Your Call

Hundreds of Sub-Saharan African migrants are trapped in no man's land on the border between Tunisia and Libya.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll discuss the power and influence of the Federalist Society.

In a piece for Truthout, law professors Michael Avery and Mark Brodin detail how the society evolved from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. The group has successfully lobbied for years to strike down affirmative action, overturn Roe v. Wade, and undermine civil rights.

Today, there are over 60,000 conservative lawyers and law students involved with Federalist Society activities with chapters in 90 cities, including six Supreme Court justices.

What can be done to counter the influence of this powerful group?

On this edition of Your Call, we rebroadcast our show about Murder in Big Horn, a three-part docuseries on Showtime featuring stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Montana.

Over the past decade, dozens of Indigenous women and girls from the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Nations have been murdered or gone missing in Big Horn County. Native families and journalists unravel a violent crisis set in motion almost 200 years ago during colonization.

What will it take to end this epidemic?

On this edition of Your Call, we discuss the Hollywood actors and writers strike.

Last Thursday, more than 160,000 actors joined screenwriters who've been on strike since early May, marking the first industrywide shutdown since 1960.

SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher accused studio executives of making Wall Street and greed their priority while ignoring the essential contributors that make the machine run.

The World Bank Group enabled the devastation of villages and helped a mining company justify the deaths of endangered chimps, according to a ProPublica investigation.

There are more than 2,500 anti-abortion crisis centers across the country. That’s an average of three for every one abortion provider.

A Guardian investigation reveals more than 1,500 oil and gas lobbyists are also employed by liberal-run cities, universities, tech companies and environmental groups.

On this edition of Your Call, we discuss the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in favor of Lorie Smith, an evangelical Christian website designer in Colorado who said she should not have to provide services to a an engaged same-sex couple due to her religious beliefs.

Smith was represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy organization, which is listed as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Stewart, the man named in the suit, says he never ordered anything from Smith. Former assistant US attorney Andrew Weissmann told Newsweek that if the lawyers representing Smith are found to have made knowingly false representations, the Supreme Court could remove them from practicing in that court and arguing future cases before the justices. Those attorneys could also be referred to their bar associations for sanctioning, which could include suspensions or disbarment.

On this edition of Your Call, we discuss the landmark 6-3 Supreme Court ruling that declared race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities unconstitutional, ending decades of affirmative action in education.

The decision does continue to allow legacy admissions, and affirmative action for military academies, however. The case was brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group funded with dark money connected to Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo.

How will this decision impact racial equity on college campuses?

Six conservatives on the Supreme Court struck down Biden's student loan program, which would have wiped out more than $400B in debt for nearly 43 million borrowers.