Background Briefing: October 5, 2020

On By gram

 

Will Amy Coney Barrett Go Down in History as the “Typhoid Mary” of the Supreme Court?

We begin with the Amy Coney Barrett Covid superspreader event at the White House which has now claimed the White House Press Secretary and, now that the president has discharged himself from hospital and is back at the White House, is likely to infect others in the building. Victoria Nourse, Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Executive Director of the Center on Congressional Studies at Georgetown Law joins us. She was a nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and served as Counsel to Vice President Joe Biden and we discuss her article at The Los Angeles Times, “Why Judge Barrett’s legal philosophy is deeply undemocratic“. With Barrett’s seemingly not embarrassed by the unseemly rush to seat her starting immediately after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, we assess whether the Covid pandemic’s spread amongst top White House officials and among Republican senators could slow down the rush to seat her and reduce the thin margin of votes for her in the senate.

 

How the IRS is Outgunned and How to Make the Rich Pay Their Taxes

Then we speak with Natasha Sarin, professor of law at Penn Law and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania about her op-ed in the New York Times “The I.R.S. is Outgunned: The agency doesn’t have the resources to battle the tax lawyers of the ultrarich. Trump’s tax returns are just one example of how little the wealthy pay.”

 

The Author of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown of 2020

Then finally we speak with Lawrence Douglas, Chair in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College who is a contributing writer to The Guardian and the author of the new book, just out, Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020. He joins us to discuss the scenarios of how Republican voter suppression combined with Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power, mean that there has to be a massive turnout of Democrats in November to thwart the stealing of the 2020 election.