Media Mentions

Bloomberg Chief Washington Correspondent Kevin Cirilli delivers insight and analysis on the latest headlines from the White House and Capitol Hill, including conversations with influential lawmakers and key figures in politics and policy. Bloomberg's June Grasso served as guest host. She was joined by Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and founder of Equal Citizens, Jennifer Rie, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Antitrust Litigation Analyst, John Sitilides, Geopolitical strategist at Trilogy Advisors and diplomacy consultant to the State Dept, and Kevin Walling, Democratic Strategist at HG Creative media.

Both Republicans and Democrats have voiced concerns over the past few decades about the expansion of presidential powers — some of it ceded by Congress looking for political cover, much of it a result of White House legal interpretations of constitutional gray areas. The balance of power now tilts in favor of the Oval Office, but since President Richard Nixon leaders have held themselves largely in check, respecting long-established informal rules and norms. Then came President Trump...In a new book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” attorneys Bob Bauer ’73 and Jack L. Goldsmith, veterans of Democratic and Republican White Houses, respectively, propose what they say are long-overdue reforms to the Office of the President that can rein in future presidents who try to exploit the position for their political or personal benefit. Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, served as assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush administration. He writes frequently about national security, government, and politics, and is a founding editor of Lawfare. Bauer, a longtime legal adviser to President Barack Obama who is now advising the Biden campaign, is widely regarded as a leading authority on executive branch powers. He served as White House counsel from 2008 to 2011 and is now a professor of the practice and distinguished scholar in residence at NYU Law.

The Trump administration rolled back over 125 environmental rules during their tenure. These policies protected wildlife and water, and regulated chemicals and greenhouse gases. This hour, we’ll discuss Trump’s environmental and climate legacy. We’ll also look at President-elect Biden’s climate plans and discuss what actions he can take (with or without a democratic Senate) to protect the environment, address our energy needs, and tackle global warming. Joining us are Michael Mann, professor and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, and Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University.

President Donald Trump is trying to steal a free and fair election that he lost by a wide margin to President-elect Joe Biden by tearing at the most basic principle of American democracy: He's trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes. Trump's latest escalation of his attempt to subvert the result of the election followed a string of knock-backs in the courts and after a statewide audit in Georgia confirmed Biden's victory in the crucial swing state. He asked state Republican leaders in Michigan to visit him Friday, hinting at a possible attempt to convince them to ignore Biden's big win in the state and send a slate of electors to the Electoral College that backs him and not the President-elect... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said Michigan lawmakers visiting the White House on Friday could be walking into an illegal meeting. "I am worried that any lawmakers who attend this ridiculous meet and greet are really attending a conspiratorial meeting to steal the election," Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett. "There's no question that the meeting that is being held is illegal. There is no question that it really is designed quite corruptly to take away people's right to vote." Tribe says the Trump campaign has lost more than two dozen lawsuits. "It's quite clear that Republican, as well as Democratic judges, are going to follow the law when there is no ambiguity," Tribe said. "The only guy who seems to be uninterested in the law is Rudy Giuliani, and God knows what he is auditioning for."

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: The conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin has tweeted an all caps call for state legislatures to “get ready to do your constitutional duty.” Levin believes they have “the final say” on which slate of presidential electors gets to vote in the Electoral College. Under this theory, even if more people in a state voted for Democrat Joe Biden, their legislature would still have the power to pick a slate of Donald Trump electors. In other words, the Republican legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could all now select a slate of electors for Trump. Needless to say, Levin’s theory has been embraced by many who continue to believe it can give Trump a second term. Levin is wrong about the power of state legislatures. But he’s not making his theory up out of whole cloth. There’s a kernel of truth to Levin’s theory. And it’s important to understand why that truth does not mean that legislatures have the power to do something that no legislature has ever done  —  to veto the results of a popular election and pick a slate of electors for the loser in that popular election. Levin grounds his claim on the part of the Constitution that gives legislatures the power to select the “manner” by which presidential electors are appointed. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court interpreted that power to mean that the legislature could vest the selection of electors in the people — through a popular election — but that it could “take back” that power “at any time.” On Levin’s reading, “at any time” includes after an election. So that after an election, the legislature could say, “Thanks for your input, but we’re going a different way.”

Two Republican canvassers in Michigan’s largest county are attempting to rescind their votes certifying that Joe Biden won there after President Donald Trump personally called them, The Associated Press reported. Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, who represent half of the four-member Wayne County canvassing board, initially refused to certify the election results on Tuesday ― an unprecedented move ― despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud. They quickly backtracked, voting later that day to certify the results. Trump reportedly reached out to Palmer and Hartmann later that night after the board certified the results. Now, the two GOP canvassers say they want to rescind their votes. The president’s decision to call them and the canvassers efforts to walk back their votes drew swift backlash from some election and law experts, who raised questions regarding the legality and ethics of it all...Deepak Gupta, a lawyer and Harvard Law School lecturer, called Trump’s actions “truly shocking.” ... Biden won nearly 70% of the votes in Wayne County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Detroit. But Trump and his allies have falsely declared victory in the state. Trump has baselessly claimed there was widespread voter fraud in Detroit, alleging Wednesday that there were “FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE” in the city. (That’s false: More than 670,000 people live in Detroit. The city said a little more than 250,000 ballots were cast there.) Palmer and Hartmann have said they decided to vote in favor of certification after facing backlash and accusations of being racist over their initial opposition.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In the opening of her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” from 2019, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris writes that, as a law student, she found her “calling” while interning at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, in Oakland, California, in 1988. Harris then spent nearly three decades in law enforcement, referring to herself as “top cop,” rising from local prosecutor to district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California—the first woman and the first Black person in these jobs—until she joined the U.S. Senate, in 2017. When I was in law school, twenty years ago, prosecution was a form of public service that was thought to carry little controversial baggage. Marked as neither liberal nor conservative, it was also an all-purpose route for young people who aspired to political or judicial positions. In recent decades, former prosecutors have been ubiquitous in public life. President Bill Clinton and multiple Presidential nominees and candidates—John Kerry and Chris Christie, for example—were once prosecutors. So were New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and several dozen members of Congress, including Senators Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Richard Blumenthal, Doug Jones, and Josh Hawley. Countless federal judges have been prosecutors, among them Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito, and also President Barack Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, whose prosecution of Timothy McVeigh, for the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, was soon followed by President Clinton’s nomination of Garland to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

An op-ed by Samantha Power: Ever since then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright memorably called the United States “indispensable” more than two decades ago, both Americans and publics abroad have vigorously debated the proposition. Today, as President Donald Trump’s term comes to a close, foreign observers of the United States are more prone to use a different word: “incompetent.” The Trump administration’s response to the most urgent problem in the world today—the coronavirus pandemic—has been worse than that of any other nation. This, in turn, has understandably tarnished perceptions of the United States: according to recent Pew Research Center polling conducted in 13 major economic powers, a median of 84 percent of respondents agreed that the United States has done a poor job of handling COVID-19—by far the most damning appraisal received by any major country or institution. Yet the mishandling of the pandemic is just the latest in a string of lapses in basic competence that have called into question U.S. capabilities among both long-standing allies and countries whose partnership Washington may seek in the years to come. A brand once synonymous with the world-changing creations of Steve Jobs, with feats of strength and ingenuity such as the Berlin airlift and the moon landing, and with the opportunity represented by the Statue of Liberty now projects chaos, polarization, and dysfunction.

Installing partisan loyalists into top defense and National Security Agency posts in a president’s final weeks in office is “completely unprecedented,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” a new book about executive branch reforms.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith: Long before Donald Trump became president it was widely believed that he would spark a “constitutional crisis” if elected. And during his term in office there were panicked claims that he was just on the verge of destroying the American constitutional order: when Mr Trump threatened to defy judicial orders related to the Muslim ban, and to fire or stop Special Counsel Robert Mueller; and when he made absolutist executive-power claims in defying congressional subpoenas for his tax returns and urged prosecution of his political enemies. In these and many other contexts, Mr Trump’s verbal assaults and threats, incessant norm-defiance and claims of absolute power provoked four years of vertiginous panic. Mr Trump was so discombobulating that relatively few noticed that these and many other worst-case scenarios never played out. Mr Trump has left enormous damage in his wake—to the psyche of many Americans, to many institutions of American democracy and to beaten-down citizens’ confidence in these institutions. There is much repair work to be done. Yet the most remarkable fact about his presidency is how well the American constitutional system stood up to and survived it. This was true, most importantly, in the recent presidential election. Hundreds of stories and reports warned about foreign hacking, domestic and foreign disinformation, violence, insecure voting machines, voter suppression and pandemic-related problems. Yet more Americans than ever (approximately 150m) voted for president. And the election “was the most secure in American history,” according to federal election infrastructure experts.

Every corporation is unique. It follows that governance arrangements should be tailored to suit. Yet many shareholders, especially indexers, roundly condemn certain governance practices as if one size fits all. Three corporate practices illustrate this: combining the roles of chairman and chief executive; staggered director terms, and classes of stock with different voting rights. Each is derided for valid abstract reasons, but all persist because they can be suitable at particular companies...Why might indexers and other critics universally condemn corporate practices that quality shareholders accept and that may enhance a company’s performance? Different business models may explain: indexers address the market as a whole while quality shareholders focus on specific companies. Indexers prescribe policies expected to benefit the overall market, on average, not particular businesses. The size and reach of indexers — commanding around one-third of public equity — give them outsized influence, and a wide critical following. But they have small stewardship staffs and minuscule budgets to address particular companies, according to research led by Harvard Law School’s Lucian Bebchuk — no more than 45 people covering  well more than 3,000 U.S. companies.

If you’ve been on Twitter lately you may have heard that there’s a possibility that President-elect Joe Biden would cancel some student debt — and you likely saw a lot of back and forth about the idea. Following a speech on the economy Monday, Biden told reporters that student-debt cancellation “does figure in my plan,” after being asked about it. Indeed, on the campaign trail, Biden proposed cancelling $10,000 in student debt as a coronavirus relief measure. Still, he stopped short Monday of saying he would cancel the debt without the help of Congress...Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren have said that cancelling up to $50,000 in student debt is something Biden can and should do immediately. Their urging is based in part on a legal memo written by lawyers at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which notes: “The Higher Education Act gives the Secretary of Education the authority to cancel student-loan debt,” said Toby Merrill, the director of the Project and one of the memo’s authors. But even among those who support broad-based student-debt cancellation, there is some concern about doing it through executive action.

Thousands of traumatized veterans kicked out of the Army achieved a legal victory Wednesday after the Army agreed to review punitive discharges linked to mental health and sexual assault trauma, potentially unlocking care for those struggling in their post-military lives. In a lawsuit filed against Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, a class of veterans argued that the Army should overhaul its process of reviewing discharge upgrade requests and review past denials under more generous guidelines. The Army agreed to a settlement that would achieve that, the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School said, with an approval pending by a federal judge...A study released in March found that the Department of Veterans Affairs has improperly turned away many thousands of veterans who may have qualified for medical care at their facilities. Bad paper discharges make it less likely that veterans can receive VA care, but the agency is required to look for mitigating circumstances, such as behavioral issues tied to trauma, when it decides to accept those veterans. Some veterans have gone decades without trying to receive care at VA, the Veterans Law and Disability Benefits Clinic at Harvard Law School concluded, after misconceptions about qualification and extenuating circumstances brewed within the agency itself.

President Trump fired the nation’s top election security official, Chris Krebs, Tuesday over his agency's recent statement that called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history" — a statement that undermined Trump’s political attempts to falsely spin his election loss into a story about election fraud. To discuss this and other attempts by the Trump administration to undermine the legitimate results of the election, Jim Braude was joined by Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe.

Climate activists have set a high bar for President-elect Joe Biden's staff picks, asking that he exclude anyone with ties to fossil fuel industries. They've already been disappointed. Biden faced backlash this week after naming Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond to lead the Office of Public Engagement. Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said it "feels like a betrayal" because Richmond "has taken more donations from the fossil fuel industry during his Congressional career than nearly any other Democrat." The oil and gas industry has been among Richmond's top campaign contributors over his career in Congress, according to Center for Responsive Politics...Among the names on the Biden transition's agency review teams a few have limited ties to fossil fuel, but more are from environmental groups. "When I look at that list I think the clear message is the Biden team wants good people in place, right from the start, who have experience in these agencies and are not wasting any time," says Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. She was a former counselor on energy and climate change in the Obama White House. Freeman is a good example of those who could be excluded if a Biden administration rejected people connected to fossil fuel companies. She sits on the board of oil company Conoco-Phillips, but she also led Obama's effort to double car fuel-efficiency standards. Freeman is also an expert on using presidential powers to address climate change, knowledge that likely will be necessary if both parties can't agree on new climate legislation when Biden is sworn in next year.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: This week’s Michigan election theft scare lasted just about three hours — unless you were checking your screen in real time, it may have passed you by. Yet, brief as the episode was, when historians look back on this strange interregnum in which President Donald Trump has not acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, they could do worse than to dig deep into the sorry affair. It carries important lessons about how delicate our system of electoral transitions is, and also about the social forces that preserve the system despite its sometimes precarious-seeming character. The historians will have to start with the weird institution at the heart of the events: the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. On Tuesday, two Republican election officials announced they would not agree to certify the county’s results before reversing themselves after a national outcry. The board has four members, two Democrats and two Republicans. They are technically appointed by the County Board of Commissioners to serve four-year terms. But in effect, they are political patronage appointees chosen by the state political parties. The two-and-two structure is a matter of courtesy. Wayne County, which includes Detroit, is overwhelmingly Democratic. All 83 boards of canvassers in Michigan have the same two-and-two structure. The board’s most important job is to certify the county’s election results. Ordinarily, this is a simple matter; so simple, in fact, that it wouldn’t be unfair to refer to the members of the canvassing board as functionaries. They are part of the vast apparatus of overwhelmingly reliable and conscientious election officials all across the U.S. — the same officials who presided over a remarkably clean electoral process in 2020.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: President-elect Joe Biden just got an excellent suggestion about how to approach regulation of food safety, clean air, clean water, highway accidents and occupational health. It comes from a brief but illuminating passage in “The Promised Land,” the new memoir by his former boss, President Barack Obama: “Those of us who believed in the government’s ability to solve big problems had an obligation to pay attention to the real-world impact of our decisions and not just trust in the goodness of our intentions. If a proposed agency rule to preserve wetlands was going to lop acreage off a family farm, that agency should have to take the farmer’s losses into account before moving forward.” For that reason, Obama believed in cost-benefit analysis — not as a numerical straightjacket, but as a way to apply science and economics to measurement of the real-world impact of decisions by government agencies. Suppose, for example, that a proposed regulation from the Department of Transportation, requiring vehicles to be equipped with a new technology to reduce crashes, would cost $900 million. What would we get in return for that expenditure? How many lives would be saved? Would it be worthwhile? In 2009, Obama appointed me as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and he directed me to focus intensely on those questions. During my four years in government, Obama asked me to try to quantify both benefits and costs — and to make sure that for every regulation that I approved, the former would be higher than the latter.

Samantha Power, the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, joins Lawrence O’Donnell to explain how foreign actors like Vladimir Putin were unable to “delegitimate the democratic process” through foreign interference in the 2020 election and why fired Trump admin. official Christopher Krebs “did such important work keeping the election straight.”

An article by David Sanchez ‘22: As the plane touches down, the tires give off a screeching sound, the force of the braking sends loose items rolling, and the pilot welcomes the crowd to its destination. Most passengers feel a sense of excitement, relief, and maybe some lingering nausea. I always feel a bit of melancholy that the flight has come to an end. It means we’re back to Earth, where time resumes its steady march and the to-do list war reboots. If I’m lucky, this is just a layover. Then it’s back up to thirty thousand feet. The sky is a place, I've found, where I can do the type of deep thinking that the daily grind doesn’t allow. It’s where I go to reason through important decisions, consider radical solutions to messy problems, and reflect on life’s biggest questions. I made the call to move across the country for a new job in seat 5F on my way to San Francisco. I wrote my marriage vows in the exit row on a bumpy flight to Chicago. I considered moving back to Wisconsin to run for mayor of my hometown in a middle seat en route to the Dominican Republic. I find clarity in the clouds... Without flying in my life, I have been searching to replicate the time and space for serious reflection that long flights had wedged into a busy calendar. I’ve tried long morning walks, daily meditation, and stargazing. Once, I sat in the back seat of my parked car for an hour with no phone before a neighbor knocked on the window to see if I was locked in. Others are turning to rural Airbnbs, which have experienced 25% growth this summer, or are becoming first-time boat owners to escape the lockdowns. None of these come close to producing the same sense of controlled freedom I felt sitting on a lightly padded aluminum frame with thirty inches of legroom.

In the face of enormous obstacles, democracy looks likely to survive 2020. A record number of Americans went to the polls this year, despite spiking COVID-19 rates, rampant misinformation, and an ongoing campaign by the Trump administration to weaken America’s faith in the electoral process. In the end, the result was clear: Joe Biden won about 80 million votes nationally, more than any other candidate in history, defeating Trump by more than five million votes... “There was a real risk in this election of the country degenerating into a soft totalitarianism,” says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School. “So getting rid of this president is very important. But we still have a long way to go towards perfecting our democracy.” ... Stephanopoulos argues that since there is no evidence of voter fraud, it is far more useful to focus attention on real, documented problems with our democracy. “I don’t worry about voter fraud because it isn’t true,” Stephanopoulos says. “Voter suppression and gerrymandering are not a figment of imagination: We can trace them.” ... Stephanopoulos notes that the main obstacle to any electoral reform is that it requires new legislation, which Republicans will likely block. “The American system is not designed to work well under conditions of polarization,” he says. “When you combine polarization with our checks and balances, it is almost impossible to get things done. Democrats will have to wait for landslide victories to enact sweeping changes that will make the political playing field fair.”

President Trump’s abrupt firing Tuesday of the country’s top election security official who publicly said Trump lost to president-elect Joe Biden in an election drew outrage from Massachusetts political science scholars and officials. Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had also said the Nov. 3 election was reliable and free of interference. Trump announced his firing on Twitter Tuesday night...Though other presidents have fired those they considered disloyal, and previous election results have been disputed, there are few parallels to Trump’s firing of Krebs simply for telling the truth, academics said...Daphna Renan, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the firing was “appalling — but, unfortunately, no longer surprising.” “Constitutional democracy depends on the integrity and leadership of officials like Christopher Krebs,” Renan said in an e-mail. “Regretfully, at the moment, it depends on their heroism as well in response to a reckless president intent on undermining our democracy.”