'BradCast' 8/1/2018 (Guest: Alexandra Thornton of American Progress)
b"Good news (for a change!) today: Michigan's state Supreme Court approved a wildly popular, non-partisan anti-gerrymandering measure for November's statewide ballot, just one of several encouraging election reforms that Michiganders will be able to vote for during this year's midterms. Similar citizen-driven initiatives to end partisan redistricting have also qualified for the November ballot in Missouri, Utah, and Colorado. An appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling finding Donald Trump's executive order barring federal funds to so-called "sanctuary cities" as unconstitutional. In the wake of the Trump/GOP tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy late last year, new studies find U.S. corporations are spending their record profits are on stock buybacks rather than increasing worker wages. Now, Trump's Treasury Dept. is considering a scheme to bypass Congress entirely to offer an additional $100 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. Alexandra Thornton, former tax policy adviser to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and now Senior Director of Tax Policy at the Center for American Progress, explains the latest Treasury Department scheme, and debunks the GOP "fairy tale" that tax cuts pay for themselves, and in reality explode the national debt and deficit.\\xa0 Finally, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's scheme of canceling the August Senate recess in hopes of ramming through Trump's federal judicial nominees and his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, faces an unexpected hurdle with the absence of Arizona's outgoing U.S. Senator Jeff Flake. Is Flake, who claims to be a Trump opponent yet votes for most of his agenda anyway, finally taking some form of real action in response?..."