June 25 - Today's Radical Ruling Gutting the Voting Rights Act; The Implications for Voting Rights; Ruth Bader Ginsberg's Dissent

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Part 1	We begin with today’s ruling by the Supreme Court to strike down the key provision in the Voting Rights Act that protected young, elderly and minority voters in 15 states from an array of new and improved Jim Crow laws and voting suppression devices that make it harder for those likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel of the Constitutional Accountability Center, joins us to discuss this radical ruling. She frequently participates in Supreme Court litigation and has argued several important cases in the federal courts of appeals.
Part 2	Then we examine the implications of this ruling on voting rights and election protection with Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School where she founded and directs the center’s Voting Rights and Election Project. We discuss what remedies are likely to come from a gridlocked and dysfunctional Congress and whether it will be open season from now on in those states with a recent history of trying to enact voter suppression laws that were stopped by the Voting Rights Act, given that they are now free to enact a whole range of voting restrictions claiming to prevent the negligible if not non-existent problem of voter fraud.
Part 3	Finally we speak with Aziz Huq, who was a clerk at the Supreme Court for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who issued a strong and almost indignant dissent which she read aloud, pointing out the lack of logic and legal underpinning of the conservative majority’s opinion that praised the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act before gutting the very mechanism that makes it work, while declaring it unconstitutional without bothering to cite what part of the constitution it violated.