'BradCast' 1/8/2019 (Shutdown Crisis is Real, 'Border Crisis' is Not)
On today's show:\xa0 The effects of the federal government's partial shutdown continue to worsen, including potentially tens of thousands of American families who could be evicted from homes subsidized by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development. Vice President Mike Pence repeated Trump's false claims of a \u201cnational emergency\u201d crisis at the border \u2013 but declaring a "national emergency" may be Trump's only face-saving way out of it. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear two partisan gerrymandering cases this session from Maryland and North Carolina which may not be good news for advocates of voting rights, but the Court rejected Virginia Republicans' latest bid to delay remedial redistricting maps for statewide elections in Nov. 2019.\xa0 The effects of last year's 'blue wave' election continue to improve the lives of Americans across the country.\xa0 Maine's new Democratic Governor Janet Mills signed an order to implement Medicaid Expansion, finally giving some 70,000 Mainers access to healthcare that had been blocked for some eight years by the former Republican governor. Florida's Amendment 4, adopted by nearly 65 percent of voters in November, kicked in on Tuesday, allowing as many as 1.4 million former felons the right to vote in a state notorious for close elections. The result could be a sea change for the state in 2020, not to mention for the rest of the nation where Florida's electoral votes are key to presidential elections. Plus Desi Doyen has the first 'Green News Report' of 2019, where last year's 'blue wave' is bringing changes on the environmental front at both the state and federal level, even as Trump's shutdown is trashing National Parks and blocking important scientific research...