Our Long Road Out of Autocracy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Strict Scrutiny is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It's everywhere right now. The celebration of America's 250th, and we're in the thick of it this month. Christian nationalists are using this milestone not to unite, but to divide. They're pushing the lie that America was founded to be a quote unquote Christian nation, where just one religious movement gets to decide who fully belongs, instead of the truth that America was founded as a democracy committed to liberty and justice for all.
The idea that America was founded as a Christian nation is propaganda, not patriotism. It's a dangerous lie meant to justify censorship, discrimination, attacks on public schools, assaults on LGBTQ plus rights, restrictions on reproductive freedom, and government favoritism toward one extremist version of Christianity. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is here to fight back against this dangerous and egregious misrepresentation of our founding documents.
AU fights daily for everyone's ability to live as themselves and to believe as they choose, so long as they don't harm others. It's a novel idea in the day and age when almost every day we're seeing Christian nationalism weaponize a faith to attack individual freedoms across our country. So do something patriotic this summer as you're dodging the propaganda flying at you from all angles. Become a member of Americans United. By supporting AU, you're committing to standing up and protecting church state separation in every area of life. You can learn more about how you can support AU and the protection of everyone's rights at au.org/crooked.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:36)
Mr. Chief Justice, please report. It's an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:51)
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** (2:18)
Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. I am your lone regular host today, Kate Shaw, and I'm delighted to be joined by a returning guest and friend of the show, Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton and one of the world's leading scholars of democratic backsliding, autocracy and the rule of law. Kim, welcome back to Strict Scrutiny.

**Kim Lane Scheppele** (2:42)
Great to be here.

**Kate Shaw** (2:43)
So for those of you who don't know Kim, let me just say a few words about her before we dive in. Her research examines the rise and fall of constitutional government and she is recently focused on the rise of autocratic leaders who are elected on these populist political platforms and who then use the law to undermine constitutional institutions and democracy. Her comparative scholarship and commentary is both broad and deep, and her work on Hungary has been particularly instructive in recent years. And we're going to get to that. But Kim, as you know, we typically begin our shows with breaking legal news. So I think if it's okay, we will start there and then turn to our deep dive on what's going on in Hungary right now and what we here in the United States can learn from it.

**Kim Lane Scheppele** (3:26)
Great. Wonderful.

**Kate Shaw** (3:28)
Okay. So let's dive in. It has only been a week since Leah and Melissa and I sat down to take stock of the Supreme Court term that just ended.
So before we turn to this last week's news, Kim, I haven't had a chance to really get your take on the term, right? So whether that's the opinion narrowly invalidating Trump's birthright citizenship executive order that came down in the last day or its decisions handing him new power over independent agency heads with the big exception of the Fed. So those are just the terms in general. Before we turn to breaking news, Kim, what are your big takeaways from Scotus as a court watcher with a very particular perspective?

**Kim Lane Scheppele** (4:05)
Well, first of all, thanks for having me on and thanks for starting there because in my background, I worked for four years at the Hungarian Constitutional Court. I worked for one year at the Russian Constitutional Court. These are both courts that got captured by the autocratic leaders that came in and decided that rule of law was a tool that they could use against their opponents. So I know a lot about captured courts, and my conclusion at the end of this term is that the US is living with a captured court, okay? Now, why do I say that? I mean, captured courts, sort of like clocks, can be right twice a day. I mean, captured courts don't just rubber stamp what an executive does because the captured courts have to maintain the fiction that they're still courts, that they're still independent, they're still doing law somehow.