On today’s BradCast, we fly through a mountain of incoming stories (with the help of a great guest!) as the news gods seem to be unleashing a tidal wave in advance of the Thanksgiving Day holiday. [Audio link posted below. Buckle up before clicking.]
Among the ridiculous number of stories covered today…
- Five are dead after three shootings in three different states over the past 24 hours;
- Despite warning of an “invasion” on the U.S. southern border by a migrant caravan from Central America prior to the midterm elections, now that the elections are done, the Trump Administration is reportedly withdrawing more than 5,000 military troops they had deployed to the border just weeks ago;
- The President’s daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump reportedly sent hundreds of government related emails via a private email server over the course of 2017 in the months following her father’s election in which he repeatedly called for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to be “locked up” for doing the same thing. Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, also a senior adviser to Trump, reportedly used the same private server for government-related communications.
On the election results front…
- Republican Rep. Will Hurd has reportedly squeaked out a victory over Democratic challenger Gina Ortiz Jones in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District. The contest was among a handful of still-undecided races;
- At the same time, Democrat Ben McAdams appears to have pulled back into the lead over GOP Rep. Mia Love in Utah’s 4th Congressional District, where it now appears McAdams will be the victor by fewer than 700 votes out of some 270,000 tallied, flipping yet another U.S. House seat from “red” to “blue”. The final margin is reportedly 0.258%, just above the 0.25% that would have allowed Love to request a recount in the otherwise ruby “red” state.
- When the few remaining undecided U.S. House seats are called, Democrats appear on track to have picked up an extraordinary 39 seats in their “blue wave”.
- One of the three still-undecided House races is in Georgia, where this year’s Libertarian candidate for Sec. of State has now endorsed Democratic candidate John Barrow in the upcoming December 4th runoff against Republican Brad Raffensperger to replace GA’s vote suppressing Sec. of State, now Governor-elect Brian Kemp;
- In Wisconsin, Democrats won every single statewide race on November 6th, including Governor (unseating Scott Walker) and U.S. Senate. They also outvoted Republicans in State Assembly races by 8 percentage points, 54 to 46 percent. Nonetheless, thanks to the GOP’s extreme partisan gerrymandering in the Badger State, Republicans will hold 63 seats to the Democrats’ 36 in the new Assembly;
The great (and newly wed!) MARK JOSEPH STERN, legal journalist at Slate, joins us to discuss how voters pushed back against gerrymandering this year by approving ballot initiatives — and other measures — in several states on November 6th, in an attempt to restore fair(er) elections in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court opting to not strike down partisan gerrymanders as unconstitutional in states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina earlier this year. Among the many other issues we fly through with Stern today, on which he offers his as-always cogent legal insight…
- Ivanka and Hillary’s email issues (Stern hopes a Democratic House investigation will result in real reform to the “arguably improper” if not unlawful use of private email by officials like Trump and Clinton, though not in the opportunistic political fashion that GOPers previously dealt with the issue);
- Trump’s appointment of GOP operative Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General (which Stern describes as blatantly “illegal” and, he believes, very likely to be struck down by the Courts). He also describes the DoJ’s legal defense of the maneuver as “laughable”;
- A federal court on Monday night blocked the Trump Administration’s new regulation denying asylum claims by immigrants who fail to present themselves at a port of entry (Stern explains the judge found the Administration’s new rule to be in strict violation of federal laws, and predicts that even Chief Justice John Roberts, based on similar rulings he made against the Obama Administration, will be forced to agree when the case reaches SCOTUS);
- The decision by a Trump-appointed federal judge to order the White House to restore press credentials to CNN’s Jim Acosta (Stern is impressed with the Trump judge’s anti-Trump ruling, I remain a bit more skeptical);
- And how (and why) Trump’s controversial new Justice Brett Kavanaugh has, so far, laid low by not yet fuly tossing in with the Court’s nihilist right-wing caucus.
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report as the catastrophic wildfires continue to burn in California, Trump shows up to make things worse, and a coming turn in the weather signals both good news and bad for firefighters and recovery workers amid the record disaster…
The BradCast
with Brad Friedman
11/20/2018
It’s the Stupid, Stupid: ‘BradCast’ 11/20/2018 | Guest: Slate's Mark Joseph Stern with legal insight on a fire hose of news, from Ivanka's emails to Whitaker's appointment to Trump's trouble in court to encouraging midterm push-back against partisan gerrymandering... · · · · · It’s the Stupid, Stupid: ‘BradCast’ 11/20/2018 | Guest: Slate's Mark Joseph Stern with legal insight on a fire hose of news, from Ivanka's emails to Whitaker's appointment to Trump's trouble in court to encouraging midterm push-back against partisan gerrymandering...
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Here’s a winning ticket for you:
DIGBY/STERN
in
2020!!
IMO, Trump must be locked up for his own “good.”
“White house authorizes use of force for troops stationed at border” (The Hill)