Background Briefing: June 29, 2025

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Welcome to One Party Rule As SCOTUS Removes the Last Check on Trump

We begin with more evidence, not that we needed it, that the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court are political activists in robes. We discuss the latest gift to a lawless president with the removal of the last constitutional check on Trump’s authoritarian march in a rigged sleight of hand where Trump pretended to want to overturn the 14th Amendment but really wanted to get rid of universal injunctions that were blocking his unconstitutional power grabs. Joining us to discuss this latest tipping of the scales to ensure one party rule following the gutting of voting rights, the opening of floodgates of limitless dark money, immunity for a criminal in the White House and now a free hand for forging a fascist state is Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the corporate watchdog group True North Research and president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy. She is one of the nation’s foremost experts in exposing how special interests distort public policy and has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government–as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief of the article 3 judges division for the U.S. Courts.

 

We Are Back in the 1850’s With ICE Repeating the Cruelty of the Fugitive Slave Act

Then, with the Senate passing Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that gives $45 billion to ICE and DHS to bolster what is becoming Trump’s private militia of stormtroopers, we look into similarities to the buildup to the Civil War in the 1850’s as a reactionary Supreme Court and the brutal roundup of escaped slaves and innocent blacks under the Fugitive Slave Act split the country with moral outrage growing in the North against the cruelty of Southern racist rule. Joining us is Garrett Epps, a legal affairs editor of the Washington Monthly who has taught constitutional law at American University, the University of Baltimore, Boston College, Duke, and the University of Oregon. He is the author of American Epic: Reading the U.S. Constitution, and we discuss his latest articles at The Washington Monthly, “Trump’s Deportation Frenzy Echoes the Fugitive Slave Hunts of the 1850s” and “Amy Coney Barrett and the Supreme Court Give Birth To a Disaster.“

 

There Was a Respectable Right Before Trump’s MAGA Took Over the GOP

Then finally, now that we have a MAGA GOP spewing hatred and division and a Republican Party firmly in Trump’s hands as he moves to undo American democracy and unleash corruption and cruelty, we look back at what was a respectable right which debated liberals without demonizing Democrats and courting violence. Joining us is Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of the national bestsellers Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize) and The Death of Conservatism. His latest book, just out, is Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.