Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show, Dahlia Lithwick says “The tide is turning.”  She will analyze three key court cases where Trump suffered major defeats, defeats which are likely to have an “exponential effect”
on other judges.  But first: Sherrod Brown talks about winning back the working class – That’s coming up, in a minute.
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It’s time to talk politics with Sherrod Brown. Of course, he was the senior senator from Ohio, served 18 years, first elected in 2006, re-elected twice. For years, he was the only Democrat to win statewide office in Ohio. Then last year, when Kamala Harris lost Ohio by 11 points, Sherrod Brown also lost, but only by 3.6 points. He could run again next year, in 2026, when Ohio will have an open Senate seat – or he could run for governor. In the meantime, he started a nonprofit, The Dignity of Work Institute, dedicated to the central theme of his political life. Sherrod Brown, welcome back.

Sherrod Brown: Thank you, Jon, very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

JW: The big question for all of us, of course, is how the Democrats can win back working-class voters who have been supporting Trump. Over the last couple of decades, you’ve done a lot better than most Democrats at winning working class votes, even while your state was turning red. How did you do it?

SB: Well, I start with this — I don’t see politics as left or right. I see it as whose side you on? And even during this tariff debate, it’s important that we understand that workers should be at the table, that workers should be making these decisions, that in too many cases, Washington says, “Well, here’s what our program is. Here’s what our proposals are. We’ve got to go out and sell them to workers.” And that’s not how you do it. You listen.

I think people are coming to the conclusion that the economy’s not measured by inflation rate and unemployment only. It’s measured by how well a worker’s doing.  We see workers, increasingly as profits go up, as executive compensation explodes, workers are more productive, but the workers aren’t sharing in the wealth they created. If you talk in those terms and you listen to workers, it means better policy.  It means better politics.

JW: And how do you explain the fact that Trump did so well last year with working people in Ohio?

SB: Well, I think voters wanted change. They wanted change in ’16 and they got a different party. They wanted change in ’20; they got a different party.  They wanted change in ’24, and I don’t think that Democrats recognized that enough. I don’t think Democrats understood that you’ve got to talk to workers, you don’t talk down to them. You bring them into the discussion.
And one of the issues, and I know we’ll get to this at some point, Jon, is the issue of trade. Years ago when NAFTA passed, that was my first real big vote in Congress, in 1993, I was a freshman and I just remember I was leading the freshman class in opposition to NAFTA.  And a more senior member guy named Bill Richardson, whom I liked — he was supporting the administration, pro-NAFTA, and he would say to me, he called me ‘Brownie,’ the only guy that’s ever called me ‘Brownie.’ He said, “Brownie, why is it? We’re in recess. We go home and my side loses votes.” And I said, “Well, Bill, it’s because voters don’t want NAFTA — in huge numbers.”
So in the end, I think voters, working-class voters, and I say that very broadly, working-class voters, whether you punch a clock or work for tips or swipe a badge or take care of an aging parent or a sick spouse or raising children, workers, they really think that they are left out of this discussion. I think workers mostly thought that they expect Republicans to sell them out because Republicans are the party of corporate interests. But when Democrats sell them out, it seems like a betrayal. And even in my race this year, 20, 30 years after that passage of NAFTA, I heard in places like Dayton and the Mahoning Valley, two places particularly hard hit by NAFTA, I still heard mention of that, and they blame Democrats — even though it was a bipartisan.  Frankly, it’s a bunch of complicit politicians in both parties that sold them out.

JW: Of course Trump says his tariffs, especially taxing imports from China, will restore American manufacturing. We, of course, are eager to restore American manufacturing. Do you think Trump’s tariffs will help do that?

SB: No, I think Trump’s tariffs are not thought through. They’re scatterbrained, they’re inconsistent. You aim tariffs.  I have supported, there’s something called the International Trade Commission that I have testified in front of in my time in Washington, maybe, I don’t know, 25 times, maybe more, probably more than that. And I’ve gone to support tariffs aimed at countries who cheat and where Americans are disadvantaged. So a tariff might be steel with Mexico or China, it might be washing machines with Turkey, where countries are selling things in here. American workers can win on a level playing field, but so often it isn’t. But you don’t aim tariffs on products that in the U.S. we can’t grow, like bananas. That only raises prices. You don’t aim tariffs at countries that frankly have standards of living where their workers are well-paid and their workers are protected with good environmental and worker safety standards. You don’t aim at Canada or France. Generally, you aim those at countries that cheat. Trump is doing this across the board. He doesn’t really understand what he’s doing in that case.
But the note of caution there, Jon, is don’t go back. It’s not just two choices. It’s either Trump’s scatterbrained tariffs that are aimed all over the place, or go back to the neoliberal trade economics that screwed workers. There is another option. The other option is to do this right. It’s bring workers to the table. It’s aim tariffs at those countries and those companies that cheat, those countries that cheat usually.  And it’s passing any laws that help workers. And that’s why I don’t want, while Democrats rightly and many other people oppose Trump’s all his whole tariff regiment, I don’t want to go back to what it was because workers intuitively understand that they’ve gotten screwed by these.
And let me give you the best example. I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, a small industrial city, and most of my classmates, their parents worked, they were union workers. They were steel workers, rubber workers, auto workers, electrical workers, or they were sons and daughters of the tradespeople that get those plants running — the pipe fitters and the iron workers and the electricians and the bricklayers. And they saw, by the time I was probably 25, more and more of these jobs were moving south. The executives, the companies realized they could make big profits by moving to not just non-union, but to anti-union states like South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi.
But that wasn’t good enough for corporate America, so they lobbied Congress starting with Bush Senior, maybe even a little before that, they could go overseas because the reason we have this trade problem with China, it’s not initially China, it’s the fact that U.S. corporations saw an opportunity.
They passed MFN with China. It was originally called Most Favored Nation status. They realized that didn’t sound very good.  So they changed to ‘Permanent Normal Trade Relations.’ But that’s the reason China has had so much they export — because a company will shut down in Mansfield, Ohio or Shelby or Dayton or Gallipolis, Ohio, move their production overseas, get all kinds of advantages, low wages, weak environmental laws, no worker safety costs, and then sell those products back in the United States.
And that was the intent of corporate America. It’s still their intent. And when Trump does what he’s doing and the choice is either these tariffs or you go back to neoliberal economics, business still wins. They still get their way at the expense of the American worker.

JW: I want to talk specifically about Joe Biden’s trade and tariff policy. He had some pretty high tariffs on a few things, but he combined those tariffs with government support for the creation of new manufacturing capacity in specific industries, electric vehicles in particular, and the batteries that power them. And then he stimulated demand for American made e-cars with rebates, and he raised tariffs on imported batteries. Do you think Joe Biden basically had it right? Do we need more of what Joe Biden was trying to do?

SB: First of all, we need workers to be part of these decisions, and that’s union and non-union workers alike. More of them were brought to the table.
I think what was missing though is that we still continue to talk about, we grade everything in our economy on what’s the inflation rate, and what’s the unemployment rate? Two very important indices, but not good enough — because there are, when you say the unemployment rate’s down to 2 or 3%, but a lot of those workers have to have a second job because more money’s going out than coming in, that’s not a successful economic policy.
But I did want to see us go in the direction of a real industrial policy, not this trickle-down stuff that right-wingers do. You cut taxes to the rich, it trickles down. It’s what Trump’s going to do, it’s what Trump did in his first term. It’s what Bush did. It’s what they all do. You don’t want to go back to that, but I think it was steps in the right direction.
But I also hear people, well, I won’t go into that, but I think it’s a good start. We need an industrial policy. We can’t do it the way Trump’s doing clearly. I mean, Trump’s not even talking about an industrial policy.

JW: I want to talk about immigration, which of course was one reason why a lot of working people supported Trump. They were concerned, they were worried, and some believed that immigrants take jobs away from native-born people. And of course, it was in Springfield, Ohio that J.D Vance said Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs. What do you say to voters about the place of immigrants in America today?

SB: Well, it’s clear he was lying about that. And sometimes politicians that lie get rewarded for it, and we’ve seen a long history of that from time to time in this country.
I’ll answer with a story real quick. I was talking to, most of your listeners know this, that people in the trades go through a four or five or six-year apprentice program in the trades, meaning millwrights or pipefitters or bricklayers or roofers or electricians, and they sign up, often in their early twenties, an apprentice program. The apprenticeship pays pretty good wage from the start, often 18 or $20 an hour. Hard work, challenging work, dangerous work. We still see more construction workers hurt or die in the job than almost any other profession.
Over four or five or six years, these apprentice programs result in a journeyman’s card for the bricklayer or the electrician or the pipefitter or the ironworker. And then they’re often making 35 or $40 an hour and they get retirement benefits and health benefits right from the start. One other thing, you don’t have college debt because you’re paid during your training program, during your apprenticeship. In the case of the man in Maryland in El Salvador, he was a union bricklayer, I believe.

JW: Albrego Garcia.

SB: Yeah, he was in one of the apprentice programs. But anyway, so I was talking to a bricklayer in Columbus who told me that he has started one of his bricklayer apprentice programs classes. He hired a dozen Haitians from Springfield, Ohio, and he stopped, and he said, “These are the best workers,” he’s ever seen because they’re not going to commit crimes because they want to stay in this country and they’re working hard because they want to get ahead in this country. And that’s not every case. I understand that. But when you give people an opportunity, they more often than not deliver on it.
And that story, I mean, this was a typical bricklayer guy that told me this story that he had done training for a long time, and he saw that class as pretty remarkable.

JW: I want to ask about your defeat in 2024. Your opponent ran ads accusing you of supporting trans athletes. The Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars on TV ads about you and trans athletes. Seems like that succeeded at distracting voters from the kind of issues you’re talking about. What is to be done about this kind of politics?

SB: Well, I was walking my dog right before the show and then it started raining and my dog hates rain.  I’m not wild about it either, but I’m walking my dog. I went by a house, a yard sign, and it said, “Hate has no place in this home.” And I mean, that’s what people do.
I came out early in a fairly conservative House district in support of marriage equality 25 years ago. And my opponent just went after me, went after me, went after me and it may have cost me votes, but not anymore. So they went from going after people on gay rights to now going after people on transgender. That’s what they do. I didn’t lose because of that. They ran eight different ads on transgender. They ran maybe that many again on immigration. We answered those ads. We didn’t lose because of that.
We lost in the end because Trump did an ad saying, a series of ads saying, “A vote for Sharrod Brown’s a vote against me.” And it didn’t matter who my opponent was in my state where Harris lost by — you said at the beginning of the show — Harris lost by about 12 points. I couldn’t overcome, that because people are not ticket splitters the way they used to be. In fact, I believe there are only three states now in the entire Senate that have a split delegation, one Republican, one Democrat. Every other state is two D’s or two R’s, so I could not overcome that vote for Trump against Harris.
Trump had carried Ohio twice by eight points in ’16 and ’20. We would’ve won if it had stayed at eight.  I didn’t think the bottom would drop out the way it did in the Harris campaign and in Ohio.

JW: Well, a lot of us think we need you back in the Senate, working people need you back in the Senate. Ohio will have a special election next year to fill out the remainder of the Senate term of J.D Vance. We also know the governor’s race will be wide open. The incumbent Republican governor will have served two terms, can’t run for a third. Governors can do some things a senator can’t do. I’m pretty sure you’ve been asked this question before — what do you think about running in 2026 for governor or for the Senate?

SB: I’m considering it, but I really don’t know. I’m not being evasive. It’s been a long time since I’ve been out of office, and I want to just think about my life this way. My wife, and I’m calling you from Cleveland, we’re in the process of moving to Columbus. We’ve always been in the Cleveland area, but Columbus is the home of five of our grandchildren. And instead of a two-and-a-half-hour drive, we’ll have an 11-minute drive. So over the course of the spring and the summer, my family will sit down and figure this out if I want to do it again, either for governor or the Senate. So as I said, I’m not being evasive. I just don’t know yet.

JW: Sherrod Brown – for decades he’s been saying that working people built this country and are working harder than ever, but have less and less to show for it. They need to benefit from the wealth they created. That’s why he’s a hero of ours. Sherrod, thanks for all your work – and thanks for talking with us today.

SB: Jon, what a pleasure. Thanks for your show, and what you’re doing.
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JW: What comes after Trump’s first hundred days of lawless attempts to dismantle everything, and what comes after several weeks where the courts blocked almost every single illegal executive order of his, and after thousands of demonstrations and protests filled the streets all over the place?
Dahlia Lithwick thinks what is happening now is that the tide is turning. She’s an award-winning journalist and author who writes about the courts and the law for Slate, and she hosts the podcast Amicus, one of my favorites. She’s also written for The New York Times, The American Prospect, The Washington Post, and The Nation. Her book, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America, was a New York Times Best Seller. We talked about it here. Dahlia Lithwick, welcome back.

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s good to be with you, Jon.

JW: With more than a hundred lawsuits challenging Trump’s initiatives, and with Trump losing in court all the time, it’s impossible to keep up with everything that’s happening, but in the last couple of weeks there have been some major developments. I want to look at three of them with you, starting on Thursday when a US District court judge in the Southern District of Texas named Fernando Rodriguez Jr. issued a ruling about Trump’s effort to deport Venezuelan migrants using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The judge ruled that the Alien Enemies Act cannot be the basis for deporting any of them. And for the first time, this was not a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction. This was a permanent injunction. How big was that?

DL: I think it was huge. And I’m going to say the part that judges hate the most first, which is it matters that he was a Trump appointee, and it matters that he’s in the Southern District of Texas – because this is not a person who you might have just said was this sort of firebrand liberal who was going to do what turned into, as you said, the first ruling on the merits.
We’ve had a bunch of judges enjoin the use of the Alien Enemies Act and said, “This is not an appropriate vehicle. We are not in a war, or an invasion and you cannot use this to deport gang members.” But to have a judge do it on the merits, to have him dig deep, as he did, and look at the statute, look at the uses of the language, and to essentially come out with a purely textualist, originalist rebuke that said, “Listen, I don’t know if you can come back with another reading of this statute. I’m not going to tell you under the major questions doctrine, as it’s called, that the president doesn’t have all sorts of powers. All I can tell you is that I, as a judge, think this is not a correct reading of the statute.”
And then he went and did one more thing that I think is really important, Jon, which is he said, “I’m going to create a class so that all of these folks in Texas can, instead of seriatim bringing habeas corpus petitions and having to find a lawyer,” the government’s giving them a couple of hours to contest the findings that the government is making, he’s saying, “we can do this as a class.” And that is also hugely consequential because there was no way to effectuate the relief that the courts had given up until that point. And so, I think the one-two punch of having, I’ll say it again, a Trump judge come out and say, “On the merits, you may not use this statute for these purposes. And then moreover, here is the relief that I am going to make sure that these petitioners can seek.”
And so I think, listen, it’s going to go to the Fifth Circuit. I know that’s your next question. That is not a court that has been apt to say ‘no’ to Donald Trump, but I think that having a district court judge in Texas say ‘no’ to Donald Trump on the merits is a very, very big deal. And I think for those of us who are really, really wondering if this kind of what I’ve been calling Calvin ball, moving deportees from one district to another and turning buses around and doing it in the dark of night and changing the rules and winking and nodding and saying, “Oh, we could ask to get someone back, but we don’t want to,” it seems like this is the judiciary saying, “That stops here.”

JW: A lot of my friends say, “Of course the Alien Enemies Act doesn’t apply. It’s about wartime invasions. Trump’s claim was obviously ridiculous. This ruling was a no-brainer.” What do you say to them?

DL: It is certainly hugely tempting to say these wins aren’t real wins because all these judges are doing is saying that which is completely obvious, the emperor has no clothes, the president does not have this power. But it’s not just score one in the W column. It’s not just a win for truth. I think if you had asked me three months ago, a hundred days ago plus, if it was going to be the judicial branch, the Article III life-appointed judges who would be at the very forefront of the Trump resistance, I would have laughed and laughed — because they are not bred for this, right? Most federal judges are kind of dorks. They do their work in obscurity. They live in a world of law clerks and books. They do not exist to be on the hustings defending democracy.
And you and I both remember from the first Trump administration that people were on the streets and they were protesting, and that corporations were much, much more apt to take a role, and the academy was apt to take a role. And we are now in this very strange world where a lot of those entities that have been at the forefront of the Trump resistance the first time around have gone very quiet — or, I know we’re going to talk about it, are starting to find their way back, and that the folks who have thus really been the bulwark is the judiciary is really astounding.
And I think that the turn here that is really important and worth noting is this is a collective action problem, right? That every time a judge says “No” to Donald Trump, democracy gets its wings. And it is really, really true, I think, that judges looking around, whether it’s at Beryl Howell, at Judge Boasberg, at Judge Rodriguez, whatever it is, as they look around and they say – Judge Kuhnauer — We are seeing across the ideological and political spectrum judges saying “No.” And I absolutely believe that that kind of judicial courage is contagious, and I think we should give huge credit to the first couple of judges out of the chute, but also credit to the fact that, and it’s hard to explain this, but I think it’s exponential — so that it’s not just that it’s contagious, it’s that judges who two weeks ago were saying, “I don’t know. This doesn’t seem right. I’m not really sure, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt,” two weeks later are saying, “I’m ready to find somebody in contempt. I think you’re lying to me. I can’t trust the Justice Department anymore.”
So it’s not just that the number of judges standing up is astounding, it’s that each individual judge is more and more and more apt to say, “No, not in my courtroom.”

JW: The second significant case I want to talk about is the one dealing with Trump’s attack on the law firms that have worked for Democrats. He had that sweeping executive order that suspended security clearances for the firms’ employees, barred their attorneys from access to government buildings and officials, and ended government contracts with the firms. And the first to be targeted was Perkins Coie, which had represented the Hillary Clinton campaign. This was a case where a US District Judge, Beryl Howell, again, did not issue a temporary restraining order, but permanently blocked the executive orders issued by Trump punishing law firms for representing clients for causes that he dislikes.
I just want to quote her ruling briefly. “No American president has ever before issued executive orders like the one in this lawsuit. In a cringeworthy twist on the theatrical phrase ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’ Trump’s executive order takes the approach of ‘Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like.'”
This was summary judgment. How big was that?

DL: Again, this is a hugely consequential decision. Just to unpack what summary judgment means, there wasn’t weeks of trial on this. She essentially had to find that there was no plausible argument that the Trump administration could make that would save this. That’s what summary judgment means. So it is like ‘under no set of facts can you do this’ — that’s how broad it is.
And as you know, this is a 102-page order in which she more or less says – she doesn’t stop at, “You can’t target a law firm on the basis of who they have defended.” She really turns this into a kind of a love song to the role of lawyers in a democracy, and she essentially even calls into question the law firms that have taken the deal from Trump.
I would use this as an example of that idea that it’s exponential, right? She’s not just saying, “You can’t do this.” She’s saying, “No, this is a dagger to the heart of the profession. This is a dagger to the heart of the rule of law and the independence of law firms,” and that “firms who kowtow are selling out this core value of what it means to do zealous representation and core First Amendment values.”
Would she have written an opinion like this a month ago? She might have. She’s pretty sassy. But I think it’s this idea that you’re seeing judges across the board go way beyond the four corners of what they have to do to get the job done, and excoriating the administration for the actions it’s taken, and naming it as lawless — I think that’s a huge, big deal.

JW: The third case I want to bring up is the Supreme Court order that came on Saturday, April 19th at one in the morning. This was the Supreme Court, not a district court here. Presumably, this was from John Roberts. telling Trump not to deport that group of Venezuelan immigrants in Texas that were already on buses heading for Northern Texas — from where they could presumably be flown to prison in El Salvador.
Elie Mystal wrote about this for The Nation. He’s had nothing but contempt for the Roberts court up to now, but he wrote about this one, “The decision to issue this ruling when it could have opted to hide behind technicalities and courtesies tells me that the justices who ruled in the majority were fed up with Trump’s games. Trump was attempting to make an end run around the Supreme Court’s authority, and not only did the court tell him ‘No,’ it told him ‘No’ in the middle of the night.”
Elie Mystal called this “an unprecedented rebuke.” I wonder if you agree with that.

DL: I really do, and I think that unless you are one of those weirdos like Elie and me who watch the court for fun and profit, it’s hard to understand how many layers of outrage were manifest here, right? Because at the end of the day, it just looks like there’s a late-night, very brief Supreme Court ruling. But then when you look at the common practices of the court, Jon, they don’t issue rulings at one in the morning. They don’t hustle things through. Even when they’re acting at their speediest, they don’t act this quickly.
And, this is the most important thing and I think Elie flags this and Mark Stern and I flagged it on Amicus, they didn’t wait for Samuel Alito to file a dissent. It took until the next day or late that day, late on Saturday, for Alito to file his dissent. It is a cardinal principle of Supreme Court good fellowship that you wait until the dissent is penned to release the opinion.
The fact that they rushed this out the door knowing that Alito was going to dissent and that they did it anyway because they knew, as you said, that the clock was ticking and that the game here was to get these folks out of the country, and now we know the game is you ship them to El Salvador and then you throw your arms up and say, “We have no jurisdiction. There’s nothing we can do. Once they’re there, it’s a matter for President Bukele to resolve,” we know that’s the game.
And the fact that the court had pretty explicitly understood that there was a ticking countdown clock here and didn’t wait for the dissent to be filed, to me signals exactly what you just said, Elie noted, which is this is a court that knew it was dealing with somebody who was trying to play fast and loose with the rules, trying to take advantage of a judicial system that – I often joke there’s turtles built into the architecture all over the Supreme Court building. Literal turtles, right? You go out into the courtyard, there’s turtles. They pride themselves on being slow and steady. And so when the court chooses to be, to drag out the metaphor, the hare in this situation and to act really quickly, so much so that it’s willing to sacrifice its own internal rules of the road, they’re telling you something really significant, again, not just about the merits of the case, about these late-night deportation flights, but also saying, “We are not even going to let our own colleagues run out the clock on that” — that is earthshaking conduct.
Let’s just remember this is the same John Roberts Court that gave us immunity. This is the same John Roberts Court that gave us the Colorado opinion that wouldn’t allow Colorado to take Trump off the ballot. In every single way, this is the Court that is the architect of the lawlessness we are in right now. And so, for the Court to go outside the four corners of the opinion and say, “Not on our watch, Mr. President” — that is a huge, huge seismic shift.

JW: Trump says these people he’s trying to deport are murderers and drug dealers. Their defenders say they aren’t. Is there any way to decide who’s right about this?

DL: Why yes! We call it ‘the judicial system.’ I mean, this is the point that, again, another non-liberal squish, J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit, said, when this case got up to a very, very conservative judge, and he was the one who authored the opinion that said, “If, in fact, you are going to prevail on all of your claims, Mr. President, and every single one of them is a gang member and a sex trafficker and a senior leader in this gang or the other, show us in court and you’ll win. But you can’t just wink and nod and show AI-doctored images of tattoos and tell us that somebody is in a gang.”
And so I think what we are hearing, and we’ve heard it increasingly over the last week and a half, and again this last weekend from the President, we can’t give due process to millions of people, right?

JW: Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. First of all, do immigration courts try murder cases?

DL: [Laughter] No, they don’t. I mean, I think the question, it’s like a fanciful question, but your correct question is if all of these folks have heaps and heaps of criminal charges against them, they go through the criminal process. They’re not immune from the criminal process. And more pointedly, I would say, than that, an awful lot of the folks that we are now seeing deported are people who actually were doing the process, right?

JW: Yes.

DL: They were showing up to immigration courts as scheduled, as demanded. They were in fact going through the hoops that the courts demand of them, and then they’re getting picked up in immigration court for showing up for their opinion. So it’s this funny – I think you’re right to highlight not just that this isn’t the right venue to say, “These people are all killers,” but that in fact they’re actually doing the steps of this process to become legal immigrants to the country and they’re getting picked up for that too.
But just the very, very last thing I would say is that it’s essentially important that when you hear Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or other proxies say, “Oh, we don’t have time to do due process for people. We don’t have time to have a trial for everyone. You just have to, wink, wink, believe us when we say they’re all gang members,” I just want to quote back Judge Patricia Millett from the D.C. circuit who said in one of these cases, “If that’s true, they could deport me.” And if that’s true, Jon, they could deport you, right? If we just have to take their word for it that a gang member is a gang member because they say so, nobody in America, citizen or non-citizen, is safe.

JW: We started out by saying you think the tide is turning. In part that’s because of all the court activity we’ve been talking about here, but that’s only part of the reason you think the tide is turning. Let’s talk very briefly about the other part.

DL: I think the other part is some of what we saw last week, Jon, which was the May Day marches, the Tesla marches, the people showing up at town halls. I mean, this is where let’s credit Rachel Maddow at MSNBC who’s really been highlighting the protest movement that gets no coverage in the corporate media. And I think that the fact is that while we can express real disappointment and frustration at leadership in Congress, supine leadership that have taken a long time, I think, to find their way, what we can say is that this is a genuine, ground-up, grassroots movement that is being organized by incredible groups, I can’t name all of them, Lawyers for Good Government and Swing Left and just incredible groups that are essentially saying, “Put your body on the street. This is how we fight back autocracy.”
And I think that it feels destabilizing that we don’t have a leader telling us what to do right now, and that makes us feel as though there’s not a plan. The fact that the plan is coming from the ground up is very important.
And then the last thing I think I said in that piece, but I think it’s really a marker of a shift. A few weeks ago, this is the law firm piece that you mentioned with Perkins Coie, when Paul Weiss took the deal and a couple of other law firms took the deal and we saw young lawyers quitting, young associates saying, “I’m out. I’m not working here anymore,” and then we started to see senior people quitting, the absolute trend line we have seen across the boards is that while last week there were a couple of hundred signatories to the amicus briefs in support of Perkins Coie, Susman Godfrey, another firm that refused to take the deal, there were twice as many signatories in the amicus briefs, and the next law firm that refuses to take the deal, and this is why Beryl Howell’s ruling is so important because now it’s bolstered by a judicial order, there’ll be a thousand law firms.
So I think the trend lines are really important, and I think that the thing that we coded wrongly as apathy, public apathy, I think was public freakout. I think it was paralysis and a need to shake something off. But when I look at the trend, whether it’s driving Elon Musk out of D.C. on a rail, whether it’s the polling numbers around the tariffs, Trump’s popularity and approval ratings, that all trends, right? I want to be really clear. I am not a Pollyanna. What we are facing is existential, but what we know, just to go back to Poland and Hungary and other authoritarian takeovers is what we know is that the thing that is the game-changer is people putting their bodies on the streets. And we’re starting to see that happen, and I think that we should absolutely not gloss over how consequential that burgeoning movement has become.

JW: “This thing is finally trending in the right direction” – Dahlia Lithwick, she writes about the courts for Slate and hosts the Slate podcast Amicus. It’s really good.  Dahlia, thank you for talking with us today.

DL: It’s always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.