Day: March 3, 2020

Background Briefing: March 3, 2020

 

Trump Trolls the Democrats For Ganging Up on Bernie

Wev begin with this big day of Super Tuesday primary voting in which more than a third of the delegates needed to reach the 1,991 threshold for the Democratic presidential nomination are up for grabs. Democratic strategist Mike Lux, co-founder of Democracy Partners and founder and CEO of Mike Lux Media and author of How to Democrat in the Age of Trump, joins us to discuss the extent to which efforts to undo the fragmenting of the moderate vote as Buttigieg and Klobuchar pull out of the race and throw their lot in with Biden will blunt the momentum of the frontrunner, Bernie Sanders. We will also assess the games Trump played by encouraging Operation Chaos in South Carolina’s open primary to have Republicans vote for Bernie and recent reports from the Intelligence Community that the Russians are boosting Bernie’s campaign because they want him to be the candidate who Trump has the best chance of beating. Meanwhile short of those anti-democratic dirty tricks and foreign interference  Trump and the Republicans appear to be comfortable with, we examine how Trump is repeating his successful strategy in 2016, aided and abetted by the Russians and Wikileaks, of sowing divisions between Democratic moderates and progressives by claiming the Democratic establishment is stacking the deck against Sanders and rigging the election in favor of Biden, something Bernie himself has suggested.

 

The Constitutional Earthquake Rendering the Legislative Branch Powerless to Conduct Oversight

Then following Friday’s ruling by three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sanctioning Trump’s stonewalling to prevent Don McGhan from testifying which many legal analyst are saying is a constitutional earthquake rendering the legislative branch powerless in the future to conduct oversight of the executive branch, we speak with Aziz Huq, a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the co-author of How to Save a Constitutional Democracy and he joins us to discuss Trump’s efforts to have Ginsburg and Sotomayor recuse themselves from Trump-related cases and what can be done to reverse this dangerously un-democratic ruling by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

 

The Democratic Old Guard’s Politics of the Past Versus Bernie’s Politics of the Future

Then finally we speak with David Schultz, a Professor of Political Science at Hamline University and the University of Minnesota School of Law and author of American Politics in the Age of Ignorance: Why Lawmakers Choose Belief Over Research. He joins us to discuss how the Democratic Party establishment is making a massive mistake by alienating the new and growing constituency of young and minority voters flocking to Bernie by fighting a rear guard action in support of the old guard to hold onto the politics of the past at the expense of the politics of the future.