Background Briefing: June 28, 2021

On By gram

 

The Republicans Will Win Back the House in 2022 Before One Vote is Cast

We begin with the wake up call that the Republicans will win back the House in 2022 before one vote is cast because of the gerrymandering underway following the recent census. They will pick up 2 seats in Texas and North Carolina, and 2 more in Georgia and Florida, with another in Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and New Hampshire for a total of 12, when they only need 5 to win back the House. Joining us to discuss how our democracy is withering and dying and is about to disappear, slowly, legally and is plain sight is David Daley, a senior fellow for FairVote and the author of Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Plan to Steal America’s Democracy and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back To Save Democracy. We discuss his article at The Guardian “Republicans can win the next elections through gerrymandering alone” and the extent to which Democrats are limited in gerrymandering states they control even if they wanted to take off the gloves because of fair play laws that have created independent redistricting commissions in California, Washington and New Jersey and are in the process of creating them in Colorado, Oregon and Virginia.

 

The U.S. Could Pull All of Its Troops Out of the Middle East

Then we examine the possibility that the U.S. could pull out all of its troops from the Middle East and not just Afghanistan which the Biden administration plans to do in September. Eugene Gholz, a professor of political science at Notre Dame who served in the Pentagon as Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manufacturing and Industrial base, joins us to discuss his new report at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “Nothing Much to Do: Why America Can Bring All Troops Home From the Middle East.”

 

A Violent Taliban Takeover Of Afghanistan and Blowback for Pakistan From Its Proxy

Then finally we speak with Madiha Afzal, a Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at The Brookings Institution whose research lies at the intersection of political economy, development, and security, with a focus on Pakistan. She is the author of Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State and joins us to discuss her recent article at The Washington Post, “What the Biden Administration’s Narrative on Afghanistan Gets Wrong.”