Station Selected:
Beginning this broadcast with another supremely “late breaking” story, our focused
exposition and in-depth analysis of two overtly “competing” decisions from the
federal courts—both affecting the broad right to privacy and its especially
important application to reproductive/abortion rights: In the Northern District of
Texas, a trial judge finding inadequate, unsupported, and invalid the Food & Drug
Administration’s quarter-century-old decision approving the drug mifepristone for
use in abortion services and miscarriage treatments. But in the Eastern District of
Washington, another federal judicial officer explicitly directs the FDA to ensure
access to and distribution of that same drug—in some 17 states nationwide whose
Attorneys General brought the civil action. Making sense of the specific
implications of this latest, predictable post-Dobbs battle over reproductive
rights—along with the no-less-significant concerns that other drugs long approved
by the federal government and used uneventfully for all sorts of health-related
reasons might also be adjudged off-limits—even as the Biden-Garland Justice
Department challenges the legitimacy of the Texas judgment in the Fifth Circuit
Appeals Court.
In the immediate aftermath of yet another “first” in American history, a review of
the 34-count criminal indictment returned by a grand jury in New York, charging
former President Donald Trump with falsifying business records to accomplish
felony violations of federal and state election and tax laws. At the center of the
state prosecution by the Manhattan District Attorney are three discrete events in
which Trump allegedly paid two women to remain quiet about their accounts of
extramarital affairs with him many years ago, along with another claim by a
building doorman that Trump fathered a child out of wedlock. Those payments,
along with phony invoices and equally false accounting records, form the basis for
what prosecutors describe as a criminal scheme “to hide damaging information
from the voting public.” Explanations of what happens next in the case assigned to
a Manhattan trial judge, who scheduled another case hearing for early December.
Finally, in a return to the work and activity, both on the bench and off, of the
United States Supreme Court, a review of the revelations that Associate Justice
Clarence Thomas took lavish vacations, valued in hundreds of thousands of
dollars, at the invitation of a Texas real estate billionaire. Analysis of why that
past conduct, now known by the American public, is important to understanding
the disclosure obligations, past and present, of the Justices—along with the abiding
need for the imposition upon them of an omnibus new code of judicial ethics.
