Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at background briefing.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with President Biden's speech to the nation on Thursday in which he likened Putin to Hamas

in their determination to exterminate democracy in their neighbor's country.

But Biden did not extend the analogy to our domestic politics, where the Trump cult in the House are demonstrating their fealty to Putin

in their determination to cut aid to Ukraine

and their contempt for democracy as the insurrectionists insist they won the last election

as they worked to rig the next one.

Joining us is Victoria Norse, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center

and the Executive Director of the Center on Constitutional Studies at Georgetown Law.

A nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2014 to 2015,

she served as counsel to Vice President Joe Biden, and prior to that, serves as an appellate

lawyer in the Justice Department and Special Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Her latest book is The Impeachments of Donald Trump, an introduction to constitutional argument,

and the latest article at Ms. Magazine is

the Supreme Court's blindness to gender violence. Then we're looking to Biden's $105 billion

request of aid to Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Taiwan, and the border, which was sent to a legalist

house with no one constitutionally able to act on it.

Joining us is Stephen Wirtheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Tomorrow The World, the birth of

U.S. global supremacy in World War II. We'll discuss his article at The Guardian. The Ukraine War is in a new phase.

Biden must rethink the U.S. position. Then finally we'll assess how much third-party candidates will

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