

 

Kate Shaw I don’t even know if he thinks those things, but.

 

Melissa Murray Well, let’s just say, at some point he had to, this is a man who’s argued before the Supreme Court so many times, and he must’ve been listening to this, like, what is this fucking? Where am I? I can’t believe this is my life.

 

Kate Shaw Where am I? I can’t believe this is my life. I was at the United States Supreme Court making normal arguments for like 40 years, and now this is my job.

 

Melissa Murray Exactly. It’s like one of those record scratch moments. You might be wondering how I got here. Anyway, Dreeben got up and reiterated all of the irregularities that had occurred here and urged the court to simply dismiss this sham prosecution for the retribution-laced unconstitutional mess that it is and put everyone out of their misery.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, so that should have been the last beat on this story last week. And yet, on Thursday, I think it was, DOJ decided to follow up this hearing with a short document that seemed to walk back DOJ’s own, like Clemens and Halligan’s own representations. And in this- Like JK, Your Honor! Yeah! They basically said never mind everything we said. The grand jury actually did vote on the final indictment. Our bad. We got that slightly wrong. But having just said the opposite in court, I don’t think this four-page memo is going to clear things up. So I’m not sure what the next move here is, but I don’t think it’s good for DOJ. This seems like another cell phone. It does. Another cell phone, sure does.

 

Leah Litman So as we said in the intro, like this is a truly we the men slash we the men’s episode and it wouldn’t be a week in legal news without a new development in La Faire Epstein. And once again, I think that earlier discussion was really a we the Lindsay

 

Melissa Murray That’s right. Like, let’s not erase, like, Like, that’s not erase.

 

Leah Litman That’s fair. And Harmeet Dhillon before, you know? So yes, anyways, so you know, we are once again in a position of having to ask, what is it with this administration and accused sex traffickers? Running point for alleged sex offenders seems to be a thing because last week new reporting emerged showing that the White House intervened to help a sex criminal. But no, not that one. This time it’s a team of alleged sex traffickers. But no. Not those ones. This time, Andrew Tate and his brother, truly no sex traffickers left.

 

Kate Shaw So ProPublica broke the bombshell story that the White House intervened into a Department of Homeland Security investigation into the Tates, who had been accused of sex trafficking and sexual assault abroad and are now back in the United States. So pursuant to a U.S. Investigation, DHS reportedly seized the Tate’s electronic devices upon the brothers’ arrival in the U. S. But then DHS promptly returned those devices, after having been instructed to do so by the Trump White House, and not just anyone in the Trump White House—specifically one Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s failed nominee to head the Office of Special Counsel, whose nomination failed in part because he was accused of sexually harassing a female subordinate and maybe also being Nazi curious.

 

Melissa Murray All right, let that one wash over you while you’re thinking about it. Let’s go back to a more familiar sex pass. The release of the Epstein emails last week included thousands of pages and lots of analyzes of the emails. And we talked about it last week on the episode, but all of the analysis and all of the email leaks continued even after our recording. So we wanted to highlight one particular series of exchanges that was identified after we recorded last week and that exchange involved Larry Summers. In our last episode, we discussed the 2017 email in which Summers wrote to Epstein to complain that Me Too had gone too far. And maybe that was something of a tell.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, because then people focused on some exchanges that occurred during 2018 and 2019, i.e. The supposed height of the MeToo movement that had just gone too far in policing sexual misconduct and abuse of women. So then Summers emailed Epstein asking for Epstein’s advice on sleeping with a woman several decades, Summers Jr. In Summers Field Economics, who he also described as a mentee. And the emails basically straight up lay out a sex for professional connection scheme. So Summers claimed that his quote best shot was that the woman found him quote invaluable and interesting end quote. This is like he admitted, like this is one of the most senior scholars hoping a junior scholar will have sex with him that he recognizes she’s not interested in for romantic reasons or sexual attraction, but might do it because he’s quote invaluable.

 

Kate Shaw That’s vile. And don’t worry, it gets worse because of course it does. So the woman about whom they’re talking is Asian and Summers and Epstein referred to her in conversation by a code name, which was Peril, making their exchange. A twofer. Yeah, a twofer, misogyny and racism rolled up into one. Two great tastes. So these exchanges continued up until the day before Epstein was arrested in 2019.

 

Melissa Murray Which makes me want to ask once again, who ruined the workplace? Definitely the women, I think. We were the ones who made these unrealistic demands about not wanting to be pressured or feel pressured or see other women feel or be pressured into sexual relationships with predatory men who leverage their seniority, power, and connections. Why can’t we just lighten up and let the good times flow? Take a joke, smile more. Some of the emails indicate that Jeffrey Epstein was corresponding about Ken Starr vouching for, wait for it.

 

Leah Litman So what? So apparently Epstein wrote to Bannon to crow that Star was touting Kavanaugh’s credentials to Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton to Republican senators who would vote to confirm Coach Kavanaught to the high court. And in an email, Bannon noted that Star thought Kavanaagh was brilliant, to which Epstein responded that Kavanaigh was quote, reliable. Wait, did Epstein just feel relatable for a moment?

 

Kate Shaw He’s like, I wouldn’t go that far, not brilliant. I think it was kind of a zing. Let’s just go with reliable, oh god.

 

Melissa Murray It was like maybe too much.

 

Kate Shaw And reliable for what, though? So Bannon and Epstein have this big back and forth about the likelihood that a newly constituted court with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh installed would be able to overrule Chevron versus NRDC, a case they also mentioned that Gorsich’s mother had been involved with, which was true. She had been Reagan’s EPA administrator and was one of the parties named in the case when it was before the D.C. Circuit. So they made that prediction. Weirdly, that happened. Weird. Yeah. Curious. Epstein was also coaching Bannon on how to discredit Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Epstein advised Bannon that Kavanaugh supporters should note that Ford was taking medications that could alter memory. Does raise a question, how would he know that exactly?

 

Melissa Murray Hmm. Anyway, this is probably bearing the lead a little bit, but Congress voted to release the Epstein files and there was only one nay vote in the House, which is enormous given this president’s hold on the Republican party. And it went through the Senate without any alterations, which meant it then landed on POTUS’ desk and a schoolhouse rock imagines it, the president signed that bill into law. But listeners, if you are awaiting a big wave of transparency as these files drop, I’m just here to remind you that you are a sweet summer child. Pretty sure that we are not going to be getting all of the files in one fell swoop. There will probably be a series of back and forths on redactions, possibly privilege, not to mention the fact that the president has suggested that there will be open investigations into the Democrats who have already been mentioned. In the emails that have leaked already. And if there is an active investigation or prosecution, materials related to the individuals named in those investigations or prosecutions would not be able to be released. So this is all to say, please manage your expectations.

 

Leah Litman So as you have undoubtedly surmised by this point, really big week for creepy men. But baby, don’t worry, it’s not a worm. This might belong in the favorite thing segment, but fuck it, we’re gonna talk about it here. So for those of you who have been thus far blissfully unaware, Olivia Nuzzi, who was previously the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine before she was. Fired after admitting to an inappropriate sexting relationship with Secretary Bill DeBeer, raw milk, wild whale juice, yep, RFK Jr., which is bad enough. He was also the subject of a profile she authored. So trying not to be overly concerned about the journalistic ethics here.

 

Kate Shaw Anyways, Nuzzi is back, she has decided to write a book about the whole saga, and the book, titled American Kanto, came out last week. This is kind of like Josh Hawley’s manhood, which is to say we are going to talk about it, but not tell you to buy it. Instead, just read the Vanity Fair excerpt, but we will give you a taste, and we are going to quote from it directly because we just cannot make this up.

 

Melissa Murray He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire. I am so uncomfortable even hearing you read this all.

 

Kate Shaw Oh, I know.

 

Melissa Murray Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s. Oh, no, please. No, Melissa. No. Not again. He desired being desired. He desired. Desired. You need a shower? We all need a shower after. Yeah. Alright, your turn, Leah.

 

Leah Litman The real masterpiece, I believe, is as follows, quote, I did not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. Side note, it me. It us. You got me. It’s pretty funny. Anyways, the excerpt continues, quote. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worms. Baby, don’t worry, he said. It’s not a worm. A doctor he trusted concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite. It was too late to interfere with the meme, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.” End quote. Likely not a Parasite also doesn’t mean not a Worm. Like.

 

Melissa Murray There are a lot of worms here, that’s all I’m gonna say. Anyway, that is not all. Newtzi’s ex-fiance, Ryan Lizza, who himself is a former writer at The New Yorker where he was accused of sexual misconduct, he put up a post on Substack that sought to contextualize things by detailing Olivia’s daddy issues and her prior inappropriate relationships with older men. And he did so via the world’s most tortured bamboo metaphor.

 

Leah Litman We are not going to spoil the surprise of this post. We will just say the screams that were scrumped.

 

Melissa Murray Honestly, I will say this. I had forgotten about both of these men’s who were detailed here, and I thought it was interesting since I had forgot about it and was not prepared to have one of these mens back in my consciousness. He nonetheless decided that he was going to post through it and I’ll just say that his posts are absolute art.

 

Leah Litman I, like, as this was unfolding, I was the person in that sicko’s gif, like, watching right from outside the window, like laughing. Ha ha ha ha.

 

Kate Shaw That was me. All I’ll add is this is, I think I can say this without any spoilers. This is not at all the most important thing, but the kind of discovery narrative. You gotta read it in a voice. No, it’s not, I’m not even quoting from her, but, the discovery narrative involves a letter that has this like, I want a drink from your rain gutters on your house. But it’s a love note that she apparently wrote, but then she had it in her suitcase when she returned from the reporting trip. She was workshopping it. Yeah, maybe it was a draft. I mean, yeah. So anyway, not the most important thing, but I had some questions about that choice.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, and like this is not to excuse like Newsy’s behavior, including her like laundering the reputation of a man who, right, is just enabling and facilitating potentially catastrophic human consequences and undermining the availability of vaccines and whatnot. But like one of the relationships that is detailed in this was a post is exceptionally exploitative, right. It is a relationship that Newsy appears to have begun around like 17 with like a 50 something man who effectively like paid for her college and room and board. Like it is grotesque, right? And just kind of like underscores the real problems our society has with exploiting women.

 

Kate Shaw So let’s talk about some maybe different kinds of quid pro quos. At a recent televised gathering, the CEO of Rolex gifted Trump a gold clock. Another Swiss company, MKS, also gave him a gold bar. So Rolex is a Swiss company. So is MKS. And even though they were not official representatives, maybe, of the Swiss government, the week after these Swiss companies gifted POTUS this gold. Switzerland and the United States, purely coincidentally, I am sure, reached a deal that lowered U.S. Tariffs on imported Swiss goods from 39% to 15%.

 

Leah Litman Now, no one is entirely sure if it’s illegal for the president to accept gold bars or gold clocks as bribes in exchange for lowering tariff rates, thanks in part to the Supreme court.

 

Melissa Murray Leah, I think you know that this was not a bribe. It was merely a gratuity. Some might say it’s just a tip.

 

Leah Litman You know, the analogy works here, too, because they insist this leveraging money for access and influence doesn’t fuck our politics when we know it fucks our politics. Anyways, the Swiss economy minister rejected criticism of the deal and insisted, quote, we haven’t sold our soul to the devil. Well, that’s crazy.

 

Kate Shaw And I do have to say, this might have been another thing that one of us manifested, and this time I am looking at you. Me? So it’s you. Let’s play this clip from our live show at Crooked Con in D.C.

 

Leah Litman Which item has Trump specifically announced he is not tariffing? One, Coca-Cola products or ingredients. Two, gold. Three, computer chips. Four. Silver. Gold.

 

Kate Shaw First of all, I really like this voice you’re doing, Leah. Thank you. I’m going with Coca-Cola products. Doesn’t sound like me at all. He’s a big diet Coke drinker. I’m gonna Coca-cola products.

 

Melissa Murray I’m going with gold.

 

Leah Litman Melissa wins! Kate, start thinking of your compliments.

 

Melissa Murray The gold, Kate, everything in Mar-a-Lago is covered in gold.

 

Kate Shaw That’s true. But he does drink I think diet coke anyway, you’re right gold was clearly was right there you called it

 

Melissa Murray I, I’m sorry. I, this was not a manifestation. This man has been on gold for some time. Like I did not do this. Like the Swiss were merely reading the room, literally reading the road.

 

Leah Litman That’s, that’s fair. Um, so I can’t think of a transition here. So I’m just going to go back to, we have another update from Department of Injustice or from an artist who was formerly at the Department of injustice. And this is the additional reporting on the administration’s bag man slash turned federal judge slash Cripkeeper slash dark Lord of the third circuit. Um, who turns out Who it turns out isn’t just a bag man, but a body bag man. So as it happens, while Beauvais was at DOJ, he was a busy, busy man. Not only was he involved in plotting to defy court orders, encouraging administration officials to tell the courts, fuck you, if they attempted to stop the explosions to the Salvadoran torture prison. And strong-arming DOJ and going on a rampage at the Southern District of New York, U.S. Attorney’s Office to try to use the criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams is leveraged to get the mayor to support the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. He was also, according to NPR, involved in the administration murders and executions on the high seas. The lethal strikes the administration has been carrying out on people it labels narco traffickers.

 

Kate Shaw So as NPR reported, quote, at a Justice Department conference in February, then Acting Deputy Attorney General, Emile Beauvais told the department’s top drug prosecutors that the Trump administration wasn’t interested in interdicting suspected drug vessels at sea anymore. Instead, he said, the U.S. Should just sink the boats. Which, to be clear, is, you know, literally piracy and also murder.

 

Melissa Murray I don’t mean to make light of this, but do you remember the SNL Weekend Update skit when Bowen Yang pretended to be the iceberg that sank the Titanic?

 

Leah Litman I do.

 

Melissa Murray Because that is how.

 

Kate Shaw It connected to the conversation.

 

Leah Litman Yeah.

 

Kate Shaw They’re both boats.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, I also.

 

Melissa Murray Sink the boats just sink the boats. Emil Bove is literally the iceberg. He’s like, forget the black robe. You don’t need Judgesburg. You need like a white spangled outfit and a big thing on your head. That’s how I will remember him. Life tenure, Judge Bove. Okay, switching gears, let’s talk about Vanilla Ice. Not the famed rapper of the 1990s, but the ICE Enforcement sweeps that are happening all over the country. So the administration has decided to direct its ICE enforcement efforts to the Queen City, Charlotte, North Carolina. And the impact of those raids has already been significant. According to reports on Monday, November 17th, Charlotte Mecklenburg schools reported 15% of its students were absent from school and area businesses have noted a downturn in business because so many people are staying home to avoid ICE. All of this sounds like a solid plan to jumpstart the economy and leave no child behind. In other administration news, in Memphis, Tennessee, where there has been an ongoing effort to deploy the National Guard, a federal judge stepped in to block said federalization and deployment of the National guard in that city.

 

Kate Shaw And in more federal district court action, although here involving DHS rather than the National Guard, Judge Sarah Ellis in Chicago, who we’ve now mentioned a couple of times on this show, released her opinion in the case involving challenges to DHS abuses in the city of Chicago. so the Seventh Circuit had actually already stayed an injunction that she issued of finding that injunction over broad and scheduling arguments in the Seventh Circuit for December, but Ellis subsequently released her 233 plus page banger explaining her decision and it is Just a pretty crystal clear statement that we definitively cannot trust anything that comes out of DHS’s mouth because we are not done with Willie Allen’s West End girl The opinion describes Greg Bufino, who is the senior border patrol official who is handling the efforts in Chicago, although I think he’s actually now moved on to North Carolina, but has been a key high-level coordinator of these aggressive enforcement efforts. And Ellis describes him as not credible, noting that his answers to the court’s questions are, quote, cute or outright lies. The opinion also provides numerous examples of the government’s accounts of particular incidents involving clashes between DHS officials and civilians as being flatly contradicted by body camera footage also notes that DHS agents have used chat GBT to generate incident reports. I mean, it is just like a wild indictment of essentially the candor and integrity of DHS as an entity. And that is who is terrorizing American cities across the country.

 

Leah Litman And relatedly, it’s been reported that agencies within DHS, including ICE, CBP, plan to target for immigration enforcement, Spanish speaking churches across the country during the upcoming holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Like, we have found the Christmas Adventurers Club, Greg Bovino is Lockjaw, and we have A war on Christmas now.

 

Melissa Murray What would Jesus do indeed? The prospect of ICE raiding churches during the festive season doesn’t break your resolve. Don’t worry, this might actually do the trick. Last week in an Oval Office meeting with the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, a reporter asked the president about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who often criticized the Saudi royal family and the Saudi government was murdered in Istanbul in 2018, allegedly at the direction of MBS. And the president of the United States responded to that question about Khashogi’s murder in the following way.

 

Clip You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t him, things happened. But he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.

 

Leah Litman So by things, the president means being tortured and dismembered with a bone saw, which, you know, his characterization, sympathetic characterization, checks out given that this week the president did call for Democratic lawmakers to be executed. You know, and as far as being controversial, as we said, Khashoggi committed the cardinal sin of expressing views critical of MBS, Saudi royal family, Saudi Arabia government that MBS didn’t like.

 

Melissa Murray Wasn’t sure whether this was worth mentioning here for its connections to free speech or just general ongoing interest in misogyny, but I’m just gonna say it. There was also an episode last week when a female journalist from The Guardian asked Donald Trump about LaFaire Epstein and he told her to quote unquote Quiet Piggy.

 

Kate Shaw The bars in hell, as you say often, and is correct. But can I go back for a second to what Leah just said about the Democratic lawmakers? So last Thursday, the president accused six Democratic members of Congress of, quote, seditious behavior punishable by death. He did this on Truth Social. After the six released a video advising U.S. Service members that they have a right to refuse to obey unlawful commands. The military code of justice provides that a member of the armed services can refuse to follow a quote. Patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime or one that goes against the U.S. Constitution, which service members swear to uphold when they join the military. Some would actually go even further and, you know, explain that service members don’t only have a right, but actually have an obligation to refuse to follow an illegal order. That is the totally uncontroversial position that these members of Congress, former members of the military themselves, were communicating. And, per usual, the president decided to truth- through this. So he posted that the lawmakers should, quote, be arrested and put on trial and that an example must be set. He also reposted a post from one of his followers urging that the lawmakers be hanged as, quote George Washington would. So just two things. One, Andrew Johnson was impeached for much less. He wasn’t removed from office, but his political career was essentially over and to This was a chilling set of events, I think would have been on any week, but on the week that Trump, you know, lavished attention and praise on MBS in the Oval Office, it really made my blood run cold.

 

Leah Litman That’s it for the news, and speaking of men’s, after this quick break, we will be back with Kate’s conversation with Professor Jill Hasday about Hasday’s new book, We the Men.

 

Melissa Murray [AD]

 

Kate Shaw I am your lone host for this segment, Kate Shaw, but it is not just me, because I am happy to be joined by University of Minnesota law professor Jill Hasday to discuss her new book, We the Men, How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality. Jill, welcome to Strict Scrutiny.

 

Jill Hasday Thanks so much for having me.

 

Kate Shaw Okay, I wanna ask a couple of general questions about the book, and then also try to connect the book to the present moment, which is something I thought about constantly as I read it. It unearths many of the ways, and some are familiar and some far less known, that women’s struggles get written out of our collective history. So why write this book in the present movement? Was there a specific incident or pattern you observed that motivated this desire to do this deep dive in particular into the historical record?

 

Jill Hasday I’ve been thinking about the seeds of this book since I went to law school. And I’d be sitting in these classes and the professors who were with two exceptions men would tell stories about how the law has treated people over time. And it really struck me that these stories were actually about how the law had treated men. And either women didn’t appear in these stories or they were footnotes to be mentioned as an aside later. And it just occurred to me, women are about half the population. We’re not a footnote or an aside. There’s no story about the law that doesn’t include women as much as men. So I always had this book kind of percolating in the background. And then what really pushed me to write it is the 250th anniversary of the United States is coming up in 2026. In every commemoration America has ever had, women have always had to claw their way in from the outside. And I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to write this book before that commemoration takes place?

 

Kate Shaw You open the book with Alice Paul’s 1922 predictions about women’s future in politics and society. When the Washington Times asked Paul to predict how modern feminism would shape the course of history over the next hundred years, she offered the series a pretty optimistic forecast, including that there would be a woman president of the United States in less than a century. And I have to say that one hurt. She was so close to getting it exactly right, but just not quite there. So, you know, you note that, quote, in some, she was hoping and working for a world where women participate equally in the control of government, a family and of industry. So I’m curious why you begin with that anecdote and, you know, how do you think Paul’s optimism contrasts with the realities that you document today?

 

Jill Hasday So I began with that quote, I guess, for at least two reasons. One, because the timing is so perfect. As you said, Alice Paul leads the more militant wing of the women’s suffrage movement. She invents the idea of picketing in front of the White House, which now seems like old hat, but she literally invents it. And she gets the 19th Amendment, which prohibits sex-based denials of the vote in 1920. She’s only 35 years old, and as you can imagine, she thinks she can do anything. Look what she managed to do against ferocious opposition, like women are literally being dragged in the street for picketing for the vote. And so at the end of 1922, they ask her, what’s the world gonna look like in 2023? And as you say, she imagines. In some ways, actually a pretty modest agenda that there’ll be at least one woman president in 100 years, that half of Congress will be female and that women will have equal opportunities across social, economic, political dimensions. And it just struck me that this was a great way, in addition to the timing being perfect, this was just a great of showing it’s not that women haven’t made progress, but how far we have to go. Literally none of her goals. Have been met, and in fact, as I talk about in the book, there was this 2019 poll where they asked people, would your neighbors be comfortable with a female president? The reason they asked that is because people don’t like to admit their own biases, but when you ask about their neighbors, they’ll be more forthcoming. Only a third of Americans said their neighbors would be comfortable with the female president. So I just think it’s a good reminder that, yeah, there’s been progress, but much less than you might hope.

 

Kate Shaw And I should say that for people for whom these stories about Alice Paul are not familiar, the wonderful Broadway musical, Sufs, depicts both by Shayna Taub, depicts Paul and many of her fellow travelers in particular picketing outside the White House, being arrested, facing brutality. It’s closed on Broadway. I’m not sure what kind of afterlife it’s gonna have in other cities, but it really is a wonderful effort to do, I think, kind of theatrically and musically, a lot of what you are doing in the book, which is. Remedy some of the historical omissions and elisions that are so prevalent. So the book outlines, I think, what you call two ways of forgetting about women that predominate in America’s stories about itself. So one is erasure, and then the other is distortion. So can you just give a top line explanation of how you use these concepts and how they sort of manifest in our collective memory?

 

Jill Hasday The book, as you say, talks about two kinds of forgetting. One is just leaving women out of the story, and that’s what I mean by erasure. Some examples are concrete. If you imagine walking down a public park to a government building and you see a statue, without knowing much about you, I suspect that most people in their minds envisioned a man maybe on horseback. If you think about the name above the government building, you’re thinking of a man’s name. And that’s because that’s how commemorations are, even if you look at commemorations in the last four years. And in some ways, I actually wasn’t too surprised to find that. I kind of expected that. What I was surprised was how many times women are left out of the story, even when the story is about women. In the book, I call it spontaneous enlightenment stories. And if you’ve ever heard a textbook say, men gave women the vote, that’s an example of a spontaneous enlightenment story. It’s not true. First, all the 19th Amendment does is end sex-based vote denial. So plenty of women, especially women of color, still don’t have the vote after 1920. But also, men don’t give women anything. It’s a multi-generational, literally bloody battle. So that’s an example of leaving women out of the story, even when it’s about women. So that what I mean by erasure. And the other is distortion. And distortion is basically leaving out the work America still has to do. So anyone who lives in 21st century America, I suspect you’ve encountered someone who announces or assumes that the sexist battle days are behind us. But what I was surprised to learn is just how early those stories start. I literally have textbooks from before the 19th Amendment. So when women are denied the vote in most states, the United States saying men and women are equal under the law. And it’s just stunning. And part of the point of the book is to show how these statements, they’re not just kind of like. Rosy, they actually function to justify the status quo. There’s nothing more to fight about women already have enough.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, I’ll say that you have a lot of these examples and I was reminded by a lot of them of this passage in the civil rights cases which con law students will be familiar with. So that’s the 1875 case in which the Supreme Court really undermines the full force of the 14th amendment and announces this state action requirement. But there’s language in the opinion, you know, that basically a decade post-slavery racial equality has already been achieved. And there’s this language that basically says A man has emerged from slavery and has shaken off the, you know, inseparable sort of concomitants of that state. So there has to be some stage when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the law. So that’s language from the opinion. And it’s like 10 years post actual enslavement the court is saying, that’s all behind us. Like let’s move on. And decades before there was even formal access to the ballot for women, at least for white women, where you already have all of these men saying, sex equality has been achieved. Like it’s really pretty stunning. So I actually wanna ask you to talk about one specific example of the erasure phenomenon that you talk about. This one I thought was really interesting. So you compare the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Lochner, which is from 1905, with its way less known, but also infamous decision in Mueller versus Oregon from 1908. And you show that these are sort of equally shoddily reasoned opinions. Mueller has arguably more persistent consequences but has significantly less notoriety. So you write, quote, Mueller shared Lochner’s pension for constitutionalizing ideology with the justices using their constitutional decision-making to impose their personal views about how the world should work. We kind of know that about Lochner and its sort of commitment to a laissez-faire vision of kind of the role of government in the economy. But you have Mueller constitutionalizing this notion that women’s primary roles and responsibilities are domestic. So can you talk about the different places of these two opinions in the constitutional canon and then discuss why Mueller’s neglect from contemporary discourse is so troubling? And I’m gonna say one more thing, which is students are familiar with the idea of kind of Lochnerism, but you coined this term Muellerism. So I guess I’d like to hear kind of what you’re capturing with that term and how far away we are from incorporating it into our general legal vernacular.

 

Jill Hasday Thanks for that question. OK, so just for anyone who hasn’t gone to law school, one of the worst insults one lawyer or one judge can lob against the other is to say that they are guilty of locked terrorism. And that is after this 1905 case where the Supreme Court held that a 10-hour workday for male bakers was unconstitutional on the idea that the Constitution protected a freedom of contract conceived in their mind is basically the freedom to work yourself to death. And for instance, one of the highlights of my own academic career is I once was at a workshop. I gave someone what I thought was constructive criticism. They accused me of Lochnerism. I accused them of Lochnism right back. This is like a very well-known term. And it kind of stands for the idea of judges constitutionalizing their own ideological views. So three years after Lochner, there’s another case that comes before the court, Muller v. Oregon. And the question in that case is… The court has already held it’s an unconstitutional constraint on autonomy to have a limited work day for men. What about women? And the court goes in the opposite direction, in some ways in the absolute direction for women, and says, no, you can limit women’s hours. But the ultimate approach is the same, which is the court is committed to the idea that women’s primary responsibilities are on the home. And it’s going to reason on that ideological basis. As you said, in some ways Mueller has a much bigger impact than Lochner does. Lochner’s overturned in 1937. In contrast, Mueller remains good law into the 1970s. There’s a federal survey in 1969. A majority of states exclude women entirely from some jobs, limit women’s hours, which ends up just keeping them in the pink collar ghetto. Even after Mueller is overturned in a footnote, the court continues to reason on the idea that women’s ultimate responsibilities are domestic. For instance, Dobbs overturning Roe could be an example of Muellerism. But what’s so striking to me is that Muellerism isn’t a term, right? This is just me inventing it. No one talks about it. One way that constitutional law professors Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next one. Often write and they often teach in their classes is let’s talk about what are the most important cases the Supreme Court has ever decided in constitutional law and what are the most terrible. And one thing that’s really striking and actually another motivation for writing the book is none of those cases on the worst or the greatest list are about women. Women simply do not exist as a maker of important cases. And that’s just remarkable to me. I don’t think there’s that many great cases about women, but a lot of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions are about women. And certainly that list could be expanded very easily.

 

Kate Shaw Yeah, it’s such an interesting point. So, Muller, I think, is sort of a complicated story because I think that there is this rationale, which is that it’s not as purely sort of kind of villainous, an incident of the Supreme Court’s intervention because it’s almost like a wedge to break Lochnerism to sort of show there are justifications, even if those are incorrect ones that do permit legislatures to impose sort of limitations in the service of protecting workers and things like that. But you’re right to say that, you know, cases like Bradwell versus Illinois, which has logic that is, you now, as ideologically driven in particular and Justice Bradley’s concurrence that, you know holds that states can deny women access to the bar. It’s not really on people’s like top five or 10 worst Supreme Court decisions list. And it really should be. When I say most people’s list, I’m talking primarily about male academics. But I think you’re to sort of note those omissions. You know, also on the kind of erasure point, you mentioned sort of statues before. So the book spends quite a bit of time cataloging ways in which decisions around public memory and commemorative honors, right? Things like monuments and courthouses and museums and stamps, erase women. And you offer a lot of, I think really persuasive data about just like how wildly absent women are from many of those spaces and honors. But I’m curious to actually hear you talk about how much this matters, right. So like on the one hand, this sort of commemoration is largely symbolic. And there is a critique, which I think has some force in some contexts, which is that in recent years, many on the left have focused on efforts to remedy symbolic erasures. And that I think is true when we’re talking about both sex and race, but to the neglect of a focus on more material conditions, right of inequality and subordination. So I guess whether or not you think that critique is forceful. I actually think it is very telling that when the second Trump administration came into office, they focused immediately, and this was especially striking in the military, although it happened in other places too, on undoing efforts at improving representation and inclusion. So they definitely think it matters. So I’m just curious to get your reaction to all of that.

 

Jill Hasday OK, so do I think our agenda should be only commemorations all the time? No, but that’s a parody. Why are commemorations so hard fought? I think one myth we have is there’s so few commemorations of women just because no one thought about it, it’s inertia. That’s just not true. There’s so few commemorations of woman because every time women try for commemorations, which they have been for over a century and a half, there’s a lot of pushback. Commemorations are so hard-fought. Because commemorating the past is really about understanding the present and imagining the future. And that’s one thing Donald Trump and I agree on. He knows the importance of commemorations. For instance, in my book, one of the stories I tell is he opposed the Obama administration plan to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill immediately. At the time in 2016, he was running for the Republican nomination. He immediately denounces it as political correctness. He says later to an age, he doesn’t look like the kind of person who belongs there, which I think is both about what kind of person he thinks belongs in the $20 bill, and also he probably doesn’t find her physically attractive, just this being Donald Trump. I think it’s very striking that how heavily the Trump administration has pushed commemorations. So there’s a lot of examples. Again, one of the first things the Trump administration did is they set up their committee for the 2026 commemoration, the 250th anniversary of the United States. Donald Trump himself is chair. If you look at some of the things they’ve been, the military is a great example, how they’re rewriting history. The National Park Service took Harriet Tubman off. There was a large picture of Harriet Tubman when explaining the Underground Railroad. She’s probably the most famous conductor of the Underground railroad, which is just the term used to describe the system of kind of safe houses and guides that helped people escaping from slavery get to the North and then maybe to Canada. They took her picture out and placed her kind of in like a montage picture. And they also de-emphasize slavery, which is bizarre because exactly why are they underground if they’re not escaping from Slavery. But those, it’s just an example of. Commemorating the past is about the future. Why are they so anxious to take out examples? Because they’re trying to say the military should be more white and male. I mean, I don’t think it’s a secret. And I think that’s why commemorations are so, that that’s, why they are so contested. And we’ve seen a lot of, I think, that’s very top of mind for people when we think about Confederate memorials, but it’s actually also true for memorialization of women. That that’s why they’re fought about. So I guess another way I would say it is it’s not commemorations all the time, but it’s also it’s either or. It’s kind of the same thing, right? Fighting about commemorations or having commemorations is another opportunity to talk about how the present and future should be. So for instance, in the book, one of the I propose is an equal pay clock. So anyone who’s ever been in New York, there’s this national debt clock and you can see the numbers going up and it’s very alarming, you know, it’s good commemoration. So I’d like maybe in Times Square an equal pay clock and of course the numbers won’t move, but like we can rotate between different groups of women so it catches your eye, but imagine that pay gap between men and women has hardly switched in the last 20 years. It was about 75 cents. 20 years ago and now it’s about 82 cents. And when you include race, the numbers are even starker, right? When you include like people are underpaid for being part time, you know, so imagine going through all of those disparities, women as a whole, different subgroups of women, etc. All the time. I think that would be just extremely powerful.

 

Kate Shaw So we’ve been talking about different dimensions of erasure. Let’s now shift to the second form of forgetting that you address, which is distortion. So you criticize a long history of what you call self-contradictory victory announcements. So these are these announcements like we were just talking about that sex equality has been achieved, full stop often, and then a pairing of that announcement with often substantive efforts to roll back equality. As you have said, it is really striking how early and how often you see these kinds of proclamations, often paired with substantive rollbacks, happening. So can you say a little bit more about this? And maybe, you know, you were talking about this happening even before the adoption of the 19th Amendment. Can you offer some specific examples?

 

Jill Hasday So that’s exactly right. Self-contradictory victory announcement is you’re declaring victory. Women’s equality has been achieved. At the exact moment, you’re denying victory. That’s why it’s self-contrary. So I’ll just do an example that springs to mind. In 1948, Gwendolyn Hoyt is convicted of second degree murder for killing her husband with a baseball bat. She’s convicted by an all white male jury. Because Florida only puts white people on the jury. And for women, women have to opt into the jury rolls, which most people of any sex don’t want to opt in. And even if women do opt in, Florida will put like a max of 10 in any county’s jury roll that has like 10,000 men. So basically it’s all male juries. Maybe the occasional one has one woman. And she appeals to the Supreme Court and she says, I was denied a jury of my peers. Women would have been more sympathetic. Her husband was an adulterer. This is the era before cell phones. So his girlfriends are literally calling the house phone and asking for him. She has epilepsy and she claims basically I had a mental break and the baseball bat was right there. And I had this moment of temporary insanity. Women would have been more sympathetic. Men obviously don’t like the idea of women beating their adulterous husbands with baseball bats. And the Supreme Court rejects her claim. Saying, an example of Muellerism, women’s responsibilities are domestic. The state can prioritize women at the home. But at the same moment, it says that. It keeps women, it treats women as inessential jurors and denies female defendants, juries of the peers. It says women have enlightened emancipation. Again, who’s been enlightened? It’s the male lawmakers. There’s no sense that women push for this, but it’s over. And I think Hoyt is a great example, there’s a lot, but it’s a great sample of simultaneously declaring victory. There’s been enlightened emancipation. Women didn’t have to fight for it. It was natural, men gave it to them in their wisdom. And why are we declaring that there’s so much equality? Because we know, confident in this sex equality being achieved, we know we can deny you what you want. So they preserve male jury systems. And one thing I show in the book is that this is just a strategy. As you mentioned earlier, it. I could do a similar chapter just about race, but I think I’ve really revealed in this book, this is just a strategy by which inequality is achieved. You declare victory as a way of rationalizing, not actually extending equal rights.

 

Kate Shaw And I can’t now remember if it’s Hoyt or one of the other cases you talk about in the same chapter, but there are also some mentions, I think both in judicial opinions and the broader discourse of not only sort of women having achieved equality or American women having achieve equality, but American women alone amongst the women of the world are having achieved a quality. And so there’s also, there’s this kind of comparative claim that women in the United States have achieved something that women elsewhere have not. And therefore, whatever specific demands are being made are unjustified, unnecessary, maybe unreasonable. And also there is this sort of undertone of this kind of the reason that this equality has been achieved is this beneficent gift from men.

 

Jill Hasday Yes, and you see that in newspapers. You see that a judicial opinions. You see an anti-feminist literature, like Phyllis Schlafly loves to say, American women are more liberated. There’s a lot of things you can say. One thing I’ll say about that is it’s objectively false. Women are not in America. That’s not the earliest victory for women’s suffrage. New Zealand gets it generations earlier. But that’s that’s part of their claim. And I think as you said, it kind of enhances the idea that American men are particularly wise and beneficent, but also American women particularly lack of grounds for complaining. There’s even an undercurrent of like, if we gave what you’re asking for, it would actually be too much. You know, you already have equality. And if get this, it would actually be too much. We’d be going too far.

 

Kate Shaw You mentioned Phyllis Schlafly and you devote an entire chapter to demonstrating how anti-feminists have capitalized on America’s misremembered past, as you say. So can you talk a little bit about parallels you see between early, even anti-suffrage sort of rhetoric and then modern anti-Feminist movements, either more modern, like sort of the anti-ERA movement headed by Phylliss Schlafly, or sort of even more contemporary kind of anti-feminism. Sort of how. Does that effort capitalize on claims about women having already achieved full equality?

 

Jill Hasday So I think Phyllis Schlafly, who led the anti-ERA movement in the 70s and 80s, really is a pivotal figure. She takes ideas that were in the anti suffrage movement and she really refined them in a way that I think the half century of anti-feminists have just followed her playbook. Her two central arguments against the Equal Rights Amendment were one, the Equals Rights Amendment was unnecessary because had America had already left discrimination against women behind. And two, the ERA was menacing because it would take women out of the home and cause a variety of other horrors like same-sex marriage, you have a lot of things. And that really is the anti-feminist playbook to date. I have many examples in the book of how anti- feminists opposing government support for childcare or abortion rights or affirmative action or modern efforts to ratify the ERA. Basically make those two claims. Whatever you’re asking for is unnecessary. Equality has been achieved. And it would be menacing because it would take women out of the home. And I think one of the reasons the strategy works so well is that Americans are primed to even, if only subconsciously, accept that narrative of progress. Because we’ve literally read it in textbooks. I have a lot of examples of textbooks. That’s just something we hear. So she strives very openly for a a position in the Ronald Reagan administration and he doesn’t give it to her, I can’t have a whole, it’s hard to say definitively why, but I will say that almost everyone in the Reagan administration is a white man, but there’s a way in which you can’t quite admit that because our whole thing is there’s no sex discrimination. Anyway.

 

Kate Shaw So Schlafly is a figure that people are probably at least somewhat familiar with. We talked about Alice Paul. I just wanna ask, you obviously did deep historical research for the book and you mentioned having uncovered stories that you actually never knew about despite spending decades kind of working this field. And I have to say, I also felt like I learned a ton. So I’m curious if there is a story of like a particular woman or a legal fight that wasn’t something that you had been familiar with previously and that has particularly stayed with you.

 

Jill Hasday Yeah, I have a favorite. So yeah, so one reason I think this book is actually really fun is there are so many remarkable women who I had never heard of despite doing more than two decades of work in this field and who are just, they’re just very impressive, like despite odds, they keep fighting. So let me tell the story of Ann Davido. In 1945, Michigan passed what was known as an anti-pharm aid law. That banned women from serving as bartenders in larger cities, unless the woman was the wife or daughter of the male bar owner. This law was pushed through by the All Male Bartenders Union, which liked to call women barmaids to distinguish them from male bartenders. And in public, they often said that they were protecting women from the immorality of bars. But that argument never quite made sense. Among other things, women could be cocktail wagers, which is definitely more vulnerable to violence and harassment by customers. And in their private internal union documents, which I looked at for the book, it’s very clear that economics drives it. Keeping women out of bartending helps protect male jobs and keep the wages high. And they know, actually, a lot of employers would like to hire women because the women are kept out of the union and they can pay them less. Anyways, they push it through. And poor women want to challenge the law. Two of them are bartenders, two of them own a bar, and then one of the bar owners is actually the mother of one of them bartenders because one of their perversities of the law is that if you own a barn, you’re a woman, you can’t bartend, and you can even have your daughter bartend for you. Ann Davido is a pioneering attorney, feminist attorney in Detroit. She left school to support her brother through law school. And then to his credit, when he becomes a lawyer, he supports her so she can go to law school, they become a brother, sister law firm. I just love it. The odds are against her. At this point, the Supreme Court has upheld dozens of restrictions on female labor. It’s never struck anyone down, but she persists and she gets to the Supreme court in 1948 in a case called Gossard v. Cleary. In that era, the Supreme Court doesn’t record oral arguments. So we don’t know exactly what’s said, but she gives an interview years later. And she reports that also in that era you don’t have an assigned time when your case begins. They give you a day and you just kind of sit there waiting. So she’s waiting. There’s the lunch break. After the lunch, the Solicitor General for the state of Michigan who’s defending the law comes in with the justices, i.e. She thinks the fix is in. He’s been to talk to them over lunch. Sure enough, they hardly have any questions for him. Then when she goes to give her argument, Felix Frankfurter, who’s known as a great liberal, harasses her and heckles her from the bench while telling her that the days of chivalry aren’t over. By the way, a great example of a self contradictory victory announcement because he’s saying, you know, we’re living in this great year and women are treated with respect as he’s harassing her. She loses and he writes an extremely disrespectful opinion that’s less than three pages long. He says, This is a rare case where to state the question is to answer it. Can women be excluded? Of course they can. He includes another self-contradictory victory announcement. He says women basically have all the freedoms and all the vices of men, so we don’t have to give them access to this job. Eventually, she gets the last laugh, though. The Supreme Court overturns Gossard in 1976. But that’s actually, she’s not my favorite because eventually she wins. She’s my favorite because she tries and she’s willing to go forward. And I think that we’re not in a feminist moment in American history right now. And the question is how to keep going when you probably won’t win this day or this week, but how to key mobilizing over the long term.

 

Kate Shaw You do end the book with this call for hope and renewed engagement. So I’m curious where you see the most potential for change right now, even in light of that, obviously sober and somewhat pessimistic framing with respect to the actual current moment we’re living in.

 

Jill Hasday I’m actually extremely optimistic long-term. I think in part because, well, okay, let me back up. So I started the book before Roe was overturned. And in my initial introduction, I said something like, you know, women definitely have more rights and opportunities now than they had a half century ago, but there’s still more work to do. And I initially thought the book was gonna be along the lines of there’s been progress, but it’s too slow, too small. And Dobs, the case overturning Roe, really focused my attention on regression and the threat of regression and how many times women’s rights have been rolled back. But what’s very striking to me is how women pushed through. They kept fighting because that’s really the only alternative. I talk about a lot of arenas where we still need reform and to keep fighting, not only teaching, commemoration, political representation. There’s a lot of legislative work to do. Maybe I think the most important is everyday life. One reason these stories have so much power is because people believe them or kind of accept them unconsciously. And I hope that reading the book or just listening to this conversation can help people kind of recognize it. So if you see someone or you read an article that is declaring victory while justifying an unequal president, I think it would be just. That’s the first step like say look what they’re doing it’s declaring victory as a way of justifying what he’s doing. Every advance women have ever achieved has taken generations against ferocious often violent opposition that’s just the reality of the situation. So I’m not minimizing the position we’re in right now as a nation I think we are in a perilous position but I think we can survive.

 

Kate Shaw The book, once again, is We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality. It was out earlier this year, and it is available wherever you get your books. Jill Hasday, thank you so much for joining me today.

 

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

 

Thanks again to Professor Jill Hasday for that conversation. Let us end, as always, with our favorite things.

 

Leah Litman So we wanted to give a shout out to Ali from James for the civil rights work that Ali has been doing as part of the University of Washington School of Laws Civil Rights Clinic under Professor Owens. We hear how hard you’ve been working and on such important work. So thank you.

 

Kate Shaw Couple quick things. Rosalia, who’s a Spanish singer, songwriter, has a new album, and people have known her for a long time. She’s new to me, and she’s amazing, so I’m discovering her back catalog as well as the new album. Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser had a, I think, must-read piece in the Times compiling first-person accounts of the destruction of the Department of Justice, some on the record, some anonymous accounts. I read the novel, Wild Dark Shore, on Leah’s recommendation. I loved it. And I started the nonfiction book, Gods of New York. Kind of about New York in the 1980s. The rise of Donald Trump is part of it, although there hasn’t been much Trump yet, but the book is really fantastic.

 

Leah Litman I have a few recs. One is, Hillary Duff has a new single, Mature, and it is amazing. Second is, Got the News. Wait, can we talk?

 

Melissa Murray Let’s talk about it for one second. Yeah. Who is it about? So some have speculated it’s about Leo DiCaprio because there’s this discussion of the Basque Gap. But I don’t recall her dating him. I do recall her date Joel Madden. Well, also she says like Leo with the Scorpio touch. So it’s not about Leo. Oh, she’s so good because I actually thought she was just sort of making like weird astrological references. I hadn’t. Yeah. Okay. That’s good. That’s Good. I thought she was being very deep there. It’s Joel Madden, then.

 

Leah Litman I mean, that is definitely a possibility, but this song is amazing. It is a bop and is exceptionally topical, given all of the things we have been talking about. Okay. So second recommendation is we received the news that at this year’s Pop Tarts Bowl, there will be six edible mascots, three on team sprinkles and three on Team Swirls. And we can only assume that at least one of them will have to die in the toaster. I love this pop- What the fuck is the Pop-Tarts bowl? Really? Oh my gosh, Kate, you missed this. Anyways, go Google Pop-tart bowl, the like death of Pop- Tart. You’ll love it. Okay, I will. Everything. Anyways, okay. Great. Um Third, I was out in California this week, including at Melissa’s Old Stomping Grounds at Berkeley. And I wanted to give a shout out to some stricties, Srishti, Joanna, and Erin. I even remembered, like Melissa does, to take down names. And the Cupcake and Bake shop, one of them gave me cupcakes from because they knew I liked Magnolia. Loved that. Also to Sarah and Rachel, who I met Rachel on the plane back. I always forget to mention this in the moment, but. If you hear your names, please email me. I would love to send you something small. Also on the California bit, I got to swim with my old swimming team at Stanford, so I wanted to say hi to Tim and Kathleen and Joe. And one more California item, which is I have a review up of Justice Barrett’s book in the LA review of books, so you can check it out. We will include it in the show notes.

 

Kate Shaw This is sneaky because it’s out by the time you’re listening, but it’s actually not out yet. So Melissa and I haven’t read it yet and I’m dying to read it.

 

Melissa Murray Oh, I’ve read it!

 

Kate Shaw It’s actually dropping Saturday. Did you read a draft?

 

Leah Litman Yeah, I offered to share a draft and Melissa said yes.

 

Kate Shaw Ohhhh I missed that email.

 

Leah Litman Check your email, Kate.

 

Melissa Murray Check your email, Kate.

 

Kate Shaw I will.

 

Melissa Murray It’s like pop culture, Kate, you’ve got to actually watch it.

 

Kate Shaw Read about Pop Tarts and Leah’s draft. Well, I’m psyched to read it.

 

Melissa Murray Okay. Among my favorite things, last week I got to participate in the Kettering Foundation’s inaugural democracy prizes. So the Kettering Foundation is a philanthropic organization that awards grants and they’ve been focused a lot on democracy and democracy building institutions, hence the inaugural democracy prize, which was awarded to two laureates. Was awarded posthumously to Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who was killed allegedly at the direction of the Kremlin, as well as Judith Brown Diana Sab of the Advancement Project who is a tremendous civil rights lawyer who has done amazing work, including spearheading the effort on Florida’s Amendment Four, which would restore voting rights to those who had been formerly convicted of felonies. So absolutely amazing to be a part of that evening and to you. Introduced Judith Brown, Diana’s, and just great work all around. The other thing I really enjoyed this week was the Duchess of Sussex’s Harper’s Bazaar cover and interview. And I’m just gonna say, she was really going for a very light, no makeup makeup look and not my personal choice, but I get what she’s doing here. She’s sort of like, this is who I am, this is me authentically and without all of the artifice and I love that for her. And it’s a very interesting profile. I thought she came off really well. And The clothes are actually amazing. She is doing some very high fashion things, and any of that. My third favorite thing is the Mother Jones profile of veteran and ICE antagonist, Buzz Grambo. He is an individual who lives in Baltimore. He basically follows ICE around the city on a scooter. He’s upgraded his scooter motor so that he can chase them faster. And he just documents their abuses and warns city residents of their presence, like Paul Revere. And it’s just a really great reminder that we can all push back. Speaking of some great items and a high fashion profile in Harper’s Bazaar, if you’re thinking about a high-fashion moment for yourself, well, that means it’s time for you to get on over to the Crooked Store. This is the best time to shop because not only do you get to avoid your MAGA family by getting online and shopping at the Crooked Store, the deals are actually great. The vibes, as the kids say, are immaculate. You can grab holiday gifts for all of the libs and pod lovers in your life, and you can pick up something for yourself while the best sales of the year are on. You can get brand new stocking stuffers and a classic tee that you’ve had your eye on. Everything is on sale. This is the glow up you have been waiting for. So just head on over to crooked.com forward slash store to shop the sale, get your glow up and get ready for everything 2026 has to offer.

 

Leah Litman In case my favorite things, didn’t make it clear, love California, which means.

 

Melissa Murray Wooo woo best coast.

 

Leah Litman We are super, super excited to be headed to that best coast, west coast. We are finally bringing the podcast off your headphones and onto a real stage. We’re coming to San Francisco on March 6 at the Herb’s Theater and to Los Angeles on March 7 at the Palace Theater. Gift a ticket for the holidays or bring a friend you can snag those tickets at crooked.com slash events

 

Melissa Murray Berkeley/Oakland folks, don’t be mad that we’re going to San Francisco. The Bay Area is broad and you are part of it. Get yourselves across that bridge to the Herbst Theatre. We will see you there.

 

Kate Shaw Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked Media production, hosted and executive produced by Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and me, Kate Shaw. Produced and edited by Melody Rowell, Michael Goldsmith is our associate producer, audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landes, music by Eddie Cooper, production support from Madeleine Herringer, Katie Long, and Ari Schwartz, Matt DeGroot is our head of production, and thanks to our digital team, Ben Hethcoat and Joe Matoski. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny on YouTube to catch full episodes. 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 app So you never miss an episode and if you want to help other people find the show, please rate and review us. It really helps