We had a bunch of excellent callers on today’s BradCast. It sounds like many of them heard my warning today. Hopefully you will too. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]
But, first up, on our first show after taking several much-need days off last week, we catch up with just a few of the most noteworthy items from what turned out to be another very busy news week. Among those items…
- the Independence Day mass shooting in IL;
- the popular and political uprisings resulting in agreements by both British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as well as Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister and President to resign;
- the horrific assassination of Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (in a nation where just one person, out of population of 125 million, was killed by a gun in 2021);
- the excellent jobs and unemployment numbers released by the Labor Department last Friday (and, as usual, ignored by the bulk of the corporate media due to everything else);
- the good news that Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Lindsey Graham and 5 others who served as attorneys for Donald Trump in 2020 have now been subpoenaed to testify by the Special Grand Jury in Atlanta, convened by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, in her criminal investigation of the disgraced former President’s attempt to steal Georgia’s election in 2020.
- All of that in advance of another public hearing to be held on Tuesday by the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s multiple failed attempts to steal the election from Joe Biden and the American voters.
Then, its back to the issue that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since we previously WARNED about it on our last show before taking a break. Specifically, the corrupt, extremist, illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court’s announcement that they intend to hear Moore v. Harper next term, in a case that will give the stolen and packed far-right Court majority the opportunity to undermine American electoral democracy as we know it. That is not an overstatement.
If you thought what the Supremes did at the end of this past term — ignoring the text of the Second Amendment in order to block states’ rights to well-regulate firearms; stripping away previously protected Constitutional privacy rights and reproductive freedoms to overturn Roe v. Wade; all but ending Constitutionally-required Miranda Rights for those detained by law enforcement; further eroding what’s left of our Constitutional separation between Church and State; and gutting the ability of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions driving our deadly climate crisis, as mandated by Congress — well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
As explained, SCOTUS is now set to undermine any and all elections laws for federal elections enacted by state Boards of Elections, Secretaries of States, Governors, state constitutions, state Supreme Courts or even ballot initiatives adopted by voters themselves. The corrupt Republican Court is likely to do this by declaring that Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution mandates that state legislatures — and only state legislatures — may determine laws regarding the “manner” of federal elections. Specifically of note in 2024, the way each state appoints Electoral College votes, as the Constitution says, “in such Manner as the Legislature therefore may direct”.
In other words, in 2020, while most swing-states had rules, laws and state Constitutional mandates in place declaring that voters shall determine who will win the state’s Electoral votes, an opinion by the Court, likely to come as early as 2023 in Moore v. Harper, will free up the gerrymandered GOP-controlled state legislatures in our nation’s half a dozen or so swing-states to name anybody they like as the winner of their Electoral College votes, no matter what the Governor, state Courts or, crucially, the voters of those states have to say about it.
It’s called the “Independent State Legislature” theory (or doctrine, as the GOP autocrats supporting it describe it.) As we noted in our last show on this, this is not a drill. This is very real, and now even very likely to happen.
While we were away, our friend and colleague Thom Hartmann posted a chilling Twitter thread on the ISL theory/doctrine, detailing just one potential scenario — which includes thousands of dead bodies in the streets — which he describes as not “just plausible” but now “probable”.
We agree. Thus, we explain the importance of electing Democratic majorities in 2022 in both the U.S. House and Senate as our only hope of defeating this “probable” scenario. If 52 Democrats can be elected in the Senate and the Party is able to hold the House (both tall lifts), then the possibility of filibuster reform in the upper chamber and the expansion of the Supreme Court in order to unpack and uncorrupt it becomes a reality.
As discussed on today’s show, the luxury of pretending that “both parties are equally bad” is over, as I see it. And not because I give a damn about protecting Democrats, but because I believe we must protect — indeed, SAVE — democracy itself at this point.
Anyway, please tune in for a very lively, if occasionally chilling hour, along with some really great calls from listeners on all of this in the second half…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Article II Section I is not the whole story:
(Article II, Section 4,Clause 1, emphasis added).
The 14th Amendment limits “states” (including state legislatures) from impairing rights:
(14th Amendment, emphasis added).
It would seem that removing a legal voter’s participation would be unconstitutional.
The above has been expanded to apply to females (19th Amendment) and the voting age was lowered to 18 (26th Amendment).
SCOTUS is inspired and reinforced by a new brand
of logic:
https://thegarlicwww.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-worlds-most-advanced-mathematics.html