We’ve got a rollicking — if occasionally maddening — BradCast for you today, with one of our longtime favorite guests! [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
FIRST UP… A few quick news headlines: Trump’s ceasefire with Iran, as expected, crashes and burns; Dems in Maine wait for Graham Platner to drop out of the U.S. Senate race again Susan Collins (Update: He has just done so); a Milwaukee state judge receives a fine (no jail time or probation) as her federal sentence for helping an immigrant avoid arrest by ICE in her court; a federal judge orders Trump must now pay writer E. Jean Carroll the $5.8 million owed her after he was found guilty of sexual abuse in a case where she says he raped her. He is, of course appealing today’s ruling.
THEN… We’re joined for the rest of the hour by the great LISA GRAVES, former Deputy Asst. U.S. Attorney General, former Deputy Chief for the Article III Judges Div. of the U.S. Courts; and former Chief Counsel for Nominations in the U.S. Senate. She now leads True North Research, pens the “Grave Injustice” newsletter, and is the author of WITHOUT PRECEDENT: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.
Graves joins us today on the heels of the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court wrapping up its 2025-26 term last week with, as usual, a cascade of blockbuster rulings. Sadly, as has become the case on the packed, corrupted, radical, activist John Roberts‘ SCOTUS, many of the rulings broke with decades of well-established precedent; were filled with racist dog-whistles or worse; invented “Constitutional” clauses that simply don’t exist to further amass power in the Presidency while taking it away from Congress; and, in projects that Roberts has slowly but surely carried out during his decades as Chief, dismantled largely any and all limits on campaign finance and all but destroyed whatever was left of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As you might imagine, we’ve got quite a bit to discuss with Graves, the author of a new book on Roberts and a longtime investigator of corrupt, corporatized, dark money campaign financing and more.
“The reality is that John Roberts and the other Republican appointees on that Court have gone out of their way to aid Donald Trump,” Graves explains in summing up the Courts final rulings of the term last week. “And, in some ways, they are using Donald Trump as a convenient vehicle for them to advance their agenda. In particular, John Roberts’ long-standing agenda, dating back to the Reagan Administration. Overall, America is worse off. Our rights are greatly diminished by this Court. And we’re going to have to work to restore and expand them, because of the destructiveness of the Roberts Court.”
Graves details two different instances of Roberts’ personal, decades long projects on the Court, both of them begun during the Reagan Era when a young John Roberts was hired by the Administration to challenge a central premise of the Voting Rights Act (he lost back then, but finally won this year, almost 50 years later), and the institutionalization of the “made-up” Unitary Executive Theory — which, Graves reminds us today, “appears nowhere in the Constitution” — to amass power in the Presidency despite the wishes and statutes adopted by Congress.
One of the Court’s rulings last week will allow the President to fire members of independent, bipartisan Executive commissions — such as the FTC, FCC, SEC and many others — at will, even though they were created by Congress specifically to remain independent of the President. It is another decades-long victory for the Chief Justice.
The Unitary Executive Theory, Graves explains, was invented during the Reagan years. Exploiting the theory in order to expand Presidential power was regarded as too radical for many at the time, but “it was not too extreme for John Roberts!,” she tells me. Last week, in Trump v. Slaughter, it became a reality when Roberts penned the partisan 6 to 3 majority opinion overturning a case named Humphrey’s Executor which, Graves notes, “stood for 100 years” until Roberts finally got “his chance to strike down the precedent that he didn’t like way back” in the mid-1980s, now that he was finally able “to wield the judicial power to do so.”
Yes. Republicans know how to play the long game. What will a decision like that mean under a Democratic Presidency? If one is elected in 2028, will they too be allowed to fire all of Trump’s appointees without cause? Or will the Roberts’ Court find a new clause “in the invisible part of the Constitution” to prevent it?
Tune in for Graves’ thoughts on that and much more, including how the rightwing project of gutting campaign finance limits has now been all but completely won and the critical need for the High Court to be reformed as soon as possible by both Democrats and democrats alike.
“Anyone out there who cares about voting rights, who cares about addressing climate change, who cares about equality, Court reform has to be something you’re asking your representatives or potential representatives about, insisting that they take a stand on the side of liberty, on the side of having a check on the Supreme Court,” she argues. “No matter one’s party or no party, this is a fundamental issue of freedom for the American people and for the future of our democracy. We have to build the momentum to reform this out-of-control court.”
But, that’s not all. As a former DOJ official and Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate, I had to ask Lisa for her thoughts on the nomination of Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, to become the next U.S. Attorney General, and the 1,200 former DOJ employees from 14 Administrations, both Democratic and Republican, who wrote to Congress this week demanding that Senators reject the nomination. Yes, Graves was one of the signatories on that letter and, yes, she has a few thoughts today on the unspeakably corrupt and uniquely unqualified Blanche to take the position of the nation’s top law enforcement official…
