When the real problem i think is not the government but its infiltration by corporate forces. If we could get those corporate forces where the Founding Fathers thought they should be, which is out of elections and out of politics, everybodys frustration with government would decline a lot. Host to go way back to your beginnings, and a c you went to yale. Your dad went to yale. Her dad was informed service, laos and thailand. Tell me about your upbringing and your worldview and how you think to the process of living through the experiences that you lived through, you sort of developed your worldview of it. Guest growing up in the foreign service, i saw two things. One, we were always in pretty dangerous and impoverished places. So i saw around me everywhere American Families who had chosen to go where, if the kid was seriously hurt, there was not a good hospital or there were not medicines where you couldnt go to the movies where the water wasnt safe to drink, what if somebody got bit by a dog you had to go to the rabies series because it was probably rabid. What you learn from that, although Net Generation people didnt talk about as much as we do now, is that something mattered, something mattered about america that was worth putting your family through all of that stuff. Then i saw the other side of it, the reciprocal, which is in all these Different Countries although my father used to say they like to tweak the eagles beat, we were a big player and everyone thought that to push back, but beyond that was a respect for, admiration for any confidence in america that created i think a beacon for many, many people and many, many countries around the world. So it kind of came in by osmosis and slowly. Nobody gave me a lecture and told me this, but the Important Role of america in the world and the fact that who we are and what we do matters enough to put people in harms way, not just our soldiers but civilians as well has been kind of a lasting lesson from my youth. Host just going to cut to the book in a minute but youre looking at your career. You have really pretty much been in Government Service and she graduated from university of virginia law school. You work in the attorney General Office to start and then you went to work for the governor, then you are a u. S. Attorney, then attorney general yourself and then ultimately elected to the senate. So much of your career with some stints in between i think in private law practice has been in the government sector. Why do you think thats been the career and the life youve chosen . Guest i think part of it is to try to follow the lesson i learned as a child, which is that america is a special place and getting government right for america is a special thing to do, even if the state and local level. It has given me the chance to see government from a lot of different perspective and its that array of different perspectives that has helped inform this book. Host the core argument of the book captured is essentially that theres this unseen rolling class, corporations, and they are kind of army of lobbyists and accents of backof the backs and conserve pac foundations and bibl five o4 and all these other entities. All and some court need away working to try to influence the american political system and congress and successfully doing it. So why is it different now than it was decades ago, do you think . What is changed . Citizens united is perhaps the top of your list but what has changed so much about the control from your perspective that this kind of octopus of players has over the american political system . Guest some of the elements of corporate influence of been around for quite a while. The extent to which corporate lobbying dominates in congress i think its about 30 to one over everybody else by recent studies. Thats probably been so since the 1970s. The problem of regulatory capture in administrative agencies come in the regulatory agencies where the regulated industry basically moves in and begins to exert control over the Regulatory Agency has been around since Woodrow Wilson wrote about it. So some of this is a constant theme. The new things have been Citizens United and the entry of Corporate Power and the front groups that exert Corporate Power into our elections in such an amazingly dominant way. When you have one corporate front Group Spending 700 million plus in the last election, and threatening, planning to spend 400 million in the next election, in the midterms, thats just a huge footprint. And theres a lot more going on behind it. The second piece of that has been kind of bringing home the longterm effort of Republican Party to put socalled business friendly judges in the courts. So that the courts have become increasingly hostile to regular folks and increasingly interested in protecting corporations to the point where there was a poll not too long ago that asked people whether they thought a human being could get a fair shot against a corporation in your state Supreme Court. And i think 9 of of the people answered said it could not. Take it back in a 6 of the people said yeah, we think an individual can get a fair shot against a corporation. 54 said no, the corporation will have the advantage. When you have a 91 spread like that about whether a human being can get fair shot against a a corporation in the United States Supreme Court, at th a signal we have a problem. Host the book talks about the impact of Citizens United and sees it as a turning point in the influence of money and politics. I guess i wonder how you reconcile reconcile that with the fact that we have President Donald Trump a defeated 17 gop candidates and then hillary clinton, both at home for much of the races were much better funded by tax and Interest Groups barron trump . Similarly you at the tea party which disrupted congress before trump came along and the chamber of commerce and the Koch Brothers are sorting out friends of the tea party. I just wonder how you reconcile your sense that Citizens United sort of has brought this upon us with these counter realities. How do you reconcile those things . Guest i dont think they need all that much reconciling. Its a longer conversation that we should probably have your today, but jeff nesbitt who was once a Republican Communications person in the white house and then went to the fda as a republican official there, has written a book called poison t about the extent to which the tea party was actually closely connected with the fossil fuel crowd and the Tobacco Industry and how that all developed very much in sync with the deregulatory propolluter agenda, those big forces. I dont think that is quite as autosync as you might think. I put the question of donald trump the other way. One of the reasons people were attracted to somebody with his braggadocio and with this sort of general importance and destructiveness was because they were fed up. One of the reasons they were so fed up is that they saw a government that has started to bog down and bog down and bog down into being unable to cross any Major Corporate interest. He in some respects, trump, may be the product of what im talking about in the same way i think to a degree on the democratic side of the aisle the burlbernie folks responses simir impulse, that we are sick of this, no one is listening to us. What the hell is going on here . Host you have a chapter in the book entitled the constitutions of blind spot. I guess i wanted to ask you to explain a little bit more etc that theres a flaw in the way the constitution was drafted or is it sort of a weakness with congress and the courts . Could you explain to viewers what your view is on that . Guest sure. The constitution was drafted by an americas founders as the document i was going to balance different topics of interest, and vicky answers they were kind of balance was the rights of the people to not be overwhelmed by their government. And so they divide at the government into brent different branches like a check when another and the protection from the creation of a new royalty or a new aristocracy. So they had a very specific set of concerns they were trying to address. I think they address them really quite well when you consider how long that document has lasted. The public was not happy with that. They wanted more. The one of the bill of rights. They wanted to make sure some of these are more precisely recognized and protected. So then the bill of rights got added. But to that entire process there was not a lot of concern about corporate participation in our politics. It was understood that this is going to be a human being, citizens, operation peer and there were not very many corporations around at the time if the ones that couldve been threatening were far away in england and had disgraced themselves in some cases already. They were very few corporations in america, and the ones that were tended to do things like build canals or build schools and that was it. Then they were also under very close political control by the state legislators that it set them up. I dont think it ever cross the Founding Fathers mines that corporations would have a big role in this Political Institution that they establish. That blind spot has been exploded by Corporate Power first in the runup to the progressive era when Teddy Roosevelt took them on and actually broken and set it right, and then now they have rebooted and we had the problem again of just way, way too much Corporate Power in places that the Founding Fathers never contemplated they would be. And having never contemplated that they would be there, they didnt build any checks and balances. Host one of the most interesting parts of the book i find is the extent to which it really examines the role of nonprofit groups and sort of organizations that are backed by, groups the present themselves as philanthropic but really are part in an alliance with funders that allows them to influence the political process without necessarily registering as lobbyists. As reported that writes about this i see this agree to myself. Its not the registered lobbying but its all the work on the side that perhaps is playing the greatest role in influencing the process and in a lobbyist cinderblocks in the points to the handiwork of all these affiliated groups which have been lined up by some of the same funders. Just talk about what its like as a u. S. Senator to see the handiwork sort of playing out in a way in which it just creates this appearance of like a groundswell nationally when, in fact, its something thats being courted by relatively small group of players. Talk about that a bit. Guest let me give a specific example. I was the United States attorney in rhode island back with the department of justice sued the Tobacco Industry for behaving in a fraudulent fashion in denying that tobacco caused health harm to human beings. So i remember that very well. The government won the case. It was very clear and i found that in the back of my mind so i was thinking about whether that particular lawsuit brought against the Tobacco Industry back then should maybe be considered as a model for looking at climate denial and the fossil fuel industry. And i wrote an oped to that effect that the Washington Post was good enough to publish. There was a little pause because im not a very prominent senator. Im not one of the celebrities and nobody really paid attention very much for a while, but after a couple of days suddenly one of the things that the estimate is you keep track of your press, and so i noticed suddenly over the next couple of weeks that there were more than 50 oped pieces that appeared around the country attacking me, attacking this idea, and they all came from the same more or less. Come you could scramble the words around a little bit but it was essentially a repeat performance, cookiecutter argument in many cases with the same authors. In every single one you could trace it back to this machinery of special interest front groups, and they came up with a telltale idea like that, theres a First Amendment right of this fossil fuel companies to commit fraud, which is wrong. Thats just legally a falsehood. Forever the First Amendment has ended where fraud began. So the arguments that that wasnt the case or the implication that that wasnt the case was like a telltale sign that this had a kind of Common Thread to it. And then it happened again a couple of months later when i provoked them in a different way. So you could actually kind of ring the bell of this network and watch it respond with multiple dozens of apparently independent and apparently legitimate expressions of opinion that are, in fact, just the beast doing its propaganda work. Host what is wrong with that setup to you . Why does that threaten democracy from the perspective . Guest because people dont know who it is. If it was exxon mobil saying this is our opinion and we are going to fight for it, this is Koch Industries and this is what we believe and what we stand for, which is that we should be able to defraud the public to our Hearts Content about whether Climate Change is real, then we can have that discussion and you know who the parties and interest are and the people understand what the circumstances. When you set up something called the Heartland Institute, which nobody knows what it is, or you set up an institute that is named after the extraordinary American Hero George C Marshall and you just steal his name, put on institute and mark it out as a front group, and you do that 40 or 50 times, you end up with this array of screens that deceive the public as to who is saying this stuff. Because it really helps people understand the story when the know who the protagonists are and if youve been able to hide who the real protagonist is, if theyre hiding behind a curtain pulling strings, and the public as a statement that is not good for democracy. Host so doesnt the left is some of the same things wax your book doesnt talk much about tom steiner or george soros or labor unions or by mental groups. They all have their own networks of nonprofits that have opinion pieces, oped pieces. Whats different about their operation . Guest i think to think their personal and very close to them by Mental Community and the first thing i would say about them and i say to the faces im not speaking out of school, is that there just pathetically badly organized. Everybody goes off and does their own thing and its really rare to get any kind of organization or strategy on an issue. Whereas on the other side this is all very strategically develop because these are not really legitimately different organization. Theyre all just technical tips of the same creature. So theyre deployed to create the illusion that its a lot of Different Things but that aint so. The other big, big, big difference is that for them by mental groups and for labor unions, they are spending down a scarce resource when they engage in this kind of work. Theyve got to run out and try to get donors who believe in theiin thecause, to try to fillt resource back an in so they can stay in business. This is a moneymaking industry. The International Monetary fund has said that the fossil fuel industry get a subsidy in the United States every year of 700 billion, billion with the beat. So for that kind, to protect a subsidy that big is an enormous amount of money you can spend. So it is profitable for the other side to play this again. At our site has to try to find a friend in sympathetic sources to continually replenish their coffers. That creates a massive unfair advantage. So both in resources and in synergy the corporate side is miles ahead of us. Host but theyre using some of the same tactics. I just wonder why youre not more critical of guest not really. Wenwhen lcv, the league of conservation voters does something to us a look, we are the league of conservation voters. Everybody knows who they are. Theres nobody behind him like a gazillion donors and members who believe in their cause. They are not a front group for a particular corporation or a particular industry. Whereas the george c. Marshall institute behind it is like i Big Companies and five big foundations, and its part of an array that they maintain. So you really dont know when somebody from the Heartland Institute writes an oped in the local paper, who they are there on behalf of the window league of conservation voters writes an oped in the local paper and putting knows thats the league of conservation voters. This is and if i middle group, we it. Nothing is being hidden. Host im going to read some language that was used in breitbart to describe you. Litigious ecoloon, kneejerk antimurdoch who is spewing out Conspiracy Theory dribble that make you sound like some hard left attack dog blogger at the center for medical progress. That you are a conspiracy theorist who is an kneejerk antimurdoch type. Whats it like to be on the receiving end of that kind of criticism . Guest well, it shows that im getting through because those sort of last cudgel desperation i guess is that kind of wild invective. They dont say what im saying isnt true. They dont argue on the merits. They just attack me as an attack dog or whatever. I think anybody who reads this book will see that i have taken a very thoughtful approach following legal principles and following pretty clearly understood history and looking around and would have what he sees is plainly happening around us and drawing very logical conclusions from that. So this isnt suggesting that jfk and Marilyn Monroe are in the salt caves in utah, and that Justin Bieber is their love child. This is very, very i think sensibly develop stuff. They just dont want to hear it because they are gaming the system and so they put people out there to try to screw things up a little bit. But it all comes in a days work. Host another thing ive read is criticism that in some way you are influenced by your wife in an inappropriate way. They point out she has a phd in marine science and specialize in coastal biology. And in some way she guest she actually knows knw something about ocean so the fact that the also fuel industry polluting the oceans and we shouldnt demonstrate in a middle School Science lab by combining co2 and saltwater and watching the p. A. To drop and the acidification go up, i kind of hope, not only my wife but a whole lot of other scientists cant have influenced me in the way i argue this chapter its really deadly serious. Stop for a minute about the book and peoples opinions. The ocean is a certifying right now at the fastest rate since human beings have been on the planet. Our co2 is at 400 ppm and it is been basically between 170300 for as long as human beings have been on as long as human beings have been on the planet. So we are rolling in some really dangerous dice and going to places weve never been in history of the species before. Now you see species like the oceans that which nobody cares about except that it is really important and oceanic food chain and they go off the coast of washington or oregon and the measure, 50 of the little Sea Creatures have had severe shell damage and acidification of this is a very Important Role in that. So theres some real stuff that is going on, and i couldnt be more proud to stand with the nasa and noaa and the union of concerned scientists and the American Academy of science and my wife and pointed all that stuff out. Host so lets talk a bit about, you used the term Money Laundering when you talk about groups like the donors trust that our philanthropic groups, private 501 c threes which donate money to other groups. Why do describe them as money laundry efforts . Guest what they do is they take money from whomever. Lets say you are exxon mobil and you want to make a big contribution to the george c. Marshall institute, but you dont want the george c. Marshall institute to be tagged by a member of the press as somebody who takes huge amounts of exxon mobil money. So then you go to a place like donors trust which is set up of exactly one purpose and that is to take money and move it through themselves and delivery deliver it to where the money source wants it to go with the name and identity of the source stripped away. So that now the donation to the george c. Marshall Institute Just says donors trust. Its an extra layer of deceit that helps protect these big powerful corporate interests from people knowing what is being done and that this is actually their hands at work and that some innocent sounding actually quite impressive sounding Public Research group. So it is kind of a nefarious role i think in protecting all these different front groups from accountability for who they are that can be proven by where they get their money. And it severs that link so that the money seems to come from this kind of neutral place called donors trust. It is identity laundering. It washes away the identities of the donors for that except purpose, in my view. Host so how seriously consider the problem of the way that nonprofits are used as a way to influence the political system, even though they are, under law, a nonprofit . How series do you consider that issue . Guest i think its pretty darn serious. First of all, in some cases by virtue of being nonprofits they are allowed to hide their donors into the can i do usually behind him and again that they can speak as if they are independent when, in fact, they are actually the glove over the hand of a particular industry. Second, they are capable of gathering enormous amounts of resources so they can become immensely powerful. And third, they are allowed by Citizens United to get involved in politics and to spend enormous amounts of money in politics. So when americans for prosperity, for instance, a cofunded front group says its going to spend over 700 million in the last election, and does and is now going to spend basic over 400 million up to 400 billion in the coming midterms, that since an incredibly powerful signal to the Political Class to stay out of our way, dont cross us. When you add to that threat they made publicly, like you will be severely disadvantaged, thats a quote, savored a disadvantage, if you. And if they crow about the quote political peril they have caused i think thats a danger sign. You dont know who the player is. Its just this americans for puppy and prosperity . Who are they really for . That i think has been a problem and that segues into the final and really deadly problem of these groups, which is that if they spend money than everybody at least knows americans for prosperity is spending the money and you can look back to see what on earth, try to use Investigative Journalism techniques to find out who they are doing this for. If they just threaten to spend the money come if they just go into the Campaign Manager or the candidate and safe listen pal, you are going to vote this way are these things are us we will spend 10 million on your primary opponent in the next election and you will never see, and we will just like you and you will know who it is because we will be gone before people can identify the front group, thats a really serious threat and nobody will ever see that. It just changes the way politics works and its not visible in the public space and it is wrong. Host im going to read from page 182 when youre discussing some of these things in a couple of paragraphs. Im sure you republican colleagues dont like it too much but think of the republican senators in their core around fenced in. Think of the fences as high and borrowed. Barbed. Think of the gun towers at the corners and the signs on the fence morning political peril. Imagine the bullard amplified voices warning nobody leaves the corral. Try and leave the corral and you will be severely disadvantaged. You will, thats not a analogy. There are munitions roaming in the corral and a lot of inmates are restless. The corral is not a great place to be. Nobody likes to be threatened and bossed around. Nobody likes to play the fool or cater to someone elses whim spirit nobody likes to go against what someone respected voice in the own conscience and homes state universities are telling you. Your point is that the republican senators apparently feel compelled to do so. Talk about that a bit. Guest i said this over and over again. Talking to republican colleagues about Climate Change is like talking to prisoners about escape. They may very well want to do it, but they are really anxious about being caught. So we probably have six to ten republican senators who probably would like to work on a good climate bill. We have wines have sponsored climate bills before Citizens United. We have wines who have run for president on good climate platforms, but nobody will budge your gun at the the fence that getaway car, if you will, what we could do about Climate Change is a carbon fee. We just had three Republican Former secretaries of the treasury endorsed a carbon fee. And the former chairman of walmart and george bush is Economic Advisor chairman, so theres a distinguished group of republicans who have come up with a climate solution and they are not the only ones. Theres a broad array of people who support a revenue neutral they call it border adjusted carbon fee. So between an actual solution that republican support and a bunch of republican senators who have a record of supporting action on climate, whats the problem . The problem is that kill zone that the Citizens United decision has allowed the fossil fuel industry to set up where they say look, with unlimited funds and where going to crush anybody that crosses us. They have been clever about just trying to nail all the republicans to the ground, knowing that that makes it look like its partisan as opposed to just traditional smelly old special interest special pleading, and that they can then use the Republican Party to prevent things from getting done. So they dont torture us on the democratic sick in a near as much as they threaten the republicans. To be a republican and come out on climate is an extraordinarily brave thing to do right now. Host have any of your colleagues come up and say they are offended or suggestion that theyre essentially held hostage by money and that they are denying their true beliefs press on the issue . Is that anything that ever privately converse with you about or confronted you . Guest yeah, i get both that and to make it look, i know im stuck. Keep doing what youre doing. Weve got to get it. I know its the right thing, but right now i just cant do it. So i get a little bit of both, and when i get the first comment, what i try to do is go to the home state universities of the colleague who expressed their disappointment or frustration with me and say look, heres what the universities in your home state say about Climate Change. So if they will say this, may be you should listen, and we go on from there. I try to be polite about it, but weve got a real problem on our hands and the fossil fuel industry is misbehaving in really exceptional ways. Host maybe we could just, i just want to go back to talk a little bit more about tom stier and his role in the Democratic Party and trying to promote measures for Climate Change. You say that groups like thereby middle groups are generally funded by small dollar amounts and they, i cannot get back to why his role is not can you would argue different from the role that saint exxon mobil place on the other side. The dollar amount is putting in our so great and you may have factors that influencing him and his role in the democratic system that are self interested as well. Guest there may be but i havent seen that. I mean, i think tom made an enormous amount of money as a big investor out in california, and he is now out of that business and he is spending his fortune, and one way spinning it to put money into trying to counter the fossil fuel effort by putting someone up on the environmental side of the issue. If i come i dont know exactly what he spent but it think news reports were the last time around it was about 15 million. Well well, americans for prosperity alone spent 750 million. So he is up against forces that are way, way bigger than him. Although he is a very considerable fortune, theres only so many billionaires out there who want to spend on trying to protect the earth and fight back against this industry. And on the other side, the industry has an endless desire to prevent any kind of regulation, and continually spend money at those levels and run these front Group Operations out in front of themselves. I admire what tom is trying to do, and i think you can say okay, youve got big money, billionaire on one side and the fossil fuel industry on the other, bu but i dont think its really that equivalent. Certainly in the politics of this, people who live and die by the politics of this, nobody really sees it as equivalent. Host one of the things again the book does is it walkthrough a range of levels of activity. Interested corporate funded organizations, and so for example, you talk about civil litigation, you talk about the federal court system and you also talk about gerrymandering or the creation of congressional districts in a way to cut influence outcomes. I wanted to ask you to define the term bulk gerrymandering and what it means and what effect do you think it has on democracy in the United States . Guest sure. In the old days gerrymandering started when governor gary of massachusetts arranged to have a legislative district of a massachusetts state senator drawn in such a way that he couldnt possibly be defeated because he was a key political ally of the governor. The newspaper made a cartoon of a shape of the district that looked like a salamander and they called it the gerrymander and thats with the term came from. It didnt take long for people to figure out that if you could do, protection gerrymandering you should also do attack gerrymandering as a people started drawing districts to ruin the chance of opponent, you know, politicians that they didnt like. What the republicans did in a thing called the red map project was to say wait a minute, this is not about these individuals. This is about a delegation. So what they did was they took states like wisconsin, ohio and pennsylvania, swing states, and they drew maps and was democrats were concentrated into very, very heavily democratic preserves. Basically sucking the democrats out of the general population into these high concentration districts. And that allowed him to go to the rest of the state and draw lots of districts where they could win with a comfortable, 55, 58 margin. And so the result was situations like in ohio in 2012, president obama got reelected and ohio, statewide. My friend, senator sherrod brown, democrat, got elected statewide back to the senate. But ohio sent a congressional delegation that year that was i think 13 republicans to five democrats. So they sent a huge counter majoritarian delegation, because they packed the democrats to get into those five districts and that allowed him to carve up the rest of ohio into 13 republican districts. And by doing so they were able to win a house band, and they took pride in that. They sent ou out in membrane ofe said yes what, guys . We lost congress by over a million votes, but we won it by 30 congressmen because we carved up the districts in this way. Unfortunately, five republicans on the Supreme Court had given the green light to do that, told them no matter how bad their behavior was going to be day would never quarrel with that kind of political gerrymanderi gerrymandering. Host the republicans have taken control of the majority of state legislatures and the governors in the United States, why is it not been the right to create congressional districts as they see fit, from your perspective . Guest well, because theres a constitutional principle of one person one vote. And the theory of that is that everybodys vote for more or less count the same. And any deliberate attempt to take people to vote a certain way and isolate them, corral them into highly concentrated districts so that they simply dont have the effect statewide, that they should have in our regular democratic system, is counter majoritarian. When youre dealing with a house, which is supposed to be the majority rules place, you are basically turning upside down one of the most basic democratic principles, which is them that when the most votes wins the election. And i think thats a tough game to start to play. Host you talk about, going to the Supreme Court and you feeling that shows a pattern thats inconsistent with a disinterested neutrality. The Supreme Court, do you feel, it has become more politicized in recent decades and what are the consequences of that, from your perspective . Guest yeah, well, look, ive argued a case in front of the Supreme Court. I spent a lot of time arguing in Appellate Courts and in my state Supreme Court. Its hard to believe and its hard to say that a court has begun to put its thumb on the scale. But when you look at the biggest Business Lobby Group in the country winning by two to one in cases nowadays, and when you look at the predictability of the cases that involve either the ability of republicans to win elections or the balance between corporations and human beings being directed in favor of corporations, or some of the far right wing social issues, they just always, always always seem to tip that way. Its like that needle is always pointing magnetic north. And then you get really good correspondence who covered the Supreme Court for, in some cases, decades, jeff toobin, linda greenhouse, norm ornstein and if all basically throw up their hands and come to the agreement look, this has gotten political. Its blatantly political in many cases because its 54 decision with all the republican appointees lining up to do stuff and before democratic appointees hollering wait a minute, this isnt right. This is a consistent with president. This is inconsistent with originalism. This is a consistent with the text of the constitution. This is a doctrine that you just made up and it doesnt matter because time after time after time, 54, reliable as clockwork, that the go. The pattern i think is becoming really demonstrable. Host the court cant enforce its will people have to believe in the court. And when 6 of people polled think that a human being will get a fair shot in the Supreme Court against a corporation, and 54 think that there will not get a fair shot in the Supreme Court against the corporation, something is wrong i goes beyond just one senators observations. Host one of the things that has occurred in the courts that you talk about and what ive observed as well is the extent to which theres all these amicus briefs, all these intervenors, and they often come with names that appear to be either academic or trade associations, but they are playing a role in helping moving forward cases that seem consistently aligned with the corporate interest that also litigating the same cases. How much of that is happening and is a something that is a phenomena that you think is grown in terms of the role that his point in federal Court Matters how they move forward . Guest it has grown. Its new and its different and its weird, and i dont think Many Americans are aware that it is going on. I think most people believe that what happens in the case tickets to the Supreme Court is that a litigant has a grievance, so they go out and hire a lawyer and a lawyer then takes the court to trial seeking to win that trial for the litigant and eventually the case if it continues to be disputed works its way up to the Supreme Court. Thats not the way hes cases work. Very often you have a group that is paid for by corporate interests to scan the country looking for litigation opportunities to try to bring cases up to what the perceived to be a friend the court, then the lawyers go out and hire the litigant. They found a case in rhode island when i was the attorney general, a group called the Pacific Legal Foundation Came all the way across the country to rhode island to find digital been named dash peninsula, we like your case. We would like to come on and take it to the Supreme Court because we think we can prove a point with it. So he went along with the opposite. He got free lawyering in the next and you know im in the Supreme Court arguing this case. But that is the turn completely backwards and then theres this additional added a coal chamber of amicus briefs from these often front organizations that are telling the republican appointed judges what it is they want. So when republican appointed judges and deliver back to them what it is that they said they want, i think it creates a very unfortunate impression that there is basically a machine being on the court or special interests put up a front group. The front group files the brief, the Supreme Court listens, the benefit goes to special interests and on back to the front group and around and around. As somebody court is supposed to be. Host one of the players that is been participating in litigation which has a lot of these briefs and groups that are funding the writing of memos and the trade associations, it was of the attorney general from oklahoma, scott pruitt, who had 14 lawsuits against the Environmental Protection agency to just last week was confirmed to serve as the administrator at the epa. You vote against scott pruitt. What is your concern about having him running the epa . Guest well, he has never given any indication that he hasnhasthe slightest concern fe environment whatsoever. His predecessor was guiding to an incident in oklahoma. Was Rhode Islands attorney general and assertive with the drew andrew had an appointment to Protection Unit that he ran in his office. Not only that he set up a statewide environmental Prosecution Task force with other agencies and affirmative groups and so forth. When scott pruitt came in he shut all that down and opened up a new appellate unit designed to basically sue on behalf of the fossil fuel industry pics of this was a big step up for the falls of the industry. The utep to go to these front groups that would filed amicus briefs. Now they had an attorney general who would loan them his badge and it would go into court on their behalf. So if you wanted to obscure the hands of industry and add a a veneer of legitimacy to the argument, what better thing could you do to get an actual attorney general to come and do this for you . So with all of that going on i think the prospects for significant of our mental enforcement happening in this epa under its new administrator are really, really small, and i think people around the country where to look very, very carefully picked it like clean air and clean water watch whats going on there. Because i think he will be up to no good. Host one of the things you dont focus a great deal on in the book is sort of how to get out of the situation that you think we are in . Whats the solution . Whats the pathway forward . So maybe take some time to, two or three to four ideas, how to emerge from this place that you think would end up in . Guest well, a simple way would be to pass the disclose act thats been in the senate four years now that would require the dark money that comes into our elections, the money but nobody knows where its from, to actually be reported. Its pretty simple. If you contribute more than 10,000, youve got to report it. If it ends up in politics, doesnt matter how many groups you longer through on the way through spending and election, you have to follow it all the way through. It takes the fun out of hiding behind all these screen groups because you end up having to disclose any way. That would be very important. I frankly think the corporations should not have a political role in this country. The Founding Fathers set up nothing for the Corporate America to have a political role. They assumed that america and the elections that we run would all be decided and run by human beings. And corporations committed his s landscape and a very, very successful creatures, very successful predators against regular human beings. The backing them out i think more or less completely would be significant. There are various campaignfinance ways of doing that, but ultimately as you look around at all the alternative fax and fake news and corporate propaganda that is floating around out there, i think the ultimate thing that come through for us always in the past has been for the American People to step up. When we took a look at the Cuyahoga River birdin burning we decided enough on the pollution stuff and which install we would look at it and it was a big Inflection Point and we passed a bunch of laws. But mostly we changed the way we thought about pollution and environment. Without a similar thing with our guys. I grew up being, eating tv dinners and canned vegetables, also mostly great stuff. Weve learned wait a minute, Health Food Stores of gone from being weird places that you had to member to join to being like whole foods with trillions of dollars in business. So we had another Inflection Point there. When so much of our public debate is now the information equivalent of pollution and junk food, i think we need to make that step as a people. When we do we will be a better educated citizenry, more active citizenry. Will be a more aware and knowledge citizenry of the push back against these powers that nobody really invited into our politics but are now dominant. Host have you considered reaching out to President Donald Trump who was elected, they say campaign talking about trying to decrease the power of special interest in washington . Is this something you thought about doing . Have you tried doing it . Is it possible to attempt to do that . Guest yeah, i dont know. I dont know the people around him. Ive written some things and said something publicly that i hoped might trigger a response if so what is missing in the white house. But its been really discouraging, because he was a a guy who came up a very populist, Disruptive Campaign and he couldve easily been a force for really good change in washington. But instead its Goldman Sachs at treasury, its the polluters and epa. Its the forprofit education industry at the department of education. Over and over again the most kind of nefarious interests in the area has actually been given control over the regulator. And its about as antipopulist as you can get. So seeing that signal has been really discouraging, because i hoped we could of had conversations like that. We are still looking for to doing things that he promised on the campaign trail like getting rid of the carried interest exception that gives huge head find you all units lower tax rates than brick masons and figure out how to bring down the cost of pharmaceuticals. Hedge fund we pay the highest pharmaceutical price and will and they say they need to charge us more to do their research, but it are car compass it will charge americans more farc are savory else in the world so we can to our safety research, or boeing civil charge americans more than anybody else in the world, we want to make and save them a need to charge for the safety research, nobody would accept that. Its nutty. There are areas where we can push back and i hope that he will pick them up. He said them on the campaign trail. Lets see if he is true to his promises. Host what you like to be in congress right now were basically or in the american political system even if you look at with the exception of maybe the New England States on the west coast, where democrats have so little power to all the things your talk about most of whats in your book, there is little prospect for actually implementing the change are talking about, whats that like to be in the senate right now in such a place . Guest well, its a little frustrating because we went into the election expecting to be in the majority in the senate and expecting to see president clinton in the white house. And expecting to have an agenda to think what it in a very good one for the American People. Instead would you do with a very unusual president who has created enormous amount of alarm both in congress, among republicans, and among democrats, among americans were out protesting in the streets like never before. And worldwide as people look to america for leadership and wonder what did he mean by that . So its a bit of an eerie time right now, but i take a lot of confidence in the fact that ultimately the power in america is in the hands of the people in america. And people still do, and vote in the 2018 elections in any kind of sympathy with the expressions that we are hearing from the public right now, well, we will have a democratic speaker of the house at least and we will be able to begin to push back and begin to try to get some of his public business done. Host practically speaking, you are a United States senator. You still live part of your life in rhode island. How did you manage to figure out time to write a book while you weryouare doing her job as a ser and as a husband and father . Talk about that a bit. Guest well, its a little harder than i thought. Some of the different chapters began with the thing about these issues as a senator. So i wrote articles on regulatory capture and ive been giving a lot of speeches on the fossil fuel industries role in climate denial. And i spoken about the court and the extent to which its tendencies seem to run towards corporate and republican interest now. So a certain amount of this sort of stuff i learned and gathered in the ordinary course of the work, by sitting down to write it out was not easy. But weekends and late at night before going to sleep and on that wonderful 55 minute plane flight between washington and providence, turns out if you pac steadily away at it you can get stuff done. Host have you ever talked to joni ernst about your suggestion that she essentially was a creation of the Koch Brothers . What was a response to that . Guest no, i havent. I just use it as an example. Its really less about her i think that about that series of different interventions by their front groups that escorted her along her way. She is that the focus of that story. Shes the passenger. The focus of that story is that the Koch Brothers had this very elaborate setup in which they basically handoff at different stages of the election there support efforts so that they can keep themselves underwater and not be visible to the public as they support candidates. And to me thats the heart of the story. Host what is your advice for read or some endemic in public thats just what a watching the political process point out . What kind of advice would you have for them as their feeling frustrated or powerless at this point . Guest i would say that, for so everything comes back to voters. And citizenship is more than just sitting there watching tv ads and facebook posts that are designed to influence you. Youve got to step up a little bitter being a citizen is being a consumer are not the same thing. The second thing that i would say is that we should not lose faith in the american system of democratic government that we fought wars and survive depressions and centuries of past protecting us. And so what is wrong with it isnt that government itself. What is wrong with it is the fact that this corporate force has intruded into it so that its not responsive to human beings any longer because you are such a small signal in the overall noise from Corporate America, from corporate money that theyre really not heard. So dont lose faith in the system if you dont feel youre not heard. Figure out why it is that the system is not hearing too. I think you can read the book and if you take a look around you you will come to the conclusion that you can pull corporations back out of their political role and put them into the economic role where the event so incredibly valuable for humankind, but not in a political role, that if human being started running our democracy again we would all feel a lot better for everybody. Host thank you for spending the time with us to talk about the book and guest thank you for having. I appreciate it. Host we will watch and see what goes on. Thank you. Guest we will see. This is cspan2. Cspan2. Heres our primetime lineup. First up at 6 45 p. M. Eastern that all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. This is Henrietta Leavitt who was looking at how we will get to these magnificent images, who was looking at images taken from south america. Because a whole sky had to be covered. There was a second observatory built in peru to photograph the start of the southern hemisphere. And she was looking at images of the clouds and she discovered a couple thousand variable stars and made a fundamental discovery about the pattern of variation, that the stars that took the longest time to go through their cycles tended to be the brightest stars. And she figured all of the stars she was looking at were roughly the same distance away. So the ones that looked brighter really were brighter. And that observation led to the first usable yardstick for measuring what we would call now to lactic distances, intergalactic distances in space. Her work enabled the size of the milky way to be determined, i may be getting ahead of the slides here. The milky way was not the only galaxy in the universe, that the universe in fact, consisted of multiple galaxies
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