GOV310 – In The News: A look at national politics through the eyes of Texas, July 17, 2018

[0:00:00 Speaker 1] in the news

[0:00:08 Speaker 2] morning. I’m Professor Shaw

[0:00:09 Speaker 3] and impressive McDaniel. Welcome to in the news for introduction to American government.

[0:00:13 Speaker 2] We got a couple of things we want to talk about today. Actually, four things we want talk a little bit about the Supreme Court vacancy and nomination of Mr Kavanagh. Want talk a little bit about Trump and Russia. Try to impose a little bit of order onto that whole conversation. I want talk a little bit about the Texas elections, and Professor McDaniel wants to talk a little bit about a Senate bill that is in the news lately. So four items as always in these in the new segments, our goal here is to talk about what’s going on, but to attempt to connect it up to the concepts and the theories and the constructs that were introducing in the modules. Right. So this is one of our main goals Here is not just to acquaint you with some of the nuts and bolts information about American politics, but to try to get you to think more like a political scientist to you show a little depth of understanding and knowledge to take these concepts that were introducing in the course and in the readings and use them to give you better understanding what’s going on. So let’s start with the court situation, right? As you all probably heard. Even if you’ve been deep in the woods, you probably heard that there has been a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The president of the United States gets to nominate somebody to fill that vacancy. This is part of the I was going to say, You know, I did my notes written checks and balances. There’s a little bit of that, but in some ways it’s almost ah better example of separation of powers, you know, because what you’re talking about is that the court is its own entity. It’s a distinct branches defined in Article three of the Constitution, but the president gets to nominate people to the Supreme Court, and then the Senate gets to advise and consent, which in this, in this case means gets to essentially ratify or not ratify the nomination of Mr Kavanagh to fill the vacancy left by Mr Kennedy and what we like to do. Actually, right now, if we can show you an op ed piece from the new York Times that ran a couple of days ago, featuring our very own professor Steven Jesse, who’s in the government department. Stephen is American politics expert

[0:02:15 Speaker 0] and someone who also studies political methodology. And he’s got a piece here with ah ah, colleague of his Neil Malhotra from Stanford on. But what I wanted to do, I will use the tablet here and cursor down a little bit. It’s an article on the ideological composition of the court. Okay, so what you’ve got and Stephen Jessie’s research agenda really takes takes aim at the ideology of, you know, Stephen studied a lot of Congress, So he talks about the ideology of Congress and members of Congress as well as the ideology of the average voter. And right here. What he’s presented with Professor Malhotra is a coating based on their judicial opinions of the liberal nous or the conservative nous of the justices on the current court, as well as some former justices. Compared to where the average American is. So you guys can see in that center that central line that runs from the top of the slide to the bottom. That’s that’s where the average American is and so everybody to the left is more liberal. Everybody to the right is more conservative and you see just a little bit down. You’ve got Sotomayor as the most liberal Ginsburg, Kegan Briar. Then you’ve got Kennedy, right? So the Kennedy dot, which you guys will see, is actually closer to the average American than anybody else on the court in terms of voting behaviour. Then you’ve got Roberts. So he’s the next most conservative. Alito and Gorsuch notice how they line up pretty close to the next to each other. Then you got Steve analysis based on decisions that have been rendered by Mr Kavanagh in his current position on the District Court on. Then you’ve got Thomas. So what Steven, Jesse and Machar saying is that Cavanagh would come in is the second most conservative justice, at least based on his previous voting record. Now I would advise you guys, you know, if your liberal and you’re really concerned or if you’re conservative and you’re jazzed by this that when justices get on the Supreme Court, sometimes they behave very differently than they did when they were in lower courts. So you have to take this with a grain of salt. In fact, Justice Roberts here shows himself to be conservative, but not inordinately, so he’s actually moved to the left a little bit based compared to his voting record previous to his nomination of the court. You also have I’m a cursor down just a little bit here, Justice Stevens, Souter, Saturday O Connor and Scalia. These air former justices and Jesse and Malhotra have actually rated them in the by the way, I should point out the dots. The color of the dots indicates whether a Republican or Democratic president appointed that justice. So it’s interesting. You see, if you move to these former justices, Stevens was appointed by a Republican. So was Souter and O. Connor and Scalia. But they’re kind of all over the map. The Democratic appointees have been fairly uniform and consistent in their liberal voting tendencies. If you’re interested in why the band that you see goes from sort of darker 10 toe lighter tan, you can see Jesse and ultra vindicated. That’s the middle 50% of Americans. So half of the American public is the darker ban. So the justices who are outside that band that indicates that they are more liberal or conservative than over half of the American public. So I like this chart. It’s a It’s a quick way to get a sense of where the court is. Ideologically, it’s based on data. It’s based on actual decisions cast by these justices in previous cases. So it’s an extension of Professor Jessie’s larger research agenda. So that’s trying to bring a little data into this question about you know, where Cavanaugh falls. I guess the take away point, I would suggest is that if you want to take a look at Kennedy’s slot right there very next to the average American voter and then Cavanaugh’s What Jesse and the culture is saying is that if Kavanaugh behaves as he has in the past, that would in fact move the court considerably to the right. And in fact, the new pivot point is Justice Roberts, right? So the pivot point is you got four out, four on one side, four on the other, the person in the middle, right? That’s the pivot point. And that would move from Kennedy, who’s pretty close to the average American to Roberts, who is decidedly more conservative. Okay, so right, That’s all

[0:06:36 Speaker 2] I really want to say on that. If you guys want take a look. The article is still up on The New York Times. I think you get like three or four free articles from The New York Times a month before they force you to pay a $1,000,000 or whatever it is that you pay for you

[0:06:47 Speaker 3] to go to the library. You can access

[0:06:48 Speaker 2] it, Ah, libraries that they still have those, well, have coffee shops connected to him. That’s true. That’s right there. Exactly. That’s their larger coffee shop. So, uh, any rate of those data available? A lot of other conversations will probably revisit this. As Kavanaugh’s nomination winds its way through the Senate, you know, his issues come up, and perhaps we might even have a vote, maybe even a confirmation. By the end of this class, who knows? Things seem to move at a glacial pace in American politics, and yet they also seem to move at a lightning pace, so we’ll see how this one goes. Um, so second issue we want to talk about today is the Russia investigation, and this comes up in a very appropriate time. Yesterday, President Trump. Actually, Two days ago, President Trump met with Russian President. Wait. President, Prime Minister at this point? Yeah, he was president before. I

[0:07:41 Speaker 3] think it’s president again.

[0:07:42 Speaker 2] I think this president again. Vladimir Putin. This was a summit in Helsinki. You guys were interested? What is exactly is a summit. I went into a little bit of research on this. The first meeting between world leaders it was referred to as a summit was actually the World War Two summit between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. That was first time a meeting between world leaders was referred to as a summit mawr. Recently meetings between the Soviet premier and the American president, beginning with Nixon and Brezhnev, referred to as summit meetings. And, you know, you get the idea that these air meetings of at the peak of governance between the two or sometimes cases more than two countries. Um, American presidents have tended to meet with their Russian counterparts over the years. Not always. Not every president, not in every administration, but they’re fairly common in the past. They involved more, more often than not, strategic arms agreements or negotiations over limiting strategic arms and particularly nuclear arsenals, that didn’t seem to be much on the agenda This time around. It seems like they were talking about a number of things. But as you all probably saw in the news coverage of this, one of the things that came out of this was for lots of questions aimed at President Trump in the news conference after the meeting with Putin about Russian interference in the 2016 election. And Trump took a lot of heat from the media because in response to those questions, you know where the media is saying, Did you raise? This is an issue. What did you say to Putin? Did you tell him not to do this again? Trump, basically, you know, said, Well, um, you know the Russian meddling. We don’t even know the extent to which it happened. He blasted American intelligence organizations for their investigations and their handling of, you know, Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the reaction on the part of certainly the news media. And we’ll see, maybe the public is This is odd to be in a foreign country and to seemingly side with, you know, the Russian interpretation or the Russians spin on this particular controversy, right? So why would you be in Helsinki attacking the FBI and attacking these American intelligence organizations, essentially buying the Russian line that, you know, we didn’t do anything. We have no idea about this now, but I’m not. You know, I’m not saying that what President Trump intended, but it started came off that way. And so if you’re wondering why he’s getting a lot of heat, that’s basically why. So, Pressman, did you see the press conference or any interviews afterward?

[0:10:17 Speaker 3] Yeah. I mean, the reaction to it was that the people were really upset about the president openly criticizing US institutions. The intelligence Intel tells us institutions in a foreign country, Aziz pointed out. And so this has been some of the problem of People have argued that this is unique and some have gone far, saying that somehow he and Putin have struck some type of deal or he’s being blackmailed. The fact that he seemed to be much mawr, Um, I guess forgiving to Putin and others would have been, as we know, that President Obama is the famous picture of President Obama and Putin engaging in a stare down, whereas they seem to be very chummy. Eso it was. There was really one of these weird things trying to figure out what’s going on. And also, like many opponents, say, with the America first rhetoric where Americans first, it becomes problematic when you go out and criticized the U. S. In other nations. And so where was America first in this regard? So it’s gonna be interesting to see how this plays out, because this, you know, this matters for international politics for for a long, long way out. Because in fact, when President Obama was in office, he was not necessarily in line with or he and and Prime Minister Putin didn’t really agree in a lot of things, specifically how to deal with the Middle East on. So it’s gonna be interesting to see how the U. S strategy in the Middle East changes. As we see President Trump would be more agreeable with Prime Minister Putin.

[0:11:52 Speaker 2] This isn’t It’s a very odd situation. I grew up in a time when the Republican Party was, you know, just reflexively opposed to the Soviet Union and took the harder line in the Cold War, and the Democratic Party was a little more tourney on you know how to handle the Russians. So this is interesting to see this reorientation with the end of the Cold War. Um, President Trump was very critical of President Obama and then, more distantly, President Clinton for engaging in what he referred to as apology tours. Right. You know, the President Obama in particular would go to countries and sort of spent a lot of time saying, We know that America has made mistakes in its foreign policy and Republicans generally and Trump in particular have just trashed Obama over this said, you know, this is ridiculous. Why do you goto, you know, to Egypt and, you know, confess in front Egyptians, all the American. Since why do you go to these foreign countries and talk about all the ill America has done to these Muslim populations? You know what? What is that? What are you doing? And yet here is, you know, an example where it seems there’s a little bit of an apology tour relevant What President Trump is doing here with respect to the Russians. Um, you know,

[0:13:00 Speaker 1] I tend

[0:13:01 Speaker 2] to be so again, the broader context here is the discretion that a president has and shaping and forming American foreign policy. Congress is nowhere to be seen, the courts enormous, and this is really the president’s Bala Wick. But what’s fascinating from the political science point of view is the extent to it’s The president is at odds with his own intelligence and in some sense, foreign apparatus. You know, President Trump is in charge of the executive branch, and yet he’s engaged in these firefights with the FBI with C I A in some sense with his own Justice Department. Um, which is you know, many there been deputies in the Justice Department that have, uh, which I’ll get to in a minute are backing the recommendation that Robert Mueller sit down to indict 12 Russians accused of meddling in the election. And you know what? Rosenstein, who is ah, deputy in the Department of Justice under Trump, has said, Yes, we’re going to seek the indictments of these 12 Russian agents, and the president has actually been critical of that. So it’s it’s It’s very odd for those of us who study American politics in American foreign policy to see if president who seems to be so at odds with his own administration in some sense. And you know, the elements of this trump refers through the deep State, the sort of entrance bureaucrats he doesn’t necessarily have control of. That’s a fair enough point, but a lot of the people he’s fighting with or actually his appointees to. So you know, we’re kind of observing this and we’re not quite sure what the long game is here. Um, I tend to think, you know, we’re talking about, you know, do the Russians have something over Trump? Why would he be so interested in kind of resetting this Russian American relationship? I don’t know what to make their I. I tend to think that Trump is that core kind of a realist and thinks that it’s probably in American interest to have a kind of open lines of communication. But, you know, maybe I’m hopelessly naive in this regard. We didn’t want to cover. Ah, a couple of things. So this summit occurred and the fallout is still occurring. So pay attention to that. We didn’t want to cover a couple things about the Russia investigation more generally, and I saw kind of interesting article that it was framed along the following lines. What do you need to know? As an American consumer consumer of American politics? What do you need to know about the Russia investigation? I just want to make a couple of points here, So, um, I’ll proceed a few points. So what is it that is exactly being investigated? So there’s, you know, this whole sort of Russia thing. What are we talking about?

[0:15:35 Speaker 7] Right?

[0:15:36 Speaker 0] And what we’re talking about

[0:15:37 Speaker 2] are are two separate things that are being a little conflated in the news, right? One is that investigations that the Russians interfered with broadly construed interfered with the 2016 election process in the United States and then, secondarily, this other sort of issues. To what extent was the Trump campaign you know, involved with this? Did they know about it? Did they have any sense that they help to further? So there’s this question of collusion now these

[0:16:04 Speaker 1] are

[0:16:04 Speaker 2] two separate issues, and I think one of the things that I would you know, nobody’s paying me for advice. But one of the things I would advise the Trump people to do is to actually be a little more proactive in terms of supporting the investigation, right? The notion that Russians interfered because almost everybody thinks that this is a serious issue and that, you know, the government needs to be attentive to these sorts of things. But I think that the conflation between the collusion issue on the one hand and the interference on the other has, you know, I think the administration has exacerbated this a little bit, right, so that in our minds it’s confused. But these are two separate things. So who is in charge of the investigation? Well, there are multiple congressional committees. So again, getting back to our checks and balances there multiple congressional committees. They’re investigating this that have launched probes. The Department of Justice, so again under the executive branch, appointed Robert Mueller as a special counsel overseeing its investigation in May of 2017. All right, so you’ve got. And this was appointed by Jeff Sessions, the attorney general. Um and so you’ve got congressional investigation as well as a special counsel. The House Intelligence Committee has been perhaps the most aggressive House congressional committee investigating this, and there seems to be a rift between the Republican leadership and the Democratic members of that Intelligence Committee. But that intelligence committee has been on this from the get go. OK, has anybody actually been charged? Yeah, there’ve been multiple people that have been charged, although not are directly related to misconduct from the campaign. So it’s not true that nobody’s been charged. There have been charges, but none of them are related to the Trump campaign directly so far. So who’s been indicted? Who’s been charged? Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager. But he wasn’t indicted because of what he did during the campaign. He was indicted because he’s had dealings with Russians, shady sort of financial dealings for years and years. So Manafort has been charged, but not as part of the collusion charge. This is other stuff financial stuff Prior to his involved with the Trump campaign, Trump’s national security adviser, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, reportedly about his talks with Russian Ambassador So Flynn has been charged and in fact, uh pleaded guilty. So in addition George Papadopoulos, which I love the name former policy foreign policy adviser, foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign pleaded guilty in 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his connections with Russian officials. So you’re seeing a trend here, Professor McDaniel? I will teach you small things throughout this class. One thing is, if you are brought in from the FBI, don’t lie, right. The chances of you being indicted for lying to the FBI seemed to be greater than your being indicted. For whatever it is you did. OK, so small thing it brought in by the FBI, you know, First of all, don’t mention us. Secondly, don’t like

[0:19:00 Speaker 3] the cover up is really important. So if you think about this with drug testing, a lot of times people are caught not because they find the drug in the system, but because they found the drugs was to cover it up in the assistant. And so the cover up is usually what get would makes everything worse.

[0:19:15 Speaker 2] I tell this to my kids all the time. It’s not the lie. It’s the cover. Right? So, you know, whatever you do in the first instance, actually, not the crime, not the crime. It’s the cover up. So Ah, couple others. Alex Vendors one. I’d forgotten about this one, Actually. He was attorney pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about Gates in the Russia inquiry. Richard Penedo, California man sold bank accounts to the Russians meddling in elections. So again, these are not people directly connected with the Trump campaign. This is just people who, in the course of Mueller’s investigation, have turned out to have these connections with Russians. Um, then 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities organizations were indicted by federal grand jury for allegedly interfering in the election. So Robert Mueller’s case alleges those involved had a sophisticated plot to wage quote information warfare unquote on the U. S. The Justice Department did not say if the actions had an impact on the outcome of the election, so they’re not saying anybody matter. They’re just saying the attempted to do this. Ah, and then additionally, the Justice Department on July 13th. So this is the stuff that came up very recently announced that 12 Russian intelligence officers were indicted for allegedly hacking the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election. All 12 are members of the G. RU, the Russian intelligence agency. So these guys were in Russia’s so indicting them unless the Russians turned them over. Where the United States aggressively seeks indictments. There’s some sort of deal struck. Things probably aren’t gonna go anywhere but these air indictments again about direct Russian state involvement. This is interesting because in Putin’s interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, Putin denied any Russian state involvement. He also denied it in the press conference. So this is in direct contrast to what Mueller’s investigation has turned up. So so that’s I’m sorry to go through all of that. But those are the peat. There have been indictments, but you notice again, keeping these pots separate. There’s, you know, sort of the Russia interference. And then there’s the collusion. Has there been anything with respect to collusion? No, Um, there are members of Trump’s team that have been subject to scrutiny in this investigation. Donald Trump Jr took a meeting with a Russian attorney who claimed to have knowledge from this, apparently from whatever the Russians were doing with the DNC and Clinton campaign emails. Trump Jr took a meeting with the lawyer, said she had information on this, but of course the meeting, she apparently didn’t really bring it up Uh, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner. Kushner is the president’s son in law were also at that meeting. So there’s some question about what they knew. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, agreed to meet with Mueller as part of his investigation. Um, so there is some speculation that maybe Bannon eyes involved in this session’s Jeff Sessions and Secretary State Mike Pompeo have already met with Mueller. So there are people in the Trump administration from the Trump campaign who have met with Mueller. But it’s not at all clear what’s going on now. What about Trump? Trump says he’s looking forward to being questioned by Mueller under oath. I not I’m not an attorney. I would strongly advise him not to do this. I think he asked former President Clinton about testifying in front of special investigators. The problem with you know, the president going in in front of a special investigator to the FBI is that everything you say, anything that’s loose, anything that is inconsistent, then has the potential to be considered perjury lying under oath. Even misremembering, can be considered obstruction of justice lying under oath, perjury again. It’s sort of the reaction, not necessarily the crime. So I don’t know who is advising him. Um, you know, I think Trump is very concerned about how it looks. You know, he wants to testify, to show he has nothing to hide. But any lawyer worth their grain will tell you just don’t do this. Clients don’t testify under oath unless you absolutely have to. So why is this stuff also controversial? Well, Trump has been very critical of Mueller. Remember, Mueller was appointed by Jeff Sessions. Um, he said his friendship. Mueller’s friendship with James Comey, the FBI director, is quote very bothersome. This is Trump’s quote. Multiple investigator on. Investigators on Mueller’s team have faced question about their potential political biases, and Trump keeps pointing this out. The House Republicans released a memo in early 20 February 2018 that detailed alleged surveillance abuses in the Russia probe. So this is, you know, the United States government engaged in abusive surveillance techniques. Um, so all of this has kind of come up. Its is the activities of the government investigating Russian interference have come under scrutiny and come under attack. And you might ask, like, how did this Russian meddling stuff even begin before Trump even took office like this is during the campaign, the Russians were sort of systematically, uh, now the media keep saying

[0:24:16 Speaker 9] hacking.

[0:24:17 Speaker 2] Um, there was some hacking, but the most most of stuff they’re involved with involved sort of misinformation trying to plant stories and things like that. There was some hacking, and that was Democratic emails, Democratic servers. And this information showed, you know, sort of embarrassing stuff about Hillary Clinton. Why the heck of the Russians doing this? You know, some people say it’s because they like Trump, and they wanted Trump because they had something on him. I would go the opposite way on this. It’s pretty clear Putin doesn’t like Hillary Clinton. Clinton did some things when she was secretary of state. That Putin didn’t like made statements about a lot of the activities of Russians were getting recruiting does not like Hillary Clinton. It seems to me they’re really trying to embarrass Hillary Clinton. And if Trump was the beneficiary more now again, maybe I’m naive. But you know, that seems to be at least as important effects. So that’s as best we can do in about 12 minutes. What we can tell you about the Russia probe in the Russia investigation. It is ongoing. Mueller, when you put a special investigator special counsel, when you empower them, the president can fire them. Technically. And there’s been some speculation about Trump. Perhaps doing that, I wouldn’t expect that. Um, you know, these these these positions tend, have a life of their own. We’ve had multiple investigate special investigators of councils in the past. They tend to go until, you know, they reach some resolution in their investigation. So anyway, we have that to look forward to throughout the summer. So two final things we want to talk about before we go to our T A’s. I just want to really briefly talk about the Texas elections coming up. So we’re gonna go from, you know, the national stuff on the Supreme Court, this international broad geopolitics stuff. Let’s bring it back to this state in some more local politics. So real

[0:25:58 Speaker 0] clear politics runs an average of all the available polling information that you’re gonna find for statewide races. And I wanted to just point out that this, uh 2018 November 2018 there’s a midterm election in Texas, all of the statewide offices are going to be up. So the entire Texas state Legislature, half of the Texas Senate seats Texas Sen. It’s on staggered terms. Half is up every two years and the other half is up. The next two years you’re gonna have Ah, Senate election. Ted Cruz’s seat is up, and that’s the polling data have free right here. So I always like this because it’s showing 123456 polls. There’s all the available polling information we have on the Texas Senate race, and you’ll see the dates the polls were done. The samples, how many people were interviewed, whether it was a likely voter versus a registered voters. The margin of air and what you can see is here’s Ted Cruz. The last five polls show Cruz it 51 50 41. That’s the UT Triple 50 and 47 then Beto O Rourke, 40 to 40 36 39 40. So if you go up to the average see, the cruise is averaging 48%. O’Rourke is averaging 39% so about 8.5 point spread on average. So if you want a sense of the state of the race right now, you say cruised about eight points, which is actually pretty good for a Democrat in Texas. You know it doesn’t get you elected, but it puts you within striking distance. And who knows what can happen if the bottom falls out for Trump? If Cruz does something that’s particularly offensive or makes a big air of, you know, maybe will work his position to be the first Democrat since 1994 to win a statewide race, let me go up real quickly here because we also have. We’ve got the crew seat, but we also have the governor

[0:27:48 Speaker 5] race to see if I can get that here,

[0:27:50 Speaker 0] Valdez and Abbott. And once again, if we go down, we can take a look at Abbott up 10 12 19 and 12 in the last four polls, which is equates to an average spread of about 13 points. So go ahead and just get out of

[0:28:07 Speaker 2] there and we’ll talk about it here for a second. Okay, so what you’re seeing in the polls then is Rourke trailing Cruz by about 8 8.5 points, Valdez trailing Abbott by 12 or 13. So if you’re interested in what is the difference between sort of ineffective, aggressive candidate and campaign, which I think most of us would say, O. Rourke is versus a candidate may be less popular, a little less aggressive, a little less intent, maybe not running his high quality campaign. I think most people see Valdez has been a little lackluster so far. She’s got time, but so far, not so great. It looks to be about five points or so, right? I mean, that’s the difference now between Abbott and Cruise in the polls, both Republicans look like they’re in pretty good shape. But as we said, it’s summer. You know, there’s four months until Election Day. There’s a lot of time in addition, so you’ve not only got the Senate race, which is, of course, a federal race, the governor’s you want to point out the lieutenant governor will be elected. We have Dan Patrick, the incumbent Republican running against Democrat Mike Collier. Um, the Texas Attorney general race, which is Ken Paxton, the incumbent Republican. Running against Justin Nelson is the Democrat, and then theatre Race, I think, is gonna be interesting. Is the land commissioner race, We elect the Land Commission. All these executive offices in Texas are elected, so you know the president appoints thes positions, and they constitute his Cabinet. In Texas. The executive is, by and large, a series of elected positions, and the Texas Land Commissioner race will be George P. Bush. So Jeb’s son is running a Republican running for reelection against Miguel Suazo, the Democrat, and George P. Has had some, you know, some problems had some difficulty with the way he managed the Alamo on. And you know one thing you know about Texas politics, you can mess with a lot of different things. You could screw up a lot of different things in Texas, but you can’t script the Alamo. That tends to be politically consequential. So George P. Obviously the big name iconic family in Texas politics. His curse seems to have stalled out a little bit. We’ll see if he can win reelection in that land commissioner position. So those Air five races toe watch the Senate, the Gove Light Gove Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General Land Commission race in Texas and that real clear politics average has good polling information. If you’re interested in how things are shaking out. So that’s my last little tidbit. Professor Dan, you had something you wanted to talk about. The

[0:30:33 Speaker 3] so one final thing that we want to mention is a court case that’s going on right now regarding a bill that was passed in the Senate in 2017. And so, Senate Bill eight ah required help providers to either performer burial or cremation of fetal remains. And so if a woman had an abortion that the health care provider would then be required to you to have a burial or cremation of remains. And it’s been argued as issue of dignity regarding this and so those who are pro life, I need to be some dignity surrounded. But it should not just be castaway, whereas those who are pro choice of arguing this is just a way of making abortions more expensive because the cause of the cremation of barrel be passed on to the woman who’s receiving this service. Now, it was important to note about this is that the Texas the Department of State Health Services actually had a rule regarding this earlier on, but it was struck down in the federal courts, but Then the Senate passed this, and now it is under an injunction, so it cannot be able to go into effect in February. But an injunction went into place in January, and now it’s being argued in the courts. But whether or not this is legal, and this story is really important, because one it’s held story about about the role of the courts in balancing what’s going on within the Legislature. And so you have the governor Legislature saying this should happen but the court saying, Well, is this really legal? Should this be allowed to happen? But also you have an issue of federalism where you’re seeing that the state is making a decision, but you have the federal courts stepping into civil. This is violate federal laws, things of that nature. And so you have again issue of checks and balances between the judicial judiciary and the executive and legislative branch. But also you have a federal case here where you have the federal government’s discussion of state activities. And so while we won’t talk about the issues of the of the Legislature executive branch in the courts, and so the second module, what we are talking This first module is federalism and really a lot of the issues dealing with federalism or handled in the courts. And you’ll find that a lot of times when there is a challenge against a there’s a challenge of certain state laws. They take it to the federal courts. So if you think of Brown V board, you think of a variety of decision that have come about. Its people are challenging what this state is doing in the federal courts, and this is the same thing you see happening here. And but in addition, this is also what people refer to his venue shopping where you see that. Okay, you may not be successful with state level, but you may have more success of the federal level, and in many times people are trying to control where they’re gonna have. We’re gonna wage political battles for that one away, just somewhere somewhere where they know they have a good chance of winning. And so, if you think about my discussion of the shot Snyder and really in the early in the early lecture about controlling the scope of conflict again, those who are pro life would have liked us to say at the state level because they know they have the most power there. Those are pro choice. Wanna move this up to the federal level? Because I think they may have, ah, way to win, man. So, again, this is how we see these political complex come into play and how this shapes. And so we’re seeing again it issue of, uh, the institutions interacting with each other, but also interaction between the state government and federal government. And so these are things to be aware of that closely tie into things that were already talking about in this first module.

[0:34:05 Speaker 2] Yeah, I just say, Ah kind of piggyback on what Professor McDaniels saying I’ll take it to the Supreme Court level tight back to the discussion we had about Cavanaugh. One of the things that Democrats are most concerned about liberals progressives are concerned about is if you have a court that’s more conservative, you know, might you see erosion of, ah, a woman’s right to choose abortion rights. However you want to style it and perhaps even overturning of Roe v. Wade, the seminal case where a right to privacy was established and held to protect a woman’s right to choose. Well, you know, one thing I would point out is that if that were to happen, if Kavanaugh were to be sworn in and the court were to reconsider Roe v. Wade and to toe overturn to say that there is no constitutional right to an abortion, there’s no ah specific right to privacy that protects a woman’s right to choose. That doesn’t mean that abortions, you know, are outlawed in the United States. In fact, what it would mean is that there would be no declared constitutional right. So you would either get a constitutional amendment establishing that right or congressional legislation establishing that right or state by state laws establishing or knocking the edges off of that. Right? So, you know, one of the interesting things here is that the Republicans, in this sort of conservative position on the court, you know what? I’m not arguing that it’s not consequential, but I think it’s an overstatement to think that Republicans start knocking out some of these established rights that have been asserted by, say, the Warren Court or the Burger Court, or even the Rehnquist court. If Republicans were to take those back and to say like, Well, those aren’t actually constitutional rights. You know, they’re not explicitly in the Constitution. That simply would again, I’m not saying this is a great thing, but it would mean that Congress has to act right. There’s nothing that says, you know, you can’t have a constitutional amendment or congressional legislation on these things, but it would force Congress to step up in act. And one of the interesting things you see in American politics, whether it’s immigration or, you know, some of these court LGBT rights is that the executive president, Obama, expressed his frustration. You know, if Congress won’t act, I will. Trump has done kind of the same thing in a lot of ways. Presidents, when they get in office, get very frustrated with Congress. Congress doesn’t seem to act. The courts and the president have been in lot of ways, the locus of you know, a lot of these rights, establishment and protections of you know, a more conservative court, you know, would put the onus back on Congress and who knows whether Congress could get its act together to do some of these things? So with that, I think we’re done substantively with are in the news segment, and we will see you next week.

[0:36:52 Speaker 1] Government 3 10 in The news podcast is hosted by doctors Darren Shaw and Eric McDaniel and is produced by the liberal Arts TS Development Studio and the Department of Government and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin