Background Briefing (Monday, 5am)

Background Briefing (Monday, 5am) – November 13, 2023

Senate Republicans Protect the Powerful From the Public

We begin with the shameless display of Republican fealty to billionaires with Senator Lindsey Graham and Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee blocking efforts to have Harland Crow and Leonard Leo testify about lavish and unreported gifts to justices Thomas and Alito. Joining us is Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the new corporate watchdog group True North Research.  She 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.

A Preview of the Biden/Xi Summit in San Francisco

Then we get a preview of Wednesday’s meeting between President Biden and China’s Xi Jinping at the APEC summit just underway in San Francisco. Joining us to discuss what can be done to reverse the downward spiral of relations between the world’s two largest economies is Orville Schell, who was formerly the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and currently is the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. His books include Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century, and most recently My Old Home: A Novel of Exile.

Will the Saboteur Joe Manchin Deliver Biden a Fatal Blow?

Then finally we get a local perspective on Joe Manchin who has already sabotaged Biden’s legislative agenda and, now having left the Senate, has undermined the Democrats’ slim majority and is poised to end Biden’s presidency by likely running as a third party candidate under the No Labels banner. Joining us is James Van Nostrand, who until recently was the Director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development and a Professor of Law at West Virginia University College of Law and is the author of The Coal Trap: How West Virginia Was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution.