Background Briefing: April 25, 2019
Biden Takes a Moral Stance as He Enters the Race
We begin with the announcement today by former Vice President Joe Biden that he is entering the Democratic presidential race and in doing so in a three and a half minute video, he staked out a moral stance against Trump recalling the white supremacists at Charlottesville who murdered a young women before our eyes who the president praised as “very fine people”, as a reason to run saying “we are in the battle for the soul of this nation” and if Trump is reelected, “he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen”. Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and author of “The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment”, joins us to discuss the high stakes in the crowded field of democratic hopefuls in the presidential primaries with a younger progressive base wanting someone they like when later in the general election an older and more centrist electorate will choose the next president. And although a recent op-ed by former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart posited that the reelection of Trump would destroy the Republican Party, the opposite may be true with Democrats now angry at Hillary Clinton for losing to Donald Trump, giving up on their party if they lose to Trump a second time in 2020.
Is Trump Counting on the Russians to Help Him Again in 2020?
Then we look into reports that former Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen could not even bring up Russia’s continuing meddling in our election to her boss the president because Trump doesn’t want to hear it. Michael Greenberger, the director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland where he teaches courses in cyber-security and leads a team of experts on cyber-security law, joins us to discuss how Trump and the Republicans have sold us out to the Russians who will help elect them in 2020 as they did in 2016. And that it is up to the states to shore up our election systems because Trump is making sure the federal government will do nothing to stop future cyber-attacks.
The Courts Packed with Partisans
Then finally we speak with Moira Donegan, a writer in New York whose work has appeared in the London Review of Books and The Paris Review, about her article at The Guardian, “Enough playing nice. It’s time to pack the courts”. With prominent legal analysts now predicting the Supreme Court will rule in Trump’s favor to have the census not count all persons in the United States as the constitution mandates, the pretense that the court is not stacked with political partisans will be laid bare and the Democrats will have to take power to wrest the federal judiciary from Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society.