'BradCast' 7/21/2023 (Encore: Legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern on John Roberts' neat SCOTUS 'Moderation' Trick)
Encore: original airdate 7/12/2023. On today's 'BradCast':\xa0 The Republican-controlled Iowa state legislature hastily enacted a law banning nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, despite polls showing 61 percent of Iowa voters support legal abortion in all or most cases. 2024 GOP candidate and former Vice President Mike Pence called for a national, federal ban on abortion and cruelly forcing women to carry unviable pregnancies to term. Iowa Republicans are able to inflict this cruelty on women because the corrupt, far-right majority on the US Supreme Court overturned women's reproductive rights last year. This year, the radical rightwing Supreme Court supermajority's rulings were no less radical. Slate legal journalist MARK JOSEPH STERN discusses a number of those decisions, and what has now emerged as Chief Justice John Roberts' neat trick to hoax the media into portraying the Court this year as 'moderate' - - essentially manipulating the Court's docket to make end-of-term rulings appear less extreme than they actually are. Stern explains the most alarming and worst ruling of the term, the made-up-out-of-whole-cloth, wildly subjective 'major questions doctrine' that allows the Court to legislate from the bench (despite Republicans' pretense of being against such a thing), what to expect in the Court's next term, and specific policies for court reform.