Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg

The Axe Files with David Axelrod

CNN

News

4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2020

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As a young reporter, Nina Totenberg once got a tip about a robbery underway at the local bank. When she called the bank to confirm, one of the burglars answered the phone. Her career has since taken her from covering misguided crimes to reporting on the country’s highest court. Nina joined National Public Radio in 1975 as a legal affairs correspondent and has covered the Supreme Court ever since. She joined David to talk about her journey as a reporter, the evolution of the court over the years, and her friendship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Music
0:06.0	And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.
0:15.0	Music
0:19.0	As we post this podcast, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite of conservatives, to the Supreme Court of the United States to replace liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
0:32.0	What will this change mean for the court and the country?
0:35.0	I sat down with a grand dom of Supreme Court journalists Nina Totenberg to talk about it and her long and colorful career. Here's that conversation.
0:44.0	Music
0:50.0	Nina Totenberg, it would be great to see you under any circumstance, but it is particularly good to see you.
0:58.0	Today we're recording this on Friday, before the U.S. Senate will vote on the nomination of Judge Barrett to succeed your friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
1:13.0	On the Supreme Court, there is a huge gulf between them in terms of judicial philosophy. Tell me about Judge Barrett.
1:27.0	What Judge Barrett is an originalist, originalist, from what I can tell. She's only been on the bench three years.
1:34.0	There is a limited amount that we can tell that she's willing to do as a judge that she might like to do as a policymaker to speak in her terms.
1:47.0	She talks so much about policy versus law and every nominee does. Every nominee tells you they're going to follow the law. They're not going to impose their own views.
2:01.0	That stands for Democratic nominees.
2:05.0	I prepped a couple of candidates for the Supreme Court justices, so to my or and Cagan.
2:12.0	I understand that whole exercise. I have to say that Amy Coney Barrett was as disciplined a witness as I have seen.
2:21.0	She discharged that with, I joke that she held up the pad with nothing on it to show that she had no notes.
2:29.0	I said that she had a blank pad in front of her reminder to say nothing.
2:33.0	Yes, I think that's right. But I think that increasingly these hearings are so unsatisfying to everyone that at some point they begin to break the back of the system.
2:46.0	Now, I've seen other nominees do it, but I think perhaps because either because she wanted to and reminders told her to or because she had only 16 days to prep for a hearing at the same time she was meeting with people that her her basic line was sort of like shults in Hogan's heroes.
3:09.0	I know nothing. I know nothing.
3:13.0	That is a great cultural reference.
	...

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