Title: SCOTUS Weighs in on Pres. Trump's Deportations

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We continue to ask, is this what democracy looks like? Are we moving from democracy to autocracy, bit by bit, executive order by executive order, court ruling by court ruling? Are we moving from DEI for diversity, equity, and inclusion to DEI for disappearances, erasures, and inequality?

Back with us now is University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Kate Shaw, who is also co-host of the legal affairs podcast, Strict Scrutiny. Kate, we always appreciate that you come on and apply your strict scrutiny with us on the law and the courts, and this year, on that spectrum from democracy to autocracy that really the courts are playing such a key and complicated role in. Welcome back to WNYC.

Kate: Thank you so much for having me back, Brian.

Brian: The court rulings keep on coming, including increasingly now from the Supreme Court. We had ones just in recent days, I'll tell the listeners, from the high court on the deportations of Venezuelan migrants without due process, on the suspension of teacher training grants, on the firing of so-called probationary workers.

Then there was a lower court ruling yesterday that said Trump violated the First Amendment, freedom of the press, by barring the Associated Press from some presidential events because they wouldn't bend to his dictate to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. There are others. There are so many we could get to in this segment with you, Kate. Can you start with that last one I mentioned, though? What court said what about the free press and the First Amendment?

Kate: Sure. That was the most recent of the rulings that you just mentioned, Brian. That was a ruling just yesterday out of a DC District Court. Interestingly, a decision made by a Trump appointee from the first Trump administration, who ruled pretty strongly in favor of the Associated Press, which had challenged the White House's exclusion of the AP from key White House events because, as you said, the AP declined to essentially adopt the change in the name from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America as President Trump had officially renamed it.

Brian: Did it order any immediate change in policy or actions by the Trump administration?

Kate: It stayed its ruling for, I think, five days to allow for the administration to appeal, but the AP definitely won. It's a preliminary ruling. This is a preliminary injunction. The judge basically said that the White House's decision to bar the AP from official White House events violated this bedrock principle that government officials cannot punish members of the media or otherwise based on the content of their speech or the viewpoints they espouse. The AP took a position that it was going to maintain the longstanding name of this body.

Because of that decision, it was punished by the White House. The judge said that's just not something the First Amendment permits. If the White House doesn't want to let the press into certain events at all, it's not obliged to do that. So long as it makes itself and its events available to the press, it cannot pick and choose among members of the press based on what it believes are favorable or unfavorable, either coverage or decisions made by those outlets or individuals.

Brian: We'll go on to some Supreme Court cases in a sec. Just one last question on this. Where does that case go next? Should I assume the Trump administration will appeal?

Kate: I think that's probably safe to assume. There were a couple of cases much like this. I don't know if you remember during the first Trump administration where individuals were barred from access to the press room or from the press pool because of altercations with the White House or because of coverage that the administration was unhappy with. I can remember at least two such events. Actually, in both instances, the White House ultimately ended up capitulating and allowing for the reentry of those initially barred reporters or outlets.

I will be very curious to see if this proceeds along the same path. I would be actually surprised if it does. This administration is taking just a much more aggressive and harder line in essentially every way than the first Trump administration did. Where the first administration said, "We tried to exclude these reporters, we lost. We'll just take our losses and move on," here, I expect they'll continue to fight.

Brian: All right. Let's go on to some of these very recent Supreme Court rulings. The one on deporting Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act from the 1700s. The ruling this week to my lay eyes seemed to give something to both sides. Remind us of what the Trump administration did and why it's controversial.

Kate: Sure. I think I agree with that assessment, that it was a somewhat mixed ruling from the Supreme Court on Monday night. At issue here, as you said, is the administration's removal of Venezuelan nationals pursuant to this 1798 statute, the Alien Enemies Act. The administration invoked that statute in an executive order and basically said it was using the authority that that statute gives to the president to deport certain Venezuelan nationals who are members of the Tren de Aragua or TDA gang.

It was going to deport them not home to Venezuela, but to this prison facility in El Salvador, with which the administration had forged a deal for long-term detention of such individuals. Lawyers for a group of individuals so designated for removal filed a lawsuit, and they won in the District Court in DC. They had that win affirmed in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In a 5-4 ruling on Monday night, the Supreme Court, I think, handed the administration a partial victory, to be sure, but not a complete victory.

The court said, "Due process that core constitutional principle that you have a right to be notified of the essentially charges against you or whatever allegations are being made before you're deprived of life, liberty, or property." That applies even to individuals designated as foreign enemies essentially under this designation. That baseline principle is the court affirmed, but said that this lawsuit was essentially filed using the wrong device and in the wrong place. The plaintiffs who challenged their designation have to start over in a district court in Texas.

Brian: Related, I guess, the Supreme Court also paused an order from a lower court to bring back a deported man who the Trump administration admits they deported by mistake. Remind us of that situation.

Kate: That's exactly right. It's a different lawsuit, but the individual was subject to a mistaken inclusion in this larger group that I was just talking about, individuals designated as members of TDA and removed pursuant to this very old statute and the authority that it gives the president. This individual is not Venezuelan, not associated with TDA, in fact, is an El Salvadoran national. The administration has actually conceded that it mistakenly included him in this group and put him on a plane for this prison. He's filed a habeas corpus petition essentially challenging this deportation.

He prevailed in the district court and also prevailed in the Court of Appeals, including a unanimous opinion with a concurrence by a quite conservative Republican appointee on the Fourth Circuit. The merits of that case is that's pending before the Supreme Court. The court has not decided it. All that has happened is Chief Justice basically put a temporary pause on the district court order that requires the administration to essentially negotiate with El Salvador to get this individual, Mr. Abrego Garcia, back in order for a court to assess the legal claims that he is bringing. That order is right now on pause, but the court hasn't weighed in one way or another about whether it was correct.

Brian: This one really baffles me, Kate, because if they deported him by mistake, by their own admission, why isn't bringing him back here not just a moral imperative, a matter of good faith, but a legal slam dunk for the Supreme Court?

Kate: You would think that. The problem is that the courts have long held that presidents and the executive branch just have a great deal of authority when it comes to the conduct of foreign affairs. What they are saying is that the district court and the Court of Appeals below, who essentially told the administration they had to negotiate for the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia, overstepped because courts don't get to tell the executive how to conduct foreign relations and foreign affairs. That is essentially what they are resting on.

Again, not a claim that they didn't mess up in an enormous way, but that essentially there's nothing that courts have the power to do about it. I think in your question is, I think, an obvious and correct insight, which is the administration could absolutely, of its own accord, open negotiations to secure the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia. It's very clear that he is being detained at the behest of the administration. It has bragged about forging this deal with El Salvador for the detention of individuals deported from the United States.

This deal is something the administration entered into, and surely, they could negotiate for the extraction of an individual who everyone agrees should not be there. They are saying two things. Essentially, one, it's out of our hands now, and two, courts don't have the power to tell us what to do. I'm not sure even if the court's point has some strength in some context, it's not clear here why it would have much force given the obvious errors and missteps the administration has made. There's this unclean-hands idea.

The administration, it's hard for them to say, "You don't get to tell us what to do when they themselves have conceitedly committed such an egregious error." Two, they certainly have the power if they wanted to essentially head this lawsuit off entirely and this conflict with the courts off entirely to on their own simply secure his return.

Brian: That's one dramatic case of an individual that has made its way to the Supreme Court. There are other individual cases making their way through the courts, like the recent Columbia grad, Mahmoud Khalil, who had his green card revoked after being a leader of the Columbia University protests over Gaza in the last year, even though they've offered no evidence that he supported Hamas, which I think is the claim. The Tufts student here on a student visa who wrote an op-ed asking her school for a divestment from Israel, but again, with no implication of support for terrorism. There are others like that now, too. Where does that block of cases stand if you can address them as a group?

Kate: I think they're all making their way up through the lower courts. There are petitions that have been filed in all these cases, including some supportive petitions by legal experts and officials from universities, but to my knowledge, those are on a slower course. Litigation typically takes weeks or months or years and not days. These cases involving the administration and the deportation of these individuals to El Salvador have happened on just a lightning-fast track. The others remain in the more normal pace of litigation.

I'm not sure if we're going to have an answer about the decisions to revoke those either student visas or green cards, depending on the individual case, very soon. I think what we are seeing actually with respect to other visa cancellations and potentially even questions about green card revocations, individuals choosing to depart the United States. It's not something that everybody has the ability to do. I don't have any reason to think that's true about either of the individuals, either of the top student or the Columbia graduate that you mentioned. Certainly, we have heard these stories about other individuals targeted by the administration in similar ways.

Brian: Is there going to be a legal argument here around something that I've heard by supporters of the decision to deport those students or in Khalil's case, former student, that even if they weren't supporting terrorism themselves by negotiating on behalf of the larger group of Columbia students, where maybe some people did, or in the Tufts students case, writing an op-ed, maybe on behalf of a group of people who had a range of views on how to oppose Israel's war in Gaza, that just by being associated with groups that included some people who might support Hamas, that they are subject to exclusion from the United States, because they could seen as accessories, I guess? Do you expect that to come up as an explicit legal argument?

Kate: I wouldn't rule it out. I think that the administration has, in some ways, made clear that it's not even required to make that kind of detailed chain of causation claim, that it, in some ways, can just make the assertion that it deems the presence of a non-citizen detrimental to the US interests or national security, and that the Secretary of State can make such a determination, and that it has the authority to certainly in the context of student visas, just revoke on that basis.

It seems as though it's willing to make those kinds of arguments, even with respect to green card holders. I will say that whether we're talking about student visa holders or green card holders or US citizens, that kind of guilt by association is just anathema to core principles of freedom of speech, of expression, of association. What we're talking about here is the ultimate penalty, in particular, for individuals who have roots and lives in the United States. Mr. Abrego Garcia and Khalil have US citizen spouses, have or are expecting US citizen children.

The idea that you could be summarily removed from the country because of an association with an individual who espouses believes the administration disapproves of or dislikes is just wildly anathema to core principles of the First Amendment and of due process. The administration certainly seems to be on that path. I mentioned citizens because I do worry that the logic that we are discussing isn't, by its terms, limited to non-citizens. It could be applied to citizens as well.

Brian: I've heard others speculate that, too. Do you think that that could apply only to naturalized citizens who, by definition, would have been immigrants in the first place, or an actual natural born, as they call it, US citizen that they could deport? No, right?

Kate: It sounds crazy to even speculate about it. There are places in the administration that have made noise about even the El Salvadoran facility, potentially housing US citizens. I think we have to take seriously the possibility that the administration, it would not draw a bright line that it would not cross if crossing involved targeting, in some fashion, US citizens. Now, I don't know what that would look like. I certainly don't think there's a line in the law to be drawn between an individual who is a naturalized citizen and an individual who was born and remained a US citizen.

In theory, if there is fraud or something like that in the process of naturalization, there are ways the administration can investigate that process. To somehow single out for targeting, in particular, in the context of positions taken or viewpoints espoused, an individual and to throw into question their citizenship isn't something I think even this administration would have a legal basis to do. In some ways, the problem with these arguments about foreclosing judicial review is that if the administration is willing to try things and maybe try anything, it's really only courts that are going to act as a bulwark against those things. Congress in theory could, but it hasn't. What we're left with is courts.

When you have an administration arguing, at least in some instances, for no judicial review, because courts can't inquire into particular matters, it seems to me that that argument would apply even if it was citizens being targeted. If you get someone on a plane fast enough and take them beyond the jurisdiction of the United States federal courts, whether they're a citizen or not, it's immaterial.

Brian: Listeners, comments and questions welcome on any of these specific court cases, or the bigger is this what democracy looks like question underlying many of them for University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Kate Shaw, who also is co-host of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, which is about legal affairs. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Also, regarding Columbia, and by extension, universities in general, I guess, the university itself declined to sue the administration, as I understand it, but a group of Columbia professors has now sued over that suspension of $400 million in medical research and other grants, unless the school takes certain actions that Trump wants on antisemitism and DEI. Do you understand the grounds?

Kate: I think that in every university right now, there are a lot of conversations. Some of these universities have been notified, and some of them have actually received the formal revocation or freezing of funds. I think different universities are in somewhat different postures vis-a-vis the administration, even the universities that have received these kind of public threats. You've had now a handful of lawsuits filed both by individual groups of faculty but also by AAUP, the union that represents university professors. Those are entities that are independent from the actual institutions of universities.

In order to get into federal court, you really just need to be able to show that you are injured by something that the government is doing and that the government is violating the law and that a court could give you some kind of redress. I think that actually it makes a decide for whatever set of pragmatic reasons that they're not going to litigate some of these matters, that it's absolutely appropriate for the directly impacted targets of some of these cuts to bring lawsuits. We will see what the courts make of them, but there, we're in very early stages as to all of these.

Brian: Another one involving the Supreme Court for March 26th, and also kind of education-related, if not university-related. This is a CBS News version, March 26th. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene in an ongoing dispute over Department of Education grants that were canceled because they funded programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Actually, maybe this is about universities.

In a filing with the high court, that says the Justice Department requested the justices to put on hold a temporary order from a lower court requiring the Education Department to restore millions of dollars in grants for recipients in eight states that challenged the cancellations. Do you know about that?

Kate: If this is the teacher training cancellation, that's one of the five matters that the Supreme Court has-- I'm not sure if it was filed on the 26th. I will confess, the litigation is coming so fast and furious. I believe this is the one.

Brian: Even you can't keep up.

Kate: [chuckles] Last I checked, last week, there were about 150 suits that had been filed, and I think it's now up to 170 or 180. It's almost impossible to keep up with all of them. One of the five cases that the Supreme Court has decided in this very preliminary posture did involve a cancellation of these teacher training grants, which a lower court had invalidated, and the Supreme Court, at least as this very initial matter, reversed, and so allowed the cancellations to stand, at least for now. It's been a mixed record.

The first two cases involving aggressive assertions of executive power over either personnel or funding, those first two encounters with the Supreme Court, actually, the administration lost. In the next three, one of which is the teacher training grant cancellation that you just mentioned, the administration has prevailed, although in each of them, or at least in two of the three, on a 5-4 vote, including the Alien Enemies Act and including now this cancellation, it's really hard to know exactly what to make of those votes in terms of how the administration is likely to fare.

These are very, very accelerated briefing schedules. There's no oral argument, and the court is just deciding really quickly. I don't want to read, too, too much into them. There definitely is a sense, I think, that some court watchers have gotten that the administration, or that the court rather, is trying to evade or at least defer for now, a frontal head-on collision with the administration in which the court orders the White House to do something that the White House could defy.

In some ways, I think that's maybe more an accurate description, potentially, of the Alien Enemies Act finding, which was, yes, due process applies, but no, you don't have to do anything administration right now because these parties filed in the wrong lower court, and they have to start over. They're not telling the administration to do anything very specific that the administration could defy. It's at least possible that that is something that is driving John Roberts and how he is deciding some of these early cases.

Brian: Here's a question from a listener about the case we discussed before of the guy who the Trump administration deported mistakenly to El Salvador and admitted that it was a mistake, but they won't bring him back. Listener writes, "If the Supreme Court demands that the administration bring someone back and they ignore the ruling, what recourse does the Supreme Court have for the president to comply?"

Kate: It's a great question, and the answer is-- We have always had this kind of open question. The Supreme Court is obeyed because we have a tradition of obeying the Supreme Court, not because they have hard, tangible tools to compel compliance with their orders. It's not that the lower courts and the Supreme Court are without any kinds of tools. They can hold parties in contempt, which has both a symbolic and expressive value. Lawyers don't like being held in contempt, and other parties can be held in contempt, too.

There can be lower courts at least can issue sanctions and actual fines attached to contempt. There's at least one instance historically, although it goes back quite some time, in which the Supreme Court itself held a party in contempt. It's conceivable that the court could do that as to the secretary of state or of homeland security, and that would be significant. I imagine these cabinet secretaries would like to avoid that happening. Those are tools at the court's disposal.

It's also the case that the administration has many, many lawsuits pending before the Supreme Court in which they want the court to view them sympathetically, to side with them. Sometimes, the administration is the plaintiff in a case asking the court for something. I don't think the court is without the ability to make the administration's life hard in other contexts if the administration does not abide by its rulings here.

I think the fact that the question is out there, what if the court says to bring him back and the administration refuses, might figure in the deliberations inside the court about whether to actually issue such a directive, and they might want to avoid it because of the fear that they will be defied. To be clear, I don't think that's appropriate. I think that if the law requires the return of this individual, the Supreme Court has to so rule. I am sure they are thinking through all of this.

Brian: JP in Park Slope has a question about the various university-related cases. JP, you're on WNYC with UPenn Law Professor Kate Shaw. Hi.

JP: Hi, Brian. I'm glad you're back. We love you here in my household.

Brian: Oh, thank you.

JP: I'm a longtime supporter. I wanted to ask your honored guest, are the colleges playing a calculus with their acquiescence to the Trump administration? I've taught at Columbia and I'm a graduate of NYU and I know that NYU had a wonderful constitutional law program in their law school.

I'm wondering what's coming on their minds, not getting together, not getting their best lawyers to have a conference and say, "We got to fight this because it's going to ruin us. It's going to ruin our programs, and it's going to ruin education in the country." From what I remember reading, there are probably 80 colleges and universities and 55 more that are on Trump's list for clawing back money. I wonder if your guest has any opinions on this calculus that they're playing. I don't quite understand it.

Brian: JP, thank you. Kate?

Kate: It's an important question. I do think there are some collective action problems happening right now where individual institutions are making a defensible decision that they can preserve what is valuable and important about what they do, or they will be more able to preserve what is valuable and important. The research, the training, the education, the employment, these universities are enormous employers in the communities in which they reside. They feel an understandable need to protect all of that to the extent that they can.

Some of them seem to be making the decision that trying to open up channels of communication with the administration is the best way to do that as to their particular institution. I understand the thinking, but I also think your guest is right, that the only way forward is a degree of collective action, because the administration, if what is determined to do is to cripple higher education, which it really does seem to be a concerted effort to revoke the enormous swaths of funding to impose its will on curricular decisions, on admissions decisions, on decisions about particular departments.

Essentially putting into receivership one of its departments was one of the demands the administration imposed on Columbia University. I think allowing all of that to proceed essentially spells the end of higher education as we know it. I do think that a very strong stance against much of what the administration is seeking to do to higher education is imperative. There are absolutely universities that are taking that position. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has been outspoken in taking this position that Princeton simply cannot accommodate some of the demands the administration is making.

He was actually on the New York Times' Daily podcast this morning, really spelling this out. I encourage people to listen if they haven't. I think you will see more of that. It does, from the coordination perspective, sound as though from President Eisgruber's interview this morning, there is a degree of coordination happening in that there are conversations happening between and among high-level university administrators about how to respond. At the moment, I think it's true that there has been less of a collective response than would be optimal.

Brian: Are you saying that some universities-- You may have an interest here and may even have to accuse yourself because I think Trump is possibly going to withhold a nine-figure sum from Penn for things that he wants them to do. Are you advocating that universities just take the hit? Like Columbia should have said, "No, keep your $400 million. We won't do that medical research," or maybe they try to get it out of their endowment. Is that what you're advocating?

Kate: I will say I'm here as a legal expert and not in any way as an institutional representative. You're right that Penn is on the long list of institutions that have been publicly targeted. I think that what I'm, I think, putting a lot of stock in what Eisgruber has been saying, which is, it's not either full capitulation, or we will just take the hit. The responses maybe involve creative thinking about doing public communication and education to get congressional support and public support for what universities do that might cause the administration to change course.

There are ways to think about creatively funding, like drawing from endowment funding, in order to meet shortfalls that might be caused by the administration's rescinding or cancellation of funding, looking for alternative funding streams. I'm not sure that complete capitulation or just deciding to take the hit are the only alternatives. I also think the administration actually has been speaking in a public register a lot about universities, but, as are I think many facets of the new administration, there is a degree of chaos in that the announcements sometimes shift from one day to the next about what exactly is being done and what exactly is being targeted.

It's not even totally clear what negotiation or what capitulation looks like when it's not clear exactly what the administration is asking for or is threatening to do. I guess both. I'm certainly not suggesting that universities just need to say that we are going to just take whatever is being threatened lying down and we're not going to respond at all. I also don't think that just saying we will accept whatever conditions are imposed on us, even those that go to the core of the academic mission, without a fight.

A fight could just mean litigation. Lawsuits, like the ones you were just mentioning, Brian, are a way, I think, to respond to this kind of, I think, unlawful pressure. The administration, just like the district court we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, the district court found that the government cannot single out a press outlet like the Associated Press and deny it access based on a viewpoint it has espoused. The same principle applies to the revocation of government funds from an institution based on its programming or the positions or viewpoints it has taken. I think that lawsuits and the legal process are one important possibility.

Brian: We've been talking about all these specific cases. When we come back from a break, before you go, I want to pull the lens back. I have a clip of Senator Chris Murphy I want to play for you and see where you see us in the slowly boiling frog of democracy scale right now as we continue for a few more minutes with Kate Shaw from UPenn and you, 212-433-WNYC.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here's Senator Chris Murphy with David Remnick on the New Yorker Radio Hour a couple of weeks ago, worried so much about autocracy that he thinks we may not even have free elections in the midterms next year.

Senator Chris Murphy: Is this a normal moment where you can just keep on punching Donald Trump and pushing down his approval ratings and eventually win the 2026 election and set up a potential win in 2028, or is there a pretty good chance that we're not going to have a free election in 2026?

David Remnick: You believe that's a possibility?

Senator Chris Murphy: 100%. Oh, every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.

David Remnick: What does that look like?

Senator Chris Murphy: It may not even be that the mechanics of the election are rigged. I'm not suggesting that there's going to be election officials out there stuffing ballots. What I'm talking about is that the opposition, the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win, will have been destroyed. No lawyers will represent us. They will take down ActBlue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar contributions. They will have threatened activists with violence, so no one will show up to our rallies and to our doorknock events.

This is what happens in lots of democracies around the world. The opposition is just kept so weak that they can't win. That's what I worry about being the landscape as we approach 2026. If you believe that, then everything you do right now has to be in service of stopping that kind of weakening or destruction of democracy.

Brian: Kate, I know you got to go in 30 seconds. Real quick, are you thinking in those terms, as stark as he put them, in terms of where we are in the democracy to autocracy scale now?

Kate: The terms are stark, but I don't think they're unrealistic. The administration has made quite clear that it is very interested in rooting out dissent and opposition, that it wants to neutralize sources of countervailing power. That's now in the first three months of the administration. Imagine it is September of 2026, and polling suggests that the Democrats are likely to retake the House or maybe the Senate.

Do we think that the administration is going to roll back some of the aggressive moves that it has been making, or is it likely to just ratchet them up? I think Senator Murphy is right to really worry. I think that starting now, shoring up these locations in which countervailing power can be wielded, and also thinking creatively about building new ones, is critical in order to avoid all of everything, this dystopic vision that the senator was just depicting coming to pass.

Brian: Kate, I know you got to go and do your real job, teaching a class. Thank you so much for giving us a lot of time today.

Kate: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian: Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania law professor and co-host of the legal affairs podcast, Strict Scrutiny. Saba in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hello, Saba.

Saba: Hi, Brian. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I just wanted to bring up a counterpoint to this funding issue. All these presidents are talking about how this is money being cut from research initiatives. What we're failing to bring up in the conversation is that these universities are also big real estate companies. Columbia spent $6.3 billion to build up their Manhattanville campus, gentrifying that area of the neighborhood. Yale is New Haven's largest landlord. What if we just ask these institutions to just pull back on that front and keep everything else the same? Maybe that's a bit naive, but interested to hear what you think.

Brian: Saba, it's certainly a way to put pressure on the universities, no doubt. Yes, Yale isn't the only school that's the biggest landlord in its neighborhood or its city, in some cases. We're going to leave that there as a last word because we're running out of time for the show, but leaving that out there as a thought bubble is a good way to end. Again, we thank Professor Kate Shaw. We thank all our callers and texters through a very active show today. Thank you all very much. We'll continue to cover everything we cover.

The breaking news of the day, all the policy issues, all the politics, but also this question that we have to keep coming back to. Is this what democracy looks like? Where are we today on any given day on the scale, on the spectrum from democracy to autocracy, in this unprecedented time? That's the Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by MaryEileen Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our daily politics podcast. Our intern this term is Henry Serringer. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. That was Juliana Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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