The Supreme Court Accelerates The Fascism | Weekender Teaser
*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender*
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Re-Listen to last night's live show, as Jared and Nick discuss two big decisions handed down from the ultra-conservative Supreme Court. They shift to the mafia-stylings of the Trump Organization and what the indictment of Alan Weiselberg means to Donald Trump. To finish off the show, they take a bunch of questions from the live audience.
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I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this edition of the Muckrake Podcast Weekender Edition.
Feeling a little stuffy.
Ah, that's so nice.
How we doing, everybody?
Welcome to a live taping of the Weekender Edition.
We always love getting to hang out with our people.
Thank you for tuning in.
Thanks for logging on.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here as always with Nick Halseman.
Nick, it's good to see you, unfortunately, because this is our business.
Not great stuff to talk about tonight.
Not happy, good time stuff.
Except for some... We've got some people maybe going to prison, which we need to talk about.
We'll save the good for later, but as of right now, we have to talk about this wonderful Supreme Court of the United States of America.
I'm just going to begin every show by asking you, Jared, why do you hate this country so much?
Why?
How can you hate it so much that you don't want to have the proper fraud eliminated from our voting system?
Well, I just want to point out real fast, just to go ahead, because it is the weekend, or we like to pull back the curtain a little bit.
This is an actual text exchange that we had today, which is you talking about the fact that America is not that old of a democracy.
And I said, yeah, well, it was hidden behind the veneer of liberty.
And you responded, why do you hate this country?
Which is just kind of how this thing works at this point.
And it wasn't the question mark.
I did that intentionally after my sentence, because it was not a question.
Right it's it's it's this is much more of a statement right is why do you hate America?
Unfortunately, we have a couple of pretty harmful Supreme Court decisions that we have to talk about Both of them Nick tell me if this is a surprise six to three Six to three!
We were hoping, right?
There was some evidence earlier on some decisions that maybe this wasn't so, you know, such a radical court on the right side, but no.
It is.
It is.
We can't complain.
It's not.
It's 100% the Radical Right Supreme Court that we all knew that it was going to be.
Occasionally, John Roberts wakes up in the morning and brushes his teeth and he's like, you know what?
I'm going to make a stand today.
But that stand is always somehow or another in the favor of corporate capitalism.
But that's neither here nor there.
They decided to hollow out the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Uh, which they have now made a regular occurrence.
It's almost like Groundhog Day at this point.
Uh, you know, it's, it's, it's a regular occurrence because, um, you know, Nick, can you fill us in?
Why was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 necessary?
Was there something going on at the time?
Something going on with America?
Yes, there were states that were just implementing draconian, that's not the word, I guess racist, racist policies that would prevent minorities from voting.
And they needed to be cleaned up.
It needed to be federalized in order to make sure that they would behave properly and constitutionally.
Yeah, and this has become a regular sort of thing that the Supreme Court really loves to do, which is, and I want to go ahead and set the scene for everybody.
We've all been waiting on the shoe to drop, right?
We've all been waiting on them to take like a big chomp out of some of like this landmark progressive decisions.
And what we see is that they really like to nibble around at the edges.
They really like to sort of go ahead and almost like termites, they like to get in and mess with the internal structure.
of the reform.
And in this case, basically what the Supreme Court did was they made it easier, shocking, for Republicans to disenfranchise people and to meddle around with elections.
And I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to share a little quote from one of our favorite justices, Alito.
And Alito, for those who are keeping track, Alito is not Clarence Thomas, but Alito is Clarence Thomas adjacent.
He's not an intellectual heavyweight.
There's not a whole lot that he projects.
Nobody's going to write books about Alito in the future, if that makes sense.
And Alito, in the majority in this case, 6-3, of course, with the conservative court, he wrote Where a state provides multiple ways to vote, any burden imposed on voters who choose one of the available options cannot be evaluated without also taking into account the other available means.
Which means, if you're not outlawing all voting, I guess you can go ahead and outlaw certain types of voting.
As long as there are possible ways that a person could theoretically vote, well then I guess that's not voting a discrimination.
Well, you know, I read almost the entire thing and try to pull it apart like you just did there.
Because, you know, they write it in unclear language.
You know how we talked about in the past, you know, the stock market.
It's unnecessarily complicated.
It's a barrier.
It keeps people away so that the rich people can be in this club and make their money and other people figure out it's too complicated.
I can't get in on the money, whatever.
Well, from my gleaning of what I read from the majority opinion, It seems to me that they, they want some sort of barrier to voting.
It should be inconvenient.
I honestly, I read it and they kind of pride themselves on the fact that voting is a little inconvenient because... You gotta want it, Nick!
You gotta want it!
As if it's like a privilege to vote in your country when it's not.
It's a right.
And so here was the first time ever we had a really legitimate excuse to make it as easy as possible to vote.
And Jerry, can you remind me what happened in 2020 when we actually made it as easy as we could to vote?
What happened in that election?
Did people vote?
The Democratic Party stole the election from Donald J. Trump.
Is that the answer you were looking for?
Well, I was kind of looking for, we had more people voting than we ever had before.
Because you know what?
Before 2020, it was the most pathetic turnout in voting that you'd have every freaking year.
And I'm talking about even the presidential years, right?
It was a catastrophe.
We'd never have more than 50-55% of people voting.
The freaking midterms, you know, it would drop even worse.
We never had representative democracy here because people didn't vote.
We finally made it easy to vote and made it convenient to vote.
We would actually give you some water if you had to wait in line when it wasn't so convenient for waiting for six, seven hours in some of these places.
We know where.
And look what happened.
We broke every record imaginable by exponentially by how many votes people were able to do in a free and fair election.
This is what scares them.
Yes.
Right?
It's not just politicians.
This is what scares the Supreme Court.
This is what's horrible about our democracy.
That is not what they're interested in, because again, as we've talked about, there is no good outcome for the right when people go out and express their right to vote.
What they want is for people to have the right, right?
They want it enshrined.
They want people to say, what are you talking about?
This is America.
Everybody gets to vote.
Everybody gets to participate in elective, you know, representation.
But the truth is, they want to put roadblocks down within the right to vote.
Right?
They want to make sure that it's just like, they can wave the flag, they can talk about how it's a democracy, all that they want.
And meanwhile, they want to just set down one obstacle after another.
And by the way, let's be very, very clear, for the last few years, If you wanted to vote in this country, particularly if you lived in a Democratic precinct within a red state or a purple state, You had to be expected to go and stand in line for upwards of 10 to 12 hours.
You literally, and by the way, I don't know if everyone's keeping track, that doesn't work when you have a job.
That doesn't work when you have kids you have to take care of.
That goes ahead and it works against poor people and people of color.
And then by the way, every other law that they put down, whether or not it's voter ID, Or any of this nonsense that the Supreme Court is now putting a check next to, all of that disadvantages poor people of color.
It is a strategy and the Supreme Court right now is just going ahead and saying, and I just want to put this out there, Alito also says in this quote, and I'm going to read this, I'm going to read this twice, just for For dramatic purpose, Nick.
Because we are informative.
We are a progress-minded podcast.
But I'll tell you what we are first and foremost, people.
We are entertaining.
So I'm going to go ahead and read this and let the drama build up.
Fraud can affect the outcome of a close election, and fraudulent votes dilute the right of citizens to cast ballots that carry appropriate weight, Alito said.
Fraud can also undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.
All right, let that sink in, because I'm going to read it again.
I tried to have music, by the way.
I don't know if anybody heard it, but I'm afraid- I didn't hear the music, but let this sink in.
Fraud can affect the outcome of a close election and fraudulent votes dilute the right of citizens to cast ballots that carry appropriate weight.
Fraud can also undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.
I have two things to say.
First and foremost, election fraud is not a problem in the United States of America.
It never has been.
The bigger problem is getting people to exercise their votes, particularly because they don't trust the government, they don't trust the process, and on top of that you throw a bunch of roadblocks out to keep them from being able to vote.
But also what is hidden in those sentences, Nick, it is the Supreme Court in a majority decision laying the groundwork for future people to go ahead and talk about election fraud.
It's going ahead and laying the groundwork for the idea that 2020 was a quote-unquote stolen election.
It is the big fucking lie showing up in a Supreme Court decision.
Well, it also, okay, what's screamingly clear when you read the whole thing, especially when you look at it in the context of in 2010 when they gutted it the first time with, oh my goodness, Shelby versus Holder, they obviously, or at least Alito, so when you try to characterize who Alito is, I'm not gonna write books, he is a guy on the lawn screaming at you and waving his fist.
That is who this guy is, okay?
And like, it's almost like it's too perfect to describe him that way.
He and all the rest of them, including Judge Roberts, thinks that racism is gone.
There isn't a systemic racial issue in this country anymore.
It was solved probably in the 60s with the Voting Rights Act and with the Civil Rights Act, right?
This is where they come from.
And so as a result, none of these impassioned arguments, which have a lot of evidence that, you know, and Kagan was the one who was, I don't know, did you see her response to these?
Because rarely do you see these guys go back and forth like that on the dissent and then the majority.
It's bad.
Like, they pretend that they're friendly and that they can be collegial or whatever, but I can't believe that they would still be this way after this decision.
But the point being that, like, they clearly don't recognize that as an issue anymore.
There is no racism.
Hence, these issues that you're bringing up are not racist.
They're simply, like, constitutional and, you know, should just be, of course.
You know, let me ask you this, Jared.
Do you think that, like, having to vote in your own precinct Is going to solve fraud in the general election?
Well, first of all, there's no fraud.
There's no fraud.
There's no fraud, first and foremost.
First and foremost.
No fraud.
Because, you know, in Arizona, of all people, they're the ones who throw out more ballots for being people voting in the wrong precinct.
And do you know why that happens most in Arizona?
Because they move the voting places all the time and confuse, probably on purpose, where everyone is and how to get there.
So they show up to the other place where they probably had gone the year before, two years before, and, like, that's not the right precinct, and they vote whatever.
They throw them out.
This is, you know, this is where we're at.
These assholes on the Supreme Court, you know, for whatever their scholarly merits are for learning, you know, what they've learned, have gotten to a point where they don't believe, and I bet you, by the way, you know, Robert, not Robert, Clarence Thomas is probably the guy who leads the charge on this, who doesn't think there's racism anymore in the country.
And, you know, it's insane.
And as a result, we're going to continue to get these.
You're right.
And the fact that they're going to propagate the notion of fraud and mention it in their opinion is just frightening.
And by the way, we know this, right?
These guys are more political than the politicians themselves.
And every day we find this out with more evidence.
Yeah, and you went ahead and you referenced it.
I'm going to go back to 2013, and this is when John Roberts was pushing, again, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which, Nick, again, can you tell me why the Voting Rights Act took place and who it targeted, just to get everybody on the same page?
Fucking Alabama had, like, poll taxes and they have, um, you know, IQ tests to be able to vote.
When I say Alabama, I'm talking about everybody in the South, basically.
Wait, did you just have Alabama become the umbrella term for the South?
Is that what just happened?
I did.
I did.
Fucking Alabama!
The entire South.
Yeah, just to go ahead and put the historical spin on this for anybody who doesn't quite know this, the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, by the way, are some of the high watermarks in American civilization.
Like, the fact that that was able to be done from a grassroots movement is incredible.
The things that these people went through to get to this point.
That is not, by the way, my opinion.
That is their words.
They admitted as much.
tried to keep freed slaves and African-Americans as close to the condition of slavery as humanly possible.
That is not, by the way, my opinion.
That is their words.
They admitted as much.
When they didn't have a paramilitary KKK going around intimidating people, killing people, lynching people, they had these laws on the books that were specifically rendered to keep African-Americans from being able to vote and participate within the political process.
Now, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 goes ahead and lays waste to that.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and share, and by the way, John Roberts is smarter than Alito.
John Roberts is smarter than Clarence Thomas.
John Roberts is a smart dude, but what you just said is absolutely crucial to this, which is These are a bunch of justices who were raised up specifically within the Federalist Society.
They were raised up within a thought, an ideology, that America should return to where it was in the 18th century.
That the Constitution should be treated as it was originally written.
And for those keeping track at home, as I know that you are, When the Constitution was ratified, it only allowed white, wealthy men to participate within government.
It didn't even consider African Americans as human beings.
Women didn't even come up into the conversation.
And poor people, maybe they could vote and get into the House of Representatives, but everything else was set up to where they couldn't change a single thing.
Our institutions were specifically created for that purpose.
Roberts is from that tradition.
This conservative court, the entire ideological worldview, is that that's the way the world should work.
So Roberts, in 2013, when he starts taking a hatchet to the Voting Rights Act, he says, our country has changed.
While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy the problem speaks to current conditions.
And then he says the current coverage system based on 40 year old facts, having no logical relationship to the present day, Congress, it is say it is, if it is to divide the States must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.
It cannot simply rely on the past.
The logic is that the voting rights act worked.
Right.
So we should get the fuck rid of it.
Well, It worked so well that we should get rid of it, which means that it actually was taking care of racism and white supremacy, so we have to go ahead and destroy it.
Try, try to go along with that logic.
It's impossible.
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