Two Kennedys
What Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement means for… basically everything; and Massachusetts Congressman Joe Kennedy on Trump, Paul Ryan, the midterms, “work requirements,” and how Dems can move past divide and conquer. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.
Last week, SCOTUS wrapped up its term, and its last round of decisions was a doozy. But the horror show wasn’t limited to the final batch of cases it decided, from Janus to the Muslim Ban and more. It was capped off by the sudden announcement that Justice Anthony Kennedy is stepping down, leaving Donald Trump to name his replacement. To unpack what this means for… basically everything, Rebecca sat down with Ian Millhiser, justice editor at ThinkProgress and Off-Kilter’s SCOTUS correspondent (and Will had to bleep out roughly a third of what they said).
And later on the show, since the 2016 election, when white working class voters swept Donald Trump into office in the hopes that he’d save or bring back their jobs, the president has broken essentially every campaign promise he made to the so-called forgotten man and forgotten woman, instead focusing on passing tax cuts for millionaires paid for by cuts to the programs that support working people. It’s no secret that the American people want the opposite of this: an increase in the poverty-level minimum wage, universal healthcare, paid leave and childcare, and so many other central planks of the progressive agenda. Rebecca’s theory, as listeners of this show know, is that this is precisely what’s driving the GOP focus on so-called “work requirements” — as an attempt to distract the American people from an unpopular agenda through age-old divide and conquer tactics. To discuss how Democrats can move from fighting harmful cuts to reframing the entire conversation on how the economy is only working for the wealthy few, Rebecca spoke with Congressman Joe Kennedy III, a Democrat representing the 4th district of Massachusetts.
Sorry folks, no ICYMI news roundup this week with folks out for July 4th. (Hey, you’re lucky you’re getting an episode this week at all!) But don’t worry, Jeremy and ICYMI will both be back next week.
This week’s guests:
- Ian Millhiser, justice editor, ThinkProgress and author of Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted
- Congressman Joe Kennedy III (D-MA)
For more on this week’s topics:
- For more from Ian Millhiser on life after Kennedy’s retirement, check out The horrifying consequences of Justice Kennedy’s retirement and Justice Kennedy deserves this nasty unflinching sendoff
This week’s transcript
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, SCOTUS just wrapped it’s term with a set of terrifying decisions from Janus to the Muslim ban and much, much more. But more terrifying than any single decision it handed down was the surprise news of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. I talk with Ian Millhiser, justice editor at Think Progress and Off Kilter’s Supreme Court correspondent, helped by some serious tequila about what Kennedy’s retirement means for abortion rights, racial discrimination, gay rights and more. Next, I sit down with Congressman Joe Kennedy to talk about what’s behind the GOP push for “work requirements”, big scare quotes there and how Democrats can move from fighting harmful cuts to reframing the entire conversation on how the economy is only working for the wealthy few. No ‘In Care You Missed It’ this week because July 4th and things. Slevs misses all of you and he wanted me to tell you that.
[MUSIC]
You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last week the Supreme Court wrapped up its term and its last round of decision was a doozy. But the horror show wasn’t limited to the final decisions it decided, from Janus to the Muslim Ban and more, it was capped off by the sudden announcement that Justice Anthony Kennedy is stepping down, leaving Donald Trump to name his replacement on the court. To unpack what this means for basically everything, I’m joined by Ian Millhiser, justice editor at Think Progress and Off Kilter’s Supreme Court correspondent. Ian, thanks so much for joining the show and also f***.
IAN MILLHISER: F***.
VALLAS: Also, f***.
MILLHISER: I mean, we got to live in a constitutional democracy for more than 30 decades, that’s more than most people get. I think we should be grateful for what we had and remember it fondly.
VALLAS: We had a good run, Ian.
MILLHISER: We had a great run.
VALLAS: It was a good run we had. So Ian, I’m not just joined by you, I’m also joined and you are joined by copious amounts of alcohol.
MILLHISER: Yes, this is a time for drinking.
VALLAS: There isn’t enough alcohol in the world for what we’re about to talk about. Just, spoiler alert, if you’re someone whose stomach turns when you hear about literally everything you care about being wiped away in a very short span of time, this may not be the episode for you.
MILLHISER: This is a bad time to be sober.
VALLAS: Well, so with that we’ll leave our listeners a minute or so to get out their drinks if that’s something that they do so that they can cope while they listen if they’re still listening. But Ian just before we get into what comes next because Kennedy is where all of our minds are right now. Help us unpack, what’s just a quick run down of the cases that the court just handed down, a helpful starting point for what we think about in terms of what comes next.
MILLHISER: Yes, so we just had a three-day long shit-storm. We got the Muslim ban, apparently the president now is allowed to ban people so long as he says he’s not doing it for unconstitutional reasons even though he went all over the country bragging about the unconstitutional reason he was going to do it, so that’s new. We also, for those of you who are fans of Japanese internment, they simultaneously overruled Korematsu, which was the case saying that we could have Japanese internment and reaffirmed its’ core holding that we’re just going to ignore everything that the Constitution says whenever the president screams the word ‘national security’. So that was one day. We got the Janus case, which is an attempt really just to defund a bunch of public sector unions. basically what this says, so historically unions have been able to get reimbursements from non-members of union for services that they provide to those non-members. The holding of Janus is that they will now have to provide those services for free. And of course that’s not very good for the finances of the unions, the whole point of this case is that when you strain the unions of money, some of them will collapse and then no one gets the benefit of being in a union.
VALLAS: Some people have described the Janus case, which we’ve all known was coming and I think we all expected where this was headed when the decision came down, given the make up of the court right, but some legal scholars and advocates have described this case as the thread that you pull from the sweater that makes the entire sweater unravel.
MILLHISER: Right, I mean what it is, you may have heard the term ‘right to work’ laws before. That’s what a ‘right to work’ law is.
VALLAS: ‘Right to work’ being exactly the opposite of what it sounds like. It’s actually anti-union.
MILLHISER: Right to work means that the union has to provide services free to the people who don’t want to pay them. And obviously, if I had to do my job and not get paid for it, I wouldn’t be able to do that job for very long either.
VALLAS: And we talked a little bit last week in the ‘In Case You Missed It’ segment, some of the consequences of Janus, it’s not just something that’s going to hurt unionized workers and unions, it’s potentially a huge blow to workers generally.
MILLHISER: Right.
VALLAS: Because all workers benefit from unions, they receive the benefits whether they’re a member or not; higher wages, better working conditions, a voice on the job, all of that stuff. So Janus, a huge blow to workers that we know workers are going to fight back and unions are going to fight back from but a really devastating anti-worker case. There’s another case that’s not getting a ton of attention that has to do with crisis pregnancy centers.
MILLHISER: Yeah, so crisis pregnancy centers for those who aren’t aware, are the sham health centers, some of them provide limited medical services, some of them don’t provide any medical services at all. But the whole point of them is that they make themselves look like abortion clinics so if you need an abortion, you’ll go there and they basically then try to run out the clock on you. They try to delay you from getting the abortion until it’s been so long that you can no longer legally get the abortion and then ha, they’ve tricked you, now you don’t get it. And so California passed a law which required them to make certain disclosures, which would have directed women towards abortion care in some cases and in other cases just made it clear this wasn’t a place that’s going to provide them with medical care. And the Supreme Court struck that decision down, I mean I actually, I thought this was a hard case. But the reason I thought it was a hard case is that there’s another line of decisions saying that if you’re an abortion provider, states can make you follow what are sometimes called informed consent laws where often it’s just you have to read a script whose purpose is to, the doctor has to read a script to their patients whose purpose is to convince the patient not to have an abortion. And there’s six states where the script says something like just so you know, you’re about to end the life of a human life and so like it’s not, this isn’t medical information that they’re providing.
And so there’s a whole line of cases, the First Amendment just doesn’t protect you against censorship, it protects you against forced speech. So it’s not ridiculous to say that crisis pregnancy centers don’t have to post these notices, but what the Supreme Court has said is that crisis pregnancy centers get one First Amendment where they have huge robust protections against not having to post these notices they don’t want to post. But abortion clinics get a different First Amendment, which is not as good, where their doctors can be compelled to advocate for the other side. And that’s actually really, really frightening.
VALLAS: And potentially has pretty significant implications for a whole range of issues, not just within the context of abortion.
MILLHISER: Right, so the whole point of the First Amendment, so the biggest sin that the government can commit under the First Amendment is viewpoint discrimination, where they say that people who hold one view on a debate are treated worse than people, that is the worst thing you can do under the First Amendment. And the Supreme Court of the United States whose job is to police the First Amendment and make sure that viewpoint discrimination doesn’t happen just wrote viewpoint discrimination into the First Amendment itself.
VALLAS: So essentially picking favorites.
MILLHISER: Exactly.
VALLAS: Special treatment for certain views.
MILLHISER: Exactly, which is a bizarre-o thing for the Supreme Court to do. I mean again, I think that they could have struck down both the anti-abortion informed consent laws and the California law, or they could have upheld both of them. But what they did instead is they said certain speech is better than other speech in their mind.
VALLAS: So this is what the Supreme Court just did in its last round of decisions. There’s a lot more as well, those are just a few of the low lights, not highlights. But let’s get to the Kennedy news, which I know is where my brain is going and I think I’ve had about half a glass of wine in the short period of time we’ve been talking already so I think maybe I’m ready to start going there.
MILLHISER: You really should switch to the tequila.
VALLAS: Well, I’m going to get there. I’ve had a long day, Ian.
MILLHISER: Which is why you need to switch to the tequila.
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: I’ve lived a lot of lives today and yesterday. We all have and the day before this, and this year and it goes on. So ok, a lot of people as soon as Kennedy made this announcement went oh f***. And in fact, that was basically the front page of The New York Daily News the day after the announcement. That was literally what was on the front page of the newspaper with a lot of little astericks and percentage signs and other characters bleeping it out. But I want to get specific about what we think the consequences of a Trump replacement for Kennedy on the court would mean. A lot of people have said bye-bye Roe v. Wade, bye-bye protections against discrimination and more. And a lot of conservatives are saying hang on, let’s not get histrionic, let’s not say that everything is going to get wiped out. It’s all going to be fine.
MILLHISER: Let’s not say that thing that we’ve been advocating for for the last 30 years is going to happen just because we’re about to get a majority on the Supreme Court.
VALLAS: But you have looked into this and you’ve actually looked area by area, case by case, at where Kennedy has been and where we would see a shift if we saw the court’s conservative block get another member in lieu of where Kennedy has been as the swing vote on the court. So I want to go through some of these important and hot button issues in turn. So let’s start with Roe v. Wade because that’s probably where we have to start.
MILLHISER: Yes. So Roe v. Wade is done. There’s a question of how it’s going to die, whether the court will write the words “Roe v. Wade is overruled” or whether they’ll just find some way to uphold every crappy anti-abortion that comes along so that in theory you have a right to an abortion but in fact no one can open an abortion clinic unless it has a operating room that is made out of gold and unless every one of their doctors’ has completely a 100,000 hour training course.
VALLAS: Which is basically the same thing as saying Roe v. Wade is overruled.
MILLHISER: Exactly.
VALLAS: It’s just a fancy, smokescreen way of doing.
MILLHISER: Exactly.
VALLAS: But Ian, just to play devil’s advocate for a second, a lot of people are saying wait a second, Kennedy was no fan of abortion rights. He wasn’t some staunch defender of Roe himself, so really are we going to see that much of a shift with him gone and potentially a Trump selected replacement on the court.
MILLHISER: I think Kennedy sat on 22 abortion cases and he voted against abortion in 20 of them. So Kennedy was not good on this issue. But one of the things that he did in his final years on the court, there was a Texas law that was much like the law that I just described, it required abortion clinics to have, spend millions of dollars on facilities they didn’t need. It required doctors to have credentials that were very hard to get and that they also didn’t need in order to be able to safety perform an abortion. The idea, it was a shame health law. You make it look like it’s a health regulation but these aren’t regulations that actually do anything to improve the health of the facilities.
VALLAS: Like the walls in the hallways have to be a certain distance apart because what if you need to push a stretcher through and it’s actually like we’re giving people the abortion pill here so that’s not even related to what we do but that kind of stuff.
MILLHISER: Or you have to have full stocked operating rooms even if your clinic only provides medication abortions and they don’t perform surgeries at all. It was a sham regulation whose purpose was the drive up the cost of being able to get abortions. And Kennedy said no, that law is no good. Kennedy said I will allow you to carve away, to make incursions on the right to choose but if you just go headlong at it and try to knock it out, that’s not allowed. That was a 5 to 4 decision.
VALLAS: That’s a pretty significant decision where he was the swing vote and he actually joined the part of the court that was protecting abortion rights in that case.
MILLHISER: Exactly. And so with him gone, there’s no longer a consensus for that, which means, one way or another Roe v. Wade is doomed.
VALLAS: So OK, I’m getting pretty scared and pretty depressed so I’m going to pour a little bit more wine.
MILLHISER: That’s a good call.
VALLAS: And then I am going to get to the tequila that you brought and thank you for bringing it.
MILLHISER: You didn’t think I was going to bring it.
VALLAS: I didn’t actually no.
[LAUGHTER]
MILLHISER: When I told you I was bringing tequila, I will bring tequila.
VALLAS: Well I also told you I was bringing things I didn’t bring.
[LAUGHTER]
MILLHISER: I’m very disappointed in you for that.
VALLAS: We can talk about that off air. [LAUGHTER] So it’s not just Roe v. Wade that is potentially thrown in the trash. It is also protections that have been really important for racial justice.
MILLHISER: Yeah, so Kennedy again, he was no one’s hero on racial justice.
VALLAS: For anyone who’s wondering if I’m actually drinking wine, yes you just heard me pour some.
MILLHISER: Yes, no we are getting lit tonight.
VALLAS: This is really happening.
MILLHISER: So let’s take a step back. Chief Justice Roberts is now the swing vote on the Supreme Court. And Roberts’ approach to every racial question that comes before him is to stick his fingers in his ears, close his eyes and say nah, nah, nah, nah, nah I’m not listening. He refuses to acknowledge the existence of racism. He literally wrote an opinion saying that we don’t need the Voting Rights Act anymore because there isn’t enough racism in America. He wrote that three years before Donald Trump got elected.
VALLAS: Yeah, because we had Obama as president, right, so aren’t we, didn’t we fix that?
MILLHISER: Yeah, if a Black dude got into the White House, racism is done. We fixed that problem.
VALLAS: Yeah.
MILLHISER: He summarized his views on race in an opinion where he said the way to end discrimination on the basis of racism is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
VALLAS: I remember that one, it’s the Supreme Court equivalent of Wayne LaPierre of the [National Rifle Association] saying the way to stop, what is it? It’s the good guy with the gun stopping the bad gun with the gun. That’s how we end gun violence, more guns. It’s the same thing.
MILLHISER: So Roberts’ view is that the problem isn’t racism. The problem is any consciousness of race at all, so if you pass a law whose purpose is to keep Black people out of a public school, that’s bad. But if you pass a lot whose purpose is to integrate public schools have you have to actually say, OK where do the black kids live and where do the white kids live and how do we construct districts in ways and how do we do attendance in ways that will integrate these schools; that’s just as bad for the exact same reason in John Roberts’ view. So Kennedy didn’t go all in on that. Kennedy at least left some room open to desegregate schools, Kennedy in a really important opinion dealing with the Fair Housing Act, basically didn’t nuke the Fair Housing Act when his former most conservative colleagues would have. He preserved at least some nub of affirmative action. And with him gone, the swing vote on the court is going to be John Roberts with his view that if you think about race at all you are bad. If you try to target the problem of racism you are no different from the Ku Klux Klan.
VALLAS: So another area where similar to abortion rights, with Roe Kennedy has not been some hero and champion of racial justice on the court but he has been an important vote that now we’re not going to have. I think you summed it up nicely in your piece for Think Progress, one of your pieces about Kennedy because you’ve been writing a lot since that —
MILLHISER: It’s been a lot that’s happened.
VALLAS: There’s been a lot that’s happened, you’ve written a lot about Kennedy since that retirement but in one of your pieces, “The Horrifying Consequences of Justice Kennedy’s Retirement” you write, “with Roberts in the driver’s seat, the court’s approach to race will become the jurisprudential equivalent of ‘All Lives Matter’. Not necessarily white supremacist but broadly skeptical of meaningful efforts to combat racism.” That sums it up pretty nicely and pretty terrifyingly.
MILLHISER: Yeah, ‘All Lives Matter’ is now the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
VALLAS: So that’s race. But it doesn’t stop there, right, let’s get to LGBTQ rights. And that’s a particularly important discussion given that Kennedy, he may not have been a hero when it comes to racial justice or when it comes to abortion rights but he’s actually a pretty big deal on the court when it comes to some of the major cases having to do with LGBTQ.
MILLHISER: Yeah, he wrote every single one of at least the major gay rights decisions. So trans rights it a relatively new issue for the Supreme Court and Kennedy wasn’t so great on trans rights but for sexual orientation he was good. And he wrote the marriage equality decision, he wrote the Lawrence decision in 2003 we actually had to have a Supreme Court decision saying this; that gay people cannot be prosecuted for having sex. So there’s now no longer a majority on the Supreme Court who supports the proposition that you can’t be thrown in jail for having sex.
VALLAS: I’m just going to pause there. We’re going to let that sink in, also I’m going to take a drink and so are you because that is a horrifying, horrifying thing that you just said. It’s like the opposite of a drinking game.
MILLHISER: No, it’s really, every time something terrible happens you have to get drunker.
VALLAS: Yeah, OK, alright so he wrote these decisions and basically what you’re saying is with him gone, there’s no longer a majority of justices on the court that even agrees with that basic proposition.
MILLHISER: Right, so here I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. There was an opinion involving, Arkansas just had some derpy attempt to restrict marriage equality. And the Supreme Court said no, you don’t get to do that. We already told you that. Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion where using very spurious reasoning he tried to claim that the court’s marriage equality decision didn’t apply and Roberts interestingly did not join Gorsuch’s opinion. So Roberts may say look, I don’t like it but there’s thousands of people running around with marriage licenses and if we take those licenses away there’s going to be pitchforks and torches and I don’t want pitchforks and torches to be coming at me so I’m just going to let that one lay. But what we can say is first of all, there’s going to be no more good news on LGBT rights from the Supreme Court. The best we can hope is that things will stay in place.
VALLAS: Which compared to what we just talked about when it comes to racial justice and abortion rights actually sounds pretty good.
MILLHISER: Right, and then the other thing is that so an issue that is barreling, there’s a cert petition in front of the court right now asking them to hear this case is whether no Title VII, which is the broad law protecting against employment discrimination, protects against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. With Kennedy on the court, it think we were likely to win that case, with Kennedy gone I think there is close to a zero percent chance.
VALLAS: So this is a case where the question at issue is, is sexual orientation and discrimination on the basis —
MILLHISER: Can you be fired for being gay?
VALLAS: Yeah, is that a form of legal gender discrimination, right. So it’s an extension of existing precident that would be really important for gay people.
MILLHISER: Right and so that issue is done. And then of course the other really closely related issue is the anti-gay cake baker.
VALLAS: Yeah.
MILLHISER: So these cases involving people who say well I don’t want to follow the civil rights law and I claim that I don’t have to follow it because God told me to.
VALLAS: This is the area right, where we potentially sort of find the area where we’re going to see things get worse. So if we’re watching a plateau in terms of the court continuing to advance gay rights, the concept of religious freedom, this is where you think that things are going to get really bad.
MILLHISER: Yeah, and not just in the space of LGBT rights, I mean it happened to be the case that was before the court this term involves someone who didn’t want to serve a gay couple and the next case in line also is a woman who didn’t want to give flowers to a gay couple. So that’s where the bad news is probably going to happen first. But the next case in line, you’ve got a face from that tequila.
VALLAS: I told you what happens when I drink tequila.
MILLHISER: It is excellent tequila, I assure you.
VALLAS: Oh, it is, it is. I just have a long, storied history with tequila, as do many of us. Again, not something to talk about on air but maybe the bonus episode.
MILLHISER: Here’s what the next case would look like. This is an actual case that made its way through the courts in the 1980s. There was a Christian private school in California. And they had a policy where if you were a man or if you were an unmarried woman then you got health benefits if you worked there. But if you were a married woman you didn’t get health benefits because their religion told you that the man is supposed to provide for the wife. And so, no health insurance for you married women. And the court, this made it’s way up to the Ninth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit said of course you can’t do that. That’s gender discrimination, that’s not allowed. They claimed that they had a right to do it because of their religion and they were smacked down. Now what Alito has said, and Alito has been driving the ship in these so called religious liberty cases, he has said that religion can’t be used to justify race discrimination. So congratulations, no more whites only lunch counters. But he rather pointedly admitted other forms of discrimination, gender discrimination, sexual orientation based discrimination, gender identity, what have you.
VALLAS: All of that’s fine.
MILLHISER: Yeah, that’s what the fear is. We don’t know where the line is. I think I am close to 100% sure that Alito is going to say that you can discriminate against gay people all you want. I think that it is an open question, whether there are going to be five votes on the Supreme Court to say that it’s ok to discriminate against women if you claim that your religion requires you to.
VALLAS: So we are potentially entering, depending on who Trump nominates for the court an era where there’s a majority on the court who believes that the concept of a religious objection, oh my religion tells me I can’t do this or I have to do this, could give someone a license to discriminate not just against gay people and LGBTQ people broadly, but actually against women too.
MILLHISER: And it could potentially be much broader than that. Kagan and Gorsuch in the Masterpiece Cake Shop, had a fight over basically what it means to engage in religious discrimination. And normally, Kagan described the way that the laws has always been interpreted, which is that you can’t discriminate against someone because of their faith, but you can treat everyone equally. So if I own a bar and someone comes in and they’re loud and obnoxious and they start fights, I can say I kick out everyone who starts a fight so you’re gone. I could have a policy saying I kick out Catholics who start fights but not Jews because that would be religious discrimination.
VALLAS: That would cross the line.
MILLHISER: Yeah, but so long as the policy is applied neutrally regardless of your faith, it’s fine. Gorsuch said that essentially it is religious discrimination if you’re discriminated against because of an action you take that is motivated by your faith. So if i believe that Jesus told me to punch that dude over there, and I go up to him and I punch him, that is motivated by my faith and as Gorsuch understands it that would be a form of religious discrimination. Now I doubt very much because Gorsuch hates the idea of regulating businesses that he would apply that rule to the bar owner but he would apply that rule to the government. I am late to church and I believe that I have a religious obligation to be at church, so I am not going to follow the speed limit because I need to be on time to church. Under Gorsuch’s theory it is far from clear to me at all that I could be charged with speeding if I have a religious motivation for doing so.
VALLAS: I have to say, as somebody with a pretty lead foot and if you’ve ever driven with me you know this is true, I enjoy few things more than picking up minutes on the Google maps estimate of when you’re going to get somewhere. I have to say, that one sounds pretty good, I’m just going to tell people I’m sorry I was on my way to church. Jesus told me I had to be there by 3:30. I’m mean I’m joking. This is kind of terrifying, the picture that you’re painting here. In terms of how broad these implications could be.
MILLHISER: Part of the problem, I doubt that if a case came up involving someone who was driving 70 in a 45 because, that Gorsuch would say that yes you have a religious, but the problem is that these are sloppy thinkers. Of all people, Justice Scalia wrote a really great essay about the role of a judge where they said when I write something I constrain myself because if I don’t like, I might like the result that comes out in this case, but it’s going to have implications for all kinds of future cases and I have to be comfortable with the rule that I am announcing in every case I could possibly imagine because it’s going to apply to everyone. And part of what’s, it goes back to when we were talking about the crisis pregnancy center case, where there’s one First Amendment for one team and a different First Amendment for the other team. This is one of the most important constraints on the judiciary; the fact that the same rules apply to everyone. And so you have to think about, do you want your worst enemy to be able to take advantage of this thing before you hand down a new rule. These guys aren’t thinking that way. The problem with Gorsuch is opinion is either he’s serious in which case it leads to all the absurdity implications I just teased out, or he’s thinking oh no, I’ll just create a special rule when it’s my friends and then when it’s the other team, we’ll do something like ban Muslims.
VALLAS: So there are a lot more potential implications of a replacement for Kennedy picked by Trump, you outline all of them or many of them in your piece for Think Progress, “The Horrifying Consequences of Justice Kennedy’s Retirement”, I want to pick and choose among a couple of them because we also have to talk about what comes next and how we actually fight back here. But one that I am going to pick here that’s potentially incredibly important has to do with executions, the death penalty. And this is something people totally forget about when it comes to Kennedy.
MILLHISER: Yeah we’ll just start killing kids now.
VALLAS: And you’re not actually all that far off, you’re not really kidding here.
MILLHISER: Yeah, the rule, with Kennedy there was no longer a majority for this proposition. You are not allowed to execute people who offend when they’re under the age of 18 and you’re not allowed to execute the intellectually disabled.
VALLAS: And both of these, when you consider the length of time that the United States have had a criminal justice system, these are fairly recent developments within our jurisprudence.
MILLHISER: Yeah, these are within the last 15 or 20 years.
VALLAS: Just process that for a second, listeners. That those are recent developments when it comes to how we treat the death penalty in this country.
MILLHISER: Without Kennedy, Kennedy wasn’t great on the death penalty but the last death penalty argument was a case called Glossip v. Gross, it involved whether you could use very painful execution drugs and Kennedy wound up voting yes you can, but the bloodthirstiness, I thought that Justice Alito was going to offer to travel down to the prison and personally strangle the person at the heart of the case. The stuff that, it’s just going to get bad. These are folks who think that criminal law exists to inflict grave sanctions upon people who have hurt us in some way.
VALLAS: Including people who haven’t even committed homicide.
MILLHISER: Right, Justice Scalia once said actual innocence isn’t a defense.
VALLAS: That’s right, that’s right.
MILLHISER: He said you get your process and once the process is done, that’s it.
VALLAS: Being innocent, sorry, that’s not enough to get off from being killed by the state. That is actually what that quote means.
MILLHISER: And for what it’s worth, at least one of the people on Trump’s short list had an opinion where he more or less said this. There was a case where there was a man who was in prison for 20 years, he was on death row. The prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense attorneys that would have exonerated the man. And fortunately, eventually the Third Circuit said no, no, no you can’t execute someone who is innocent. And he was let free, but this guy dissented. He said you got all the process you’re going to get, if the state wants to execute you doesn’t matter that literally they withheld physical evidence that placed him away from the scene of the crime.
VALLAS: So it comes down to a partisan difference in opinion should you be killed by state if you are innocent or should you not.
MILLHISER: Right.
VALLAS: That is actually what you are described. OK, so there is a lot more to think about, I’ll refer folks to your Think Progress piece, which will be on our nerdy syllabus page as usual for a fuller discussion of many of the other areas we haven’t had time to get to wherein a Trump appointed replacement for Kennedy could cause all kinds of horrific consequences for basically everything for humans who care about humans should care about. But let’s talk a little bit about what comes next. So in the last couple of minutes that we have, we’re going to cram a lot into this, Ian, and I as two longwinded individuals, which may or may not correlate with our legal training. I’ll let other people weigh in on whether that is actually the reason we talk for a long time about everything that we ever talk about. In the last couple of minutes that we have, so there, what’s going to happen next is Trump is going to nominate someone.
MILLHISER: Right.
VALLAS: For the court. And that person is likely to be incredibly conservative, similar to Neil Gorsuch who now we are seeing what kinds of decisions he hands down including Janus and others. But there are two very important humans in the senate for whom a lot of this is really going to come down to them.
MILLHISER: Right.
VALLAS: And those people are Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.
MILLHISER: Right so we have a 51–49 senate, which means that if two Republicasn flip and vote with all the Democrats Trump’s nominee is not confirmed. Collins and Murkowski at least claim to be pro-choice. And what they need to realize is that this confirmation vote, it’s about a lot of things. But one of the things it is about is whether or not Roe v. Wade is overruled.
VALLAS: That’s right.
MILLHISER: If you vote to confirm Trump’s nominee you are voting to overrule Roe v. Wade. That is your choice you have done it. And so Susan Collins in particular, the United States senator from Maine, which is a blue state and so she can either run for reelection in a blue state as the senator who saved Roe v. Wade, or she can run for reelection as the senator who singlehandedly killed Roe v. Wade because they will need her vote. So Collins and Murkowski are the people you have to watch. If you are in Maine or you are in Alaska, you should never stop calling them because they are the people who potentially hold the keys, I’m not optimistic that we can hold the seat open for the rest of the Trump presidency, but we could actually have a normal process where rather than Trump picking some guy, a nihilist like Neil Gorsuch, there’s actually an ordinary negotiation and he picks someone that’s broadly acceptable and widely respected and maybe someone in the vein of Anthony Kennedy. And whether or not we get someone who most people can live with or whether we get someone who wakes up every morning and says how am I going to own the libs today, comes down to whether there’s enough pressure put on Collins and Murkowski that they start to feel it.
VALLAS: So those are the two people to watch and to try to influence in the weeks, the months, potentially the years ahead. But there’s also a lot to learn from what Republicans did when it came to the Supreme Court not that long ago. They kept Merrick Garland from taking his rightful seat and what a different place we would be in right now if we were watching him as a member of the court as opposed to Neil Gorsuch.
MILLHISER: So here’s what I hope John Roberts is thinking. Two words that I have heard a lot in the last few days, which aren’t used very often in judicial circles.
VALLAS: I’m on tenterhooks.
MILLHISER: Are court packing.
VALLAS: That’s not what I thought you were going to say.
[LAUGHTER]
MILLHISER: What did you think I was going to say? Also, oh sh*t.
VALLAS: It was closer to what I was thinking.
MILLHISER: Court packing is the jurisprudential equivalent of nuking another country to take out their missile silos because they are presently fueling their missiles and if you don’t launch first you will die. It is an act, court packing is when you add new members to the Supreme Court in order to change it’s majority. It’s something that Roosevelt briefly tried and then would up being mooted because the court flipped on some important issues. It is what you do when your court becomes such a threat to your nation continuing to be a democracy that you have no other choice. And Roberts has the power to make sure that doesn’t happen because when he is the swing voter he can make sure that the court continues to preside over a nation where elections matter, where states cannot be incredibly aggressive in suppressing votes. Where when there’s a president he doesn’t like in power that president can still sign a health care bill and that health care bill won’t be thrown out on some ridiculous theory. And if we continue to be a democracy then the Supreme Court will continue to play a very substantial role in American life. But I fear that people are angry. I think that people are justifiably angry because of what happened to Merrick Garland, and if the court overreaches, the demands that are going to come from the Democratic base are going to be things that will fundamentally restructure how our government functions in ways that won’t be easy to reverse.
VALLAS: So no big deal but democracy sits in the hands of Justice Roberts as well as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. You heard it here from Ian Millhiser who is pretty deep into some tequila but still dropping some knowledge that has been terrifying and yet incredibly helpful. Ian Millhiser is the justice editor at Think Progress, he’s the Supreme Court correspondent for Off Kilter. Don’t you like that you have a title for Off Kilter?
MILLHISER: I didn’t even know that I came with a title these days.
VALLAS: I’ve been using it for a while but maybe I should have told you.
MILLHISER: You haven’t plugged my book yet.
VALLAS: He’s also the author of “Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.”
MILLHISER: Yes, very nice.
VALLAS: Got it right.
MILLHISER: The one good thing that could come out of this is book royalties.
VALLAS: Oh man, and there we have it we’re going to leave it there. Ian Millhiser, thank you as always for coming on the show and someday, someday you will come with good news. That day is not today.
MILLHISER: When was that day?
VALLAS: In the future.
MILLHISER: Yes, we shall look forward to that.
VALLAS: Someday.
MILLHISER: Someday.
VALLAS: Ian, thanks so much.
MILLHISER: Alright.
VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.
[MUSIC]
You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Since the 2016 election when white working class voters swept Donald Trump into office in hopes that he’d save or bring back their jobs, the president has broken essentially every campaign process he made to the so-called forgotten man and forgotten woman, instead focusing on passing tax cuts for millionaires paid for by cuts to the programs that support working people. It’s no secret that the American people want the opposite of this, an increase in the poverty level minimum wage, universal health care, paid leave and child care and so many other central planks of the progressive agenda. My theory as listeners of this show will know is that this is precisely what’s driving Republicans’ focus on so-called “work requirements” I put that in big scare quotes. It’s an attempt to distract the American people for an unpopular agenda through age-old divide and conquer tactics. To discuss how Democrats can move from fighting harmful cuts to reframing the entire conversation on how the economy is only working for the wealthy few, I’m joined by Congressman Joe Kennedy, a Democrat representing the fourth district of Massachusetts. Congressman, thank you so much for taking the time.
CONGRESSMAN JOE KENNEDY: Rebecca thank you, appreciate it.
VALLAS: So you delivered the rebuttal to this year’s state of the union, a state of union speech like none other before it, I think it’s fair to say. Also feels like years since we actually watched that speech.
KENNEDY: It does, it does.
VALLAS: But the refrain of your rebuttal was false choices and that we need not fall victim to false choice types of frames. And that’s exactly what Republicans are trying to sell us in the form of these so-called “work requirements”. It’s about us versus them and you don’t think that’s how we need to be viewing this.
KENNEDY: So 100%, I think President Trump has been relatively good at diagnosing some of the challenges we face across our country, particularly economically. He has offered no viable alternative long-term solutions to any of it. To the extent that he has one, it’s been taking off some of the governors around our economy that were put in place after our recovery so building off of eight years of Obama recovery, pouring these benefits back into the economy, overheating it. And yes, taking some headlines from short term economic growth but an awful lot of the comments that I talk to start to say at some point this is going to come back. And so the real question in all of this is one, from my perspective anyway, how is the economy really working for Americans, everyday Americans. And so that is just a slice of how it’s going for folks at the top, that’s going for folks that are struggling to make ends meet, that’s how it’s gone for folks in the middle. And the bottom line to that is it’s a very, very mixed record. If you are wealthy you are championing what this president has done. You have done very, very well under him, absolutely period, yeah absolutely. If you are not, it is a very different story. If you are at the lower end of the economic spectrum or you are fighting and scratching and clawing to try to make ends meet, this president has been a disaster from everything from trying to take away your healthcare to trying to increase your rent in affordable housing to going right after transportation infrastructure and not making the investments we need in order make it easier for people to go to work, to be able to get to a grocery store, going after food stamps and cutting their access to nutrition, bailing out on what was supposed to be a promise by the president and Mrs. Trump, Ivanka Trump about childcare more affordable. None of the structural issues that so many working families confront on a daily basis have gotten even any semblance of notice from the presidency, the White House or anyone in Congress.
And then that leaves everybody else in the middle and I think I hear all the time, hey, stock market’s done so well, isn’t that a good thing? One, stock market has on the whole done well although it’s been very up and down as of late. Two, remember that 50% of Americans don’t own a single stock, nothing. No retirement account, no 401(k), nothing, so when you talk about the gains in a stock market, you’re talking about the gains for a slice of our economy, slice of our population that is wealthy enough to be able to actually own those assets to begin with. Again, 50% of the American public doesn’t. I’m not going to argue against the benefits of having an increasing stock market, of course nobody can, nobody should, I think that’s a good thing. We can ask the question though at whose expense and how is everybody else doing that doesn’t have it.
Sorry for the long answer, but the one last piece I want to highlight in this is a story that is not unfortunately unique to my district but this one happened in my district. In the case of Philips Lighting, Philips Lighting had been in Fall River, Massachusetts since the 1970s, has 160 employees, 100 of them are unionized. The city of Fall River, where I actually gave the response speech from is a city on the east coast of the United States and it’s got a median household income of $34,000 a year, which is to say it is a tough working class community that is fighting and scratching and clawing to try to pull it’s way out of the economic transitions that have affected a lot of other industrial towns across our country. That city, Fall River, contributed to the plant in Philips Lighting a couple million dollars back in the 90s and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts helped with a grant for about $500,000 to provide a wind turbine to generate about 70% of the energy that the plant needed to make the products that they were making. Philips Lighting last year earned $342 million in profits, and spurred on by this tax bill and have been doing stock buy-backs to the tune of $190 million. About two months, they told every employee there that they were getting fired, they closed the factory and are moving the jobs to Mexico. Are the shareholders doing well in Philips Lighting? Yes. Is the CEO of Philips Lighting doing well? Yes. Are those workers they helped ensure that Philips Lighting earned part of that $342 million in international profits, are they doing well now that those 160 jobs have just been taken away from them? No, they’re not. And so I think like many things when it comes to policy, it’s worth having the level of detail here and recognizing that there are some folks that are doing very well. There’s an awful lot of other folks who are hurting and what’s different about this administration, what’s different about the narrative that I see today is that we’re championing the success of some and not caring about at whose expense it comes. And those workers are getting short shift and that’s a shame.
VALLAS: Trump keeps telling us that he’s created the so-called best economy ever, that’s his new phrase that he’s coined and he likes to point to the job numbers that come out each month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He also likes to point to a 3.8% unemployment rate. These are facts, these are things that we are watching, but they as you point out really only tell just one inch of the elephant of this story because they ignore the fact that close to half of households in this country are struggling to afford food and housing and health care, that 4 in 10 Americans don’t even have $400 in the bank, let alone stocks and that that is a much bleaker picture than what he’s painting about this economy he wants us to believe his tax plan has created. But he is simultaneously using economic numbers to make the case for why it’s ok for his party to be championing taking away health care and food and housing from people who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job and that’s what they call work requirements. But it’s again more of this divide and conquer, trying to signal to people who are struggling, many of whom actually did vote for him in 2016 that somehow this is justice for them because it’s taking something away from someone else that they view as pitted against them in that kind of a divide and conquer frame. How do we get out of that in how we talk about this?
KENNEDY: I think the way you get out of it is the way that Americans have always gotten out of this. We have never before in our history defined success as zero sum. We’ve never tried to say some segment of our society can win if somebody else loses. That’s antithetical to what American was founded on, antithetical to our history, it’s antithetical to our present and it’s not going to give us the long-term success that our country needs and our citizens deserve, period. And there’s no debate about that, that’s just reality. Think about what that says. The president of the United States is actually cheering for some segment of a society to lose. I will remember, I hope at some point I will be able to forget the image of my Republican house colleagues toasting champagne glasses behind a podium at a Rose Garden ceremony with the President of the United States after they took health care away from 30 million people. I don’t know how anyone could ever champion somebody else losing health care, let alone 30 million Americans losing health care. He did, and they did and if there was a issue out there, if there was a message out there for our country about what is at stake in this election, it’s not just able healthcare although that’s a big piece to it. It’s about the question as to whether we are all deserving of a country that at this moment, the richest one in the world, that is able to say given the challenges that we all face in everyday life, we’re going to make sure that if an emergency happens, if the unthinkable happens, you’re going to be ok.
That’s [INAUDIBLE], that’s it, is to try to say the time of your moment of deepest need, there’s going to be something there for to make sure that we can try to do the best we can to make sure you’re going to be OK, and by the way it’s not going to bankrupt your family. They just, they celebrated taking away those protections and I’ll never understand it. They celebrate trying to put in place work requirements, which are essentially coded language to say if you are poor, you don’t deserve health care. And for those out there that say that’s not what it does, that’s exactly what it does because if you think of what work requirements should do, if you believe that the goal of those health care programs are to make people healthier then you’d say ok fine. Show me one study that says that work requirements actually make people healthier. I’ve asked that question to every single administration official that has come in front of my committee, they can’t point to a single study, does not exist. They’ll point to a study that says healthier people work, that’s not the same thing, anywhere close to it, in fact.
What they will say is for folks that are healthy they should, folks that are able to work, they should be working and that is something that part of this benefit of the bargain you should get for health care. Well, let’s look at the stats. The vast majority of folks that are on Medicaid already are working. What work requirements are very effective at doing so putting in place a whole bunch of administrative burdens that make it next to impossible if you are sick, if you are suffering particular from some sort of chronic disease or particularly mental illness from continuing to hit these deadlines, continuing to gather the paper, the certifications, the issues, the documents that you need in order to meet those obligations. And so what it basically means is that those folks lose their health care and that’s all it does. It’s very effective of kicking people off of health care, it’s extremely ineffective at actually making people healthier.
VALLAS: The health care debate is not the only context where work requirements have come up and where efforts to take away a basic standard of living from people who can’t find jobs or can’t get enough hours at their job, that also extends to the food context, you mentioned food stamps where we watched all of your Republican colleagues save for 20 of them, vote to take away food assistance from two million Americans, all Democrats stood in lockstep against that bill, which was exceptionally cruel and was partisan. We’ve also now watched this emerge in the housing context where Trump’s proposal for the affordable housing crisis apparently to triple the poorest families’ rents in this country and take housing away from jobless workers and their families. What is your message to your Democratic colleagues who might be nervous about voting against a proposal that they hear dressed up in the language of work and they feel like I can’t vote against that, how am I going to explain that to my voters.
KENNEDY: Well luckily when it comes to those issues, not a single Democrat asked me for my opinion because this one is pretty obvious, right. And I think the efforts from the administration that try to conceal this as anything but cruel have failed. And anything other than what it actually was, pass a tax cut that puts an enormous debt burden on the shoulders of our citizens to the tune of $1.5 trillion if not more, depending on how you want to calculate it, and then come back and try to balance it out by taking away food stamps. And so no Democrat came even close to falling for it but I think again, this is the question of those equities. Of just saying, what kind of country do you want to be and how do we want to get there? And do you want to be a nation where we basically say look, we recognize that for a complex series of reasons, life today in the United States is hard for an awful lot of families. And it is OK, and I believe this, it is OK for success to be an achievement, it is OK for in order to succeed, for you to have to work really hard and put your shoulder to the wheel, that’s alright. But the basic fundamentals of economic fairness in this country cannot be that a family has to go to bed every night completely and totally spent at the very margins of losing everything, exhausted, wrung out, just to make ends me, just to be able to make rent in a two bedroom apartment, just to be able to afford food, just to be able to try to make sure your kid is going to a good school.
And if that is where we are at, if that is the transition that we have made for the vast majority of middle class families in our country at a time when our corporate balance sheets are so flush with cash, at a time when profits are so high, at a time when our economy is doing so well, then I’m sorry, we’ve lost track. And we’ve lost focus as to what’s important. Rebecca, the bottom line to this is life in this country is supposed to mean something more than just chasing ROI and GDP. And to the extent that we end up having a government that forces policies that end up sucking the life out of people in order to hit some number of ROI but focuses you to sacrifice the moments that make life worth living then your government has totally let it’s people down. And that’s where I worry we’re going if we’re not there already for an awful lot of Americans.
VALLAS: The 2016 presidential election I think to a lot of people made clear that having the right policy agenda may not always be enough to resonate with voters who would be helped by those policies. Some people lament voters voting against their self-interest, it gets a lot more complicated than that when you bring in other issues and dynamics but what is your advice as we look ahead to the 2018 midterms, which are just around the corner and as we think ahead to 2020, what is your advice to Democrats who are running on the right policies but who need to be focused on communicating in a way that resonates with working people?
KENNEDY: So I think, Rebecca, the basic piece to this that I actually think most Democrats do pretty well but all of us everybody in office can do better, it sounds corny, it sounds hokey, just listen. There is no substitute in this line of work for just going out and doing town halls, doing your office hours, just listening to your constituents, asking them what’s on their mind and how you can try to help and then actually trying to do it. Most folks are I think by and large focused on trying to take care of their families, trying to go to work, trying to make sure those folks are in a good school and that they’re doing their homework and you got an extra little bit of time, you can do a barbeque on the weekend and you do it all over again the next week. That’s what people want and they focus on politics when they can or when they might be interested in it or when an election is coming up. But other than that, they want to live their lives, and our job is to I believe is to help them do that. In fact, I am compensated; you all pay me to care about these issues and to try to figure out the solutions to these challenges so that you don’t necessarily have to. Yes, your opinion matters and yes we want you to weigh in, but if I’m not spending as much time as I am diving into these policies then I’m not doing my job because you literally pay me to do that. And so I think the main thing for us at this point is anybody in office, is a healthy dose of humility, a bit more empathy to recognize that even for the most ardent Trump supporters and the most ardent Trump supporters, representatives in congress here who are my colleagues, recognizing that those individuals that that member of congress represents, they’re Americans too.
And those voices count and those voices deserve to be heard. And so part of my responsibility is to ask why they feel the way that they do, what do they see out of this administration, this president that they didn’t see out of other ones? Why is it that they think that some segments of our society think that he’s doing so well when my constituents and I think he is doing so poorly and betraying American values and mortgaging our future? And listen to our constituents, listen to other Americans I think is a critical part to that. It is reasonable for us to then ask though that others show us the same respect. that if I’m willing to sit down and listen to those Trump supporters in other parts of the country or yes even in Massachusetts that they be willing to also hear the concerns, the anxiety, the fears of so many Americans that feel like this administration has literally targeted them and scapegoated them for the economic social ills that we are seeing across our society and said that this is your fault, which is not fair and not accurate and extremely disappointing to be coming from a president.
VALLAS: It’s hard in a time where everything is under attack and where you have to constantly even check Twitter just to see what might have become policy all of a sudden because the president has tweeted it as my boss Neera Tanden likes to say, we’ve moved from being in a 24 hour news cycle to being in a 24 second news cycle. We’re feeling that in this week perhaps more than ever. But it’s important and you’re one of the people focusing on not just what are we fighting against but what are we actually fighting for. If Democrats are successful, if that blue wave happens in November, I’m knocking on all kinds of wood that is helpful attached to this chair, and do take back the house in November, what is H.R. 1 if you’ve got Dems holding the gavels?
KENNEDY: I think a couple of things, one of those priorities has to be infrastructure. There’s a massive infrastructure debt in our country. This is a great way to try to get and put millions of Americans to work, it makes our companies more competitive, lets us bring goods and services to market more cheaply, it makes those businesses more economically competitive around the world. And it’s infrastructure that we desperately need. It’s been a priority for Democrats now for years, a priority under the Obama administration, Republicans essentially wouldn’t let us do it. So I think that’s a big piece do it. Two, I think this will be a bit informed over the course of the rest of the campaign but I do believe that there has been a shift over the course of the past 25 years or so from the power that individuals held in our economy to the power that corporations hold. And we’re seeing that reinforced, particularly this week by the Supreme Court. But we saw that reinforced last term by a conservative Supreme Court and I am extremely concerned about how that trend could continue if not accelerate with the recent announcement that Justice Kennedy is going to retire, what that replacement might be.
But what that means is everything from affordable child care, which is so critical now for families that are trying to get their feet underneath them and actually start families which wasn’t a big issue, I remember this, was not a critical issue for most members of congress because most members of congress are far older and they came from a generation where it might have been the case where one parent was going to be able to stay home and actually provide for their kids on a full time basis. That’s not the economic reality, the social reality of most millennials today at all. Both individuals are going to have to be, you’re two income households, which means somebody’s got to take care of the kid and when childcare is so expensive on top of student loans, on top of astronomical rents in major urban centers, the economic pressures here just get way too tough. And so I think one part of this is infrastructure, I think another part of this is looking at the economic empowerment of the American worker and the American family. I think there’s some reforms to our tax code, yes, there’s reforms to our financial sector about what works there. There’s some of the additional issues around things like childcare that I think could be critical important as well.
VALLAS: So I want to close on a note that is a space in both of our lives that we share, we both have roots as it were in legal aid, for you back in law school, for me listeners will know I’m a recoving legal aid lawyer who will always be a legal aid lawyer at heart and it drives everything that I do in this space. This is a priority that Trump has not just devalued, he’s actually called for eliminating the Legal Services Corporation.
KENNEDY: Over and over again.
VALLAS: Outright, he’s done it in every budget document, he has basically said we just don’t even need to spend a dollar in federal funds making sure that struggling families have access to lawyers if they’re facing domestic violence or eviction or anything else. I would love to hear you reflect a little bit on your experience working in legal aid and how that hits you when you hear that from the president of the United States.
KENNEDY: A lot in there, one it tells me that he has no idea as to the realities of the gap in which many Americans have in actually accessing our justice system, one. Two, it tells me that the administration doesn’t have an appreciation for the consequences of that gap. Three, it shows that the administration, Republicans in congress, also don’t understand the concept, we fight over the language in these laws and the bills that we pass because we believe that they matter and then we spend very little time wondering whether everybody can actually get access to the protections that we finally approve and that’s a big piece to it. Outside the window that’s right behind you is the Supreme Court and it is literally etched in stone, equal justice under law. Part of that is making sure that laws are in fact fair, part of that is actually making sure that everybody has access to that system and that’s what legal aid does.
I have been really encouraged by a number of my conservative colleagues that have actually adopted that mantra as well and say that there’s a conservative reading of the constitution that indicates that people should have, be able to access an attorney and access our judicial system because this is a conservative value as well, it is your last backstop where if you have been treated unfairly by your government including, that you actually can go to get redress. And working with my colleague Susan Brooks, Republican from Indiana, Fred Upton, Republican from Michigan, I helped found an Access to Justice Legal Services Caucus and we were able to actually get more signatories on the appropriations letter for legal services center than I think ever in history by having a number of our Republican colleagues to tell those stories and share those stories of their constituents about how they benefitted from the very basic idea of just being able to access a lawyer. This is probably something I imagine most of your listeners have never had to do but it’s not like going to a doctor, where if you end up in a doctor’s office, in an emergency room, something else, and you’re kind of panicked because something’s happened and you don’t know what it is, you don’t understand the language or the lingo or the consequences and there’s just a huge gap of understand of what’s going on and so you default to some expert to tell you what’s happening and how to navigate it.
And whether that’s a medical issue or a condition or results of an accident or whether someone is saying hey, you’re about to lose your home. And make no mistake, the lose your home part, that happens and often times happens because you didn’t do anything wrong and it’s literally a mistake or that there’s rights that you have that can prevent this from actually happening but if you don’t have somebody to actually tell you how to access those rights, you are going to lose your home. And the same way that you’ve got a doctor that’s going to help you navigate those that process and try to provide that information for you and help you through it, that’s what legal services attorneys do for domestic violence victims, for folks that are facing eviction often times through no fault of their own. For countless other issues that people are facing where they just need somebody to help them make sure that they’re treated fairly by our justice system. It’s not too much to ask.
VALLAS: Well, apparently it is for some people but hopefully those people are not in power indefinitely and that’s why people need to get out and vote in November. Congressman Joe Kennedy is a Democrat representing the 4th district of Massachusetts, Congressman thank you for what you do everyday and for taking the time to join the show.
KENNEDY: Really grateful, thank you.
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.
This program aired on July 2nd, 2018
