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The Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Clean Water Act this week in a 5–4 decision limiting the government’s ability to protect Americans from raw sewage discharge. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion barred the Environmental Protection Agency from ordering cities to maintain water standards above a certain level of safety, insisting that the agency could only restrict specific quantities of discharge dumped into rivers, oceans, and bays. Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented, joined by the three liberals, objecting that Alito butchered the text of the law to let polluters off the hook. The decision came just one day before Barrett joined a 5–4 majority that compelled the Trump administration to pay out $2 billion in foreign aid that it unlawfully withheld.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the court’s decision, its split along gender lines, and Barrett’s apparent continued drift away from the conservative bloc. An excerpt of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I want to know what you think! I’ve been waiting all week. You did write a book called Lady Justice, after all. This is the second environmental case recently where Barrett has joined with the liberals in dissent in a 5–4 decision. Each time, it was the five men against the four women. But it goes beyond environmentalism, of course. What’s going on with Barrett?

I don’t know if those are gender qualities as much as they are qualities of not being so rarefied in your existent worldview that you are incurious about how anyone is affected by anything other than your own self. Maybe it’s not gender, it’s just not the psychopathic solipsism that we’re seeing in others, but I’ll take it. Maybe this is the place to say that after years breathlessly watching Sandra Day O’Connor and then breathlessly watching Anthony Kennedy, I am absolutely not interested in doing justice by way of waiting for Amy Coney Barrett to make constitutional meaning for me. We need to start making it for ourselves. But that said, I do think we are seeing Barrett and also the chief justice making feints towards being something that isn’t what Thomas and Alito are every single day.

I want to pick up one part of what you said, which I think is so interesting and clearly correct—Barrett is trying to live in the real world more than some of her colleagues on the right. In this Clean Water Act case, she is the only one who acknowledges the real-world impact of this decision and of the environmental law in question. Alito ignores it. She has this really striking passage where she talks about how San Francisco’s discharge of sewage has led to “discoloration, scum, and floating material, including toilet paper” in its waters. That mention of toilet paper has stuck with me. It’s incredibly vivid, and really a stark contrast to Alito just whitewashing the horrific environmental impact of this decision. She is acknowledging: Yes, we are humans who must drink water. It exists, and we need it to be clean. That’s what Congress said. It was one of those moments, then and in the foreign aid order on Wednesday, where it just felt like she and Alito were living on two different planets.