Background Briefing: January 6, 2019
The Alarming Powers Trump Will Assume in Declaring a National Emergency
We begin with the president again threatening to declare a national emergency in order to get his border wall, a threat he said on Sunday he was nearing a decision on invoking after having raised the prospect at a press conference on Thursday of going around the Congress to get his wall on the Southern border. Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice joins us to discuss her article at The Atlantic “What the President Could Do If He Declares a State of Emergency: From seizing control of the Internet to declaring martial law, President Trump may legally do all kinds of extraordinary things”. We look into how Trump is already pushing the Constitutional boundaries by using his veto power to demand that Americans pay for a wall Mexico was supposed to pay for before he will allow the government to reopen. But if he were to declare a national emergency, a decision which is entirely within his discretion, a parallel legal regime allowing the president to sidestep many of the constitutional constraints on him as more than 100 special provisions, become available to him, similar to the powers that the dictators and despots around the world who Trump admires, already have.
Military Analyst William Arkin on Why He Quit NBC News
Then we speak with William Arkin, one of America’s premier military experts and co-author of the landmark “Top Secret America” investigation at The Washington Post which was also a national bestseller. His latest book is “Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare” and until recently he was a military analyst, reporter and consultant to NBC News before just resigning in frustration at NBC’s coverage of President Trump and U.S. foreign policy. We will discuss the contents of his resignation letter.
Trump Spouts the Kremlin Line in Rewriting the History of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Then finally we examine how state-controlled Russian media is portraying Trump’s Syria pullout which they portray as being too good to be true, treating Trump as delusional while Putin, with condescending charity says maybe Trump helped a little to defeat ISIS, but doubts the U.S. will ever get out of Syria. Julia Davis, the founder and editor of Russian Media Monitor which analyses Russian media and the relationship between news and propaganda, joins us to discuss how Trump is spouting the Kremlin line in his recent rewriting of the history of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.