It's the democracy, stupid

In this WCPT 820AM conversation, I talk with my friend Jill Wine-Banks. She is an MSNBC legal analyst. Author of The Watergate Girl and host of the podcast Sisters In Law. Talented young women today do not know how much they owe to women like Jill, and that’s as it should be but only is because of decades of hard work and commitment.

In this podcast, we talked about two main topics: The Trump legal drama and the recently completed Supreme Court session. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

Jill Wine-Banks

Thanks for reading It's the democracy, stupid! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Yasmin Radjy is the Executive Director at Swing Left. She is one the top political organizers in the country and we are so lucky to have her using all of that experience & energy to help Democrats win. She is also one of my all-time favorite guests.

In this recent WCPT-820AM conversation, we talked about:

* Swing Left’s new targets for the 23/24 cycle

* Adjustments to those targets after the recent ruling in Allen v Milligan

* Swing Left’s efforts to push for an expanded court, or for other reforms that many of us now see as necessary to preserve the independence of the judiciary?

* New opportunities, for example in North Carolina where there’s a dynamic new party Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton

* How we get out the message about the American future we hope to build when the media will be covering the goings and comings of Donald Trump

Thanks for reading It's the democracy, stupid! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Meagan Hatcher-Mays is the Indivisible Guide’s Director of Democracy Policy, leading the organization’s advocacy on impeachment, the courts, and democracy reform. She is attorney and an advocate for a more progressive judiciary, and she has been fighting to prevent us from coming to precisely this spot.

In this recent WCPT-820AM conversation, we talked about the various outrages at the U.S. Supreme Court and what can be done to fix the court. We also talked about Indivisable’s 2024 goals and how people can get involved with the work.

Thanks for reading It's the democracy, stupid! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Jones spent much of his career as Research Engineer with the University of Iowa. He is avid outdoorsman and one of the nation’s experts on the Upper Mississippi River ecosystem. He’s the author of The Swine Republic, a book that explains the damage being caused by Iowa’s agriculture industry. Recently on WCPt 820Am, we talked about:

* How Chris has a double story to tell. One is the story of industrial agriculture, the damage it is doing to the environment. This is a 21st century update to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The second story is about our politics, how big ag’s power extended to the university system and stood between you and the telling of facts.

* The environmental impact of Iowa’s Ag business?

* His new book ‘Swine Republic.”

* I read one sentence and nearly lost my mind. Chris wrote, 

“We’re polluting water at a continental scale. Iowa occupies 4.5 percent of land area in the Mississippi Basin but contributes to 29 percent of the nitrate and 15 percent of the phosphorus polluting the Gulf of Mexico. What we do here is impacting water quality 1,500 miles away.”

* How the impact is also felt along racial lines.

* His now former blog on Iowa waterways.

* The Supreme Court’s recent decision to limit the clean water act’s definition of wetlands and what it will that mean for Iowa and for the hemisphere.

ALSO: be sure to read this Outside Magazine piece featuring Chris’ thoughts on Iowa farming and how the dirty water is spreading beyond the state borders to a stream near you. An excerpt:

Every year, millions of pounds of raw hog waste are applied to the state’s corn and soybean fields. Nutrients from fertilizer wash into lakes and streams, poisoning water that flows into the Missouri and Mississippi river basins, which provide drinking water to a combined 28 million Americans. The state’s tributaries to the Mississippi have played an outsized role in creating the Gulf of Mexico’s annual “dead zone,” an oxygen-depleted area of the ocean.

Thank you for reading It's the democracy, stupid. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

David Pepper, author of Laboratories of Autocracy, has spent at least a decade trying to turn our attention to state capitals where, unseen by most of us, partisan legislatures were doing great damage to our democracy. As David is the first to admit, it is a dark book that does not fully square with his own optimism that we have still the power to save the democracy we love. So he wrote a new book, Saving Democracy, to celebrate what people are doing to fight back, and to provide everyone else with what he calls a users manual for every American.

In this WCPT 820AM conversation, we talk about both of David’s books on democracy. We also tackled a few other timely topics including:

* The campaign for reproductive choice in Ohio and the backlash that has led to a bizarre August referendum to change the state constitution so that Ohioans can’t again change the constitution.

* Allen v Milligan and the impact that decision might have on districts across the country.

* The Trump indictment

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Donald J. Wuebbles is the Harry E. Preble Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois. He is also a Presidential Fellow at the University of Illinois, with the aim of helping the university system develop new initiatives in urban sustainability. From 2015 to early 2017, Dr. Wuebbles was Assistant Director with the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the Executive Office of the President in Washington DC, where he was the White House expert on climate science.  His whole bio is so impressive that reading only its highlights would leave no time for our conversation. 

But I have to tell you this part: he was part of a group that won the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Wuebbles was the lead author on several key climate assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC won the Nobel in 2007:

“for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”

Dr. Wuebbels and the IPCC shared the Nobel that year with climate activist and former Vice President Al Gore.

Wubbels also played the leading role in the passage of the Montreal protocol that banned CFCs in aerosol cans and ended thus use of FREON as a refrigerant. Put differently, this man saved the planet. 

In this WCPT 820AM conversation, we talked about:

* Climate change: what are we seeing

* Major weather events

* Rising sea levels

* Retreating glaciers

* Rising temperatures

* Changing migratory patterns

* Human contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere- you can look back nearly a million years using things like ice cores and tree rings and see accelerating change in the last few years.

* Measuring the risk of various gasses relative to each other including methane.

* How the greenhouse effect is what makes life possible, but too much of a good thing is not a good thing

* What are the costs to climate change?

* What can we do to help stop/ slow it down?

Thanks for reading It's the democracy, stupid! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

 

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

* David DeWitt is the Editor-in-Chief of the Ohio Capital Journal. He’s been covering the goings on in that state for more than 15 years. In this conversation, we are talking about the important and controversial election in Ohio this coming August.

Earlier this month, the Ohio State Supreme Court ruled that the election could go ahead as the Cap Journal reported:

Along party lines, the Ohio Supreme Court on Friday gave the green light to an attempt by Republican leaders of the state’s gerrymandered legislature to make it much harder for voters to amend the state Constitution. The court ruled in a 4-3 decision that it’s OK for the issue to be placed on the Aug. 8 ballot even though the legislature just outlawed such elections in January.

The Republican majority said that regardless of the law, the Ohio Constitution gives the legislature great latitude in deciding when elections will be held. In a dissent, the Democratic minority argued that while that might be the case, the legislature still has to follow the laws it has passed — and change the ones it doesn’t like.

Issue 1 would raise the percentage of votes needed to pass a voter-initiated amendment from 50% to 60%. It would also require that a given number of the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to get an amendment on the ballot come from each of Ohio’s 88 counties instead of the current 44.

Critics — including bipartisan groups of former governors and attorneys general and more than 240 other groups — say the requirements would make voter-initiated amendments practically impossible. Some add that Issue 1 would greatly enhance the gerrymandered legislature’s power over the state Constitution relative to that of Ohio voters — the exact opposite of what former President Theodore Roosevelt argued for when he successfully advocated adoption of the current system in 1912.

Republican leaders, including Secretary of State Frank LaRose, pushing the amendment have given inconsistent reasons for why it’s needed. But to partisan audiences they’ve conceded that one reason for putting the matter on the ballot in a low-turnout Aug. 8 election is to try to block a voter-initiated abortion-rights amendment expected to be on the ballot in November.

Thank you for reading It's the democracy, stupid. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes frequently for MSNBC and other media outlets on threats to democracy around the world. Her latest book, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present examines how illiberal leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century. She also has a substack called “Lucid” that I highly recommend.

In our most recent coversation, we talked about:

* How many Americans are naïve about what democracy is.

* Why autocrats hold elections. Turkey, Hungary, Thailand? What do these elections do for the autocrats? What can we learn from Erdogan’s win in Turkey?

* The spread of authoritarianism within the republican party.

* How to sever the relation between authoritarian leaders and their followers.

* The impeachment by Republicans of one of their own, AG Ken Paxton in Texas.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Holly McCall, the Editor and Chief at the Tennessee Lookout is back with me to talk politics & much more. She is a real expert in Tennessee media and politics. She is exactly what a great journalist should be: unafraid, skeptical but not cynical, and, as I learned the last time we spoke, never unmindful that there are better angels out there, if only we would listen.

In this conversation, we talk about:

* The overturning of the Tennessee drag show ban

* Updates on the response to the horrendous school shooting in Nashville earlier this year.

* The right-wing attack on higher ed

* The so-called “constitutional republicans” who took over a Tennessee county

* The indictment of the former TN House speaker and his chief of staff and how the current Speaker is fighting charges of residency fraud

* Private prisons

* The state of local journalism in Tennessee

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Geidner is a journalist who covers the law. His substack publication, Law Dork, is really a good read. We spoke a couple of weeks ago, but his focus on the court is so relevant and important I wanted to get him back with us. I’m sure, after you hear from him, you will want to sign up for his newsletter.

In this conversation, we talk about:

* A round-up of court cases before SCOTUS so far this term

* Decisions still to come

* Ethics and the court

* The latest on the the dispute between the Senate Judiciary Committee and Harlan Crow, the financier with close ties to Justice Clarence Thomas

Chris Geidner, Author of Law Dork

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe