The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: March 25, 2022

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

On a four-day trip through Europe, President Biden is sending the message that the US and allies are united in their response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But a month after the invasion began, it's not clear that diplomatic pressures are working to deter Russia's aggression. Also, Clarence Thomas's wife Ginni Thomas repeatedly urged then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The news is sparking questions about whether the Supreme Court justice should recuse himself from future cases related to the January 6 insurrection. This episode: Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, State Department correspondent Michele Kelemen, and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Andrew Thompson in Miami Beach, Florida, and I am sitting on the beach enjoying one last morning of spring break. This podcast was recorded at 1.08 p.m. on Friday, March 25th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. I'll be back in Indiana in PA school once again. All right, here's the show. Wait, didn't Miami declare a state of emergency about spring break because it's been so insane and violent and terrible? People are pent up. They need that spring break. I need that spring break. Yes, I am looking forward to mine. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And we also have Michelle Kellerman, who covers the State Department

and Diplomacy for NPR. Hey, Michelle. Hi, everyone. Tam, you're joining us from Poland, where President Biden has been on a European swing meeting with NATO allies about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden spoke to reporters yesterday in Brussels. NATO has never, never been more united than it is today. Putin is getting exactly the opposite what he intended to have as a consequence of going into Ukraine. Tam, from the start of the conflict, the Biden administration has been really clear. Its focus has been keeping NATO allies united. So far, that seems like it's been a success.

Well, that has been the message of this trip. If there is one word that is the buzzword that the Biden administration wants us using, it is unity. And they certainly got that picture yesterday, right? They got it repeatedly. They got what's known as a family photo where the leaders of NATO stood side by side, you know, showing their unity. Then there was a family photo with the G7 leaders, the leading economies, again, standing side by side, looking united. And they came out with, you know, a series of measures, a strong statement, all of these things sort of holding the allies together. And, you know, President Biden said coming into this that it isn't a sure thing. And his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, today said, you know, it's easy at the beginning. In the first

couple of weeks, there's a lot of momentum and momentum can breed unity. But what happens after weeks drag into months? And so part of the point of this trip is laying the groundwork for that. And, you know, in the in the months to come, we will know whether it's been a success. Michelle, this was a pretty high stakes trip for the president. Yeah, I mean, as he as you said, you know, you know, he's trying to keep the momentum going here. I mean, one of the problems has been that, you know, the U.S. and its allies imposed really tough sanctions, came out strong. But it's not clear how much they can convince Putin to back off this war. The Russian leader has shown that he's really willing to risk a lot of blood and treasure and doesn't seem to be bothered so far from this diplomatic isolation that Tam is talking about. So the idea of this trip was to show that this world is going to

remain united. This is a senseless war that Putin started. And to keep up the pressure and to keep him isolated. But it's, you know, as this drags on, we'll see how much that can that can last. One of the headlines from Biden's press conference was he said, they would respond in kind if Russia uses chemical weapons in Ukraine. Michelle, is that of significant concern right now in this conflict? They have been worried about it. And one of the things is that you're hearing the Russians, for instance, bring up concerns about chemical and biological programs in Ukraine, making kind of outlandish accusations about Ukraine on the world stage. And, you know, what the Biden

administration has been saying is, look, it's Russia that has done these things in the past. It's Russia that keeps planning these false flag attacks. And I think, you know, the way they're talking about this chemical weapons, potential chemical weapons use is really kind of what they did before this war started, warning the world that Vladimir Putin's government might do this, just like they said before, they were going to invade Ukraine. And the world has to be ready to respond, you know, in a united way and a united front if he does. And let me just jump in and add that the administration sort of walked back the in-kind term because the U.S. is not going to respond in kind. That is clear. The U.S. is not going to use chemical or biological weapons. But what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said today is that the allies did talk about scenarios, about what happens if Putin does use chemical or biological weapons.

What happens if, you know, there's a stray missile that ends up in Poland? What are they going to do in any number of scenarios? Now, of course, they did not answer repeated questions about, well, okay, so what are you going to do? That's not something they're going to reveal. They've also been highly resistant whenever asked, what is your red line? They don't want to go there because red lines only end up in, you know, embarrassment, walkbacks, trouble, political trouble. The administration also announced that the U.S. will accept 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. More than 10 million Ukrainians have had to leave their homes since the war started, although most of them are choosing to stay inside Europe. Tim, how hard do you think that's going to be to implement?

You know, just last week on the podcast, we were talking about how the U.S. refugee infrastructure isn't doing so great. I mean, they're still struggling with placing Afghan refugees. Right. And the U.S., President Biden lifted the refugee cap, but they haven't come anywhere near meeting it or being able to resettle that many people, get them through the process. One interesting thing here is that it's not just through refugee status that these 100,000 people could potentially come to the U.S. They could come through other means of legal immigration, which might be easier to get over that hurdle than to go through the formal refugee process. I'll just say, though, that, you know, the Trump administration did a lot of damage to the asylum refugee program in the United States. And then you also had COVID and just a huge

backlog in processing visas, doing all the health and security checks that are necessary to bring people in. So, you know, there is a lot of work to be done, repair work to be done here at home. Sure thing. You know, we've seen all these developments. I would also note that the U.S. put out a statement acknowledging that Russian troops have committed war crimes. If you add all of these up, do any of these steps sort of change the basic posture of the U.S. response so far? I think the most fundamental posture of the U.S. response so far? I think the most fundamental part of the U.S. response is that U.S. troops will not put boots on the ground, if you will, in Ukraine, that this is Ukraine's fight, but the U.S. and NATO allies is they are desperately trying to avoid escalating the conflict or becoming actively involved in a head-to-head conflict with Russia. Instead, some of the harshest economic sanctions that have ever been levied in the history of the world on Russia right now. And I wonder, is this question of diplomacy, like, are there still options on the table for diplomatic efforts that they haven't

used yet? Or is diplomacy just not doing what it needs to do right now? Well, for instance, you know, the UN Security Council can't really do anything. Russia is a permanent member. And so it can veto anything there as it has done. The General Assembly has passed a couple of resolutions overwhelmingly, but you have dozens of countries that abstain from the vote. really take sides in a conflict that they worry is going to just increase fuel and food prices around the world. But you do have countries stepping in like Israel, like Turkey, who are talking to both sides, and you have the Ukrainians talking directly with the Russians. U.S. officials say that's going to be the, you know, where this is resolved eventually, but they're not seeing that Putin is under enough pressure, essentially, to negotiate a fair deal. All right, we'll leave it there. Michelle, thanks as always.

Thank you. All right, we'll take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the political activities of his wife, Ginny, when we get back. And we're back and Justice Correspondent Kerry Johnson is with us. Hey, Kerry. Hey, Sue. So Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas just this morning was released from a week-long stay in the hospital over an infection of unknown origin. We really don't know more about his health condition than that. There is also some news that broke overnight involving the political activities of his wife,

Ginny Thomas, and her communications with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in support of efforts within the Trump White House to fraudulently try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Now, we'll get into those communications in a second. But Tam, I think it's worth just backing it up for a minute and explaining Ginny Thomas's long history in political activism. Right. And I think that political activist may be Republican activist may not be quite the right term for what she is now. But, you know, she started very mainstream, like Chamber of Commerce, Heritage Foundation, sort of mainstream Republican conservative activism.

And in recent years, though, she has sort of followed the Tea Party wave and then followed even to further extremes so that in these text messages that have been published, she is in the sort of far right fringe of Republican thinking. She is definitely not anywhere near the mainstream at this point. She is trafficking in the kind of conspiracy theories that you might find on YouTube or Facebook that might get taken down. In fact, some of these things have been taken down. So CBS and the Washington Post last night reported that Ginny Thomas had texted with Meadows repeatedly over the course of several weeks. We know this because they obtained it from the House committee that's been investigating the January 6th attack

on the Capitol. There are 29 text messages in total. Tam, would you like to do the honors and just read a couple of them to give our listeners a sense of what they sounded like? Sure. Help this great president stand firm, Mark. You are the leader with him who is standing for America's constitutional governments at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the left is attempting the greatest heist of our history. She moves on from there. And Sidney Powell is a lawyer who, for a short period of time, was working on President Trump's effort to overturn the election results. But eventually, even she was sort of put at a distance because she was too extreme, even for President Trump and his White House. She was seen as putting forward crazy conspiracy theories. But Jenny Thomas was an advocate for her, writing, sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud.

Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down. So, Carrie, from the court perspective, right, it's not unusual for spouses to have political activities for any number of people that serve in government. But this seems like a uniquely different case. And I wonder from the court's perspective how significant of a revelation it is to have a justice's wife so directly involved with efforts to try to overturn an election. Yeah, there had already been a lot of reporting in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker about Ginny Thomas and some of her connections. And then Ginny Thomas herself told the Washington Free Beacon that she actually attended part of the January 6th rally, but left before any violence ensued because she said she was cold. But this new revelation from CBS and the Washington Post about these text messages to Mark Meadows have been basically a bombshell in the legal community. We have members of Congress calling on Justice Thomas to recuse himself. Other outside groups that are progressive calling on Justice Thomas to resign. That's,

of course, not going to happen. But there's a ton, a ton of concern about the ethics and the court vis-a-vis this example of Ginny and Clarence Thomas. And while most legal experts, and in fact, most lawyers who practice before the court firmly believe that a spouse's activities are generally speaking off limits, this set of facts really has challenged that assumption. Well, part of that, I think, and you mentioned the issue of recusal. First, just to be clear, Supreme Court justices decide on their own when they should recuse from a case, right? Like there's no real enforcement mechanism for that. There is no enforcement mechanism. The justices on the court are not bound by an ethics code that

all other federal judges are, but they are bound, Sue, by a federal statute that governs recusal. And the law says that they're supposed to recuse themselves if their impartiality could be reasonably questioned. And a lot of people right now are reasonably questioning Claren Archives from turning over his records to the January 6th committee. Right. And this is ongoing. I mean, there are questions that could go before the court, especially as the January 6th committee is in sort of a constant battle to get more records released before it and to try to force former Trump administration White House employees to testify before the committee. You got that right. I can see Steve Bannon, who's actually been charged with criminal contempt over his failure to cooperate with the January 6th committee, him trying to take his case all the way up

to the court. And then there's this case ongoing now involving John Eastman, the law professor who provided former President Trump with a lot of advice about the power that then Vice President Mike Pence may or may not have to overturn the election. He's got a case in court with the January 6th Committee, too. All of those could definitely get up to the Supreme Court. Yeah. Sue, you obviously cover Congress. You've been watching the January 6 committee. Are they going to want to hear from Jenny Thomas now that her texts have shown up in the records that they have? I mean, she has certainly opened herself up to a subpoena request.

The committee itself has not made any official public statement on that. But the fact that they already have these documents in their possession suggests that it is part of their investigation and it is ramping up. The committee is expected to start to hold hearings soon in the coming weeks. And also a reminder that the House has already referred Mark Meadows to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution for him failing to comply with the committee investigation and refused to sit for a deposition. So this isn't just sort of politically scandalous. It could be there could be real legal liabilities here for these folks if they do not comply with an ongoing investigation. For me, one of the things that I think is interesting about this, that it is also sort of shining a light on about government, is about

how the Supreme Court operates. And by that, Carrie, I mean, compared to Congress, Tam, compared to the White House, the court just really operates with very little public transparency on for the judge's conduct, for how the court operates, and their personal lives. And I wonder if this story might make the public more interested in that fact. You know, I'd also point out, Sue, that public opinion polling on the court is all the way down. It's only 40%, which is, of course, much higher than Congress opinion polling about Congress, but it is at a low, which has raised some questions about the legitimacy of the court. And Chief Justice John Roberts tries to keep things balanced over there, but he in his annual reports every year, almost every year, has talked about how the court does a just fine job on ethics. I don't think you can maintain that Congress can't pass laws forcing the justices to abide by certain ethics codes, you know, I don't think the current situation is tenable in terms of public opinion.

I consulted with a historian, a really wonderful law professor at Duke University named Marin Levy, who studies the history of the court. And I asked her whether there was an example of the Chief Justice ever pressuring somebody, a lower justice, an associate justice, to actually do the right thing in terms of ethics. And she pointed out an example from before any of us were born, from 1968-1969, in which Chief Justice Earl Warren was about to retire, and Abe Fortas was nominated to replace him. Fortas got in a lot of hot water over financial improprieties, and Warren basically went to Fortas and said, you can't be the Chief Justice. You really need to resign. And Fortas did wind up leaving the court, but we don't have a more recent example than that. And I don't know what Clarence Thomas would do if John Roberts tried to lean on him.

The operations of the court, the interpersonal relations are so shadowed that it's hard to imagine we'd find out about that in real time. It also makes me think, too, just about in terms of disclosure, not just the recusal issue, but if you think about like a member of Congress, like a member of Congress cannot have an immediate family member working on their official staff. There's other types of sort of ethical and legal constraints for, especially for immediate family members. Members of Congress also have to file annual financial disclosure forms, things like book advances they would have to disclose or even not be able to accept in some cases. And the Supreme Court certainly has some of that, but it's nowhere near as extensive as, say, a member of Congress has to face. Well, just to complicate matters a slight bit, that federal recusal statute that does bind Supreme Court justices does talk about financial interest. So, you know, if their spouse or they themselves

have stock holdings or are employed by a business or a child, an adult child is employed by a business, the justices are supposed to recuse in that situation. And they do file financial disclosures. But I would point out that Clarence Thomas about 10, 11 years ago, had to amend many years of financial disclosures because it turned out he hadn't been including his wife's income from the Heritage Foundation, which was a lot of money, over $600,000 over several years. Wow. All right. Well, let's take another quick break. And when we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back and it is time for Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where

we talk about the things we can't stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. Tam, what can't you let go this week? Well, this is for sure otherwise. I got this super awesome new thing that I brought on my trip here and um I can't decide if I am embarrassed or if I am like over the moon excited about it um I acquired a fanny pack oh my god oh those are back in style again it is my first fanny pack since like 1988 and um I'm in love. It has pockets. It is. I have a fanny pack fanny pack life. Once you go fanny, you never go back. Oh, my God, you might be right. And, and I have been mocked relentlessly by basically every member of the White House press corps this entire time. From Brussels to Warsaw, everyone thinks I am an embarrassment, but it's amazing. They clearly don't read the fashion pages because those things have been back for like a year and a

half. Major designers. You're on trend. They don't know what they're talking about. No, I'm behind trend because I always exist a little bit behind trend. But apparently like the way to not be an embarrassment is to wear it over your chest instead of as around your belly. But it is like I was able to hold my phone, my microphone, like everything I needed to make radio, run to the president's press conference, not drop anything. It is a life changer. And, you know, I went all in and I got one that's floral. So I'm not I'm not camouflaging this thing at all. I embrace the fanny during the

pandemic because I would spend a lot of time outside with my kid. And we all wear athleisure. None of us are dressed in like grownups anymore. And it was really hard to find a place to like put your keys and your phone and a snack for the kid and just random mask, like all the kind of random things you needed. So I got a fanny pack, and it's amazing. They're fantastic. All right, listeners, go get it. Do it. Sue, what can't you let go of this week?

The thing I can't let go this week is something that brought me way back to my childhood, y'all. I got an email from my daughter's school this week from the families sort of association saying that uh the book it program has come back and they were encouraging classes to sign up for it and it made my heart sing i don't know if y'all did this when you were kids but there when i was a kid growing up there was this thing called the book it program did you have this oh yes i don't know you know what i'm talking about tam books yeah Books. Yeah. Book It. Book It, when I was growing up, was a national program that if kids read like a certain number of books and you'd get like a whole punch card from your teacher, you could take it to Pizza Hut and you could get a pizza.

And it was like a hugely popular program when I was a kid. All the kids did it growing up. It was like a huge, huge, huge deal. And it was one of those things I had just, my brain just forgot about it. Haven't probably thought about it in like 30 years. And when I got this email, I just got so excited for it because one, I think it's gonna be super fun to do with my kid. But it was like, just, you know how sometimes things just get you like nostalgic for childhood in the best possible way. It just brought back like all these warm, fuzzy childhood memories of my book kit program. And you'd get like a big old pin you could wear to school do you get a personalized pan pizza from pizza hut only the

kid does but you can steal some of your kids pizza you could steal some of your kids pizza also an important lesson to talk teach them but yeah i just feel like it's uh coming full circle in my life right now book it you know when i was, and now I'm going to do book it again with my kid, and I'm excited for it. Carrie, what can't you let go this week? I cannot let go of a photo, an iconic photo from the confirmation hearings this week for Judge Katonji Brown Jackson of the Supreme Court. This woman at the New York Times, she's a fellow, a photography fellow, her name is Sarah Beth Maney, took the most amazing picture of one of Judge Jackson's daughters wearing this marvelous lilac pantsuit, looking with such pride at her mother, such an enormous smile inside the hearing room as her mom testifies. And it was really

lovely to see the 17 year old Layla Jackson looking at her mom that way. I think we see lots of pictures of parents looking at their daughters that way, but this was a rare, rare moment, the other direction. And it was so beautiful. Especially at an age where you don't necessarily look at your parents that adoringly, right? For sure. And the other thing that really struck me was, you know, Judge Jackson, who has reached the pinnacle of her profession, it looks like she is going to get confirmed, actually took a moment during her confirmation hearing to say she was sorry to her two daughters that she hadn't always got this balance between work and home life, right? And it was so relatable.

I remember my mom many years ago apologizing to me for not being home more when I was a kid. She was a single mom. She worked a lot to keep food on the table and clothes on my back and pizza in my lunch. And I just thought, Mom, you've been carrying this burden for so long. There's nothing to apologize for. I'm grateful for everything. And this photo this week of Layla Jackson looking at her mom, it just really warmed my heart. Yeah. And I do have to say that I appreciate the vocalizing of this struggle of getting that balance right, especially as I sit half a world away, missing baseball and all the other things. Amen. Amen.

All right. Well, that is a wrap for us today. Our executive producer is Muthoni Matori. Our editors are Eric McDaniel and Krishnadev Kalamar. Our producers are Lexi Schapittle and Alina Moore. Thanks to Brandon Carter. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover justice.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.