Buckle up, strap in, grab a good stiff drink. Whatever you gotta do to keep from blowing your top during today’s BradCast. We are going to need you with your top intact over the next few months. At least until Election Day. (180 days away.) [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
Among our stories today…
- A Trump-appointed panel has told Donald Trump what he wanted to hear: Go ahead and slash the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the bone. Let states worry about their own emergency and disaster management. What could possibly go wrong? That, on the same day Mississippi is recovering from yet another in a recent string of massive tornado swarms. Once again today, hundreds of houses were destroyed last night.
- The destruction following the rightwing activist U.S. Supreme Court‘s horrible Louisiana v. Callais ruling last week, gutting the Voting Rights Act, continued today in several GOP-controlled states which are now erasing majority-Black U.S. House Districts from their map, even in states where 2026 midterm primary voting has already begun. Most notably today, the Republican Legislature in Tennessee voted to wipe out of existence the only majority-minority District left in the state by cracking the city of Memphis into three Republican-majority pieces. The vote was carried out at the statehouse amid protests, shouts of “Jim Crow 2.0” from lawmakers, and a call from a Memphis legislator for the City to secede from the State.
- In addition to the pathetic desperation revealed by Republicans rigging voting maps to remove competition, even after voting has already begun, there are other signs they expect to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress this November. They now seem to be racing the red light in hopes of passing legislation to give immunity from liability to their largest corporate funders in the fossil fuel industry.
Recently, Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a liability shield law for Big Oil, which is facing dozens of lawsuits around the country seeking to hold them to account for decades of deadly climate change due to the use of their products.
Republicans are hoping to pass a law at the federal level, akin to the shield law giving both state and federal immunity to gun manufacturers, to prevent the fossil fuel industry from being held liable for the local costs of foreseeable, destructive climate disasters. Recent investigations have revealed that the industry has known about, and has attempted to hide and lie about, the dangers of burning fossil fuels for decades.
We’re joined today by LAURA PETERSON, Senior Analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists‘ Climate & Accountability Campaign. She tells me these companies have a real problem on their hands and they know it. They realize that “when these cases get into discovery…more evidence of their wrongdoing will come to light.”
In a recent article, Peterson detailed how these types of broad immunity laws have worked — or not — for other industries, such as Big Tobacco, the gun industry, and the ongoing efforts to protect companies like Bayer from liability for deadly glyphosate, the chemical compound used in the weedkiller Roundup, originally manufactured by Monsanto.
Legal protection for the firearms industry, quickly introduced and signed into law back in 2005, is the model that Big Oil is now gunning for. “The firearms industry was also facing dozens of suits, particularly from cities because they were really reeling from gun violence,” she explains today. “And since it passed, not a single negligence case has gone to trial against a gun manufacturer.”
She urges people to get up to speed on what is going on at the “No Immunity for Big Oil” campaign website. “If there’s one thing that we need to convey to people now, it’s that as massive as Big Oil is, and as huge a problem as climate change is, the idea of giving an entire industry complete immunity is just so fundamentally anti-democratic.”
- Finally, speaking of climate disasters, we close with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report. Forecasters warn a Super El Niño, now brewing in the Pacific, could be the most powerful in a century; even as the U.S. electric grid is facing unprecedented strain, Donald Trump is now shutting down hundreds of cheap, clean, renewable wind energy projects onshore as well as offshore; while California is demonstrating tremendous clean energy production and water-saving success with solar covered canals and quickly expanding utility-scale battery storage systems. Who would be dumb enough to oppose that?…
