Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters,

and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news. We'll begin with

more evidence, not that we needed it, that the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court are

political activists in robes. We'll discuss the latest gift to a lawless president with the removal

of the last constitutional check on Trump's authoritarian march in a rigged sleight of hand

where Trump pretended to want to overturn the 14th Amendment, but really wanted to get rid of

universal injunctions that were blocking his unconstitutional power grabs.

Joining us to discuss this latest tipping of the scales to ensure one-party rule following the

guarding of voting rights, the opening of floodgates of limitless dark money, immunity for a

criminal in the White House, and now a free hand for forging a fascist state is Lisa Graves,

the executive director of the corporatedog Group, True North Research,

and president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy. She is one of the nation's

foremost experts in exposing how special interests distort public policy and 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' divisions for the U.S. courts.

Then with the Senate passing Trump's big, beautiful bill that gives $45 billion to ICE and

DHS to bolster what is becoming Trump's private militia of stormtroopers,

we will look into similarities to the buildup to the Civil War in the 1850s

as a reactionary Supreme Court and the brutal roundup of escape slaves and innocent blacks

under the Fugitive Slave Act split the country

...