Demolition in DC/ Developments in the DNC

Ralph welcomes Constitutional law expert Bruce Fein to analyze Congress' abdication of power in the face of President Trump and Elon Musk's actions to dismantle the federal government, and whether any of it is legal. Then, Ralph is joined by Norman Solomon from RootsAction to discuss the new Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, and whether we should be optimistic about his agenda for the Democrats.

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.

What I think shows the clear (what I would call malignant) intent, is even though he has Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, he's never contemplated going back to Congress and saying, "Hey, I want you to do X. I want you to do Y. We need to do this in the proper way."

Bruce Fein

[Trump’s] boogeyman is DEI. So he claims that a crash between a helicopter and airplane in Washington, D.C. is a DEI problem. Of course, it's amazing that somebody who has such contempt for meritocracy with his own cabinet appointments suddenly blames, “Oh, well, DEI, it's watering down standards.” Well, he doesn't have any standards himself, so it's kind of ironic there.

Bruce Fein

Impeachment is not a criminal prosecution. Impeachment is what Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention said— it's the civilized substitute for tyrannicide…And if you're impeached, it's because you have undertaken attempts to subvert the Constitution so the people no longer view you as a trustworthy steward of our liberties and the rule of law. That's what it is. You don't go to Siberia, you don't go to the guillotine, that's it. And there have been, of course, many federal judges (probably as many as a dozen) who've been impeached, removed from office. And you know what? They still survive. There's not a graveyard of them…So this idea that impeachment is somehow some enormous volcanic eruption on the landscape is totally misleading and wrong.

Bruce Fein

There are two informal checkpoints I want to run by you. [Trump] is afraid of the stock market collapsing—and it could well collapse because chaos is the thing that really gets investors and big institutional investors scared. And the second thing he's afraid of is a plunge in the polls, including among Trump voters who represent families that have the same necessities for their children and their neighborhood as liberal families.

Ralph Nader

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and his newest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.

Especially when there's not a Democrat in the White House, the leader of the Democratic Party de facto is often the chair of the Democratic National Committee. And we now, of course, have the Democrats in minority in the House and the Senate. Biden's out of there in the White House. And so, really, it falls to the chair of the DN