Background Briefing: November 17, 2020

 

Senator Graham’s Election Meddling and the Democrats Chances in Georgia’s Run-off Elections

We begin with an effort by the loyal Trump lackey Senator Lindsey Graham to pressure Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, to throw out mail-in ballots in the hope of overturning Biden’s narrow victory, an intervention Graham disputes even though a second witness to the call, Gabe Sterling, supports what Raffensperger has made public. Eric Segall, the Ashe Family Chair Professor of Law at Georgia State University who teaches federal courts and constitutional law and is the author of Originalism as Faith, joins us to discuss the Democrats’ chances of winning Georgia’s two senate seats in the January 5 run-off elections for control of the senate. We also discuss his latest law articles “Religious Liberty as Religious Supremacy: Why Justice Alito’s Federalist Society Speech was Paranoid and Inaccurate” and “Goodbye to Originalist Judges.”

 

A Vindictive Trump Exits From Afghanistan and Threatens to Bomb Iran to Hurt Biden

Then we look into Trump’s plan to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia together with his threat to bomb the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz, which appear to have little to do with foreign policy or national security but instead are spiteful and vindictive acts designed to frustrate Biden and tie his hands in dealing with the region. Clearly the Taliban will have no incentive to negotiate a peace treaty now that U.S. leverage has folded and Pakistan will again have sway over a terrorist sanctuary and fundamentalist state while, after the trillion or so the U.S. has invested, China will end up exploiting Afghanistan’s mineral riches. Christine Fair, Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service who was previously a political officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, joins us to discuss the worsening mess Trump is handing Biden.

 

Stanford University’s Weak Rebuke of the Hoover Institution’s Scott Atlas

Then finally we discuss the reaction at Stanford University to Trump’s new medical advisor Scott Atlas’s call for Trump’s supporters to “rise up” against Michigan Governor Whitmer who was recently threatened with kidnapping and murder by pro-Trump militia members. William Gould, a Stanford Law professor specializing in labor and discrimination law joins us to discuss efforts underway by Stanford’s students to dissociate the university from the Hoover Institution and what many see as a weak response to Atlas’s incitement to violence by top university officials.