Day: July 3, 2022

Will Trump Soon Announce He is Running For the Presidency to Get Legal Cover and Fleece the MAGA Crowd?

We begin with the possibility that as early as tomorrow on the 4th of July Donald Trump could announce he is running for the presidency as a way get some of the legal cover from the Justice Department’s ruling that a sitting president can’t be indicted along with the opportunity to fleece his MAGA supporters by raising campaign money. Joining on this 4th of July weekend is Norman Ornstein, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal, and an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He is the author of numerous books, most recently, the New York Times bestseller, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, co-authored with Tom Mann, now with an updated version, It’s Even Worse Than It Was. He is the co-author of One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported and we discuss his article at The Washington Monthly, “How Mitch McConnell Made the Senate Even Worse.” We also examine the extent to which Trump is either implicitly or explicitly threatening the Republican Party that if it does not go along with him, he will run as an independent taking his MAGA followers with him.

As We Celebrate the Constitution, Are We Still a Democracy or Have We Become a Plutocracy?

Then, as we celebrate the Republic’s founding document, the Constitution, we look into where we stand as a Republic and how we can form a more perfect union. Joining us to examine the extent to which plutocratic power has captured our judiciary and economy as the American oligarchy threatens American democracy is Joseph Fishkin, a Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles who previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity. And also joining us is William Forbath, who holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law and is Associate Dean for Research at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. Together they are the co-authors of the new book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy, and we discuss their essay at The Boston Review, “Make Progressive Politics Constitutional Again.”