FEATURING AARON SCHERB – More than 6 years after the US Supreme Court gutted key portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the House of Representatives on Friday passed HR 4, a sweeping bill that reverses that decision. In the years since the court’s actions, Republican dominated states in particular, have moved to undermine voting rights for those communities that tend to vote Democratic: people of color and African Americans in particular. Now, in a bill sponsored by Alabama Representative Terri Sewell, the House passed HR 4 along almost partisan lines to undo the damage. 

But given that the Senate and White House remains under Republican Control, will HR 4 become law?

Aaron Scherb, Director of Legislative Affairs at Common Cause.

FEATURING OZAWA BINESHI ALBERT – As the latest Conference of Parties or COP25 meeting on taking action on climate change continues into its second week in Madrid, Spain, indigenous communities from around the world have taken the lead on the ground. Representatives of native communities from around the world are leading civil society groups in demanding a respect for their rights and the land. 

Among them are indigenous women who are demanding justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and linking it to the fossil fuel industry. 

For more information visit It Takes Roots.

Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Movement Building Coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN).

The House Judiciary Committee held yet another public hearing on the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on Monday as Democratic lawmakers sought to summarize the evidence and build a case for articles of impeachment. Committee chair Jerrold Nadler emphasized the danger of foreign interference in US elections. During his opening statement Mr. Nadler was interrupted by a Trump supporter who turned out to be the Owen Shroyer, a staffer with Infowars, the far-right outlet known for promoting racist and misogynist content and conspiracy theories echoed by the President. Representative Doug Collins, the ranking Republican on the panel rejected any and all claims made by Democrats despite evidence to the contrary brought forth by the largely Republican witnesses. Collins asserted, “They can’t get over the fact that Donald Trump is the president of the United States and they don’t have a candidate that can beat him.” A day earlier, President Trump, apparently rattled at the pace of the impeachment inquiry and the imminent articles of impeachment, fired off more than 100 tweets on Sunday, a possible record for him. According to Associated Press, “A committee vote is coming, possibly as soon as this week, on two or more articles of impeachment on charges of abuse of power, bribery and obstruction against the Republican president.”

Republicans appear to remain united behind Trump with his one-time critic Senator Ted Cruz of Texas repeating the same conspiracy theory that Trump promoted: that Ukraine was involved in the 2016 election interference. In an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC Mr. Cruz dug his heels in on the issue. Meanwhile on Sunday the Washington Post reported on Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who is deeply implicated in the Ukraine scandal that the impeachment inquiry is centered on. According to the Post, “In several conversations in recent months, Attorney General William P. Barr has counseled Trump in general terms that Giuliani has become a liability and a problem for the administration, according to multiple people familiar with the conversations. In one discussion, the attorney general warned the president that he was not being well-served by his lawyer…” 

Meanwhile the long-awaited Justice Department Inspector General report on the FBI’s role in prompting a Special Counsel investigation into Trump’s campaign has just been released. In order to try to undermine Robert Mueller’s probe, Trump and Attorney General Barr have repeatedly claimed the FBI acted improperly but Barr’s hand-picked federal prosecutor did not find evidence to that effect in the 434-page report. There was evidence that the FBI used its surveillance powers carelessly and there may be prosecutions that emerge from the investigation. But on the wild conspiracy claims that Trump and his allies made against the FBI, the report exonerated the agency.  

In other news, President Trump in a widely denounced speech on Saturd...

FEATURING SARAH JAFFE – The Brexit drama in Britain has led to yet another election, taking place on December 12. Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the elections after failing to negotiate a deal for his nation to leave the European Union. But at the center of the political crisis is how Britain’s revered National Health Service may be up for grabs if the exit transpires. 

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn says he has obtained documents showing a plan to privatize the NHS involving American medical firms. Brits are appalled at the idea of a weakening of their universal health care system and took to the streets to denounce US President Donald Trump during his recent visit to their country for the NATO Summit. Trump has openly spoken about signing a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK that would involve NHS privatization.

Read Sarah Jaffe’s article HERE.

Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at the Type Media Center, covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. She is the author of the book, Necessary Trouble: America’s New Radicals.

FEATURING ROBERT ELLIOTT SMITH – The rapid rise of digital technology and the Internet has changed our political landscape, how we communicate with our peers, and how we communicate to the whole world. One of the major lessons of the 2016 elections was just how useful the Internet was to those who wanted to hack our electoral systems. 

Fake news and polarizing memes skewed voting patterns and hate flourished online. Today companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are under fire from those who are outraged at the proliferation of fake news and hate-groups, while right wing extremists claim they are biased against conservatives. 

My next guest says it’s the algorithms these tech platforms use that are the problem.

Robert Elliott Smith, an expert in Artificial Intelligence who has worked on projects for Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and more. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. His new book is called Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All.

*This segment was originally broadcast on September 27, 2019.

A shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Base in Florida has claimed the lives of 3 people and injured at least 11 early on Friday morning. As of this recording the suspected gunman has not yet been identified but reports confirm that he was a Saudi Arabian national. He was fatally shot by a Sheriff’s deputy. Pensacola airbase has thousands of military personnel both American and foreign troops who receive training. The Naval base shooting was the second in just days. On Wednesday a shooter identified as 22-year old Gabriel Romero shot at 3 civilians at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii. Two were killed and the shooter then shot himself. No motive is known. The attack came just days before the 78th anniversary commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

In other news, House Democrats are moving quickly to write articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump with a possible vote before Christmas. The House Judiciary Committee will hold another public hearing on Monday morning featuring witnesses who have been investigating how Trump used his office for political gain in the Ukraine scandal. Meanwhile in the case over Rudy Giuliani’s associate Lev Parnas facing campaign finance violations, there may be a possible plea deal looming. If Mr. Parnas takes a plea he may be willing to implicate Giuliani, who is Trump’s personal attorney and at the center of the Ukraine scandal. Giuliani is also implicated in communication records with the Office of Budget and Management showing that he may have been in contact with OMB officials around the withholding of US military aid to Ukraine. 

The latest jobs report for November is out and points to an increase in job growth. The US economy added 266,000 jobs last month with analysts pointing to the end of the General Motors strike as one reason for the jump in numbers. Wage growth remained stagnant according to some economists but others pointed to a slight increase in wages. President Trump celebrated the report on Twitter. 

Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is facing scrutiny for several years of work he did with the top consulting firm McKinsey. Because the company is secretive about the services it offers Buttigieg says he cannot reveal what he did at McKinsey during his time working there. The New York Times explained that, “The firm has long advocated business strategies like raising executive compensation, moving labor offshore and laying off workers to cut costs.” Additionally the company has been notorious for, “its work advising Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” opioid sales, its consulting for authoritarian governments in places like China and Saudi Arabia, and its role in a wide-ranging corruption scandal in South Africa.” Most recently ProPublica in collaboration with the Times revealed how Bu...

FEATURING REBECCA GORDON – Watching the many hours of impeachment hearings over the past several weeks has been a challenging experience, particularly when House Republican committee members addressed witnesses. The obfuscations and angry defiance with which they have defended President Donald Trump could lead one to believe they inhabit an entirely different plane of reality. 

Asking “What’s Wrong with Republicans” in a new article is my guest Rebecca Gordon. According to Gordon, “The Trump Republican Party has inherited, and continues to make use of, the legacies of this nation’s twin evils: slavery and imperial expansion.”

Read her article HERE. Also read her readings at https://mainstreamingtorture.org.

Rebecca Gordon, writes for Tom Dispatch and has a new piece called “What’s Wrong With the Republicans, Fruits of the Twin Roots of Evil: Slavery and Imperial Expansion.” She is on the faculty of the University of San Francisco’s Philosophy Department.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked Committees working on the impeachment inquiry to proceed with drawing up Articles of Impeachment against President Donald Trump. In a speech early on Thursday morning Speaker Pelosi made the announcement. She gave no indication of the timeline of the process but it is expected that the House will pass them to impeach Trump with a Democratic majority. After that the US Senate will take up a trial to determine whether or not to remove the President. Trump responded on Twitter (here and here) saying, “if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business.” He added, acting as though he was in complete control of the US Senate, “We will have Schiff, the Bidens, Pelosi and many more testify, and will reveal, for the first time, how corrupt our system really is.”

President Trump’s personal attorneys asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to intervene in the fight over turning over his financial records to Congress. The case involves Trump’s former accounting firm Mazars International, which has pledged to comply with the outcome of the legal challenge to a House subpoena for Trump’s records. A federal district court judge and a District Court of Appeals have already ruled in favor of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. If the US Supreme Court takes up the case it would draw up new battle lines over political power between the Executive and Legislative branches of government. 

Trump’s most controversial personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who is central to the Ukraine scandal that the President faces impeachment on, is also in the news. While the House Judiciary Committee was holding public impeachment hearings on Tuesday Mr. Giuliani was in the Ukrainian capital meeting with a former pro-Russian lawmaker named Andriy Derkach. Mr. Derkach has been eager to investigate the Bidens and has written to US lawmakers asking for their cooperation in investigating corruption in Ukraine. Giuliani has also been meeting with former Ukrainian prosecutors whose conspiracy theories the Republican Party has embraced. 

Attorney General William Barr is facing a disappointing prospect in his crusade to show that the Special Counsel investigation into 2016 wrongdoing was an FBI conspiracy. The prosecutor that Mr. Barr handpicked to investigate the origins of the probe apparently cannot confirm Barr’s suspicions and President Trump’s claims. The report from the investigation is expected to be released on December 9th and may be a disappointment to conservatives who have long sought to undermine the need for Robert Mueller’s investigation. 

The Republican-dominated Senate just voted to ...

FEATURING COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER – The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday took up the baton of the impeachment process from the House Intelligence Committee, holding its first public hearing. Four constitutional scholars and professors were called in to be witnesses, three of them by Democrats and one by Republicans. 

Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard University laid out the logic of the constitution’s framers in designing an impeachment process. Professor Pamela Karlan of Stanford University sharply rebutted Republicans for avoiding the facts of the Ukraine scandal at the heart of the process. And Michael Gerhardt at the University of North Carolina stated succinctly, “If what we’re talking about isn’t impeachable, then nothing is impeachable.” 

On the Republican side Jonathan Turley, a Professor at George Washington University claimed to be non-partisan but denounced the impeachment process and said it was moving too fast and would set a dangerous precedent. 

Corey Brettschneider, professor of political science at Brown University. He is the author of When the State Speaks, What Should It Say: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality. His latest book is called The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future.

FEATURING DOMINIC RENFREY AND ANNE WHITE HAT – The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) together with a number of advocacy organizations, has just published a report on ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, showing that it has generated bills that promote racism and white supremacy in states across the country. 

ALEC, whose annual summit opens in Arizona on Wednesday, has been the source of cookie-cutter state-level bills on a host of conservative issues. The report by CCR is called ALEC Attacks: How evangelicals and corporations captured state lawmaking to safeguard white supremacy and corporate power. 

For more information visit https://www.alecattacks.org.

Dominic Renfrey is an Advocacy Program Manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights, Anne White Hat, indigenous water protector in Louisiana.