It’s not just abortion rights that hang precariously in the balance on the US Supreme Court’s scales of justice but also voting rights and civil rights, the environment, political transparency, public health and the very nature of our democracy.
That alarm — provoked by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement by Amy Coney Barrett — is being sounded not by a political operative or pundit but by a veteran Supreme Court watcher, the New York Times reporter and columnist who covered 29 court sessions and spent more than forty years analyzing the Court’s decisions, personalities and traditions.
Linda Greenhouse joins us to discuss her new book, Justice on the Brink, about the shift in power when justices with new philosophies gained a supermajority in the highest court in the land; about the crucial struggle between doctrinaire conservatives and gradualist Chief Justice John Roberts; and to address the fundamental question of whether the center will hold or whether the Court now belongs to Donald Trump.
Linda Greenhouse retired after a 40-year career at The New York Times and is currently the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and president of the American Philosophical Society.
An attorney at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, Floyd Abrams is an expert on constitutional law and has argued 13 cases before the Supreme Court.