Announcing Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Gorsuch

Introduction

0:00Greetings, HiFiNation listeners. It's Barry. You haven't heard from me for three years now because I've had a lot to do. Started a new job, wrote a book. But now I'm back and I'm going to be putting things into the HiFiNation feed leading up to our new season coming out in a couple of months. This season, we're returning to our roots as an anthology show

0:35with a look at all kinds of cool philosophical issues. I found someone splicing animal genes into human ones and then growing them. I followed the firing of ethics professors at the military academies, and I found people using avatars of themselves to make their future medical decisions. But while you wait for the new episodes of HiFiNation, I wanted to tell you that Slate's award-winning narrative show, Slow Burn, is back with a new season. Slow Burn becoming Justice

1:09Gorsuch. In this new series, Susan Matthews traces the rise of Neil Gorsuch from his formative years as a young conservative through his controversial nomination to a stolen seat on the Supreme Court. The series is chocked full of some of the most interesting questions about judicial philosophy and interpretation. Gorsuch's libertarian leanings, as well as his adherence to originalism,

1:39make him one of the most unpredictable votes on the Supreme Court. So I want to share with you the start of Slow Burn's first episode, Man with a Plan. To hear the rest of the series, follow Slow Burn wherever you listen to podcasts.

Alphonse Madden Story

2:05In January of 2009, Alphonse Madden was driving a semi-truck along an Illinois highway, hauling a shipment of meat. He wasn't sure where his next fuel station was, so he decided to pull over onto the side of the road to double-check. That's when things started to go wrong. The brakes on the trailer froze, and so I was stranded, essentially.

2:29That's Madden talking about what happened to him at a press conference in 2017. The night he got stuck was one of the coldest of the entire winter. The temperature outside was 27 degrees below zero. The trailer was one of those super long shipping containers hitched onto the back of the truck. It was the trailer's brakes that were jammed up, making it several tons of dead weight. If Madden kept it attached to the truck and tried to drive, the trailer could skid out across

3:01the lanes, with no way to stop it or slow it down. Imagine being on the road behind that. So he called into his dispatch center to report the problem. I contacted the company's road assist. They arranged to send a repair unit. I assumed that the repair unit would take no longer than an hour to arrive. Madden settled in to wait. But there was another problem. The heat in the truck's cabin wasn't working. Soon, the temperature inside had dropped to negative

3:36seven. In the cold, on the side of the road, Madden fell asleep.

3:47He woke up at 118 a.m. when his cousin called him. His whole body was cold and his cousin told him he was slurring his speech. When he sat up, he heard the skin on his stomach crackle. And then the sensation of not feeling my feet at all prompted me, like, to panic. I wanted to panic. But he didn't panic. He called his dispatch center and told them what was going on. He asked them what he should do. They responded by telling me to simply hang in there. As I sat there physically

4:19suffering in the cold, I started having thoughts that I was going to die. By then, the temperature inside his truck was down to negative 14. He knew he couldn't keep waiting, but he couldn't drive his truck either, not with those frozen brakes. So he did the only thing he could think of. He got out and unhitched the trailer. By this point, he couldn't move his hands. They were frozen in one position. But he managed to disconnect the trailer, and then he drove his truck to an open gas station, where he was able to get inside and start to warm up his frozen body.

4:57After about 15 minutes, he drove back to his trailer. The repairman was there. They got the brakes unfrozen and reattached the trailer. Madden continued on his way and delivered the load. Within days, he was fired. They terminated me, and they cited the reason for termination as abandoning a loaded trailer.

5:22Despite knowing the horrific circumstances of that night, the trucking company said it was against the rules for a trucker to abandon his cargo. Madden filed a claim against his employer. After some legal back and forth, the Department of Labor eventually ruled in his favor. However, they said his employer had been wrong to fire him. That's because truckers are protected in dangerous circumstances like this one. But the trucking company appealed. So the case kept going through the courts for seven years. Judge after judge kept ruling in Madden's favor. Except for one.

6:02That judge was Neil Gorsuch. Neil Gorsuch ruled against Madden in 2016. At the time, he was a judge on the Tenth Circuit, one of the federal appeals courts one step below the Supreme Court. Here's why Neil Gorsuch ruled against Alphonse Madden. The law says that workers are protected if they refuse to operate vehicles because they fear for their safety. But, Gorsuch said, Alphonse Madden hadn't refused to operate his vehicle. He had in fact operated it, driving it to

6:36the gas station where he warmed up. So the protections didn't apply to him. If this sounds pedantic to the point of absurdity to you, well, you're not alone. On a very practical level, what else was Alphonse Madden supposed to do? So, there are reasons Neil Gorsuch ruled this way. We'll get into those reasons a little later on. For now, I think his reasoning in this case reveals the true interior of our justice in question. You might vaguely know who Neil Gorsuch is. If you do, it's because he's no longer just a

7:14circuit judge. Neil Gorsuch has been a member of the Supreme Court for almost 10 years now. He was the first Supreme Court justice appointed by Donald Trump. And that's why we're here.

Neil Gorsuch Background

7:26When Slate launched Slow Burn in 2017, Donald Trump had just become president. That was the reason we launched the show. Everyone was talking about impeachment, but no one really knew what to say about it. So we looked back at Richard Nixon and Watergate. Now, almost a decade later, we're in an eerily similar situation. As we enter the second year of another Trump presidency, it's still hard to know what exactly to do about it. It's not that nothing has changed in the intervening nine years.

7:59Plenty has. But one of the parts of the American government that has changed the most is the Supreme Court. Trump's presidency helped create a conservative supermajority on the court. And that supermajority has handed down major rulings, ending both affirmative action and Roe v. Wade.

8:19With Congress endlessly stalled and full of Trump apologists, the Supreme Court is also one place that is, occasionally, keeping the president in check. Take the ruling it handed down in February on tariffs, where six of the nine justices came together to say to the president, you can't actually do that. It's likely they'll also tell Trump he can't just end birthright citizenship. In other words, the court that is now one-third Trump appointees is also a thorn in Donald Trump's

8:51side. I'm a longtime editor at Slate and a former host and editor of Slow Burn. I've been covering the Supreme Court for nearly a decade now. I'm fascinated by it, especially this iteration of it and how little regular Americans pay attention. I think we should treat the justices on the high court like we treat politicians in America. I think we should try to understand them as people and thinkers and political actors because they have a ton of power over our day-to-day lives. And in order to understand

9:25this court, you need to understand one justice in particular.

9:31I, Neil M. Gorsuch, do solemnly swear. I, Neil M. Gorsuch, do solemnly swear. I take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I take it pretty darn seriously. I'll administer justice without respect to... An independent judiciary, our founders fought a revolution for it. And do equal rights to the poor and to the rich. They knew what it was like to have a judiciary that was responsive to the crown, to a whimsical king. And that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform.

10:03Why is it not the Supreme Court's job to legislate? With all due respect to my judicial colleagues, nobody elected us. It's not what we were designed to do. All the duties incumbent upon... The judge's job is to follow the words that are in the law, not replace them with those that aren't. Words matter. You have been able to avoid any specificity like no one I have ever seen before. He is the most unpredictable vote on this court, and it's not really a close call.

10:35This is Sloburn, Becoming Justice Gorsuch. Episode 1, Man with a Plan. The Constitution and Laws of the United States. So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations. Thank you for checking out this episode of Sloburn, Becoming Justice Gorsuch.

11:09Listen to the entire first episode now by searching Slowburn in your favorite podcast app. If you're already a Slate Plus member, you can binge the entire series now. To become a Slate Plus member, go to slate.com slash hi-fi plus. That's slate.com slash h-i-p-h-i plus. You'll get access to ad-free listening across all Slate podcasts, including the entire Slowburn archive, and all of Hi-Fi Nation's ad-free and bonus episodes.

11:44That's slate.com slash hi-fi plus. See you back here on the Hi-Fi Nation feed very soon. See you back here on the Hi-Fi Nation.