| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Forgotten memoir of John Knox, a law clerk to former Justice James McReynolds, a native of Kentucky. | ||
| Knox's year was the term beginning October 1936. | ||
| In history, it is very rare that a law clerk at the Supreme Court has published an insider's view of the court or of a justice. | ||
| Professor Hutchinson gives the background on where he found the memoir, which hadn't been published before. | ||
| Justice McReynolds, as you will hear, was, according to historians, arguably one of the most disagreeable justices ever to sit on the bench. | ||
|
unidentified
|
An interview with University of Chicago law professor Dennis Hutchinson on the forgotten memoir of John Knox on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| We want to take viewers now to the Badger State to talk about a key state Supreme Court election. | ||
| Jason Fechner joins us. | ||
| He's an anchor and reporter with Spectrum News One out of Wisconsin. | ||
| Jason Fechner, first, why is a Wisconsin state Supreme Court race getting a lot of attention today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
John, wonderful to spend some time with you and your callers here this morning. | |
| A lot of attention, obviously, on Wisconsin over the last few months. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are asking that same question. | ||
| Why does this race for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court keep getting so much attention and so many millions of dollars? | ||
| You know, I think it really comes down to the last few days. | ||
| And I think what we heard from Elon Musk, who was in the Green Bay area on Sunday, giving out millions of dollars to voters who signed his petition ahead of the election here today. | ||
| You heard it from him then. | ||
| He said that obviously the congressional maps are a huge issue in Wisconsin. | ||
| Wisconsin clearly a 50-50 state over the last few election cycles, the last couple decades, some might argue. | ||
| And we have six members of the House right now who are Republicans and just two Democratic members in that delegation as well. | ||
| There's nothing before the state Supreme Court currently, but you also heard it from minority leader Hakeem Jeffries last week on a podcast saying that, you know, there's an opportunity to revisit this as quickly as possible in Wisconsin. | ||
| And when you've got 218 Republicans currently serving in the House to 213 Democrats and Speaker Mike Johnson can basically afford two defections at this point, two seats in the House potentially mean a lot. | ||
| So that's one of the big national issues that has so many eyes focused on the Badger state until the polls close here at 8 o'clock our time this evening. | ||
| So who's running today in this race and what should viewers be looking for? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, ahead of 2023, Republicans, or rather conservatives, it's a nonpartisan race here, had had a majority on the state Supreme Court, sometimes a 5-2 majority, sometimes a 4-3 majority. | |
| And that all shifted in 2023 with the election of Liberal Justice Janet Protosowitz. | ||
| So liberals all of a sudden control the ideology of the state Supreme Court. | ||
| They are looking to hold that 4-3 majority throughout the course of the day today. | ||
| Dane County Judge Susan Crawford running against conservative-leaning judge Brad Schimmel out of Waukesha County here. | ||
| He's a former attorney general as well. | ||
| So a lot of push behind Schimmel to try to shift this ideological balance back in favor of conservatives. | ||
| Elon Musk said basically the future of humankind essentially hinges on the balance of this race in Wisconsin. | ||
| So a fascinating few hours ahead here. | ||
| And when will we know tonight? | ||
| Are we expecting results this evening? | ||
| When do polls close? | ||
| And what has the polling told us going into this election? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the polling so far is neck and neck, everything more or less within the margin of error right now. | |
| There are five or six polls cited at RealClearPolitics.com. | ||
| And in all but one of those, Crawford has a very narrow lead over the conservative candidate, but all of those, again, within the margin of error here. | ||
| The Marquette Law School poll, an institution in Wisconsin out of Milwaukee, going into this about a month ago, had so many voters undecided about who they were going to vote for or saying that they simply didn't know a lot about either of those candidates. | ||
| And I think as time has gone on, that's why it has really become kind of a referendum on Trump and Elon Musk here as well. | ||
| So polls close at 8 o'clock. | ||
| As of yesterday, there were more than 660,000 absentee votes that were already in across the state. | ||
| That's about 12% of the 3.8 million registered voters here in Wisconsin. | ||
| The big issue, of course, that comes up, it came up in 2020, it came up in 2024 in the Senate race here, and it might surely come up again this evening. | ||
| There is a law on the books in Wisconsin. | ||
| Wisconsin, just one of a handful of states out there, that doesn't allow the processing of these absentee ballots until the polls open on election day. | ||
| So polls open here at 7 o'clock our time this morning, and clerks across the state throughout these 72 counties here are able to start processing those ballots. | ||
| In certain communities that use a central count location like Milwaukee and Milwaukee County, their tallies don't come out until everything is in. | ||
| So depending on how many votes come in throughout the course of the day, how many hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots are tracked across the state, we might not get firm results on this race until the overnight hours. | ||
| Of course, that played out in a very big way in 2020 when it appeared that President Donald Trump was set to win re-election in Wisconsin. | ||
| And the big ballot dump, as he called it, came in kind of overnight in Milwaukee County. | ||
| And Trump went out to lose Wisconsin then. | ||
| In 2024, in November, not as big a deal. | ||
| Trump won Wisconsin again, but now the failed Republican Senate candidate, Eric Hovedy, has kind of brought that up. | ||
| And the conservative-leaning judge in today's race has also started to talk about it. | ||
| He's pushed for a big early vote get out across Wisconsin, saying, Make it too big to rig. | ||
| So we'll kind of see the talking points as they play out. | ||
| But once again, polls close here at 8 o'clock our time this evening, and I believe that a lot of us are in for a very long night yet again across the Badger State. | ||
| Jason Fechner is joining us from Spectrum News One, Wisconsin, to talk about this race. | ||
| I want to give viewers a flavor of what voters in the Badger state are seeing in this all-important state Supreme Court race. | ||
| So we're going to show two ads: one from Brad Schimmel, the conservative in this race, and then we're going to follow it by Susan Crawford, the liberal leaning judge in this race. | ||
| Back-to-back ads for you. | ||
| Liberal Susan Crawford is a buzzkill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's not right for Wisconsin. | |
| She's the last thing that we need. | ||
| Because we just voted for Trump. | ||
| To get men out of women's sports. | ||
| Criminals and illegal immigrants off our streets. | ||
| We voted for common sense. | ||
| And liberal Susan Crawford, she could roll it all back. | ||
| She's against everything we just voted for. | ||
| We don't want Susan Crawford. | ||
| Not in Wisconsin. | ||
| Susan Crawford is wrong for Wisconsin. | ||
| Elon Musk is trying to buy this election with ads that lie about Judge Susan Crawford because he knows Sprad Schimmel always helps his campaign donors. | ||
| We don't need Schimmel's corruption on the Supreme Court. | ||
| We need Judge Susan Crawford. | ||
| Jason Fechner, those are two of the ads of many ads. | ||
| Do you know how much money has been spent on this race? | ||
| There's been a lot of attention this week, of course, when it comes to Elon Musk and the money that he's putting into this race. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right, John. | |
| And the latest estimates from WISP Politics, our partners over there as of Monday, had roughly $57 million in so far for Schimmel and his campaign going forward to about $47 million for Crawford and her campaign. | ||
| And you are right. | ||
| A lot of attention, of course, especially by those backing Crawford in this race, has been focused on the donations from Elon Musk, these million-dollar giveaways that have taken place over the last couple of weeks, including the big rally on Sunday in the Green Bay area. | ||
| And we can touch on more of why Green Bay is so critical here in a minute. | ||
| Or rather, Republicans have kind of tried to flip the script on that and say, well, wait, hold on. | ||
| Susan Crawford has gotten money from George Soros. | ||
| $2 million had come into the state Democratic Party and was funneled to her campaign. | ||
| A million and a half from Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker as well. | ||
| So they're saying she's getting a lot of outside funding as well. | ||
| She has defended that, though, saying that her average donation is $107 across the board. | ||
| And more than two-thirds of the donations that have come in are basically two to one against Schimmel's donations have come from people here in Wisconsin. | ||
| On the flip side of things, Schimmel has defended the donations from Musk, saying he doesn't really know why he's given him all that money, but he's clearly happy to have it right now, and he's working to get his message out across 72 counties. | ||
| And again, as a former statewide candidate, he says he knows how difficult that can be. | ||
| So yes, a lot of money for the regular Wisconsinite who's sitting at home. | ||
| Nothing but campaign commercials over the last few weeks, a lot of mailers in the ads as well, and a lot of people knocking on doors all across the Badger State. | ||
| And I guess finally, do want you to touch on the geography issue, Green Bay, but also for voters who aren't familiar to watching an election result night in Wisconsin, where will the votes come in first and how should they be sort of knowledgeable viewers of watching the results come in tonight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, John, and forgive my rudimentary map of Wisconsin here, but this is basically a great area here on Green Bay. | |
| And the three big counties, right? | ||
| It's the old hand map, Brown, Otagami, and Winnebago counties. | ||
| And the reason that those three are really so important is that they had supported the conservative-leaning Supreme Court candidate back in 2019, and they have since supported the liberal-leaning candidate the last two election cycles now. | ||
| So a lot of eyes there. | ||
| But really, what we saw in 2024 back in November with the re-election of Donald Trump here, the redder parts of Wisconsin got a little bit redder. | ||
| The bluer parts of Wisconsin, especially the Madison metropolitan area, the Milwaukee metropolitan area, the two biggest metropolitan areas in the state, got bluer. | ||
| So we'll see how turnout is throughout the course of the day and into the evening from both Madison and Milwaukee. | ||
| And we'll see about the turnout in the redder, the more rural parts of Wisconsin, especially those bow counties there, because really there's a lot of uncertainty among farmers in Wisconsin right now about how these tariffs that are set to be announced throughout the course of the day, Wednesday and this week as well, what that will mean for these farmers across Wisconsin. | ||
| We all know that farmers across the country don't really like uncertainty. | ||
| They were hurt by $27 billion in the trade war back in 2018 in Trump's first administration against China, $23 billion back in subsidies as well. | ||
| The current Secretary of Agriculture out there, Brooke Rollins, saying in Iowa yesterday that they're going to take care of their farmers. | ||
| So we'll really see just how much farmers take that to heart going into Election Day or whether that uncertainty potentially keeps them from the polls or potentially has them supporting Crawford in this high-profile high-stakes race. |