Supreme Betrayal: How the Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Have Failed America

About Supreme Betrayal: How the Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Have Failed America

Sitting in their marble palace, dressed in their black robes, Supreme Court Justices would like us to believe that they are wise and disinterested oracles dispensing words of truth and justice. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every episode week, Mark Tushnet and Mike Seidman, two renown constitutional law scholars, lift the curtain and show us how the men and women there who sit on the High Court have been manipulating us.

Publisher

Mark Tushnet, Louis Michael Seidman

Category

government · history · news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Oct 2024

Latest episode

29 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

47 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   29 Jul 2026

   Slaughtering the Administrative State

   Using the Court’s decision allowing the President to remove members of independent agencies from their offices we range rather widely—into a discussion of departmentalism, the strategic problems facing democrats after they expel autocrats from office, and the choice between restoring the pre-Trump administrative state and reconstructing a new administrative state with a new balance among expertise, political control, and direct popular participation in decision-making in a response to some sensible impulses underlying contemporary populism.

2. 

   7 Jul 2026

   Religion, Federalism, and the Boundary Problem

   We use a recent decision by the Fifth Circuit upholding a Texas statute requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms as a jumping off point to discuss not only the religion clauses but a much more general problem of constitutional theory, which we frame as a problem of federalism but actually ranges much more broadly: What body of people gets to make decisions that govern “themselves”? City councils, state legislatures, Congress? Mark proposes a partial solution in which the courts set a “default rule” identifying the first mover and then that body can choose from the entire range of decision-makers to set policy. Mike finds this interesting but is skeptical and, as Mark works out the account, wonders whether the courts contribute anything to making policy under Mark’s scheme. (Mark thinks they do!)

3. 

   19 Jun 2026

   The Slush Fund Kerfuffle

   We discuss the slush fund kerfuffle with Professor Smauel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services and has written a forthcoming article on slush funds. One theme is that Trump’s lawyers got a decent way toward giving J6 rioters access to federal funds in a way consistent with the formal law but muffed it at the level of detail. Another is that it’s really silly—and says something bad about some kinds of discourse about this sort of thing—to focus on legal formality. And, if you hold out until the end you get one of Mark’s favorite quotations about lawyers, from Carl Sandburg.

Who has been a guest on Supreme Betrayal: How the Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Have Failed America

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Professor Louis Michael Seidman
• David Luban
• Genevieve Lakier
• Richard Re
• Will Baude

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.6 / 5

15 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 40 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

68

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

Contact Supreme Betrayal: How the Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Have Failed America

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.