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Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Before we get going today with our first guest, NPR's Mara Liasson, I just want to briefly mention that this is the next to last day of our shortened fall membership drive. We've been telling you that because of the amount of news and the seriousness of the news this fall, we are doing a shorter drive than we usually do in October. Usually, we would go through the weekend and then through next Tuesday, but we don't feel it would be right to impede the election coverage that much or all the local coronavirus information that we're trying to keep you abreast of.

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Well, it's only ten o'clock and already it's an eventful day in national politics. The Senate Judiciary Committee just voted to approve Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court nomination with Democrats boycotting what was scheduled to be several hours of debate leading up to the vote. Related, Joe Biden just announced he will appoint a bipartisan group to study the court system, which he said is getting out of whack if he's elected.

Tonight of course will be debate night, with the mics turned off during the candidates' two-minute opening answers to each question asked by the moderator Kristen Welker from NBC News. Let's talk about these things and more with NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Mara, thanks for some time on an already busy morning. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mara: Happy to be here.

Brian: What just happened at the Senate Judiciary Committee?

Mara: Well, what just happened is what everybody expected to happen. Amy Coney Barrett is on her way to being confirmed by the Republican majority in the Senate. When she is, she will be the sixth conservative justice on the court. They'll have a durable six-three majority maybe for generations to come. That's why you heard Joe Biden entering this giant debate that we're about to have, it's already started, about whether the Supreme Court needs to be reformed, whether the court has turned into just another partisan institution, a kind of partisan arm of the party that controls the Senate. We're going to have a big debate about that.

Brian: Are the democrats making their own speeches outside or what form is this boycott taking?

Mara: I don't know. I don't know the answer to that, whether they're making speeches outside. I'm not on Capitol Hill today. I'm talking here with you. Democrats have complained all along that the process was unfair. Instead of showing up at the hearing today, they put pictures of people who depend on the Affordable Care Act on their chairs. That is the issue that they have focused on more than any other even more than Roe vs. Wade, that the Affordable Care Act, which is before the court right now, the Trump administration is asking the court to declare the entire Obamacare Act unconstitutional. It's very popular, it's grown in popularity over time. That's what they focused on during these hearings.

The bigger issue, the process issue was whether it's fair or right or good for democracy to have a senate, 53 Republican senators who represent I think 45% of the American population, to decide to put a Supreme Court justice on the court with just days before an election, actually, after millions of people, tens of millions of people have already voted. Something that the Republicans said they didn't want to do when they refused to give Merrick Garland, Barack Obama's nominee to the court, even a hearing, something like 9 months or 11 months before Election Day.

Brian: I see now that Democrats are planning to hold a news conference this morning on the steps of the Capitol so we'll follow that. In fact, we'll have Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, listen to us from Connecticut on the show next hour. We'll get a lot of that from him. Mara, on this other development, on the question of court-packing, as it's sometimes called, or adding more members to the Supreme Court, that Joe Biden has been avoiding. I see he just announced this morning, that if elected, he would appoint a bipartisan group to study the court system, which he said is getting out of whack. Is there any more to it than that yet?

Mara: Right now, that's where he's landed. He says he's going to ask the commission for recommendations with 180 days on how to reform the court system. The packing of the court idea, which is adding justices is one thing that many people on the left of the Democratic Party think is a good idea. There are other Democrats who say, "Hey, Mitch McConnell can pack the court just as fast as Chuck Schumer can."

It's something like you're in a death spiral. Democrats add a couple seats to the court. When republicans get back in the majority, they add some and where does it end? There are also people who are talking about term limits for Supreme Court justices. Everybody serves 18-year terms. I don't know exactly how you make the transition to that. There are a lot of people thinking about it, but what that would mean in effect, is that each president gets two appointments to the Supreme Court.

I think that over time if demographic changes continue and the representation in the Senate gets more and more lopsided and we have what is in effect minority rule in the Senate, I think by 2040 the projections are that 30% of Americans will be represented by 70 senators and 70% of the American population will be represented by 30 senators. That's a recipe for volatility and political instability.

The other thing that I think is fair to predict is that I can't imagine a senate controlled by the opposite party that has The White House ever confirming a justice again. As a matter of fact, if you remember, in 2016, Ted Cruz and others said that if Hillary Clinton was elected president and they had the majority in the Senate, they wouldn't consider any of her nominees.

In other words, they would keep the court at eight or seven or whatever it was. That's court-packing in reverse. That's in effect what they did when they held up Merrick Garland and wouldn't even give him a hearing.

Brian: What you say about the Senate is so fundamental to our democracy. We've talked about it before on the show, but I think a lot people around the country don't get it. People talk about the electoral college as being unrepresentative because of the way it's structured, but the real issue that feeds into the electoral college math is the senate because every state gets two senators, whether it has the population of New York or California or Texas or the population of Rhode Island or Wyoming or Utah, right?

Mara: Right. There was a reason for that. The founders didn't want small population states, rural states, to be run over by the big population states. Minority rights meaning the minority party are important. That's why we've had a filibuster, that's why we have the Senate, but they can get out of whack. In other words, it can change from being a balance, a check and balance to being something that people perceive as unfair minority rule, a system that doesn't represent what the majority of people want.

Now, if we continue to have presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote over and over and over again, I think that's going to exacerbate it, but that might not happen. Democrats could start winning the electoral college. Things are changing. Georgia, Texas, a lot of states are becoming jump balls now that could get the electoral college back in sync with the popular vote.

Also this whole idea of packing the court. I don't know if Democrats could pack the court even if they wanted to. I don't know if some of these new senators that might be elected, Democrats, from purple states, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, we don't know who's going to win. Would they vote to pack the court? They have to run for re-election in purple states. That's unclear to me whether it even could happen.

Brian: Do you get any sense by the way that Judge Barrett is embarrassed by being nominated in this questionably legitimate context? Considering what happened with Obama and Merrick Garland four years ago, and the Senate, Republicans brazen double standard on that, or even by being introduced at this COVID superspreader event at the White House and taking part in that largely mask list, not socially distant show on her behalf that we know Melania Trump has not yet recovered from. Any sense that Judge Barrett is embarrassed by any of that?

Mara: No. [laughs] That's the short answer. I don't get any sense of that, do you?

Brian: No, not that I've seen. You're there more than I am.

Mara: None at all. Look, she's been on a trajectory and you could say it's kind of tragic that she's reaching the highest pinnacle, the legal world in this manner, but no. Now the other scenario about the court and whether we're going to, for years and years, decades, the conservative has complained about a liberal activist court. We're about to see what liberals are predicting to be a conservative activist court.

The last time a president threatened to pack the court, Franklin Roosevelt, you remember a switch in time saves nine, the court started getting a little more circumspect and stopped declaring all of his new deal legislation unconstitutional. Would that happen? I don't know, or would the court just plow ahead with its conservative agenda on voting rights, corporate power, et cetera? I think those are actually even more important issues than Obamacare and Roe quite frankly, in terms on national life.

Brian: NPR, National Political Correspondent, Mara Liasson, with us for another few minutes. Let me move on to the latest thing that the New York Times has figured out from those Trump tax returns they were able to obtain. Not only is he $400 million in debt to we don't know who from maybe what foreign countries, the Times now reports it has been able to discern that the president maintains a previously unreported bank account in China. While he paid only $750 in US income taxes in 2016 and 2017, he paid 188,000 to the government of China in taxes in the three years immediately prior to his being elected. Barack Obama had something to say about that last night at a campaign appearance for the Biden-Harris ticket in Philadelphia. Here's that.

Barack Obama: Can you imagine if I had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election. You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that? They would've called me Beijing Barry.

Brian: [chuckles] Besides a good laugh line, Beijing Barry, he's got a point. Can you imagine what Donald Trump himself would have said about Barack Obama having an off-shore Chinese bank account and paying more in taxes to the communist Chinese government than to our own?

Mara: Yes. It undercuts his argument that somehow or other, he's never really explained exactly how, Biden is too soft on China. That I expect will come up tonight in the debate.

Brian: Do we know why Trump had to have or decided to have a bank account in China and not just do business there with his American accounts?

Mara: Well, I don't know the rules on Chinese banking, but we do know that Ireland, Great Britain and China are the only places where Trump had bank accounts other than in the United States. That's what we do know. Why he had one there? He was clearly trying to do business in China all through the 2016 campaign, he was pursuing business interests as he was around the world. We know about Moscow. I don't know why he had a bank account there or why he needed to have a bank account there, but he did pay taxes. He paid a lot more taxes in China than he did in the United States.

Brian: Last thing. There was a kind of hard to understand briefing last night by Trump's FBI director and director of National Intelligence about attempts by both Russia and Iran to interfere in our election. Is it clear to you exactly what they were revealing and why publicly at this time?

Mara: It was a little confusing. There were messages delivered to voters that the administration says were done by Iranians impersonating the Proud Boys, the right-wing militia group who the president has variously praised and begrudgingly condemned.

Brian: Stand back and stand by.

Mara: Stand back and stand by. They said they were Iranians and they were basically threatening messages that said, "You better vote for Trump, or we know where you are and we'll come and do you harm." The messages were mixed because on the one hand, they were saying, "Look, foreign actors are trying to interfere in our elections." Christopher Wray, the FBI director said, "Don't worry your vote is safe." On the other hand, the director of National Intelligence was saying somehow or other, this was meant to hurt Donald Trump. That was the confusing part. It seemed like it was meant to deter people from voting for Joe Biden.

Brian: I know Senator Murphy has been looking into this and so we'll ask him about it too when he comes on a little later. For now, NPR National Political Correspondent, Mara Liasson. Thank you as always for some time, we really appreciate it.

Mara: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We have much more to come.

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