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From KQED.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Since Joyce Vance, former U.S. attorney for the

Northern District of Alabama under Obama, started her popular substack in 2022 called Civil Discourse,

she's been helping readers make sense of unprecedented legal issues, including the felony

conviction of an ex-president,

for example. Today, most of her posts guide readers through President Trump's and his administration's

attempts to end democracy and the rule of law, and her new book takes it one step further,

teaching us how to fight back. It's called Giving Up is Unforgivable, a manual for keeping a democracy.

Joyce Vance, NBC, and MSNBC legal analyst, and professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, joins me now. Welcome to Forum.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's great to have you. Before I get into the book, I do want to call on your explanatory powers and ask you if you could to walk us through what's happening in the courts with the challenges to the president's power to deploy national guard troops. Of course, California was ground zero for this, and now he's doing it in Portland and Chicago.

And it's an issue that you've called one of the most important ones we face and essential that we pay attention to no matter what else is going on.

First, yeah, why do you say that?

Yeah, you know, so a through line with this presidency has been an effort by Donald Trump to claim a greater share of power for the presidency,

which is upsetting the constitutional balance of power the founding fathers established. That may

sound a little bit dry and intellectual, but in reality, the three branches of government are meant to

act as a check and balance so that no one governmental institution

can become too powerful and impose itself on the citizens, right? This is how we guarantee that the

power that we see to the government is exercised wisely. So I view this move by Trump with the National

...