“John Roberts Gave Us Trump” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
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Gaslit Nation Transcript 21 October 2020 “John Roberts Gave Us Trump” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: ... to me, pretty big deal. I've never seen this around any court that I've ever been involved with, where there's this much dark money, and this much influence being used. Here's how The Washington Post summed it up: "This is a conservative activist, behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation's courts, and it's a $250 million dark money operation." $250 million is a lot of money to spend if you're not getting anything for it, so that raises the question, what are they getting for it? Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: Well, I showed the slide earlier on the Affordable Care Act, and on Obergefell, and on Roe versus Wade. That's where they lost. But with another judge, that could change. That's where the contest is. That's where the Republican Party platform tells us to look at how they want judges to rule. To reverse Roe, to reverse the Obamacare cases, and to reverse Obergefell and take away gay marriage. That is their stated objective and plan. Why not take them at their word? Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: But there's another piece of it. And that is, not what's ahead of us, but what's behind us. What's behind us is now, 80 cases, Mr. Chairman, 80 cases under Chief Justice Roberts that have these characteristics: One, they were decided five to four, by a bare majority. Two, the five to four majority was partisan, in the sense that not one Democratic appointee joined the five. I refer to that group as the Roberts Five. It changes a little bit, with Justice Scalia's death, for instance, but there's been steady Roberts Five that has delivered now 80 of these decisions. And the last characteristic of them is that there is an identifiable Republican donor interest in those cases. And in every single case, that donor interest won. It was an 80 to zero, five to four partisan route. Ransacking. Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best-selling books, The View From Flyover Country, and Hiding in Plain Sight. Andrea Chalupa: I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones. Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world. So, last week, I took a few days off, which is roughly a century in Trump time, so Andrea is going to be leading the discussion today on current events from the last week, and she has a lot to say. But one thing about going offline for a few days, is that it gives you clarity on some of the big-picture issues that are often played down or ignored, not because they're not important but because they are so horrific, and so consistent, and have gone on for so long with no meaningful pushback, that Americans have either accepted them, or are so paralyzed and frightened by the lack of accountability that they just don't want to think about them at all. Sarah Kendzior: But you need to. As I wrote back in 2016, you need to keep track of how expectations change over time in an emerging autocracy, and you need to keep your original expectations intact, even if you do not think they will be met. So here's a quick refresher on what Trump has been up to when I finally checked the news again yesterday after a few days off. Sarah Kendzior: Trump is still threatening to jail his opponent (Joe Biden), his opponent's family (Hunter Biden), his predecessor (Barack Obama)... Andrea Chalupa: Projection! Sarah Kendzior: [laughs] And his former presidential opponent (Hillary Clinton). Trump is the first U.S. President to ever threaten any of those actions. And yes, Trump's rise was made possible due to pre-existing institutional failures. And yes, he builds on a long history of corruption in U.S. government, but the U.S. has never had anything approaching this situation. We have never had such a fundamental abuse of power and threats of violence against political rivals from the executive branch. Because that is what dictators do. Sarah Kendzior: Sometimes it's not even what dictators do, because it's too fucking obvious, and those dictators fear pushback from citizens, or the courts, or political opponents, or from international observers, but not here in the USA. The world's last superpower is on the road to becoming the world's first super-dictatorship. In addition to his unprecedented threats to incarcerate his political rivals on baseless grounds, Trump is the first president to encourage Americans to vote illegally, both so he can win illegally, and so he can contest the legitimacy of the vote if he loses. He is the first president to order the destruction of election infrastructure (in this case, the United States Postal Service). Sarah Kendzior: He is the first president to be impeached for soliciting illegal election assistance from a foreign state, the first who has continued to solicit illegal assistance from hostile foreign states, the first who receives assistance from a hostile foreign state to win the previous election in 2016, which should have led to his timely removal (but nobody would actually act on that), and the first president to pressure a foreign leader to get dirt on the aforementioned current rival (Joe Biden) that he seeks to imprison. Sarah Kendzior: Trump is also the first president who has said he will contest the election results if he doesn't win, the first who has threatened to postpone the election, the first who has said he should serve three terms, instead of the constitutionally-mandated two terms. He is spelling out dictatorship in the most obvious way possible and folks are just kind of treating it like those are the daily headlines because he's been doing it for four years, but that is how dictatorships emerge. Andrea, I know you have thoughts on this. Andrea Chalupa: Lots and lots and lots of thoughts. I wanted to add to that by preparing everyone for a crash landing this November. What we have to remember, given everything that Sarah just outlined, at the heart of it, it's normalization. It's normalization, right? American democracy is the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water that slowly becomes hotter, hotter, hotter. We're boiling right now. Because of this normalization and all the institutional failure and corruption and greed that got us Trump in the first place, I want everybody to emotionally prepare themselves now, and accept the fact that Donald Trump and the Trump crime family could very well “win” this election. Sarah Kendzior: Be reinstalled in this election. Andrea Chalupa: Yeah, exactly. So, prepare yourself for that. Prepare yourself for that. I know that there's a lot of polls that are giving people false and harmful sense of cautious optimism, but the reality remains that the Republican Party has made it a core of their existence to engineer the stealing of elections, and engineer a takeover of information spaces, and I'm going to go through some of that now. Andrea Chalupa: This is what we're up against. It's this disinformation virus. You have big tech which has been profiting off of the slush fund of Republican and Kremlin disinformation––Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google. This has all run amok. This has given birth to the monster of QAnon, which the Republicans are now actively weaponizing, including in the Hunter Biden nonsense. You had Senator Ron Johnson, who surprisingly won his election in Wisconsin as Senator of Wisconsin. People expected him to lose in 2016. Andrea Chalupa: The election security advocate, Jennifer Cohn, has pointed to that, at how there were some strange patterns in the vote for Johnson in Wisconsin. And then Johnson goes and takes a trip to Moscow for Fourth of July. That's a very symbolic, kiss the ring gesture to Putin. Since then, Johnson has been a reliable disinformation weapon for the Kremlin. He's been pushing that in Congress, trying to investigate the investigators of Trump's Russia corruption, and going after people like my sister, Alexandra Chalupa, the consultant for the DNC who warned both Democrats and Republicans that Russia was attacking our democracy in 2016 and that Paul Manafort running Trump's campaign was proof of that. Ron Johnson has gone after her, and now he's on TV saying that Hunter Biden had pedophile videos on his computer. Andrea Chalupa: They're weaponizing that whole QAnon. QAnon–that cult–is how they're going to drive out their voters. And it's big tech. It's big tech that has profited from all of that, and whatever they're doing now is just a little too late. Then you have hedge funds that have been destroying newsrooms across America, gobbling up all of these legacy newspapers and local broadcast networks and so forth, and laying people off. And some of the first units to go are the investigative units, because investigative journalism is costly, it's time-intensive, it's resource-intensive, and so for a hedge fund, it's not profitable. So that's been weakening us over the years. Andrea Chalupa: And then you have this consolidation of far-right media, like Murdoch's Fox News, and the New York Post, which ran that shoddy, shady, weird Hunter Biden head piece.