Jeffrey Toobin on “The Most Important Supreme Court Case in Decades”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jeffrey Toobin tells David Remnick that, despite the mounting indictments against members of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, Trump is almost certainly safe from impeachment. Republican House members, Toobin says, have no incentive to moderate their support of the President—despite his low national poll numbers—because the only competition these representatives face is from the right flank of their own party. Gerrymandering, assisted by the latest computer modelling, has allowed the party in power in each state to lock itself into a nearly unassailable majority of votes. The Supreme Court could conceivably change that in a redistricting case called Gill v. Whitford, which Toobin has written about; he tells David Remnick that it is “the most important Supreme Court case in decades.” Hinging on the swing vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court will decide whether it can act as a check on gerrymandering, or whether a functioning two-party system can fade into history. Plus, the fiction writer George Saunders talks about the inspiration for his recent novel, which is set on one very dark night in the soul of Abraham Lincoln.

Transcript

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0:00.0	These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.
0:09.8	I think it's interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.
0:13.7	There's this sort of country-city divide for their inconvenient, and it's not clear where it goes next.
0:19.8	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:24.6	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:30.3	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're more or less one year out from
0:35.4	the election of Donald Trump.
0:41.4	And that election continues to raise a lot more questions than answers.
0:43.0	Let's put it that way, at least for now.
0:47.1	Last week, we saw the first charges come down from the Robert Mueller probe,
0:50.4	and from what we gather, we've only seen the start.
0:55.1	So I wanted to start with Jeffrey Tubin, who's been watching the investigation very, very closely for us. Jeff is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a legal analyst for CNN.
1:01.5	Jeff, I'd like to begin by talking about the election last year, which is very much in the
1:07.9	news by way of indictments. I want to get a sense from you what you think that Robert Miller has.
1:15.8	I know some of it is conjecture, but where you think his strategy is going when you look at what
1:20.5	happened early this week.
1:21.6	David, I also work in cable news, so conjecture is my business.
1:26.8	I think in many respects, the most interesting thing that was said all week was something
1:32.2	that came out in one of the papers, court papers that was unsealed in the Papadopoulos case,
1:37.2	where the prosecutor said in describing the case to the judge, this is a small part of a much larger investigation, which
1:46.2	certainly suggests unless the prosecutor is completely blowing smoke, which I doubt, that we're
1:52.5	going to see a lot more cases. We're going to see more indictments. We're going to see more guilty
	...

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