'BradCast' 7/9/2021 (Guest: Legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern on SCOTUS undermining Voting Rights Act)

On today's 'BradCast':  The Republican justices on the GOP's pack-and-stolen U.S. Supreme Court majority have turned back the clock on voting rights, says UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen, 'and the American public does not realize what a hit American democracy has taken.'  The rightwing majority legislated from the bench, allowing states to erect new roadblocks to minority voting rights with few legal consequences. They wholly rewrote the intent of Congress and ignored the plain text of the Constitution's 15th Amendment, which declares, 'The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.' Once again, they put the lie to the bogus claim by the right that they are 'originalists' or 'Constitutional textualists.'  Slate's ace legal reporter MARK JOSEPH STERN discusses the end of the Supreme Court's term, and the context and history of the two final rulings that gut campaign finance disclosure laws and further dismantle the Voting Rights Act. Justice Alito's majority opinion allows states to ignore the explicit language of Congress' legislation barring voting laws that result in disproportionate disenfranchisement of minority voters, and fabricates a new rule that is nowhere in the text of the VRA or in the Constitution. Stern warns the final two rulings bode ill for the next term of SCOTUS, any voting rights or democracy reform laws that Congressional Democrats may pass, and much more. Also today:  Corporations that pretended outrage over the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection and the proliferation of GOP voter suppression laws are still donating to Republicans who voted against certification of Joe Biden's decisive electoral victory over Trump.