Snapshot · The Bulwark Podcast
Susan Glasser argued Democrats failed to restore democratic guardrails even when they controlled the Senate and House at the start of Biden's presidency, suggesting rhetoric outpaced action.
Where this was said
At 12:46 · chapter starts 10:30
Building on the corruption discussion, Tim Miller notes that the Supreme Court's rulings this week — also discussed in a prior episode with David French — removed the last of the post-Watergate restrictions on unlimited unaccountable cash flowing to parties and candidates [1] — Susan Glasser "Post-Watergate campaign finance laws effectively gutted: The Supreme Court this week eliminated the last meaningful restrictions on unlimit…" 10:24 . Susan Glasser extends the analysis: the court has also gutted the independent agencies that predate Watergate and trace back to the New Deal. She describes the court as a 'far-right radical court' rather than a conservative one, and notes that where Trump and the justices' ideologies align, he has been upheld; where they diverge, he has been narrowly checked. Both Miller and Glasser grapple with the demoralizing implications for the pro-democracy movement: rules keep getting broken, which radicalizes some toward abandoning the rule-based approach entirely. Tim Miller also flags Kash Patel's failure to disclose a six-figure Bitcoin stock purchase tied to a DOJ-contracted company as another corruption data point in a week already saturated with them.
FBI Director Kash Patel failed to properly disclose a six-figure purchase of stock in a Bitcoin-fueled business intelligence company that holds contracts with the Department of Justice.
Trump visited the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library and spoke to an AI hologram of Roosevelt. The contrast was devastating: Roosevelt fought Gilded Age billionaires, created national parks, and championed immigrants. Trump enables oligarchs, guts environmental protections, and deports immigrants. Susan Glasser calls them near-polar opposites.
A total of 8 states have filed lawsuits against social media platforms, including an ongoing case in Tennessee, using product liability and public nuisance theories to seek accountability.
France built 56 nuclear plants in the 1970s and now has the cheapest energy in Europe, making it independent of Russian or Middle Eastern energy geopolitics.
Estonia has a single tax form, a law preventing the government from asking citizens for the same information twice, and a flat rate of tax — enabling competitive taxation.
Portugal's Lisbon, once a city with a major heroin problem, legalised drugs and redirected enforcement spending into rehabilitation and housing, dramatically reducing crime.
The first Boland Amendment banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras passed the House unanimously — yet the Reagan administration ignored it.
Over just two years, Saudi Arabia alone donated $32 million to the Contra rebels, giving loosely affiliated factions millions they had no way to spend on arms.
The National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty raised $6.3 million for the Contras but only $3.3 million reached them — a shockingly low 52% program expense rate.
Richard Secord and Albert Hakim marked up their arms shipments to the Contras by as much as 300%, making enormous personal profits from the covert operation.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, tapped to run the entire covert Contra support operation, had no prior experience in covert operations whatsoever — he was learning as he went.
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