'BradCast' 1/18/2022 (Guest: Brennan Center redistricting expert Michael Li)
b"On today's 'BradCast': The Republican Party's decades-long effort to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat in elections is in full swing, with GOP-controlled state legislatures using Donald Trump's Big Lie about 'voter fraud' as pretext to adopt new voter suppression and election subversion laws. In Texas, county clerks report they have been forced to reject an unprecedented number of perfectly legal absentee ballot applications due to minor technicalities, including errors caused by the state, under the GOP's corrupt new anti-voting laws. In Arizona, election officials further demolished the Trump/GOP Big Lie, finding zero criminal cases of 'voter fraud' out of millions of votes cast in the 2020 election. Senate Democrats are pushing to move crucial voting rights legislation, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which would establish minimum standards for voting rights, ballot access, and make partisan gerrymandering unlawful in all 50 states. But Republicans oppose expanding voting rights, and two obstructionist Democratic senators (Manchin and Sinema) refuse to modify the Senate filibuster to allow its passage, meaning GOP efforts to game elections will be largely free and clear before Nov. 2022. MICHAEL LI, senior counsel for the non-partisan Brennan Center's Democracy Program, explains how new heavily-gerrymandered partisan maps in red states make it easy for Republicans to cheat voters - - particularly voters of color - - out of their right to choose their representatives, how voting rights legislation in the Senate would be 'a gamechanger,' and much more. Also today: House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection has subpoenaed Trump crony Rudy Giuliani and several others."