[00:00:00] This is Democracy and Destiny with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy. I have the per curiam opinion and judgment to announce on behalf of the court in Buckley against Valeo. We have a cancer within close to the presidency that’s growing. In case 0 8 2 0 5 Citizens United versus the FEC, Justice Kennedy has the opinion of the court.

The First Amendment's core purpose is to foster a vibrant political system full of robust discussion and debate. There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders. With fear for our democracy, I, along with Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissent.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Welcome to the show. I'm Ciara Torres Spelliscy. I'm a law [00:01:00] professor at Stetson Law School in Florida, and I'm a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. I work on the intersection of election law and corporate law. This show was inspired by my third book, Corporatocracy, How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, published by NYU Press election Day 2024. I realize in today's busy world, reading a 300-page book is not on everyone's to-do list, but even I have time to listen to radio shows and podcasts when I'm commuting to campus or walking my dog. So here we are. This is "Democracy and Destiny." Today's episode is about law, reproductive rights, and democracy.

And I will be joined in a few minutes with my guest, Dahlia Lithwick from Slate and Amicus, who will talk about where our work on the Supreme Court overlaps. This episode was [00:02:00] recorded before the Supreme Court's term ended.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: But first, let's start with Pay to Play today.

The term pay to play comes from the radio payola scandals. From the 1950s and 1960s, record companies would pay radio stations to play their music, hence it was literally pay to play. Today the phrase pay to play is shorthand for all kinds of political corruption. Especially when a government contractor or others with business pending in front of the government bribes a public official to get a private benefit, like a lucrative no bid contract or approval of a corporate merger.

One of the things that I learned while writing my book Corporatocracy is that political corruption is prosecuted frequently, but the media just doesn't report on it as often as other things like celebrity news. That leaves the mis impression with the public that corrupt politicians or shady government contractors are always getting away with crimes.

So I swore to myself if I ever had a news [00:03:00] generating platform that I would highlight that political corruption can be met with serious legal consequences, including fines and jail time. Our example of pay to play today comes from the IRS. Let's call this one. "The bribe was in the Hallmark bag." In 2024, A Seattle woman pled guilty to Feeding Our Future jury bribery scheme.

Minneapolis. A Seattle woman has pleaded guilty to her role in providing a $120,000 bribe to a juror in the Feeding Our Future trial. According to court documents, on April 22nd, 2024, seven defendants went to trial before U.S. District Judge Brasel for their roles in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.

During the trial, Ladan Mohamed Ali and four others conspired with each other to provide a cash bribe to one of the jurors in exchange for the juror returning a not guilty verdict in the trial. As part of the scheme, Ali [00:04:00] flew from Seattle to Minneapolis to meet with co-defendant Abdimajid Nur to discuss the plan to bribe Juror 52.

Ali agreed to deliver the bribe money to Juror 52 in exchange for a $150,000 cash payment. Ali again flew from Seattle to Minneapolis to carry out the bribery scheme at the direction of Nur. Ali attempted to follow Juror 52 home as she left a downtown Minneapolis parking ramp. At the conclusion of the first day of closing arguments in the trial, Nur had previously provided Ali with a photo of Juror 52's car and a map of the parking ramp according to court documents.

Although she had agreed to contact Juror 52 about the bribe Ali was concerned that the plan would not work and that she would not get paid for her involvement in the bribery. Instead, Ali came up with an alternative plan to steal some or all of the bribe [00:05:00] money. Ali told Nur falsely that she had approached Juror 52 at a bar and that Juror 52 was interested in taking the bribe but wanted half a million dollars in exchange for returning a not guilty verdict. Ali told Nur that Juror 52 wanted Ali to deliver the money at a specific time when Juror 52 would be home alone. In reality, Ali did not speak with Juror 52 and Juror 52 never agreed to accept a bribe. Nevertheless, Nur believed Ali and told her he would obtain the bribe money from co-defendants Abdiaziz Farah and Said Farah.

Ali met Nur in a parking lot in Bloomington to pick up the bribe money. Prior to the meeting, Ali purchased two Hallmark gift bags. In which to deliver the bribe money. During the meeting, Nur handed Ali a cardboard box containing $200,000 in cash. Ali took the [00:06:00] cash out of the box and put it into one of the hallmark gift bags.

Ali then drove to an area near Juror 52's house to meet Farah who would accompany her to Juror 52's house and video record her delivery of the bribe as proof that the bribe money was delivered and Juror 52's acceptance of the bribe. Farah insisted that he drive Ali to Juror 52's house.

This prevented Ali from stealing all of the bribe money. After Ali met up with Farah, they stopped at a nearby store to purchase a screwdriver. Farah used the screwdriver to remove the license plate from Ali's rental car prior to delivering the bribe. According to court documents, at approximately 8:50 PM on June 2nd, 2024, upon arriving at Juror 52's house, Ali approached the house with the gift bag containing the bribe money, handed it to a relative of Juror 52 and explained there would [00:07:00] be more money if Juror 52 voted to acquit. The defendant Farah remained in the car and took a video of Ali's delivery of the bribe money.

Ali received $200,000 in cash from Nur, all of which was intended to be used to bribe Juror 52, but Ali only delivered $120,000 to Juror 52's relative and kept the remaining $80,000 cash for herself. Ali pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court before Judge Doty to one count of bribery of a jury.

Our next segment is Corruption Junction. I've been writing about money and politics for two decades. I was inspired to write my book Corporatocracy because of the events of January 6th at the US Capitol. One way to think of this book is it is the Supreme Court's horrible Citizens United decision meets the horrifying events on January 6th.

So that we are literally on the same page. Let me read a short excerpt from Corporatocracy [00:08:00] [Reading from Chapter 10 of Corporatocracy]

Let's take a short break and we're back.[00:25:00]

Now we get to the heart of the matter, which is the problem of political corruption. My guest, Dalia Lithwick, covers the Supreme Court for Slate. She's the author of the book, Lady Justice, I am so glad to have you here to speak about the state of American democracy. Welcome to Corruption Junction.

Dahlia Lithwick: Thank you for having me.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What inspired you to study law?

Dahlia Lithwick: I worked at a camp that Paul Newman had founded called The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and it was a camp for kids with terminal diseases. I realized that the only thing they needed more than doctors was lawyers, and I realized that if I wanted to be impactful in the world, then the really the best way to do that would be to go to law school.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What do you do to keep sane in these trying times?

Dahlia Lithwick: Ooh, what I call radical humility, which is just stay in my lane. Don't try to solve everything. None of us can do everything, but we all have to do a thing and taking the pressure off, and then I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna do [00:26:00] this, and then I'm gonna help that. And then I'm gonna sort this, and then after that I'm gonna solve that. I think that's just a recipe for turbocharge burnout.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: I had to rewrite Corporatocracy. I had to rewrite the disqualification clause chapter 10 times. I had to keep updating what happened in New York versus Trump, and I really wanted to punch the wall when Dominion versus Fox settled.

Did you have to rewrite your book, Lady Justice because of changing events?

Dahlia Lithwick: Already actually turned it in and Dobbs came down reversing Roe v. Wade. And so I had to both rewrite, I had a chapter about abortion. Right. Actually I ended up rewriting the introduction, which just sucks, but it just felt like a profoundly different world. And the book came out very shortly after Dobbs was decided. And I really felt like it had to be much more if you had this experience, but much more almost of a call to action.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: One of the things that happened after my book was at the press was Trump versus the United States. [00:27:00] What is your biggest fear about what will result because of the presidential immunity case?

Dahlia Lithwick: We're already seeing it. We're living it at the narrowest level, descriptively. It created a sense of absolute untouchability. We're seeing animate every single part of the way the executive is operating right now. To quote Richard Nixon after Trump v. the United States, if the President doesn't, it isn't illegal.

That has spread its tentacles all over, not just in terms of normative: we can do what we want. We see it being cited time again by the administration as this is the golden ticket. This is free ride to do whatever you want. Unsurprisingly, it afforded the administration with a theory of almost completely uncheck executive power, and they have a maximalist opinion, and they have gone with a maximalist interpretation of that opinion. Then it [00:28:00] becomes the predicate for a whole bunch of behaviors that under no theory of executive power, would you say this is lawful, get really hypercharged the idea that the administration could do whatever it wanted. I'm not sure that that's what the John Roberts majority in that opinion. Envisioned. I don't think they thought they were giving the president a blank check, but it's staggering to me that they didn't anticipate that that's exactly how it would be operationalized.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: I have this theory that they didn't think Trump would win again and thus he wouldn't be the one using this.

Dahlia Lithwick: I think that's right and I, they really were terrified of some president being prosecuted after he was out of office. They thought they were making a very anodyne. Theoretical rule going forward about not having presidents chilled.

I think you're right. I don't think that they in any way bolted it onto Donald Trump as a historical [00:29:00] character. They were just saying this is a theory of the executive that a lot of us have grown up. Absolutely stoked to put into effect, and now we have the opportunity to not understand that it wasn't just a purely theoretical construct that they were just opening Pandora's box. In some ways, it's emblematic of how completely untethered this court is from reality.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Do you have a prediction on where the Supreme Court is going to end up on birthright citizenship, which now is entangled with the Nationwide injunction question as you put it out on Amicus. Is your citizenship going to have to depend on your zip code?

Dahlia Lithwick: I don't think birthright citizenship is a thing that the majority of this. Court wants to reverse, but you're quite right. All of the interest at Oral Argument was should single district judges be able to impose nationwide injunctions? There was a very decent possibility that you find some [00:30:00] significant chunk of the court.They are really jonesing to do away with nationwide injunctions if they give the relief that the Trump administration is. Seeking. You are literally going to have the law be different, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. You're going to have people who are born in one state who are citizens and born across the river who are not citizens.

It throws the question of citizenship back to the states in a way that is not just impossible to administer, just absolutely antithetical to what the drafters were trying to protect. If the Court does the narrow thing, which is say, okay, “we're just going narrow,” I'm putting in little air quotes in my hands, we're just going to decide this question of nationwide injunctions, the chaos that they will unleash will be massive.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: I'm glad that I've been teaching Wong Kim Ark to now a generation of law students. If they get rid of birthright citizenship through executive order….

Dahlia Lithwick: Mm-hmm.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: I'll definitely lose it. It's ridiculous. For most [00:31:00] of my life, I've had more reproductive rights than I have right now. I live in Florida. We have a six week ban thanks to a combination of our legislature, our governor, and really disappointingly, the Florida Supreme Court, rolling back our rights. What do you think the biggest takeaway people should know about what Dobbs did to Roe?

Dahlia Lithwick: What Dobbs did to Roe was it purported to be another narrow holding. The plain thrust of the majority opinion was, phew. Thank goodness this is going to resolve this really controversial issue, so there'll be no more uncertainty. Ha ha. What they actually did was, yes, throw it back to the states. There were a lot of promises, and this can't possibly mean that you can't travel from a state that bans abortion to a state that doesn't, well, that's already starting the real upshot of Dobbs is, it's a wolf in sheep's clothing. It purports to do as little as possible and [00:32:00] to rein instantiate the world pre-Roe. There's that great line justice Alito has, women are not without political power. They want to go to the ballot box and fix all this, then they certainly can without acknowledging what the court itself has done to our power at the ballot box. We already are seeing criminalization. In some states, we're seeing those bounty laws like SB 8 in Texas. We're seeing women who can't be released from prison after they've served their time because the state has determined that they are endangering. Their unborn child. And of course the absolutely on the ground turmoil that we're seeing around the country of women bleeding out in emergency rooms, not sufficiently life endangering conditions that they have to wait until they're near dead in order to have emergency care.

The first thing is just this whole climate of uncertainty that physicians don't know what to do. Physicians are fleeing states because they don't [00:33:00] want to lose their medical license. We have abortion deserts around the country where you can't terminate a pregnancy, both because of the law and because providers are terrified.

The other thing that is really vital post-Dobbs is to just understand the chilling effect that this is isolating and terrifying the people who need care the most. Because they're afraid to ask for help, they're afraid to ask someone to drive them to a clinic. You and I are old enough to remember that in the days after Dobbs, people were like, people are going to die from this and now we're seeing extensive reporting about actual deaths that are resulting from pregnant people not being able to get care, and yet we are just so numbed to the reality that was just not the law pre-Dobbs, and it only rolls in one direction. I think it only rolls in the direction of more chilling, more fear, more really cynical [00:34:00] prosecutions of physicians.

All the things that we thought weren't on the table are on the table. Then you can tell I feel strongly about this, is that we don't even need to wait to see State Supreme Courts making decisions about IVF. We don't need to wait and see what states are going to do about birth control that can be reimagined as an abortifacient.

I mean, that's happening. The whole litany of things that were supposed to be untouchable post-Dobbs are very much touchable. But I think that the other thing that we're starting to see is talk of using the Comstock Act, Victorian anti-vice statute that's being dusted off and cited as a basis to go after people who put medication abortion in the mail, who put literature in the mail explaining how to terminate a pregnancy. This is not just going to come out of the courts. This is one of those things on the wishlist that could happen by way of executive [00:35:00] fiat, and it's a little bit of “the frogs in the pot problem” where it's so pervasive, it's happening on so many fronts. States are like falling over themselves to restrict more and more and more kinds of care that I'm not even sure that by watching what the courts are doing, we're not missing what could happen with the stroke of a pen from this administration.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: If you think that birth control is not on the line, I would encourage our listeners to read Alito’s opinion in Hobby Lobby where the question was about birth control, but it's mischaracterized as an abortifacient and the Court rules in favor of Hobby Lobby. It is scary how far this could go and how quickly. After Dobbs, lots of blue chip companies came out with statements that they would support the reproductive rights of their employees. What do you make of that behavior?

Dahlia Lithwick: I liked it while it lasted. It felt like there was an immense amount of energy for a couple of weeks to make sure [00:36:00] that companies that wanted to look like they were deeply concerned and solicitous of their female workers were really going to put their skin in the game and do something. It petered out. We don't hear about it much a year later, fascinatingly, as things get worse and worse and worse, in other words, it's no longer theoretical, it's actually occurring. We're starting to see more and more and more quiet, particularly with this administration where nobody wants to rock the boat. It's such a lesson in how flash in the pan some of these movements are.

We could think about Target and Pride, and it's not limited to reproductive rights. It's almost as if this performative element of, we stand by civil rights. How. Quickly, this dissipates under the kind of economic pressure that we're now seeing.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: The kicker is that some of the very same corporations who at least pretended that they cared about reproductive freedoms were at the very same time funding [00:37:00] anti-choice candidates. Is this level of contradiction to be expected?

Dahlia Lithwick: This is your lane more than mine. Homer Simpson says of beer, quote, “it's the cause of and solution to all our problems.” The same could be said of corporate money. Big business in America has self-interest that is not in any way meaningfully lashed to altruism or doing good or core values. It’s lashed to maximizing profits for shareholders. That is the definition of the beast. You've thought about this as much as anyone, but after January 6th we're, oh my God, we are withdrawing all support. From anyone who had anything to do with the riot and the insurrection, and then creepingly come back and of course support it.

We want to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Target are good people, but time, after time, after time, it turns out that they're funding both sides because they need to be sure [00:38:00] that when power prevails, they're on the side of power. I'm always surprised that this surprises anyone because that. Is the raison d'être of corporate entities. It's not to protect abortion rights. It's not to protect L-G-B-T-Q freedoms. It's to maximize value. This is exactly the argument for the big law firms who are bending the knee. Anybody who thinks that big law firms are committed to egalitarian values doesn't understand that this is just not how America works.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: When I was writing Political Brands about boycotts, American women were at the forefront of many boycotts. If you could motivate that group, you could actually get a boycott that could change certain behaviors. Should women today use the power of the purse to object to corporations that fund anti-abortion politicians?

Dahlia Lithwick: Yes, absolutely. It's a little bit the corrective to the question you just asked me, which is waiting. [00:39:00] for corporations to change their behavior on their own. There's absolutely no reason for a corporation to change its behavior unless it's facing dire economic consequences. Then who is going to level those consequences other than consumers?

Of course, boycotts work. That is one of the lessons of the Civil Rights era. We know that boycotts work and we know that. Women, as you say, have always played a role as a lever in those movements. It's a tricky issue. Again, you know this better than I do. There was conversations when Georgia passed really draconian anti-abortion legislation. All of Hollywood was, that's it. We're not shooting in Georgia anymore. You are going to pull out and we're boycott the state and providers there, including politicians like Stacey Abrams, were really quick to say, don't do that, because the people who suffer are abortion seekers on the ground. So be really smart about how you do this.

You can [00:40:00] actually, in some sense, engender more harm. It’s been really fascinating to watch the Canadian boycott of American products. That's really been very muscular and pretty robust since the tariff war began and talk of invading Canada and making it the 51st state. So we actually know that these can be profoundly impactful, but I also think it really takes massive public will, organizing, messaging, strategic thinking.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Dobbs swears that this is only about abortion. Thomas says, let's revisit all of substantive due process, and I would question Lawrence and Obergefell. Congress signs Respect for Marriage Act, which protects gay marriages and interracial marriages. Is that a good sign that Congress is reacting to what the Court is up to? Or is this a bad sign because Congress thinks that Thomas's view actually has more support than is evident in [00:41:00] the majority in Dobbs.

Dahlia Lithwick: We should be clear that Thomas was, I mean, that was like his Christmas wish list, right? That's was, this is all the stuff we're going after. He was calling b.s. on the Alito opinion because he was saying that Justice Alito was trying to cabin the logic of Dobbs only to abortion, and it can't be done. There's no principled reason that it stops at abortion and doesn't go on to all the other rights that have been protected credit where it's due. Justice Thomas's concurrence, while terrifying, at least kind of calls it what it is, which is. We're coming for all this other stuff. Is it ever a good thing when Congress reacts to something that the court does? Yes. You know, I think it's always good when Congress says, Hey, hey, hey, we're going to protect against this or that. And we've seen the Lily Ledbetter Act. I mean, time and again. We've seen Congress step in when the courts go too far and that that essential checking function that the [00:42:00] legislature has at this moment, we have a Congress that is still capable of doing it.

Anything. It is as supine about protecting its own prerogatives as any Congress we've seen in our lifetime. The reason that Donald Trump can make massive change, including stripping, birthright, citizenship out of the constitution with an executive order, which is like a memo, I always describe it as a letter to Santa.

It's nothing, and that's not because Donald Trump has all this power. It's because Congress doesn't check him. Congress doesn't say We are the ones who are in charge of the power of impoundment. We are the ones who are in charge of whether you can invoke the Insurrection Act or the Alien Enemies Act. We are the ones who determine how tariffs work, and we've just seen Congress nodding off to sleep.

We are now staring down the barrel of administration that doesn't care what Congress has codified. Doesn't [00:43:00] care that Congress has vast amounts of powers both enumerated and unenumerated that it simply is not fighting for, that is happily ceding to the president and to the courts. What I fear is that Congress can and has passed all sorts of laws to codify and protect all sorts of rights. And it doesn't much matter if Congress doesn't want to fight for that power. And that's the moment we're in right now, that when we say, oh, this is an unchecked executive. It's an executive that's gone wild. That's partly because the institutions that are tasked with checking it are asleep.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Every time the Supreme Court has either a campaign finance case or a white collar crime case, I get intense heartburn. The trend that I see over time is that the Robert Supreme Court is deregulating corruption. Is that how you see it from your vantage point?

Dahlia Lithwick: A hundred percent. Whether it's original sin of Citizens United. Or the line of cases that more or less now [00:44:00] provides that unless you come up to somebody with a Scrooge McDuck bag with dollar signs on it and put it on their desk and demand a quid pro quo in writing, there's no corruption.

This is a long trend line that we are seeing absolutely manifest itself, not just in terms of the court deregulating corruption and blessing corruption. But also we are now living in a world in which when the Hatch Act is violated, when the President accepts the Sky Palace airplane and nobody blinks, we are seeing not just a regime in which corruption has been completely deregulated.

We have all the statutory and institutional checks on corruption inspectors general, and whole entities that are supposed to be monitoring this and they're gone. It comes from the top. Nobody should be surprised that Elon Musk is [00:45:00] simultaneously self-dealing, getting huge, lucrative government contracts and then destroying the very entities that would regulate that kind of self-dealing. We are like in the middle of the nightmare of this is what happened when the oligarchs are running the show.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Usually we don't have the same guy who is literally the richest person in the world, literally the biggest donor in the 2024 election, then show up in the government and start kicking things over. As you said, he has things that he wants from the government. He is a government contractor. He does have fights with regulators. He put in this amount of money, which is a huge amount of money for most people, but not to him, and he expects a huge return on investment from the US government. It's that simple.

Dahlia Lithwick: What we know about corruption, and again, nobody knows it better than you. It's actually, it really works. You know, if you can break a system that [00:46:00] tries to manage for corruption, you have every incentives to start pouring money into judicial race. And state races and local races, because why not?

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: How do you see how the Robert Supreme Court has been terraforming election law?

Dahlia Lithwick: Shout out again to Justice Alito and Dobbs when he says, oh, just go to the voting booth and fix it if you don't like it. But of course, they've locked. To the voting booth, to all sorts of voters all around the country in all sorts of ways. They have fundamentally eroded the basic principles that the Warren Court tried to put into effect to protect the idea of broad voting.

And then the trick is saying something is non justiciable. Why? Because it's the court saying, oh, this can't be decided. And in so doing, the court is deciding it. But that's the court putting a thumb on the scale. That's not the court being neutral. The tell is when the court tells you that they're exercising humility, right? Humility is [00:47:00] code for we decide all the things. The trend line is eviscerating the Voting Rights Act. Whether it's making it harder and harder to prove voter discrimination, the court is deciding to decide and then pretending they've decided nothing. The tell here is that including voter ID, in these massive partisan gerrymanders, which are really warping democracy.

They have some sense that the public isn't paying attention to what's happened to the right to vote, because unless you're standing in a six-hour line trying to hold a bottle of water and vote in an election, it's easy to forget that the Court really has absolutely redrawn the landscape about how we vote.

This is just a pain point for me. I think that we have these really atomized feelings about L-G-B-T-Q rights or the environment or unions or reproductive rights, and we don't always remind ourselves carefully enough: The pathway to enforcing all of those rights is the [00:48:00] vote. A case can go well or poorly for the environment. It can go well or poorly for trying to curb corruption. It can go well or poorly for the Clean Water Act. But at the end of the day, the only curative we have is a functioning right to vote. And if the court is slowly chipping away at that over decades and it doesn't feel visible or urgent or exigent to us, then those wins and those losses almost don't matter. And, the Court has both made it harder to vote and made itself the arbiter of how we vote while pretending to do nothing of the sort.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: That reminds me of a quote from Yick Wo versus Hopkins that voting rights are fundamental because they are preservative of other rights.

Dahlia Lithwick: Mm-hmm. Folks want to know what to do.

We're in a blender and the news is pretty spectacularly frightening and there's a tendency to go numb. I often find myself answering this question, what can a person do? I guess I would [00:49:00] just say seeing the Tesla boycotts having an impact. We’re seeing marches working. We're seeing really ground-up as opposed to top-down power beginning to flex.

It's always good to end on the note of: what can't people do? People can do a lot. Started with my little love song to radical humility, but I think it's second cousin is radical empowerment and understanding that. All of these structural problems we've talked about, whether it's the right to vote or corruption, all of this stuff can be reverse engineered. I don't think hope is lost.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Thank you so much for being here. I am just so delighted to have had the opportunity to talk to you, Dahlia.

Dahlia Lithwick: It's always a treat to be with you and I love, I love this show and I love what you're doing. Keep it up.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Let's take a short break. We're back.

As someone who spends her time [00:50:00] focused on political corruption, it's easy to end up with a dim view of humanity. But one thing that has kept me happy and sane over the past eight years is my 100 pound chocolate labradoodle. Let me share my life motto with you, which is “loves dogs. Hates corruption.”

Ducks started landing in our swimming pool. Did our Labradoodle do anything? No, he did not. He would go outside and watch the ducks in the pool. I've learned over the years is if you want my dog to start barking at something, I have to start barking at the ducks, and then the Labradoodle will run out to the pool and start barking with me.

The ducks were not at all bothered by my poor facsimile of barking, but when my dog arrived and gave his loud thunder bark, the ducks did go flying away from my pool to my neighbor's pool and to reward my dog for a job well done, I gave him a treat. The next day, I think he was bamboozling us. I don't see any ducks in the pool, but I do see our labradoodle run [00:51:00] outside and bark at the empty pool.

I came out to see if there was really anything in the pool. My labradoodle looks at me to say, “where is my treat?” So now I think my dog is conning me. Maybe you can teach an old dog a new trick. Okay, now back to business.

So now we get to our final segment. The Fix Is In. Many of the problems in our democracy seem unfixable, but that is not true. These problems were created by human beings and they can be solved by human beings. We can improve laws and practices at the local, state, and federal level. And the first step is realizing that these are not unsolvable problems.

We can fix it. We talked about the issue of reproductive freedoms. When reproductive freedom has been on [00:52:00] the ballot, it has won. Where I live in Florida, reproductive freedoms were on the ballot in 2024, and a majority of Florida voters voted to expand reproductive freedoms, but that didn't matter because we needed a super majority to win that change in the law in Florida.

We needed 60% of the vote. We got 57% of the vote. And even the fact that there is a 60% threshold was the result of voter choice. In half of the states, voters can change their state laws through ballot initiatives or referenda beware when you see a ballot measure that would make it harder for voters to act in the future.

In Florida, there was an effort to raise the 60% threshold to an even higher 67% threshold. That effort was defeated. Beware of that type of tomfoolery. If you care about reproductive freedoms, remember to show up and vote to protect your own rights. And second look into campaign finance. Ultraviolet has been [00:53:00] tracking who has been funding anti-choice efforts.

Some of that information is in my book Corporatocracy. Just remember that democracy is worth defending and a little truth goes a long way. Thank you to my guests for joining me today. This is a production of Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who can be found on social media as Prof Ciara, P-R-O-F-C-I-A-R-A. The episode was mixed by WBAI. Our logo is by entire world. Theme Music was composed and performed by Matt Boehler. This show is based on the book Corporatocracy, published by NYU Press. This has been “Democracy and Destiny with Ciara Torres Spelliscy.” [00:54:00]

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