'BradCast' 11/1/2021 ('We are Watching Democracy Die')
On today's 'BradCast':\xa0 Actor and director Rob Reiner said 'until Donald Trump is prosecuted for leading a deadly Insurrection to overthrow the government and voting rights are passed,' we are witnessing the death of democracy.\xa0 From Republican efforts to squash academic freedom and free speech in Florida, to GOP-controlled states enacting extreme partisan gerrymandering, to the Republicans' stolen and packed US Supreme Court re-litigating long-established civil rights, he may be right. Tuesday is Election Day 2021, with several high-profile gubernatorial races in VA and NJ, and voting rights on the ballot in NY.\xa0 Iowa Republicans gerrymandered their new state legislative maps to completely eliminate previously Democratic seats.\xa0 The University of Florida has taken the unprecedented step of barring three professors, all voting rights experts, from testifying in a court challenge to the state's new voter suppression law, calling it a 'conflict of interest'. The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a challenge to Texas' new 'unprecedented' anti-abortion law that has effectively ended women's long-established constitutional right to an abortion in the state. It offers bounties to citizen vigilantes to enforce it, and is structured explicitly to prevent judicial review. Yet at least one far-right justice appeared to question whether the law would allow other states to adopt similar laws that effectively outlaw other long-settled Constitutional rights. Plus:\xa0 Texas' right-wing governor calls for hundreds of books to be removed from schools. Is the book burning about to begin?\xa0 Pretty sure this sorta of thing never ends well for democracies...