Cross posted to the MRC's NewsBusters blog
On Tuesday's Amanpour & Company on PBS and CNN International, Hari Sreenivasan was seen interviewing a liberal author who accuses the Supreme Court of enabling Republicans to racially discriminate and rig elections in their favor.
Not only did he push the liberal narrative that it is racial discrimination to require voter ID, but he also exaggerated the effects of gerrymandering in favor of Republicans.
Fill-in host Bianna Golodrya set up the segment: "And now we turn to democracy in the United States, which our next guest believes is under threat. In his new book, David Daley suggests that far-right actors, including within the Supreme Court, are controlling American elections. He describes a 50-year plot to undermine voting rights..."
Hari Sreenivasan was then seen interviewing David Daley about he latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. After Daley argued that Chief John Roberts has been very successful at pushing a conservative agenda on several issues, and recalled that he had long wanted to overturn the Voting Rights Act before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, the PBS correspondent followed up: "Tell me, why is it so important to understand this attack that you say is an attack on the Voting Rights Act, you know, that's been a long plan? Why is that crucial to understanding not just the power of the attacker but the consequences to the attack?"
Referring back to the 2013 court ruling against the Voting Rights Act, Daley preposterously argued that the South has not changed much since the 1960s:
In this decision, John Roberts says that things have changed in the South and that the protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary -- that we lived in a different country -- it was not 1965 anymore. The trouble with that is that the attack on the vote began that very morning. That states across the South and elsewhere were waiting for this decision and immediately began implementing things like voter ID pushes and voter roll purges and precinct closures that they could not have gotten away with prior to the court's decision.
So when Roberts says that things have changed in the South, all he had to do is open his eyes to what was happening before the court's decision and immediately afterwards. Very little had actually changed in the South except now, thanks to the court, these dark forces that the decision in Shelby unleashed were able to get away with it again.
He soon singled out Texas and Georgia as Republican-controlled states that are allegedly engaging in racial discrimination:
So many state legislatures across the South that are enacting these new laws, those maps would have had to have been pre-cleared to ensure that they were not racial gerrymanders. So in states like Texas and states like Georgia, where the population growth has been almost entirely driven by black Americans and Latinos, and yet their representation has not gone up. In fact, in many cases, it has gone backwards.
Although Sreenivasan modestly pushed back and couple of times, he still failed to dispel some of his liberal guest's misleading claims. For example, with regard to allegedly racial gerrymandering in Texas, it was widely reported incorrectly in the liberal media in 2021 that Texas Republicans were cutting minority representation in Congress and delivering 23 white-majority districts versus only 7 Hispanic majority out of 38.
But, in reality, the number of Hispanic majority districts remained unchanged at 10 with 16 white-majority while the number of black opportunity districts remained at three. (The number of Hispanic majority districts would have increased by one if Democrats had not opposed a Republican effort to un-gerrymander the 18th district.)
It turned out there were nine Hispanics (an increase of one) and six blacks (also an increase of one) who won seats in the 2022 congressional elections in Texas.
And, in Georgia, Republicans kept all four black opportunity districts, and all five black members of the delegation were reelected in 2022.
It was not mentioned, for example, that while some states have disproportionate number of Republican-leaning congressional districts, others have over strongly tilted toward Democrats. All Massachusetts districts (currently 9, previously 10) have been held by Democrats since the 1990s while only seven of the 52 districts in California are Republican-leaning seats.
In one of his modest pushbacks, Sreenivasan asked if Chief Justice Roberts was really that "sinister," leading to an emphatic yes from his liberal guest.
Transcript follows:
PBS's Amanpour & Co.
September 3, 2024
BIANNA GOLODRYGA: And now we turn to democracy in the United States, which our next guest believes is under threat. In his new book, David Daley suggests that far-right actors, including within the Supreme Court, are controlling American elections. He describes a 50-year plot to undermine voting rights, and he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the implications as Americans head to the polls in November.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. David Daley, thanks so much for joining us. Your most recent book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. I've got to ask: Look, when somebody reads "50-year plot," they're going to be like, "Okay, this is tinfoil material here, this is conspiracy theory." What makes this not a conspiracy in your mind?
DAVID DALEY, AUTHOR OF ANTIDEMOCRATIC: This has been a very strategic effort at the heart of the Republican party over the last 50 years. They have understood I think more effectively than the Democrats have that there are pressure points within our democracy, and that if you can put your finger on them -- if you can control these little levers sort of fly under the radar whether we talk about gerrymandered state legislatures or whether we're talking in many about the constitution of the U.S. Supreme Court that you are able to have outsized influence and to win victories that you never could have won otherwise.
In many ways, Chief Justice John Roberts is the most effective Republican politician of his generation because by controlling the Supreme Court as Republicans have, they've been able over the last 20 years to win victories on guns -- on voting rights -- on the environment -- on the regulatory state that would simply not have been possible through the electoral process at the ballot box.
SREENIVASAN: What makes him a politician? He and lots of our other members of our audience would say, "Hold on, he's not elected -- he's not, you know, he's a presidential appointee." I mean, you go back into his history as a young lawyer at the Reagan DOJ.
DALEY: That's right. I mean, John Roberts, in many ways, his life's work has been curtailing the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts grew up in an extraordinarily white town in Indiana. This was a town that even after America banned discrimination in housing was still advertising itself in vacation brochures as a home where only Caucasian gentiles lived. He clerks on the U.S. Supreme Court for Bill Rehnquist who -- it has been well-documented in his days in Arizona was personally harassing and intimidating voters back in the 1960s.
(...)
SREENIVASAN: Okay, so fast forward, one of his first cases at the Department of Justice under Ronald Reagan is about the Voting Rights Act, and then in 2013 he is writing the opinion for a really important decision -- Shelby County versus Holder, and for people who might not have been paying attention, there's a concept in there called pre-clearance. What was it? Why is it so important?
(DALEY)
Tell me, why is it so important to understand this attack that you say is an attack on the Voting Rights Act, you know, that's been a long plan? Why is that crucial to understanding not just the power of the attacker but the consequences to the attack?
DALEY: In this decision, John Roberts says that things have changed in the South and that the protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary -- that we lived in a different country -- it was not 1965 anymore. The trouble with that is that the attack on the vote began that very morning. That states across the South and elsewhere were waiting for this decision and immediately began implementing things like voter ID pushes and voter roll purges and precinct closures that they could not have gotten away with prior to the court's decision. So when Roberts says that things have changed in the South, all he had to do is open his eyes to what was happening before the court's decision and immediately afterwards. Very little had actually changed in the South except now, thanks to the court, these dark forces that the decision in Shelby unleashed were able to get away with it again.
SREENIVASAN: Well, give me an example, the first federal election after that decision would have been Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. Was there an impact of the Shelby decision on that election?
DALEY: Yes, I think that absolutely we can see the impact of Shelby County across American elections. We can see it in the 2024 election right now. So much of the election chicanery under way in the state of Georgia right now in which a state election board is attempting to change laws around how elections are certified and credentialed would not have been possible under Shelby County. It would have had to have been precleared first. So many state legislatures across the South that are enacting these new laws, those maps would have had to have been pre-cleared to ensure that they were not racial gerrymanders. So in states like Texas and states like Georgia, where the population growth has been almost entirely driven by black Americans and Latinos, and yet their representation has not gone up. In fact, in many cases, it has gone backwards. That would not have been possible.
The court's decision in the Dobbs case that effectively put an end to abortion in many parts of the country. In this case, the justice who wrote the decision, Samuel Alito, ensured Americans that the court was not taking away a right -- it was simply returning a contentious issue to the people in the electoral process. Except the court knew full well that they were returning this issue to gerrymandered -- often times racially gerrymandered -- state legislatures that they had allowed to be rigged in advance, and the outcomes were entirely predictable, and the outcomes were opposed -- often times diametrically opposed to the wishes of the people of these states. And yet voters had little recourse at the ballot box thanks to the decisions that the court had made over the course of the previous decade. It's as if they planned it that way.
SREENIVASAN: If Shelby County's decision -- Shelby County versus Holder -- that decision had an impact on the next federal election, I think a lot of people are also wondering: What does the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity do to the elections that we have coming up?
(DALEY)
SREENIVASAN: I can hear conservatives right now saying, "What are you talking about? The Roberts court's the one that upheld Obamacare -- it made, you know, same-sex marriages the law of the land." You can kind of go through the list of other ideas. They upheld section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I mean, is John Roberts really this kind of sinister character that you paint him out to be?
DALEY: Yes. (laughs) When you look at the America that we lived in in 2005 -- when you look at the America of 2024, our constitutional rights have been dramatically changed, and there's been a dramatic shift in constitutional law over the period of that time. Roe versus Wade simply no longer exists. The question of guns, conservative heckles and the NRA's agenda has really been allowed to run roughshod over any effort by states and localities to control the safety of their own citizens. When you look at the court's decisions on the regulatory state, what we have seen is a court that has placed itself again and again above the checks and balances of our system which is supposed to have three co-equal branches -- that this court has placed itself above the other branches.
And the American people see and recognize this. The court's approval ratings are at all-time lows. Huge majorities of Americans back the idea of ethics codes and term limits -- often times above 70 percent of Americans. So I think that the court would like us to think that they are simply neutral arbiters of the law, but we don't have to close our eyes to what we see. This is a court that is unelected, that makes its decisions in private, that is bound by no ethics code, that has lifetime appointments, and it has behaved in ways that has turned itself into a super legislature in many ways. And Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural talked about how if the decisions of the entire people had to be fixed by the Supreme Court, the people have ceased to be their own rulers. I think we're dangerously close to experiencing that moment.
SREENIVASAN: President Biden recently called for a binding ethics code and even term limits for the Supreme Court, and I'm wondering: Are those proposals enough? What would you say is necessary to reform the court?
(DALEY)
If President Trump wins another term, what do you see as the future of the Supreme Court? (DALEY)
(...)
On Friday's The ReidOut, host Joy Reid ridiculously claimed that there are currently fewer illegal border crossings than there were during the Trump administration as she hosted a segment that repeatedly compared a second Donald Trump presidency to Nazi Germany.
MSNBC's The ReidOut
September 27, 2024
7:01 p.m. Eastern
JOY REID: Donald Trump has forced another issue into the center of the campaign with a lot of help from right-wing media, including Fox -- his running mate's admitted lies, the internet and social media and conspiracy theories cooked up by literal white supremacists. That issue of course is immigration. Donald Trump knows he can't win the election based on the crappy job he did as President or his frankly crazy ideas for another administration.
(...)
And now we have Donald Trump, who has decided to make fearmongering about immigration the center of his entire campaign with fascistic rhetoric like promising the largest mass deportation operation in history and promising that it would be a bloody story; spreading racist lies about immigrants eating people's pets; and even talking about giving immigrants serial numbers Nazi style.
(...)
And just to remind you as we talk about this, border crossings are actually down to the lowest levels in four years. Violent crimes also way down across the country. And everything you hear on right-wing media to suggest otherwise is a lie. There is no migrant crime wave. Immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than people born in the U.S. They also don't eat pets.
(...)
Recent polling has shown a majority of voters say they trust Trump more when it comes to dealing with the border -- a man who doesn't know the difference between political asylum and an insane asylum, and whose plans to deport every immigrant or anyone that looks like an immigrant would send our economy into a freefall because fear, whether real or irrational, can be an effective political tactic. The question now for America is: Have we gotten to the point where we would destroy our own economy and walk willingly into a Hitlerian dictatorship because of the fear Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies are perpetuating solely for their own political benefit?
(...)
It's hard, I think, for people who probably watch this show and watch MSNBC to understand how voters look at Donald Trump, and they look at the failures, and they also look at the successes. Let me show you. Illegal border crossings fell in July -- they're at the lowest level they are in four years. That's just a fact. And so the reality that people are seeing on Fox -- this idea that immigrants are running through the country murdering people -- it's just not true.
(...)
ALEX WAGNER: Do you feel like Donald Trump's going to be better on that issue?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Based on what we've seen in his first four years, I do believe that he will be better on that. Yeah.
WAGNER: Do you -- are you leaning towards Trump right now?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, ma'am.
(...)
REID: Olivia, "Based on what we've seen in his first four years, I do believe he will be better on that." Based on what? The only things that we saw in terms of immigration -- as you talked about with Stephen Miller, were taking babies out of the hands of their moms at the border and separating them and sending them off in two different directions and losing track of them. You saw a lot of cruelty -- you saw a lot of talk about s-hole countries. He didn't build a wall, and border crossings are lower now than they were then. What are people seeing? What reality are they living in?
OLIVIA TROYE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF 97 PERCENT: Well, therein lies the problem, Joy. I think it's just because the fearmongering and all of these narratives, they work when the right-wing media machine is coming together and pushing that, and that's all they're seeing. And so this is a product of disinformation that they're continuing to push devoid of policy or facts.
(...)
What he says is resonating in communities. Now, the problem with that is that, "What does Donald Trump's immigration proposal actually look like in the future?" It's going to look like encampments. What is it going to look like when they're, like, putting people in encampments on the borders or in these cities where they're shipping them around? What's it going to look like when they're targeting just anyone who looks potentially like a minority in general and taking these kids out of schools and corralling them?
(...)
REID: Well, I'll tell you what it will look like. It will look like concentration camps in Germany in the 1930s because that's what you call it when you put somebody in a camp with means to separate them from society. It's called a concentration camp.
(...)
MSNBC's Morning Joe
October 4, 2024
9:41 a.m. Eastern
JONATHAN LeMIRE: That was a look at the powerful new documentary from NBC News Studio, titled Separated, based on the New York Times bestselling book of the same title from NBC News national and political correspondent Jacob Soboroff and directed by Academy Award-Winning filmmaker Errol Morris. The film describes the impact of the Trump administration's family separation policy at the southern border. And both Jacob and Errol join us now. ... So this is a story that obviously you have been covering for a long time. Viewers of this network will feel like they know it, but tell us why this film is so important.
JACOB SOBOROFF: Well, I mean, don't take my word for it. Listen to what the George W. Bush-appointed judge in the Southern District of New York who stopped this policy said about it. He said it was "one of the most shameful chapters in the history of this country." Not my words -- Dana Sabraw's words, Republican-appointed judge -- 5,500 kids were deliberately separated from their parents for no other reason than to harm them -- to hurt them -- to scare their people from coming to the United States. It's part of a pattern of immigration policy in the United States that is bipartisan that revolves around deterrence and scaring people from coming here by hurting them and most profoundly obviously with this famous example of the Trump family separation policy. And there is still questions about why this happened, how it could have happened, how the nation let it happen, and that's why Errol and I decided to get together to make what Errol has done -- a spectacularly beautiful film that only Errol Morris can make.
WALTER ISAACSON: You just mentioned that it's part of a pattern of deterrence that's happened for two decades now. What is the alternative to that?
SOBOROFF: The alternative is a system as the Biden administration had laid out when Alejandro Mayorkas came in as the Homeland Security secretary -- one that is orderly, humane and fair. I'm not an immigration policy expert -- I'm a journalist who witnessed this myself -- and what I can tell you is what happened in the summer of 2018 was not that.
(...)
He wanted to reinstate it, and he still has not said whether or not he would reinstate it. And that's why there are, you know, that's why I think the film is so important -- what Errol has done -- is so important -- to answer questions about what the future holds as much as it does in the past, including what the Biden administration has promised but hasn't done, which is have a wholesale radical departure from an immigration system based on deterrence and cruelty (?).
LeMIRE: So, Errol, there's also of course a timeliness to this film because it's not just that Donald Trump was President. He is the Republican nominee for President. He stands about a one in two chance of being President again. And some of his policies, including forced deportation of immigrants including some who are here legally, is what he is saying, very much your film has a timeliness here. Talk to me about why you think it was so important to come out now and your, frankly, fears of what the next Trump term will look like.
ERROL MORRIS, FILM MAKER: I'm scared. I wish Donald Trump would deport himself.
LeMIRE: Fair enough. And with that, we'll leave it right there perfectly and briefly said with some real brevity.
(...)
MSNBC's Katy Tur Reports
October 4, 2024
3:59 p.m.
KATY TUR: When you started this, Donald Trump wasn't running for office again. I think we could say that, right? Do you see it now as a warning?
ERROL MORRIS: I think he was always running for office. He was always somewhere lurking in the shadows, and he's frightening. I can tell you, quite simply, he frightens me. It's a visceral reaction. I don't even think it's intellectual anymore.
(...)
SOBOROFF: He's put it in the context -- Errol has the way only Errol can as a film maker -- of decades of bipartisan deterrence-based policy. What Donald Trump did wouldn't have been possible were it not for Democratic administrations creating -- its treating immigration has a deterrence policy -- something to punish and harm people for coming to the United States to do, and that's how we ended up with the separation policy -- how we ended up where we are today.
(...)
MSNBC's Deadline: White House
October 4, 2024
5:45 p.m.
NICOLLE WALLACE: Earlier this week at the vice presidential debate, J.D. Vance opened the door to returning to one of the darkest periods in our country's history, and that was Donald Trump's policy of forcibly separating children from their parents who were trying to immigrate to the country. Thousands of children were taken from their parents under this policy -- some as young as four months old -- and kept in wire cages.
(...)
JACOB SOBOROFF: We're looking down the barrel of the exact same policy potentially happening again in this moment, and they're employing some of the same rhetoric. And I do want to point out, we wouldn't be here if it wasn't -- and part of the reason that we wanted to tell the story is we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the bipartisan deterrence-based nature of immigration policy in the U.S. The Biden administration just put forward one of the most conservative immigration bills in the history of the country. But nobody has ever done what the Trump administration did, and nobody has used it, employed it, deployed it in the campaign in the way they're continuing to do.
ERROL MORRIS: We hear arguments that this has been done before, that this is no different from what was done in the Obama administration, the Bush administration, the Clinton administration. Did they have immigration policies that were draconian -- that were filled with, I would say cruel policies, but nothing on this level
