On today’s BradCast: Trouble in TrumpLand continues, but we’re all paying the price for it — and likely will for decades to come. [Audio link to show follows below.]
Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price is out. He’s just the latest top Administration official to be fired or to resign during the first eight chaotic months of this Administration. Price, who claimed to be a fiscal conservative during his years in the U.S. House, had come under fire for spending hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars on chartered private and military plane travel since taking office, even while working to take health care away from millions of Americans. Several other top Trump cabinet officials (EPA’s Pruitt, Treasury’s Mnuchin, Interior’s Zinke) are also now under the spotlight for similar travel issues, even though Price’s corruption, while in the U.S. House, was an open secret completely ignored by the GOP Senate during his confirmation.
Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, the situation on the ground following Hurricane Maria continues to deteriorate, despite Trump and his Acting Director of the Dept. of Homeland Security declaring the recovery effort “a good news story”, to date. The Mayor of San Juan urgently and desperately disagrees.
Then, speaking of U.S. Senate Republicans rubber-stamping Presidential nominees no matter how extremist, crazy or corrupt they may be, we’re joined by Slate’s legal reporter MARK JOSEPH STERN to discuss what he describes as the Trump Administration’s attempt to lay the groundwork for overturning marriage equality. Yes, really.
While it seems impossible to imagine, Stern makes his case — a disturbing one — after we discuss whether a High School principal in Louisiana has the legal right, as threatened, to suspend student football players for taking a knee in peaceful protest during the national anthem.
The letter sent this week to students and parents by Parkway High School’s Wayne Bates “made my jaw drop to the floor,” Stern says, going on to detail well-established SCOTUS rulings on the First Amendment in schools. “You just can’t do that. Students have a fundamental free speech right to take a knee during the anthem. And if this principal goes any farther with this crazy campaign, he’s gonna get slapped with a lawsuit that is going to make his hair fall out.”
But, how interested are Trump’s judicial appointees in maintaining “settled” law? Stern warns that with some of Trump’s lifetime appointees still likely to still be serving on the federal bench as late as 2067, a long list of extreme Rightwingers now been confirmed by Senate Republicans, same-sex marriage rights are not nearly as secure as many of us may think.
“Republicans are completely ruthless in their endeavor to stack the court with wackadoodles,” he says. “And Democrats need to get their act together, or the world is going to be incredibly bleak in 2067 — so bleak that Trump judges may be the least of our problems.”
Finally, Stern has a few choice thoughts on the unapologetic rightwing extremism of illegitimate Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, as the Court returns for its first full new term with a stolen Republican majority…
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