On Tuesday's Amanpour & Company on PBS and CNN International, Hari Sreenivasan interviewed a former editor of the far-left website Salon.com who accuses the Republican Party of a grand conspiracy theory in a book titled Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.
Not only did he push the liberal narrative that it is racial discrimination to require voter ID, but he also exaggerated the effects of gerrymandering in favor of Republicans.
Fill-in host Bianna Golodryga set up the segment: "And now we turn to democracy in the United States, which our next guest believes is under threat. In his new book, David Daley suggests that far-right actors, including within the Supreme Court, are controlling American elections. He describes a 50-year plot to undermine voting rights."
In a dust-cover blurb, ultraliberal Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) underlines the vast right-wing conspiracy: "the Federalist Society’s anti-civil rights movement is the constant humming machinery of reaction working to implant plutocracy, kleptocracy, theocracy, and autocracy in our country." These are the conspiracy-theory books PBS and CNN want to promote.
Hari Sreenivasan was then seen interviewing David Daley about he latest book, After Daley argued that Chief John Roberts has been very successful at pushing a conservative agenda on several issues, and recalled that he had long wanted to overturn the Voting Rights Act before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, the PBS correspondent followed up: "Tell me, why is it so important to understand this attack that you say is an attack on the Voting Rights Act, you know, that's been a long plan? Why is that crucial to understanding not just the power of the attacker but the consequences to the attack?"
Referring back to the 2013 court ruling against the Voting Rights Act, Daley preposterously argued that the South has not changed much since the 1960s:
In this decision, John Roberts says that things have changed in the South and that the protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary -- that we lived in a different country -- it was not 1965 anymore. The trouble with that is that the attack on the vote began that very morning. That states across the South and elsewhere were waiting for this decision and immediately began implementing things like voter ID pushes and voter roll purges and precinct closures that they could not have gotten away with prior to the court's decision.
So when Roberts says that things have changed in the South, all he had to do is open his eyes to what was happening before the court's decision and immediately afterwards. Very little had actually changed in the South except now, thanks to the court, these dark forces that the decision in Shelby unleashed were able to get away with it again.
He soon singled out Texas and Georgia as Republican-controlled states that are allegedly engaging in racial discrimination.
Although Sreenivasan modestly pushed back and couple of times, he still failed to dispel some of his guest's misleading claims. For example, with regard to allegedly racial gerrymandering in Texas, it was widely reported incorrectly in the liberal media in 2021 that Texas Republicans were cutting minority representation in Congress and delivering 23 white-majority districts versus only 7 Hispanic majority out of 38.
But, in reality, the number of Hispanic majority districts remained unchanged at 10 with 16 white-majority while the number of black opportunity districts remained at three. (And, notably, the number of Hispanic majority districts would have increased by one if Democrats had not opposed a Republican effort to un-gerrymander the 18th district.)
It then turned out there were nine Hispanics (an increase of one) and six blacks (also an increase of one) who won seats in the 2022 congressional elections in Texas.
And, in Georgia, Republicans kept all four black opportunity districts (out of a total of 14 districts), and all five black members of the House delegation were reelected in 2022.
In one of his modest pushbacks, Sreenivasan asked if Chief Justice Roberts was really that "sinister," leading to an emphatic yes from his leftist guest.
Transcript follows:
PBS's Amanpour & Co.
September 3, 2024
BIANNA GOLODRYGA: And now we turn to democracy in the United States, which our next guest believes is under threat. In his new book, David Daley suggests that far-right actors, including within the Supreme Court, are controlling American elections. He describes a 50-year plot to undermine voting rights, and he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the implications as Americans head to the polls in November.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. David Daley, thanks so much for joining us. Your most recent book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. I've got to ask: Look, when somebody reads "50-year plot," they're going to be like, "Okay, this is tinfoil material here, this is conspiracy theory." What makes this not a conspiracy in your mind?
DAVID DALEY, AUTHOR OF ANTIDEMOCRATIC: This has been a very strategic effort at the heart of the Republican party over the last 50 years. They have understood I think more effectively than the Democrats have that there are pressure points within our democracy, and that if you can put your finger on them -- if you can control these little levers sort of fly under the radar whether we talk about gerrymandered state legislatures or whether we're talking in many about the constitution of the U.S. Supreme Court that you are able to have outsized influence and to win victories that you never could have won otherwise.
In many ways, Chief Justice John Roberts is the most effective Republican politician of his generation because by controlling the Supreme Court as Republicans have, they've been able over the last 20 years to win victories on guns -- on voting rights -- on the environment -- on the regulatory state that would simply not have been possible through the electoral process at the ballot box.
SREENIVASAN: What makes him a politician? He and lots of our other members of our audience would say, "Hold on, he's not elected -- he's not, you know, he's a presidential appointee." I mean, you go back into his history as a young lawyer at the Reagan DOJ.
DALEY: That's right. I mean, John Roberts, in many ways, his life's work has been curtailing the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts grew up in an extraordinarily white town in Indiana. This was a town that even after America banned discrimination in housing was still advertising itself in vacation brochures as a home where only Caucasian gentiles lived. He clerks on the U.S. Supreme Court for Bill Rehnquist who -- it has been well-documented in his days in Arizona was personally harassing and intimidating voters back in the 1960s.
(...)
SREENIVASAN: Okay, so fast forward, one of his first cases at the Department of Justice under Ronald Reagan is about the Voting Rights Act, and then in 2013 he is writing the opinion for a really important decision -- Shelby County versus Holder, and for people who might not have been paying attention, there's a concept in there called pre-clearance. What was it? Why is it so important?
(DALEY)
Tell me, why is it so important to understand this attack that you say is an attack on the Voting Rights Act, you know, that's been a long plan? Why is that crucial to understanding not just the power of the attacker but the consequences to the attack?
DALEY: In this decision, John Roberts says that things have changed in the South and that the protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary -- that we lived in a different country -- it was not 1965 anymore. The trouble with that is that the attack on the vote began that very morning. That states across the South and elsewhere were waiting for this decision and immediately began implementing things like voter ID pushes and voter roll purges and precinct closures that they could not have gotten away with prior to the court's decision. So when Roberts says that things have changed in the South, all he had to do is open his eyes to what was happening before the court's decision and immediately afterwards. Very little had actually changed in the South except now, thanks to the court, these dark forces that the decision in Shelby unleashed were able to get away with it again.
SREENIVASAN: Well, give me an example, the first federal election after that decision would have been Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. Was there an impact of the Shelby decision on that election?
DALEY: Yes, I think that absolutely we can see the impact of Shelby County across American elections. We can see it in the 2024 election right now. So much of the election chicanery under way in the state of Georgia right now in which a state election board is attempting to change laws around how elections are certified and credentialed would not have been possible under Shelby County. It would have had to have been precleared first. So many state legislatures across the South that are enacting these new laws, those maps would have had to have been pre-cleared to ensure that they were not racial gerrymanders. So in states like Texas and states like Georgia, where the population growth has been almost entirely driven by black Americans and Latinos, and yet their representation has not gone up. In fact, in many cases, it has gone backwards. That would not have been possible.
The court's decision in the Dobbs case that effectively put an end to abortion in many parts of the country. In this case, the justice who wrote the decision, Samuel Alito, ensured Americans that the court was not taking away a right -- it was simply returning a contentious issue to the people in the electoral process. Except the court knew full well that they were returning this issue to gerrymandered -- often times racially gerrymandered -- state legislatures that they had allowed to be rigged in advance, and the outcomes were entirely predictable, and the outcomes were opposed -- often times diametrically opposed to the wishes of the people of these states. And yet voters had little recourse at the ballot box thanks to the decisions that the court had made over the course of the previous decade. It's as if they planned it that way.
SREENIVASAN: If Shelby County's decision -- Shelby County versus Holder -- that decision had an impact on the next federal election, I think a lot of people are also wondering: What does the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity do to the elections that we have coming up?
(DALEY)
SREENIVASAN: I can hear conservatives right now saying, "What are you talking about? The Roberts court's the one that upheld Obamacare -- it made, you know, same-sex marriages the law of the land." You can kind of go through the list of other ideas. They upheld section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I mean, is John Roberts really this kind of sinister character that you paint him out to be?
DALEY: Yes. (laughs) When you look at the America that we lived in in 2005 -- when you look at the America of 2024, our constitutional rights have been dramatically changed, and there's been a dramatic shift in constitutional law over the period of that time. Roe versus Wade simply no longer exists. The question of guns, conservative heckles and the NRA's agenda has really been allowed to run roughshod over any effort by states and localities to control the safety of their own citizens. When you look at the court's decisions on the regulatory state, what we have seen is a court that has placed itself again and again above the checks and balances of our system which is supposed to have three co-equal branches -- that this court has placed itself above the other branches.
And the American people see and recognize this. The court's approval ratings are at all-time lows. Huge majorities of Americans back the idea of ethics codes and term limits -- often times above 70 percent of Americans. So I think that the court would like us to think that they are simply neutral arbiters of the law, but we don't have to close our eyes to what we see. This is a court that is unelected, that makes its decisions in private, that is bound by no ethics code, that has lifetime appointments, and it has behaved in ways that has turned itself into a super legislature in many ways. And Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural talked about how if the decisions of the entire people had to be fixed by the Supreme Court, the people have ceased to be their own rulers. I think we're dangerously close to experiencing that moment.
