Part One:
We welcome David Ganz, director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability (CAC). CAC is a think tank, law firm, and action center. Previously, Ganz taught at Cardozo Law School and served as an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where he worked with Burt Neuborne on campaign finance and voting rights cases.
We discuss his article in Slate.com, entitled “How John Roberts Quietly Made It Harder to Vote.” It is not only Donald Trump and the Republican Senate who are doing all they can to suppress the vote of anyone who might vote against them. The Supreme Court and Justice Roberts have been deciding cases that have made it more and more difficult to cast their ballots in the 2020 election. And, of course, the Shelby County case striking down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has immediately freed up many “red states” to enact voter suppression laws disenfranchising voters of color, urban voters, and other communities who are more likely to vote Democratic.
The Republicans and the hard right seem to be succeeding in their long-term strategy– to pack the Supreme Court and the lower courts with right-wing jurists who are well to the right of the public and the mainstream. The question now is: Is there anything that we can do to stop this trend and reverse it back toward a more fair and inclusive balanced position?
Part Two:
We discuss Pope Francis’s recent encyclical with Kate Ward, a scholar of Christian ethics who has published articles on wealth, virtue, and economic inequality in a variety of journals. Previously Ward worked at AFSCME Council 31, a labor union organizing workers in Catholic health care settings.
Pope Francis’s new encyclical is a papal warning about a world going backward. The Pope addresses serious crises in the world, including the gross disparities in income and wealth, unnecessary poverty that afflicts “the least among us,” and the threat to our planet posed by climate change.
The Pope explains how free market capitalism has failed; it is not working for ordinary people. Trickle-down is not working. All it does is to make the rich richer. It does nothing to lift up the poor or to provide a dignified way for the non-elites to work and earn incomes to support their families. The COVID pandemic has demonstrated in a very painful way how our country’s free-market economy needs significant reform.
We also discuss the possibility that Pope Francis’s encyclical could shake up the US election next month. Some have written that the Pope’s new encyclical offers a “voter’s guide” for a post-pandemic world.
