Biden calls for sweeping Supreme Court changes | The Excerpt

On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Here's what to know about President Joe Biden's election-year proposals to change the Supreme Court . The sheriff in charge of the deputy who killed Sonya Massey declines to resign, while asking for forgiveness . USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless discusses how some Project 2025 contributors have a history of racist writings and activity . USA TODAY Trending News Reporter Kinsey Crowley takes a look at former President Donald Trump's policy proposals on crime . Iowa's six-week abortion ban is now in effect.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and today is Tuesday, July 30th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, a look at President Joe Biden's election year proposals to change the Supreme Court. Plus we discussed Project 2025 and the past racist writings of some of its contributors. And we break down former President Donald Trump's policy proposals when it comes to crime.

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President Joe Biden is using his final months in office to push changes to the Supreme Court and a constitutional amendment to ensure that presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution. Though he's no longer a candidate himself, Biden is making this a big issue for his final stretch as president. He's also handing Vice President Kamala Harris, the new presumptive democratic nominee, a hot button topic to hit on the campaign trail and energize voters who are increasingly skeptical of the high court. Still Biden is not expected to do what the left flank of his party wants. A bigger supreme court packed with democratic picks to balance out the conservative super majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, scaled back gun control laws and raise questions about the future of same-sex marriage. Biden is also urging Congress to end lifetime seats for the Supreme Court's nine justices with term limits of 18 years.

Under the change, the president would appoint a new justice every two years to replace the justice whose term ends. Another proposal is for Congress to pass binding enforceable conduct and ethics rules for justices, though Biden has not endorsed a proposal that has long been on the liberal wishlist, expanding the size of the nine member court. Biden, just over a week after withdrawing from the election formally announced his positions in an address yesterday afternoon at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library marking the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. None of Biden's proposals which Harris quickly endorsed are likely to pass in a divided Congress, but he's igniting what could be a defining issue in the 2024 campaign while setting off a debate that will last much longer. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

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An Illinois sheriff who hired the deputy charged with killing Sonya Massey in her own home, asked for the public's forgiveness yesterday saying that Massey, quote, "called for help and we failed her", unquote. Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell, told that to a packed hall of about 300 people at a Springfield church last night. The Justice Department's community relations service organized the listening session for the grieving community about three weeks after Massey's killing. Sean Grayson at the time of the July 6th fatal shooting, a Sangamon County Sheriff's deputy has since been fired and is charged with murder after responding to Massey's 911 call about a possible intruder at her home. Campbell, the sheriff who hired Grayson, said yesterday he would not step down after community members called for his resignation, contending that it would not solve anything if he did.

Justice officials opened a federal probe into Massey's killing as chaotic and gruesome body camera footage released to the public last week revealed details of the case. Grayson shot and killed Massey after ordering her to put down a pot of boiling water in her own kitchen.

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Project 2025 is a conservative blueprint for a second Donald Trump term. Some have decried it as racist and a USA TODAY analysis found that several contributors have a history of racist writings and more. It's also clear that Trump has increasingly distanced himself from the project. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless to learn more. Will. Thanks for hopping on The Excerpt today.

Will Carless:

Thanks for having me on.

Taylor Wilson:

So Will, before we get to this analysis around some of these authors, many have been raising concerns about racism within Project 2025 for months. What are some of the things critics point to?

Will Carless:

Project 2025 aims to drastically strip back programs that disproportionately benefit are more used by communities of color. Things like Head Start at schools, things like the food stamp program. They want to really dig into those. Programs that it should be said have largely been created to help address some of the racial imbalances in this country as a result of the legacy of our history. But there's also lots of coded language in here. For example, education is a big area where they want to strip back a lot of the teaching that goes on where people of color are taught about their heritage. They want to drastically strip that back, if not completely remove it.

And then there's also the big problem where they want to replace civil servants with essentially political appointees, which of course if this is successful and if Trump wins the next election, he would be making those appointments. So Trump would have the opportunity to literally install tens of thousands of people who aligned with his worldview into the federal government where previously those people were civil servants, they were not political appointees. So that's kind of just the start of it. It's a 900-page document that's highly complicated, but those are some of the biggest concerns that I've heard.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, so let's get to your analysis here that found several contributors to Project 2025, really have this history with racist writings and more. They include Richard Hanania. Let's start with him. Who is this? What's his background and what's his connection to Project 2025?

Will Carless:

Richard Hanania is a far right political commentator. He has a very strong social media presence. He's sort of a provocateur. Last year the Huffington Post investigated him and found that he had actually written under a pseudonym for really vile white supremacist publications and he'd written some really terrible things, I mean, just textbook racism.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So you wrote about several other contributors as you mentioned, one of them, Corey Stewart. What can you tell listeners about him and his background?

Will Carless:

He's a big promoter of Confederate heritage. He stood up in front of a crowd in 2017 when he was running for a failed senatorial bid for the GOP where he talked about Virginia being the state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He talked about being proud to stand next to the Confederate flag. In and of itself, that's fairly benign, but The New York Times investigated him in 2018 when he was doing that Senate run and found that he had all these white supremacists or racists working for him, mainly in a volunteer capacity. And he was repeatedly asked if he disavowed these people and he refused to. And he was controversial even among the right, I mean plenty of people in the Republican Party were deeply troubled by his candidacy. And here he shows up again, Project 2025 as a contributor. This is not a well-known politician or a well-known thinker, right? I mean, he's just an attorney from Virginia who ran for Senate once and he's being brought in on this effort, which leads to a whole set of questions of its own, I think. Why him?

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, absolutely. So beyond some of these individuals, Will, are there any other groups or organizations tied to Project 2025 that have had their own past incidents of racism or hate?

Will Carless:

Project 2025 is put together by a who's who of the most conservative and controversial organizations. Regardless of what you think of the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, they maintain a list of what they call hate and extremist groups. And that's a politically contentious label that they attach. But I do think it's notable that they have attached that label to seven of the organizations on the steering committee here. There's certainly a lot of smoke. I think what we found with these individuals is that there's fire too, not just organizations that are very conservative, but we've got out-and-out racists who were part and parcel of this effort.

Taylor Wilson:

And, Will, did you hear from any of these folks in defense of either their past actions or the project itself and also just in general how to project creators, even those without acutely racist past necessarily defend the project?

Will Carless:

I'm actually hearing from the Heritage Foundation that was involved in this effort now, we did reach out to them before this and now they've read the article, they want to comment. But in the run-up to this, we approached everybody that we named in the story and none of them wanted to be interviewed. Generally speaking, their defense tends along the line of you're just extreme leftists who see racism everywhere and you're just playing the race card in this. We're just conservatives, but you want to label us racist because it helps your cause and it helps your political cause. I think that's a pretty absurd argument. It's also just not addressing the central tenets that I talked about earlier, and the trouble that every group that represents people of color pretty much in this country has come out against project 2025. Even Donald Trump is disavowing Project 2025 and trying to remove himself from it. So I would love to sit down with some of these people and discuss this more deeply, but unfortunately they're not really interested in doing that.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Will Carless, covers extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY. Thank you Will.

Will Carless:

Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

Agenda 47 is former president Donald Trump's official campaign platform for the 2024 election. It's separate from Project 2025, but proposes conservative ideas on education, immigration, and crime. I spoke with USA TODAY Trending News Reporter Kinsey Crowley about some of Trump's Agenda 47 proposals on crime, including the possibility of the death penalty for drug dealers. Kinsey, thanks for wrapping on.

Kinsey Crowley:

Thanks so much. Great to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

As you write in this piece, Kinsey, Council on Criminal Justice CEO and President Adam Gelb says, there are three factors to consider in assessing how effective a policy might be in deterring crime from happening in the first place. These are certainty, swiftness, and severity. Could you talk through that a little bit?

Kinsey Crowley:

Kind of taking this out of Republicans versus Democrats for a minute? Gelb is an expert on criminal justice policy and certainty and swiftness, he says, are really the two things to think about as you're thinking about deterrence. So stopping a crime from happening in the first place. And severity on the other hand, is something that we use to think about punishment, how severe a punishment is. And according to Gelb, certainty and swiftness can help deter crime, but severity is likely to undercut those.

Taylor Wilson:

So in this piece, you wrote about some ways that Donald Trump's policy proposals here in Agenda 47 aim to address crime. Let's start with policing. Where does he land on investing in police and also bringing back certain police measures?

Kinsey Crowley:

He advocates for more hiring, retention and training for police officers, more investment. And of course this may hark back to the defund the police movement of 2020. That was a somewhat short-lived and pretty controversial measure. A lot of proponents said not only did they want to take money away from police, but actually redistribute it to some more social programs that might be getting towards the root of crime. Those protests really brought a lot of heat to that movement. But actually a lot of research shows the hiring police officers is a really cost-effective way of addressing crime. And that's not only in just more police officers on every corner, for example, but to really deal with understaffing and actually hiring and retention is something that since 2020 police departments around the country have been trying to fight against.

Taylor Wilson:

And it's clear Trump also has some strong policy proposals when it comes to punishment. I think these were some of the glaring parts of this piece to me, Kinsey. What do we know here? Be it on the death penalty or on, for example, disciplining minors.

Kinsey Crowley:

He's calling for the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers. The US is really an outlier amongst developed nations as far as still using the death penalty. Not all states use it, and it's used for really a small portion of sentences, really for the most extreme crimes. And that's been upheld by Supreme Court rulings even in the last 20 years. On the other hand, there were more than 18,000 drug trafficking cases that were sentenced only in the federal government in 2023. So just to give you a number sense that would be really far out there.

And to go back to Gelb's point on severity, if you make that severe punishment that could get in the way of the certainty and swiftness of trying to stop these crimes from happening in the first place. Trump doesn't get into specifics in Agenda 47, but he is calling for an overhaul of federal standards on disciplining minors. He's talking about carjackers and criminals being 13, 14, 15 years old. Actually, the Department of Justice report shows that juvenile arrests for violent crimes been on the decline since about 2006. And so this again goes back to severity. And if you think about future punishment stopping a current crime, our reporting shows that's less likely to work against people who are young.

Taylor Wilson:

What do the stats really say, Kinsey, about how crime is trending? And does that back up, this sort of, I would say, tough on crime approach we're hearing in this agenda?

Kinsey Crowley:

Yeah, I would consider this a tough on crime approach. Of course, that is a big talking point. Actually a report just came out from the Council on Criminal Justice saying that violent crime in US cities has really fallen back to 2019 levels. Of course, 2019 being the year before the pandemic and everyone's lives being upended. Kind of the takeaway from their report and from Yale detritus is that a lot of that societal change that came with the pandemic is what prompted a lot of changes in the types of crimes and the rates of crimes. But despite that, we've heard a lot from Trump and a lot of Republicans that cities are really dangerous. A lot of the talk on crime is tied to immigration even though there's not any evidence that shows that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than US citizens.

Taylor Wilson:

Interesting insight as always, Kinsey Crowley is a trending news reporter with USA TODAY. Thank you Kinsey.

Kinsey Crowley:

Thanks so much, Taylor. Great to be here.

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Taylor Wilson:

Iowa's hotly contested six week abortion ban officially began yesterday. Enforcement of the state, so-called fetal heartbeat law went into effect at 8:00 AM Monday after the Iowa Supreme Court cleared the way for the ban. The new law prohibits most abortions in Iowa once fetal cardiac activity can be detected, that's typically around six weeks of pregnancy. It includes narrow exceptions for rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and to save the life of the pregnant woman. Though Iowa's abortion clinics have affirmed their commitment to continue to provide care, the new ban also represents a major shift in access in the Midwest. You can read more about how we got here with a link in today's show notes.

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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden calls for sweeping Supreme Court changes | The Excerpt