“I have to say, that is the podcaster’s curse,” co-host Molly Jong-Fast says to open the latest episode of The New Abnormal, referring to the fact that the pod’s previous episode was recorded just before, and released right after, the bombshell Supreme Court leak. “May you never live in times when the news cycle moves so quickly that you can be completely out of date two days later.”
“Definitely,” co-host Andy Levy remarks dryly. “The worst thing about that news was that it broke after our podcast.”
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The revelation of the court’s 98-page draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, “straight out of the Federalist Society playbook” as Andy puts it, is liable to completely fracture the nation. “We’re about to have a country that has radically different laws in radically different states,” Molly says. “And I think Republicans are extremely excited about that. I don’t think they’ve completely explored all the consequences.”
So: What happens now? A certain portion of the population will certainly feel emboldened by Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion, as Andy observes. “Those are the people who are gonna look at this and say, ‘Hey, we got this one. Let’s move on to the next one,’” he says. “They’re not just gonna quietly say, ‘Well, we got Roe. So we don’t really care about Griswold [v. Connecticut] and Lawrence v. Texas and all that.’ No, this is a victory for them. And when you win, what do you do? You keep going. You don’t pull out—no pun intended.”
Guest of the pod Jay Michaelson is inclined to agree. A Daily Beast legal affairs columnist and former Supreme Court clerk, Michaelson has been watching the leak closely—he even re-read Roe over the weekend. And Alito’s draft decision “completely annihilates the right to privacy,” in his estimation. “It says it doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t have any basis,” he adds, meaning that everything else under that umbrella, including contraception, same-sex marriage, and even interracial marriage could be next.
“For people who follow the court obsessively, this is zero percent surprising,” Michaelson says. “But obviously it should be shocking—and it is shocking for everybody. But for me, the writing’s been on the wall for years, if not decades.” The one off-ramp that Democrats might have before the Supreme Court recesses at the end of June is to get it together and pass a national reproductive rights bill within the next month, according to Michaelson, which “we should have had a decade ago, or two decades ago.”
To counter all the bad news, even if just for a moment, Molly turns to Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister and former campaign manager, and now a memoirist with a memoir, Growing Up Biden, that hit shelves last month. In their wide-ranging conversation, the “Biden Whisperer,” as she’s affectionately known, discusses running the 1972 “children’s crusade” that catapulted her brother into elected office for the first time.
“We had no money. We had no influence. We knew no one in power,” Owens, who was then 26 years old, tells Molly. “Our Democratic Party was in disarray here in Delaware… So, you know, there’s a value to not knowing what you don’t know, and we didn’t know what we were supposed to do. So we just jumped in.”
Things are slightly different now. Owens tries not to tune into the news too often for the sake of her mental health, but there was one particular moment after her brother’s presidential victory that she just couldn’t resist. “My husband, Jack, he always has the TV on, listening to the news. And I heard the commentator say ‘the president,’ and I looked at Jack, and I said, ‘So what did the ass say today?’” she remembers, laughing.
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