Background Briefing: October 22, 2023
Putin, Hamas and Trump’s House Republicans Demonstrate Their Contempt For Democracy
We begin with President Biden’s speech to the nation on Thursday in which he likened Putin to Hamas in their determination to exterminate democracy in their neighbor’s country. But Biden did not extend the analogy to our domestic politics where the Trump cult in the House are demonstrating their fealty to Putin in their determination to cut aid to Ukraine and their contempt for democracy as the insurrectionists insist they won the last election as they work to rig the next one. Joining us is Victoria Nourse, a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the executive director of the Center on Congressional Studies at Georgetown Law. A nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, from 2014 to 2015, she served as Counsel to Vice President Joe Biden and prior to that served as an appellate lawyer in the Justice Department and Special Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her latest book is The Impeachments of Donald Trump: An Introduction to Constitutional Argument, and her latest article in Ms. Magazine is “The Supreme Court’s Blindness to Gender Violence.”
Biden’s $105 Billion Aid Request Goes to a Leaderless House With No One Constitutionally Able to Act on It
Then we look into Biden’s $105 billion request of aid to Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Taiwan and the border which was sent to a leaderless House with no one constitutionally able to act on it. Joining us is Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in World War II. We discuss his article at The Guardian, “The Ukraine war is in a new phase. Biden must rethink the US position.”
How Much Will Third Party Candidates Swing the 2024 Election to Trump?
Then finally we assess how much third party candidates will swing the close 2024 election to Trump and speak with David Daley, a senior fellow for FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. A digital media fellow at the Wilson Center for the Humanities and the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia, he is the former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, and the former CEO and publisher of the Connecticut News Project. We discuss his article at The Guardian, “Why do eight radicals hold power over the entire US House of Representatives?”