Brennan Center LIVE
77 episodes - English - Latest episode: 19 days ago - ★★★★★ - 20 ratingsA podcast from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
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Episodes
The Line — Episode 1: Voter Fraud
October 27, 2016 18:59 - 29 minutes - 55.9 MBPart 1 of Brennan Center Contributor Victoria Bassetti's new three-part podcast series, “The Line,” examining the false claims of election rigging, how to fix low voter turnout in America, and the continued fight over voter identification laws.
The Great Suppression: A Book Talk with Zachary Roth
October 24, 2016 18:41 - 118 MB application/zipControl of the country is up for grabs — and the integrity of our democracy is at stake this November. Nearly two dozen states passed new voting restrictions. Gerrymandering keeps partisans in power. And the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance laws and protections against voting discrimination. In The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on American Democracy, MSNBC reporter Zachary Roth reveals how this movement prevents progress and quiets the p...
The Line — Preview
October 20, 2016 15:13 - 18 minutes - 25.1 MBA preview of Brennan Center Contributor Victoria Bassetti's new three-part podcast series, “The Line,” examining the false claims of election rigging, how to fix low voter turnout in America, and the continued fight over voter identification laws.
How Political Operatives Transformed American Democracy: A Book Talk with David Daley
October 07, 2016 19:22 - 17 minutes - 15.6 MBIn conversation with: Michael Li Senior Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice David’s Daley’s Rat F**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, is an explosive account of how political operatives undermined American democracy and fundamentally altered the electoral map through redistricting. Joined by the Brennan Center’s Michael Li, Daley will discuss how a tradition of dirty tricks – known to political insiders as “ratf**king” – was taken to an unprecedente...
Eric Holder on Automatic Voter Registration
September 09, 2016 19:09 - 19 minutes - 8.79 MBThe Brennan Center held the first ever national conference on automatic voter registration. Part 2 includes the keynote speech delivered by former Attorney General Eric Holder.
Alex Padilla on Automatic Voter Registration
September 09, 2016 19:07 - 31 minutes - 14.5 MBThe Brennan Center held the first ever national conference on automatic voter registration. Part one includes a keynote speech from California Secretary of State Alex Padilla.
Overseas Surveillance in an Interconnected World
September 09, 2016 13:35 - 1 hour - 27.7 MBDespite the success of last year’s surveillance reform legislation (the “USA FREEDOM Act”), the U.S. retains the ability to collect millions of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a warrant—and without any oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—under Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333). The order underlies the intelligence community’s most expansive surveillance authorities. It generally governs the interception of electronic communications overseas, but as a Brennan Ce...
Fragile Democracies: A Book Talk with Samuel Issacharoff
September 01, 2016 21:45 - 19 minutes - 8.72 MBListen to an engaging discussion with Samuel Issacharoff, one of the pioneers in the law of the political process and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts. In Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts, renowned professor and scholar Samuel Issacharoff examines the often-overlooked role of constitutional courts in transitional democracies around the world in the past 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
September 01, 2016 21:41 - 19 minutes - 9.1 MBListen to an engaging discussion with Adam Cohen, author of Imbeciles, an exciting exposé of the American legal system. Imbeciles has been coined a "superb history of eugenics in America" by the New York Times,and the book's relevance to our current political state is highlighted in the New Yorker, stating "it's impossible ... to read 'Imbeciles' without thinking of the current election cycle."
Soldiers on the Home Front: A Book Talk with Stephen Dycus
September 01, 2016 21:29 - 42 minutes - 19.3 MBListen to a riveting discussion by author Stephen Dycus about his new book, "Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military." Called a “required reading for serious students of national security and responsible citizens alike” by former NSA and CIA General Counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military, coauthored by Stephen Dycus and William C. Banks, critically assesses the domestic role of the military as ...
The Parties Versus the People: A Book Talk with the Honorable Mickey Edwards
September 01, 2016 19:57 - 31 minutes - 14.3 MBIn his new book The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans, Mickey Edwards exposes the detrimental effects of partisanship on democracy in the United States. Reaching back to his own experience as an eight-term member of the United States House of Representatives, Edwards shows how the existing political system allows parties to control the ballot, resulting in an increasingly unrepresentative democracy. In the midst of the 2016 election, Mickey Edw...
Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the "War on Coal"
September 01, 2016 19:17 - 41 minutes - 19.1 MBThe Brennan Center hosted an engaging discussion with Richard L. Revesz and Jack Lienke, authors of Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the "War on Coal." Their new book chronicles the Environmental Protection Agency's five-decade struggle to clean up the nation's dirtiest coal-fired power plants.
Plutocrats United
September 01, 2016 19:06 - 1 hour - 48.3 MBIn response to the growing influence of money in politics in recent elections, the Brennan Center hosted a workshop to discuss Professor Rick Hasen’s most recent contribution to the debate – his new book Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections. He was joined by several other leading academics in the field.
We Too Sing America: A Book Talk with Deepa Iyer
April 07, 2016 18:27 - 39 minutes - 36.6 MBIn We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future, Deepa Iyer draws on her work as a lawyer, civil rights advocate and academic to shed light on the post-9/11 climate in the United States, focusing on the experiences of Muslim, South Asian, Arab and Sikh communities. She writes with great insight and feeling about the young activists from these communities who are working across racial and religious lines to participate in emerging movements ...
Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism
April 07, 2016 18:24 - 58 minutes - 53.8 MBIn conversation with Brennan Center fellow Mike German, John Mueller and Mark Stewart examine and evaluate the costs of the massive counterterrorism enterprise put in place since 2001, focusing on the efforts by police and intelligence agencies to follow up on over 5,000 tips flooding in each day. Mueller and Steward dive into the important questions rasied in the book: is this massive counterterroism effort necessary or effective? Or does this "ghost" chasing harm our society in ways we don...
One Person, One Vote: A Supreme Court Preview
December 09, 2015 22:47 - 22 minutes - 20.7 MBThe U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case that could radically change how legislative lines are drawn in America. In Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court might order states to draw boundaries using voters instead of total people. This change in the rule could have a significant impact on the future representation of America’s fast-growing urban and suburban communities, and of Latinos in particular. In this candid discussion, experts and practitioners explore the implic...
Who Will Represent Us? The Status of Black Women in Elected Office
December 03, 2015 18:01 - 56 minutes - 51.9 MBDespite representing a significant political constituency and large consumer base, Black women remain one of the most underrepresented groups in elected office today. The Status of American Women in Politics, a forthcoming report update from Higher Heights, reiterates this discrepancy, focusing on Black women’s candidacies at the state and federal level, analyzing state/regional differences, candidate status, and electoral outcomes. The Brennan Center for Justice and Higher Heights discu...
Stronger Parties, Stronger Democracy: Rethinking Reform
October 28, 2015 21:49 - 1 hour - 77.5 MBPolitical parties are a core ingredient of representative democracy, but in the age of super PACs there are serious questions about whether organized parties can still provide the many democratic benefits they have traditionally furnished to our political system. Today’s climate calls for new thinking about ways campaign finance law can be used to divert money back to the parties, without exacerbating the risk of corruption or further stratifying our already unequal politics. A new Brennan C...
The Shifting Politics of Criminal Justice – An Inside Look
July 15, 2015 18:07 - 24 minutes - 22.1 MBHow did reducing mass incarceration become such a potent national political issue? Can recent controversies from Ferguson to Baltimore translate into broader policy goals? Why are presidential candidates calling for reform? How will the issue play out in lead up to the 2016 election? And – most importantly – can our leaders turn words into action? The Brennan Center’s Michael Waldman and Inimai Chettiar and the Heritage Foundation’s John Malcolm discuss.
Government Secrecy and the Fourth Estate
April 22, 2015 21:38 - 1 hour - 58 MBDocuments disclosed by Edward Snowden and published by multiple news organizations have brought new focus to some age-old questions: what role should journalism play in the balance between the public’s right to know and the government’s need to keep secrets in the name of national security? In the so-called “information age,” how have the tools of government secrecy affected journalism – and how are journalists responding? And what is the future of the delicate relationship between those Ame...
Madison's Music: On Reading the First Amendment
March 31, 2015 20:48 - 56 minutes - 52 MBWhat if most of what we think we know about reading the text of the First Amendment is just wrong? For years, the Supreme Court has treated the First Amendment like a laundry list of isolated words, stopping every once in a while to pull a couple of words out of the full text and claiming to be able to use the artificially isolated words as an infallible guide to what the First Amendment really means. In Madison's Music, Burt Neuborne argues that the Supreme Court has gotten the actual text ...
Democracy's Problems and Prospects: A Book Talk with Douglas E. Schoen
March 31, 2015 20:46 - 22 minutes - 20.2 MBAmerica’s democracy is floundering, Congress is hopelessly gridlocked, and millions remain without gainful employment. Despite all this, longtime political strategist and polling expert Douglas E. Schoen remains optimistic. Democracy’s Problems And Prospects represents the best of Dr. Schoen’s distinguished career, which he has dedicated to ensuring that democratic societies reflect the consent and the will of their electorates, and that America defends its interests as well as its values.
What Went Wrong with the FISA Court?
March 31, 2015 20:42 - 23 minutes - 21.1 MBThe Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court is no longer serving its constitutional function of providing a check on the executive branch’s ability to obtain Americans’ private communications. Dramatic shifts in technology and law have changed the role of the FISA Court since its creation in 1978 — from reviewing government applications to collect communications in specific cases, to issuing blanket approvals of sweeping data collection programs affecting millions of Americans. The re...
The Black Vote & U.S. Democracy
March 31, 2015 20:38 - 53 minutes - 48.6 MBDarryl Pinckney’s new book, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy, is a meditation on the intersection between civil rights and the history of black participation in U.S. electoral politics. Fifty years after the first passage of the Voting Rights Act, Pinckney investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. Mr. Pinckney is joined by Wade Henderson, President and CEO of The Leadership...
What Caused the Crime Decline?
March 16, 2015 19:20 - 21 minutes - 19.4 MBWhat Caused the Crime Decline? This podcast examines the Brennan Center's new report that explores one of the nation’s least understood recent phenomena – the dramatic decline in crime nationwide over the past two decades – and analyzes various theories for why it occurred, by reviewing more than 40 years of data from all 50 states and the 50 largest cities. It concludes that over-harsh criminal justice policies, particularly increased incarceration, which rose even more dramatically over th...
Scott Horton Book Talk: Lords of Secrecy
February 18, 2015 20:29 - 54 minutes - 50.3 MBIn the last decade, national security issues have increasingly faded from the political agenda, due in part to the growth of government secrecy. In his new book, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America's Stealth Warfare, journalist and lawyer Scott Horton explains how secrecy has fundamentally changed the way America functions. Never before have the American people had so little information concerning the wars waged in their name, nor has Congress exercised so little oversi...
Kenneth P. Vogel and Walter Shapiro on 'Big Money' Book
June 18, 2014 20:53 - 39 minutes - 33.6 MBIn our first podcast, Walter Shapiro speaks with Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel about money in politics and Vogel’s new book Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics. Theme music courtesy of Boy Girl Party.