September 25 - Attorney General Eric Holder's Exit; The Status of Legal Battles to Overturn Voter ID Laws; How CREW Got the Secret Documents From the Republican Governors Association

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder and speak with Robert Weissman, the President of Public Citizen who has been a critic of the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute Wall Street bankers who not only caused the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, but were made whole by the taxpayer in the greatest transfer of private debt to public debt in history. We discuss how Holder’s close personal relationship with President Obama has kept him on the job longer than he would have wished and whether the Attorney General will go back through the revolving door to a big law firm that represents Wall Street and lobbies for their interests in Washington.

Part 2

Then, with the midterm election a little over a month away, we will get an assessment of how the legal battles to overturn voter-suppression laws in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin are proceeding. Myrna Perez, the Director of the Voting Rights and Election Project at the Brennan Center for Justice, joins us to discuss the new voter ID laws pending since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in states with a long and disgraceful history of disenfranchising minorities with poll taxes poor people could not afford and arbitrary requirements targeted at minorities. We also look into the status of a critical case on appeal in Texas she has been working on that, if Governor Perry prevails, will result in 650,000 Texans who have previously voted, some for decades, being denied the vote in November.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Melanie Sloan, the Executive Director of CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, about the secret documents CREW obtained from the Republican Governors Association offering access to governors in exchange for campaign donations for some of America’s biggest corporation whose identities have been shielded from the public through a post Citizens United use of a IRS 501c-4 tax-exemption supposed to be used for “social welfare”. We discuss how CREW got the documents and the secret corporate/Republican pay-to-play money pipeline they expose.