An Interview on the Increasing Power of the Unrepresentative Supreme Court
Today on this New Years Eve we are looking back at 2025 with guests we were in touch with over the year as major stories evolved chief among them the increasing power of the Supreme Court. Joining us to examine how John Roberts orchestrated the capture of the Supreme Court by a right wing oligarchy to perpetuate Republican rule is Lisa Graves, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the right-wing influence on the US Supreme Court and other levers of power. She leads True North Research and co-hosts Legal AF and has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government, as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief of the article 3 judges division for the U.S. Courts. She is the author of the new book, just out, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.
The Ongoing War in Ukraine As It Evolved This Year
Then we look into the ongoing war in Ukraine which we covered as it evolved this year and speak with Aram Shabanian, a national investigative reporter and the former Open-Source Information Gathering Manager at New Lines Institute. He recently taught in Non-Proliferation and Terrorism Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey where his research focused on the Cold War and contemporary histories of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He has just returned from Kyiv and we discuss the battlefield stalemate and how the Trump administration is pulling back support for the embattled country in favor of a so-called peace deal which asks nothing of Putin while pressuring Ukraine to make concessions.
Background Briefing offers an educational approach to providing information in an era of “fake news.”