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On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, Slate executive editor Susan Matthews joined co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern to discuss how this Supreme Court term changed perspectives on Justice Neil Gorsuch, the subject of Matthews’ narrative podcast series Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Gorsuch. The trio drilled down on how the Gorsuch of Becoming Justice Gorsuch does and does not align with the Gorsuch who veered even further to the right in the Trump v. Barbara birthright citizenship case and the trans sports cases. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Now that all of Gorsuch’s votes for the term are in and logged, do you feel as if you basically still understand who he is as a justice, Susan? You came to a pretty definitive idea about him on the show. Did anything that happened at the end of June unsettle that?

Susan Matthews: One of my arguments with the whole series is that the justices have a vested interest in telling all of us, Oh, what we’re doing is law. We’re just reading the law. There’s no politics. There’s nothing to see here. I think that Gorsuch is a uniquely interesting story because the way he got onto the court itself is the best, most obvious demonstration that we are not “just reading the law” here. Politics is informing every single thing that happens.

The players are really invested in pretending that that is not the case. I think Gorsuch was in fact the perfect person to take Merrick Garland’s seat because he’s someone who is going to stand up there, with an absolutely straight face, saying, There is nothing to see here. They say that there’s no politics here, but there’s obviously politics here. About Gorsuch, specifically, I think that what I learned was that he’s great at playing that straight-faced man. He was intriguing to me because he seems like he perhaps really believes that he’s doing it right.

That’s one of the tics that comes up in his legal writings and in his posture toward everybody all the time. After spending so much time in his brain, by the end of it, I really did think, You know what? I don’t always agree with him, but he at least believes he’s doing something consistent here. This term in particular shattered that illusion for me. With the trans sports cases and with the birthright citizenship case, it’s hard to say that he hasn’t lost his way and is following politics in a way that is so legible that there’s no argument anymore.

Mark Joseph Stern: To the extent that you complimented him in the show or praised him at all, let’s go ahead and scrap that and cut it out, because after this term we can’t really pretend that there’s much to admire? Is it that dark?

Matthews: Yes, it is basically that dark. In this term, I think, we were all waiting for him to essentially reverse himself on Bostock, and he did that in the trans sports cases. But I wasn’t anticipating he would rule the way he did in birthright citizenship. I think we all thought, Well, it’s Neil Gorsuch. He’s going to be the man who says “Remember what the Constitution says,” just like he did in the tariffs case. And he did not do that.

Going back to........

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