Our Dark and Twisted Future

executive action. They have come through one place, and that is our legal system, through the courts. Do you know who knew that and with very aware of that fact, Mitch McConnell when he orchestrated a plan to steal a Supreme Court seat, a Supreme Court appointment from Barack Obama by refusing to give Marrett Garland a hearing for over a year. No pushback from Democrats, No, let's take Mitch McConnell to court. It was all, let's play nice and

do nothing. And because of that, we now have a six to three Supreme Court because Donald Trump got not one, not two, but three Supreme Court fucking justices. Right now, Mitch McConnell couldn't have known how the election in twenty was going to go, or did he right? Did he know what the election was going to do in twenty sixteen? Did he have any idea? No one knows because there's

never any investigation into these people. But the reality is is that Mitch McConnell and Republicans have always paid attention to the courts, and for the last close to fifty years, they have been working to overturn a woman and people with uterus's ability to decide when, how and if they start a family, when, how and if they have a child. What I have always found so frustrating about Republicans over these decades is the fact that they don't actually give

a shit about kids. They don't give a fuck about your families. If they did, then they would vote for the policies like family leave, like child tax credits, like any support that you can provide for children and families you would do. We wouldn't have a child poverty or a child hunger in this country if Republicans actually gave a shit about kids outside of the uterus. But they don't. And you know what's frustrating is that they've never been

called out on their bullshit. They have never been made to come to ask and say, how is it that you talk about defending life in the life of a child, and yet when children are born you do nothing to support their well being in them turning into healthy, happy, productive citizens. You're all hands off after that. So the reality is, folks, that we are moving into really precarious and dark times in this nation as it pertains to

women's rights, reproductive rights, and health. Abortion access is going to be a thing of the past. While you have countries like Mexico, for instance, who has just approved abortion in their country, we are in America regressing backwards in every single facet, in every single avenue, from voting rights

to abortion rights and everything in between. So on today's show, I'm very happy to bring on for this Powerhouse Week of Women, to bring on my friend MSNBC legal analyst and former federal prosecutor under Obama, Joyce White Vans, who will walk through with us all of the things that we need to be paying attention to with regard to where our laws are going to what is going to happen in June when the Supreme Court finally decides on the Mississippi case, which is going to outlaw Rov Wade,

and then we are going to have abortion asylums, sanctuaries right in dotted across these United States until when until a Republican takes control of the White House for the final time and decides to withhold federal funding from states that's still grant abortion. Right. Like, folks, where this is headed is so dark. It is going to make the Handmaid's Tale look like a fairy tale, look like a children's story, because what we are facing in our reality

is so much starker than any of us can imagine. Now, Joyce will say something that I think is important, which is her belief that she thinks that Republicans are going to overreach and that what is going to happen before midterms. Before mid terms, we're going to see Rob Wade overturned, and then women are going to march to the polls. But here's the thing that I continue to be on the fence. About fifty two percent of white women voted

for Donald Trump. Right, So these women who in fact go and access abortion care then turn around and vote against other people's ability to get the same care that they just got in secret. So I don't know if there actually is enough women with good goddamn sense, enough people with good goddamn sense in this country to realize what a dark and twisted future we are presenting without

women having bodily autonomy. Right, So I think that while I want to believe that it is going to unfortunately take us losing our rights and our freedoms in mass because let's be clear, if you're a person of color, you already know what time it is in this country, right. You already know that you are on borrow time, any time that you get pulled over by police, any time that there are horrible draconian laws that are rolled out, right, You're we're always at the bottom of the totem pole.

So we already know what time it is. But for those people who are still holding on to privileges that are not granted to people of color and people from marginalized communities, when all of their rights start to go is when folks will start to act. But my feeling is that it's going to be too fucking late, right, It's going to be too late, and then what then?

What do we do? So I find myself these days, as you know, stories continue to you know, make news that we haven't been vigilant all along, that it is the complacency that comes with winning rights, that you assume that those that are held bent on oppression will somehow give up. But what we have seen is that Republicans don't give up. Actually, they will continue the same fight

with the same playbook for decades. It is the rest of us that think, oh, well, nothing's going to happen to Roe v. Wade because we've been crying wolf for so long. Well, maybe part of the strategy in twenty sixteen should have been to talk about the Supreme Court and to paint the actual picture of where we are

right now. Would have been for Democrats when Mitch McConnell was going against the Constitution and not providing the black president with the access to appoint as sitting Supreme Court justice, that we would have took that motherfucker a court right and not just said, oh, okay, that's fine, I guess we don't get a Supreme Court justice, like we just fucked the country because of our desire to play nice with people who would rather beat you to death right

then play in this play by the rules. So I don't know where we are headed. But this conversation with Joyce was incredibly illuminating because there is a lot at stake. There is a lot that is coming down decisions that are going to be made this summer by this conservative sixty three Supreme Court that is going to radically change America. And that has always been their goal, is for there to be a radical shift. And they knew that they didn't have the policies or the platform to be able

to get voted in to do these things. They knew that all they had to do was take over the courts and create an apartheid system in America and then all would be well. And I'll tell you I've said this before. Things are going to get a lot darker before they get better in this country. They are going to get bloodier before they get better in this country. And I want folks to buckle up right and understand that we have a long haul in front of us. Right.

This arc that we've been walking on that we thought was just going to casually begin to bend towards justice is not. It is not happening. If we want justice, we are going to have to fight for it in a variety of ways. Because they're not giving up the fight to persecute women in this country, people of color, queer people, Muslims. I mean, I am concerned once again about our desire to fight for democracy and fight for freedom abroad and not recognize how it is being pulled

away one decision at a time in this country. So coming up next, dear friends, my conversation with my friend Joyce White Vans. Folks, I am so happy to welcome back to wogay f our friend Joyce White Vans. You know her. She is an MSNBC legal analyst. She's also a professor at the University of Alabama Law School and a former federal prosecutor under President Obama. Joyce, it is so good to have you back. It's so nice to hear your voice. I'm missing you in person, I know,

I know, I want to know. You know. There's been, Joyce, just so much legal news. I mean, every day is another crazy headline, whether it's coming out of states like Florida and Texas that are waging a war against uteruses and reproductive health, whether it is another persecution or lack thereof of persecution around those involved in the January sixth insurrection.

I want to kind of start with the Handmaid's tale that Republicans are hell bent in turning America into Give us your insight into what you were thinking over the last couple of months, as Texas and Florida are currently volleying to be the worst state for women in the country. Yeah, you know, it's a real race to the bottom. And I can fess I laughed a little bit when you said Handmaid's tale, but only because our choices right now are laughing or crying right right. Women are not in

a good place in this country. We are, of course not alone, and I think the important first thing to say is that we should all be thinking about allyship now between communities of women who are under attack, between the black community, immigrants communities, the LGBTQ community, and especially the trans community. It's an important time for everybody to stick together. But the attacks on women are particularly pernicious because you know, we thought we were done with this.

Roe versus Wade, which gives abortion rights is fifty years old. I fully expect that row will be reversed this year when the Supreme Court hands down its opinion in a Mississippi case. Parts of our lives that we have really come to take for granted, for instance, you're right to obtain birth control. I think those rights too, show some increasing fragility under the lines of legal reasoning that this newly conservative six three Supreme Court is willing to use.

So let me just give you the recent update, Danielle. Just this week more bad news. We all know about Texas's anti abortion bill. This is this vigilante justice style bill where Texas says, well, maybe we passed this law, but we're not responsible for enforcing it. Because what we've done is created a private right of action for anybody out there in the country who learns that a woman is getting an abortion. After six weeks, that person has a right to sue anyone who enables that woman in

getting the abortion, and the monetary damages are serious. And so what's happened is that there is no longer functionally a right to an abortion in Texas. Women there have to go out of state. So up to the plate

steps Idaho, which this week passed a copycat bill. Tennessee has a new abortion bill that's modeled after the Texas bill, and something I guess I'll stop here, but I'll just say we need to think about how these bills function on the margins, and really the sort of poor it could inflict upon women, because you could have a rapist impregnate a minor, and either the miner's family or the rapist's family could sue the woman if she sought an abortion.

Can you imagine forcing an eleven year old girl to carry a fetus the product of a rape to term. I just I mean, even the description of that choice is so disturbing to me, and should be so disturbing

to every person inside of this country. That we are at a place right now where we're watching countries like Mexico, very religious, Catholic based countries like Mexico pass abortion throughout the country, and here in America, where we have always professed right to have these liberties and these justices and all of these things, and yet one can't we don't pay women what they're worth, and two, we tell them that they don't have the control over their own bodies.

And so when we are looking at these laws, I think that what is really jarring right now is the way that they are being written. Joyce, they are not being written in a way that allows for straight and clean prosecution. I feel as if Republicans and conservatives have gotten hip to figuring out that they can write things in a certain way that provides just as much threat

without it actually triggering action. Can you talk about the ways in which the law in Texas that the vigilante law that you just mentioned, was written, and how the Tennessee law that was just announced, how that has been written as well. Yeah, I think this is such an important point. And when you talk about drafting laws, of course, we're the country that couldn't manage to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have guaranteed women writes as citizens.

So I guess that's the baseline that we start as even in the best of times, we weren't able to adopt that provision because hahaha, women were fully equal in our society and it was unnecessary. So you're dead on the money about how these laws are being written. And this isn't by accident. This is a deliberate effort to craft laws that can survive muster, can survive review in

the courts. And so, for instance, the Texas statute as I've mentioned, has this vigilante provision, and it would have clearly been at least under current law as long as Roe is good law, it would have been illegal if you had flat out prohibited abortion after six weeks. That's not what Texas does. They write this very vague statute.

No one's actually sure what it means, but it suggests that people, wherever they live, can sue any one doctor, maybe an uber driver, right who gets a woman to a facility where she's going to receive un abortion, and any of those people are subject to suit. The lawsuits. You know, first off, you have to pay to defend the lawsuit. If you're sued, that's not inconsequential. But the damages are ten thousand dollars. And if you've got multiple people out there suing you for ten thousand dollars at

a time, this ultimately just becomes a real barrier. And so here's the ultimate expression of the uncertainty factor. What is or isn't an abortion after six weeks. In a recent case, a woman is having a miscarriage in Texas and she needs to have a DNC to save her life. And in the middle of the miscarriage, the doctors put her on a plane because they're afraid to perform the abortion in Texas because they're not sure what their status is under the law. And so you know, these medical

flights too, are very expensive. I don't know exactly how much this one was, but you see figures in the tens of thousands of dollars for these unplanned, life saving medical flights. And it really I have to believe that if the folks who wrote these laws thought through all of these consequences, maybe they would back off a little bit.

But perhaps I'm being too kind because these are people, after all, who are willing to not have exceptions for incest or for danger to the mother written into these laws. You know, today in America, some of the same folks that are protesting being forced to wear a mask. I think it's okay to force a minor to carry a fetus to term. I just you know, Joyce, you have

been in this game for so long. Has there been another time in our recent modern history where we have seen such a legal assault on reproductive health, on abortion for women. Has there been another time in scent history that we've seen this kind of aggressive backlash. No, And you know, this is sort of the perfect storm. This was the product of at least fifty years of conservative activism on the issue of abortion, which allowed the Republican Party to convince its voters to vote for the most

marginal of candidates. Not naming any names, but Donald Trump comes to mind. In their effort to control the federal courts, and they have been successful. There is now a six three conservative majority on the Supreme Court. That's a safe vote. So the Conservatives can and have lost the chief Justices vote on cases and still come out with a majority, which means you now have activism at the local, state and federal level that's not friendly to women. I mean,

what are we going to do? What do you see? I mean this decision, the Mississippi Court decision, which is essentially going to overrule Roe v. Wade, which we all thought was you know, cemented into our into our laws, into our country. It is not. What we are recognizing now is that what we thought was a law of the land is no longer. And I tell people that conservatives will start at abortion because it's low hanging fruit, fruit that they have been looking to pick for the

last forty five fifty years. But it's not the only thing that they will come for. Marriage equality that they will come for potentially, you know, the resegregation of schools that they will come for things the justices and the civil rights that have been received over the past several decades have come through the courts, and so what is the recourse here? What is the pushback that can happen and should happen that we're not seeing right now. It's such a hard question. I wish I had good answers

that I think. The best one is that abortion is a state by state issue. That's the view that the conservatives have always ascribed to. You know, I think a nationwide abortion ban would run a foul of some of their jurisprudence, although it's important to say that their jurisprudence is inconsistent with when you're in the area of abortion, and rules that apply in other cases don't seem to apply when you have a results oriented abortion opinion brewing.

But the real answer is to preserve the right to abortion in as many states as possible. That's unfortunate because it means women have to travel to preserve that specific right. There will be states that will take a stab at

outlying travel outside of their state. I think that that's clearly unconstitutional, and Missouri legislators suggested this week that she would propose such a bill, there a lot of pushbout, So I guess the answer is working to make sure that your right to vote in your state, and in your city and in your county is preserved. And of course we live in a challenging time for the right to vote as well. Oh Joyce, there is no good news. I want to make a quick transition to go to

the latest with the January sixth insurrection. You know, recently it came to light that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Jenny Thomas, was present at the Ellipses the day of the insurrection. That she has also provided resources that are being discovered, paying for buses for insurrectionists to get to Washington, DC. We are learning so much over the last several months of the investigation at the Helm the House Commission, over five hundred interviews, subpoenas, thousands

of papers of paperwork. Where is the Department of Justice on this? And has the commission, the White the House January sixth Commission taken this as far as they can go? So it's such a interesting question, you know. The first, maybe the most important thing to say is we don't know for sure what's going on at DJ. I don't see some of the signs that I would expect to see if DJ was conducting a long term grand jury investigation, for instance, she would expect to see witnesses. You know,

DJ subpoenas of vunca trump to the grand jury. She's not going to go in there quietly and testify, one wouldn't think, And so you might hear a little bit of noise. But there also are signs of life at DJ. Of course, they did go ahead and subpoena phones of one of the crack and lawyer's Sydney Powell. There have

been other signs of life like that. And Merrick Garla and since his speech on January five, has been saying all of the right things, the sorts of things that if you're a former DOJ prosecutor like me, tell you that there is a commitment to investigation. He says, we'll follow the facts in the law no matter where they lead, no matter whether you were there on January sixth or not. And that suggests that there is some live investigation going on. And you know, I think that there are two very

interesting things going on at the same time. One is the January sixth Committee. They are doing fabulous work, and they are. They are stacked top to bottom with former prosecutors. The two lead counsel for the committee are both former US attorneys, one a Republican, one a Democrat, and committee's staff is filled out with people who are former prosecutors. These are folks who know how to run an investigation,

and we see the results that they're getting. We'll see more when they have their public hearings, and I suspect that those will be extraordinarily compelling. And at the same time, DOJ, in its January sixth prosecutions, is starting to move up the chain. You know, that's how prosecutors work. Typically, you start with the people who are the least culpable. You try to get them to cooperate and tell you about

people who are more criminally culpable. Well, DJ has worked its way up to the leadership of some of the organizations that were involved on January sixth. First, there was the seditious conspiracy indictment for the Oathkeepers, inviting their leader Stuart Rose right, a Yell educated lawyer, which is sort of a weird detail. Seditious conspiracy is the most serious

charge DOJ has brought it. It involves an element of violence, but they've also indicted members of the Proud Boys right sating their leader, Enrique Tario, and this is essentially for obstruction of Congress and a conspiracy to obstruct Congress. And evidence in these cases would seem to place dj awfully close to that Willard War Room where so much was going on in advance of January sixth, and who knows where that's going to lead. It could lead to the

former president, it might not. Their legal issues here currently in the DC courts, there's a challenge to whether this obstruction of Justice statute dj IS can be used in these cases, and that's something that'll have to be decided in the appellate courts. So there's still a lot of

spinning wheels going on. You know. One of the things that was brought to the attention of the public as it pertained to the Proud Boys was, and this was reported by the New York Times recently, that there is more evidence that they had plans to take over the house buildings, the Senate buildings, the Supreme Court, that there were plants right much in the same way that we know that John Eastman put together that power point. Let me push back on that just a little bit. We

don't know all of the details of this yet. But in Tario's possession there was a document, you know, that had seventeen seventy six at the top, which other figures in the insurrection used, and it was a plan and it doesn't specifically mention the capital, but it does talk about how you might take over some of the buildings that you have named in DC, and it talks about strategies that were actually used on January six like opening the doors and letting the crowds in first to create

a distraction right before the established groups go in. But we don't know who wrote this document. We don't know how Tario got it, although there's some suggestion that it may have come from one of his girlfriends who also had a roger Stone connection. If that turns out to be true, and that's a big if. I don't think that that's been established yet, that could be an interesting linkage. We need to know a lot more about this document and who authored it, how serious it's intended usage was.

It doesn't actually go into effect on January sixth, so just lots more to learn here, you know, Joyce, there are a lot of people, including myself, who read and look at the mountain of evidence that is against Donald Trump his allies, and we say, there are people that are sitting in rikers right now with you know, on conspiracy charges on oh, I think that there was something in your backpack on you know, on so little and yet there are mountains of evidence against these people, and

yet we're slow walking right And so I want you to provide me and the listeners with some understanding from from your advantage point as to why we're not seeing just parades of indictments, why we're we're we're dotting eyes and crossing tea and highlighting everything to make sure that we get things right. But when it comes to the prosecution of black and brown people, we just lock them

up and throw away the key. So can you provide us with just some understanding as to the pace that we are seeing right now and the amount of evidence that is being uncovered. The pace is frustrating. I think it's frustrating to all of us, especially because we don't know what the ending is going to look like. But let me try to give at least a little bit of explanation. Evidence in and of itself is meaningless in the criminal justice sense, because evidence only matters if it

helps you prove a crime. Criminal law in this country's statutory that means that there has to be a statute that someone has violated. And these statutes have a lot of different elements. You know, as a prosecutor, you might have four or five six things that you have to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt using evidence that's admissible in trial in order to get a conviction.

And obviously the federal and the state system are different things, and I'm speaking just about the federal system, but one of the chief elements that virtually every crime has included in it is the state of mind that the defendant has to have acted with. And bear with me, Now, this is sort of criminal law one oh one. For some crimes, the defendant simply has to have known what they were doing. So a defendant has to have knowingly possessed drugs, right as long as you can establish through

some means or another. And you know, if the defendants marijuana bangs, the marijuana in his pockets, then he probably knew that they were there. Those cases are easier to convict in than, for instance, a conspiracy case or an Instruction of Congress case where the government has to prove intent. You have to prove what the defendant intended to do, and it's tough to get inside of somebody's head. We do this typically with circumstantial evidence. That's really the best

way that you do this. But you know, something that's happened in the modern era is suries expect to see something better than circumstantial evidence. They want to hear phone calls,

they want to see emails or text messages. And so when you have someone like Donald Trump who's so scrupulous about avoiding email, and when you've got twelve jurors who you have to convince beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction, and when you know how dangerous it would be to indict, to go to trial and to get an acquittal, imagine what the country would look like after that. Then I think that helps us understand why DJ, if in fact it's pursuing these investigations, is moving slowly and

waiting to see what happens. And then the last thing that I'll say about that, there is this legal issue which really gives me pause. I think the statute clearly applied in this case. There are ten judges in the District of Columbia, nine or ten who have permitted cases to go forward under it. But there is this one judge with a contrary ruling, and that will go up to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It will make it to the Supreme Court. I suspect

one way or record the other. Either the Court will refuse to hear the issue and the Court of Appeals ruling will be the law of the land, or the Supreme Court may decide to hear it. Profecutors don't like that level of uncertainty. And remember that Merritt Garland clock doesn't tick for the midterm elections like the House Committee's investigation does Merritt Garland. Unless something crazy happens and Joe Biden is impeached and there's a new president, which I

think is just not going to happen. You're never going to get the votes in the Senate to do that. You know, Merritt Garland has got at a minimum two more years after this to finish up. And this may be something that's better left until after the midterms are behind us. You know, Joyce, I listen to you and I hear you and the and the rationale, and I just don't know, because I have to be honest that if Democrats, which is you know, based on the polling right now looks like we will in fact lose the

House and lose the Senate. I don't think that Merritt Garland will have those two years left. I think that he will be hauled in before committees by Republicans. I think it'll make Benghazi look like a playground picnic in comparison to General goes through that. You know, Eric Holder went through that, and it doesn't slow down DJ's work. So I'm not saying that if I was the Attorney general, this is the sort of pace that I would want to see, right, and may well be things that we

just don't know about. I mean, so much of this, you know, just depends on the ending, right what happens at the end. If we knew what the ending looked like, maybe we'd be happier with the slow pace. It's really tough, I think, to watch this and to see all of this and to not know what the outcome is going

to be. Because Donald Trump has managed to elude justice for so many things, so many times, and the notion that he would elude justice for an insurrection, right for interfering or trying to interfere with the smooth transfer of power in this country. That's really unconscionable, it really is. Joyce, oh white Van, thank you so much for making the time to join us again on Woke a F. We love your perspective and having you and we really appreciate

your time. Well, thank you for indulging an old prosecutor. That is it for me today here on Woke a F. As always power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke. Us fuck