Part One:
We speak with David Atkins, contributor to the Washington Monthly, about his piece “Republicans Have Already Packed the Courts. Its Up to Democrats to Rebalance Them. And the Press should not Play Accomplice to the GOP Efforts to Change the Subject.”
Atkins looks at the current debate about Trump’s latest Supreme Court nominee by walking us through US history with a focus on the way our three branches of government have changed their constitutional role as checks and balances on each other. He shows us how the structure of our government is not working in the democratic way that the Founders envisioned (and as most Americans believe it should be working).
The Republicans and Mitch McConnell have distorted the way the federal government operates, to the point where, even if one party controls the presidency and both houses of Congress, their legislative programs will be inoperable because right-wing judges (appointed and confirmed by Republicans) will misinterpret the legislation or strike it down for spurious reasons.
That’s why Atkins argues that, if the Democrats win big in November, they must rebalance the way the system works. And that requires fixing the structure of the judiciary.
Under the guise of “originalism,” conservative judges pretend to peer into the minds of the founders, speculating about how the founders might view current issues. If the judges think the founders would have supported their policy aims, then they uphold it. If not, the courts ignore the founder’s view, reasoning that they couldn’t have envisioned the current situation. It’s a pretextual rationale to try to justify an exercise of raw political power.
Part Two:
We talk to James Bandler, senior reporter at Pro Publica, about his powerful and shocking article: “Inside the Fall of the CDC.” Bandler ‘describes how the Trump administration undermined the CDC, making it impossible for the CDCs experts to adopt pandemic policy and to communicate it to the public in order to help protect Americans from the COVID-19 pandemic.
This disgraceful story “will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in [the CDC’s] 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death.”
Back in December 2019, the CDC’s top career scientist, Anne Schuchat, saw the potential for tragedy as soon as she learned of an unexplained outbreak of a “novel pneumonia” in China. (She had played a major role in preventing the outbreak of the SARS virus in the US in 2003). This year, Schuchat tried to sound the alarm about the novel coronavirus; she tried to mobilize the US government to take immediate steps to protect Americans from being devastated by the virus coming to our shores.
But the Trump administration undermined CDC at every turn, downplaying the threat, minimizing the risk of contagion, and ignoring the possibility that many vulnerable Americans would suffer and die from this pandemic. Trump continued to make the danger worse through his further actions — permitting more cruise ships to set sail, refusing to mandate protective equipment and behavior (masks, distancing, restricting large gatherings), reopening the economy too soon, before the pandemic was brought under epidemiological control.
