While Donald J Trump was virtually fuming at his sentencing hearing in Judge Juan Merchan’s New York City courtroom on Friday morning, the nine justices of the US Supreme Court were taking their seats for oral arguments in the so-called TikTok ban case. And while it only took 40 minutes for the president elect’s sentence of an ‘unconditional discharge’ to be pronounced, the arguments over national security, the First Amendment, and an app that 170 million Americans use took a couple of hours longer.
Amicus has an analysis of all of it. First, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss whether and how Trump’s sentence matters, and what it tells us about the Supreme Court under Trump 2.0. Next, they’re joined by Gautam Hans, clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, who specializes in constitutional law, technology law and policy, to discuss why the Supreme Court seemed so very ready to reach right past the First Amendment and grab for national security in order to uphold the TikTok ban.
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