Background Briefing: July 1, 2021

On By gram

 

The Supreme Court Guts Voting Rights and Hands a Gift to the Koch Brothers

We begin with the Supreme Court’s end of term bombshells dropped today which make it clear that the court’s 6 to 3 supermajority of conservatives and extreme conservatives are engaged in judicial activism which in the case of the rulings today, make it clear that we are dealing with partisan Republican operatives in robes when it comes to decisions on elections and how they are financed. Joining us is Leah Litman, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and is now a regular contributor to the Take Care blog and is the co host and creator of Strict Scrutiny, a podcast about the U.S. Supreme Court. We discuss the gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act eight years after Chief Justice John Roberts gutted Section 5 of the VRA, and the decision on dark money that found in favor of the Koch Brothers, with Justice Alito arguing that billionaires who are shaping our politics and our buying our politicians wholesale, are somehow being stigmatized and having their privacy invaded if they have to reveal who and what they are buying.

 

Will Indictments Against the Trump Organization and Its CFO be Enough to Nail Trump?

Then with indictments handed down today by the Manhattan DA against Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s Chief Financial Officer and the Trump Organization, we speak with a leading expert on white collar crime, Henry Pontell, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Criminal Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the School of Social Ecology and the Sociology School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. We discuss whether these charges will be enough to get Weisselberg to flip on Trump and what further charges might be pending. 

 

Climate Change is Behind the Record Heat in Canada and the Northwest

Then finally with record high temperatures in Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest which are baking under a heat dome, we will speak with Susan Joy Hassol, the director of the nonprofit organization Climate Communication who publishes the series “Quick Facts” with the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s SciLine on the connection between extreme weather and climate change. She joins us to discuss her article at The New York Times which she co-authored, “Climate Change is Behind the Heat Dome” and how there are now places on the earth where extreme temperature and extreme humidity will kill you.