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Part One:
We speak with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern about the latest decision from the US Supreme Court on the abortion issue. The Court upheld one Indiana statute imposing additional restrictions on women who choose to end their pregnancies (by requiring significant extra costs). The Court rejected the challenge to a second statute for reasons unrelated to the abortion issue. (The plaintiffs’ challenge was based on a legal standard that doesn’t apply to abortion cases. So this issue could be back in court soon in a different case.)
But it was Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion that sparked the most debate. Thomas wrote a “screed” that compared women who obtain abortions to eugenicists. Without basis in fact, Thomas alluded to the despised idea that fetuses might be “eliminated” for “discriminatory” reasons. We noted that Thomas’s argument could, in future cases, be used by the Court to demonize and prohibit all forms of birth control.
Part Two:
We talk to Bill Curry, two-time Democratic nominee for Governor of Connecticut and a White House advisor in Bill Clinton’s administration, about today’s statement from Robert Mueller, declining to tell the public whether or not he believes that Pres. Trump committed a crime and characterizing all the evidence that his team gathered as insufficient to answer that question.
Curry waxed eloquent about how centrist democracies around the world have failed to recognize the fundamental dishonesty, corruption and injustice of our system as it has become. He explained his fear that this is how centrist democracies fall to right-wing extremism which he labeled as “fascism” – not as a pejorative but as a factual description. We must stop this trend and reverse it.
How will Democratic presidential candidates rise to this occasion? We discussed Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others in this context. Will Democrats be too afraid openly to address the real issues — like inequality, jobs, health care, college — that actually matter to ordinary Americans?
