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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We're all talking of course about the Supreme Court, apparently poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. People are calling it the first time the court took away a constitutional right. Remember this, it was nine years ago this summer that the supreme court with most of the same members gutted the Voting Rights Act. Remember the name of that case because we're about to talk to the defendant. It was called Shelby County v. Holder.

Eric Holder: Today, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, and invalidated an essential part of the Voting Rights Act, a cornerstone of American civil rights law. Now, like many others across the country, I am deeply disappointed, deeply disappointed with the court's decision in this matter. This decision represents a serious setback for voting rights and has the potential to negatively affect millions of Americans across the country.

Brian Lehrer: That was former US Attorney General Eric Holder, just after that Supreme Court ruling, June 25th, 2013. Eric Holder joins me now along with Sam Koppelman, they are co-authors of a new book called Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A History, a Crisis, a Plan. Heads up guests, I will also ask if you have a plan for abortion rights too.

These days, Eric Holder is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Attorney general, it's so great to have you on the show. Welcome to WNYC.

Eric Holder: Thank you for having me, Brian. As I listened to that younger Eric Holder, I have to think that he had it precisely right. That was a really bad decision, and the impact that young Eric talked about then unfortunately has come to pass in our nation.

Brian Lehrer: Old Eric doesn't sound that much different from young Eric so it's good to have both of you here. Also with us, co-author, Sam Koppelman, who is director of surrogate speechwriting as they call that position for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign, and is now a principal at the political communications firm, Fenway Strategies. He's previously co-author with former US Solicitor General under Obama-Neal Katyal of the book, Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.

Sam's bio says he is in a toxic relationship with the Knicks, which I think is redundant Sam because it's the only kind of relationship with the Knicks. Welcome to WNYC.

Sam Koppelman: Thank you. I spend my time worried about the Knicks, voting right, and Donald Trump. It doesn't leave a lot of room for joy and happiness, so glad to be able to have this conversation with you which is a true privilege. I'm a longtime listener, so glad to be on.

Brian Lehrer: Glad you're on. General Holder, could you look back to Shelby v. Holder to begin 2013 at the end of June? Like I said, why is the end of June important? It's the week we usually hear the biggest decisions from the Supreme Court when their draft versions aren't leaked two months earlier. Can you remind people what was at issue in that 5-4 ruling as you saw it?

Eric Holder: What we had was a Supreme Court that decided in spite of the thousands of pages of evidence that Congress had amassed despite the fact that Republican presidents had reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court took it upon itself to say that an important part of the Act. I don't want to get too technical here, but an important part of the Act, the coverage formula in the Act was inconsistent with America as it existed today.

As a result, it took away up the power of pre-clearance from the Justice Department. DOJ has the ability with pre-clearance to look at jurisdictions that will cover it and say, "You're trying to change polling places, you're trying to change the way in which people vote." That's inconsistent with their constitutional rights. The court took that away and almost immediately after the decision, the states put in place a number of discriminatory voting procedures as we predicted they would. It's Sam with the great research that he did has shown this had a pernicious effect from 2013 all the way up to present day.

Brian Lehrer: States and local governments with a history of racial discrimination and their voting laws no longer had to get pre-clearance from the US Justice Department to change any voting laws because of that ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. The court held that the formula in the 1965 Act was by then too old to be a constitutional basis anymore for treating different states differently.

The vote in Congress to reauthorize the Act as it was in 2006 included, I know you know, a unanimous vote in the United States Senate. The Supreme Court overturned a unanimous vote in the Senate from when George W. Bush was president, which had upheld voting rights. How much did that part boggle your mind? I just have to ask.

Eric Holder: I got to tell you, the unanimous vote in the Senate, I think there are only six or seven people in the House of Representatives who voted against it. A Republican president signed the reauthorization. There was literally hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, testimony. There was no basis for the court to do what it did other than its own ideological view of the way in which they thought federal powers could and should be exercised.

It was a 5-4 decision, I think it will go down as one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court.

Brian Lehrer: I remember thinking at the time, well, this should be a pretty easy fix. All Congress needs to do is update the formula, look at which states were still pussyfooting with voting law changes that could have a disparate impact on voters of color, and make a new list. They had eight to nothing Senate to start out with but they never did it. How do you understand why not?

Eric Holder: I think a couple of things happened. Once the supreme court said, "You know what? It's okay to be opposed to voting rights." It really empowered people who otherwise thought, "If I want to be a respectable person in Washington DC, even if I don't believe in this I have to vote for it." It empowered people to express through their votes a desire to be less egalitarian when it came to the vote.

The Republican party very quickly decided, "If we're not under the strictures of the Voting Rights Act, we're going to do those things that are necessary to maintain power in a changing society that is becoming more multi-racial and where the nation is moving away from the ideological positions that we have taken." There was a legal decision that had I think very dramatic political consequences.

Brian Lehrer: I'll bring in Sam just a second on some of the historical research that you've done for this book, Sam. Let me finish this thread with you, General Holder, this way. Do you see any kind of a line connecting the court's weakening the voting rights in 2013 and the possible weakening now of abortion rights today? Or should we look at them simply as two separate cases on two separate issues?

Eric Holder: No. Your instinct is right. There was a direct line through the Citizens United case, the Shelby County case, the root show decision which the Supreme Court said they would not get involved in partisan gerrymandering. All the way up to this Mississippi abortion case where the court I think is deciding issues not necessarily on a partisan basis but on an ideological basis. You have a conservative majority that was long dissatisfied with Roe v. Wade.

They see this as their opportunity finally to do something about it. They were dissatisfied with the Voting Rights Act back in 1965, so found a way to do something about it. I think there's a direct connection between this new wing in the newly empowered wing in the Supreme Court to flex their ideological muscles inconsistent with the duties that they have to precedent. Also inconsistent with what their responsibilities to the American people who have relied on these precedents for over half a century.

Brian Lehrer: When you say ideological, does that just mean political, or is ideological in a certain respect justifiable on the Supreme Court because there are different ways that liberal and conservative judges and legal scholars look at the constitution?

Eric Holder: Yes. They bring their life experience to the court and there are going to be ideological differences. I understand that. What they're supposed to do is to try to keep those ideological differences or those ideological views somewhat in check and look at what previous courts have done. Look at the impact of the decisions that they are going to render. This court, I think has made the determination that it is okay to an essence remake American society.

You look at what this court is going to do over the course of the next 18 months or so with regard to a big gun case that they have, the abortion case that they have. They have an important affirmative action case that they're going to be dealing with. There's a whole range of issues a civil rights case with regard to one of the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1962 Section two. They are going to try to remake American society in ways that no Supreme Court, I think has ever done.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the gun case I know we're waiting here in New York, to see if they give people with concealed carry permits in Texas, say, the right to walk around with guns in New York. Which New York laws otherwise would not allow. Listeners your question is welcomed for former Attorney General Eric Holder and co-author Sam Koppelman. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692 with their book, Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A history, a Crisis, a Plan. 212-433 WNYC. Or you can Tweet a question @BrianLehrer.

Sam, in the book, you and Attorney General Holder go through three phases of winning the right to vote in American history. We'll touch on all three. The first one is white men winning the right to vote through violence and insurrection. To boil it way down. That's an interesting choice of words these days, violence and insurrection. Why did you frame it up like that?

Sam Koppelman: There were a bunch of real politic factors that went into how white men won the vote were in the South. They actually advocated for the vote because they said, if their voices didn't count, they would end up siding with folks who were enslaved who are going to rebel against the powers that be and you'd rather have them with those who are in power than against them. We focus specifically in the late 1800s. In Rhode Island, one of the last states to grant white men the vote, where a man by the name of Thomas Dore and then a bunch of workers led by this man named Seth Luther decided to take matters into their own hands and lead a violent insurrection on the Capitol.

Dore ended up firing cannons at the state Capitol and his whole family was there. He was a wealthy guy who had grown up around there. They just had decided that, if America was going to be a democracy, their voices needed to be heard. Of course, in the process, they made all horrific moral compromises and subjugated Black Rhode Islanders and others women. It was this really ironic thing when we went back and looked at the history where these folks were getting the best possible rationales for why everyone should be able to vote.

They were saying if you're a part of a country if you're asked to fight in the military if you're asked to serve and pay taxes, that you should have a say in who your representatives are. Of course, it doesn't apply to Black people, or women, or anyone else. That rank hypocrisy, paired with such moral virtue fascinated us. It set the stage for many generations of similar activism that took place in the decades, centuries ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Next comes white women in the book, Winning The Right To Vote, the book says through protests and mass imprisonment. Remind us why you put that one second since Black men were technically given the right to vote in the 15th Amendment in 1870, which was 50 years before the 19th Amendment, which gave American women any right to vote at all.

Sam Koppelman: We talked about reconstruction in the book where Dubois described it as a moment in the sun, where America had seemed like a real democracy for a period of time, where not only could Black Americans vote but they took elected office across the country in South Carolina, dozens of Black representatives in the state legislature. Then those rights were wiped away.

We talked about that as a cautionary tale about the impermanence of democracy of the right to vote. We tell that story and then we switch over to white women because interestingly, many of the leaders of the movement that people who started the Seneca Falls Convention, they actually were abolitionists, they were against slavery. They realized that the quickest path for them to win the vote for themselves for white women to win the vote was to again embrace the same racism that white men had embraced early in American history.

They also pair that with true righteousness and virtue. I mean, Alice Paul, was protesting outside the White House every single day, when she was arrested, she refused to eat, she had to be fed through feeding tubes and kept it up. Ida B. Wells, joined these protests in DC, a Black woman who was supposed to be in the back of the march came undercover as we described in the book, and marched at the front.

It was with these, the seeds that were planted by these movements, these flawed imperfect movements that ended up making our democracy a bit more perfect that the Civil Rights Movement inherited that struggle, and Black men and women alike joined our democracy in earnest in 1965. The reason we focused on reconstruction at the beginning of the book is to say that since the Shelby County decision, we are once again seeing it become harder. Not easier to vote for the first time, and with reconstruction in mind, you realize how tenuous our democracy can be and why we have to stay so vigilant.

Brian Lehrer: In all these three phases, you're emphasizing that voting rights were not won by simply debate and legislation but with real struggle in the face of violent or government resistance. Mass imprisonment, the women's suffrage movement, insurrection, in the case of white men, as you describe that. We know about the lynching, some of our listeners lived through the Civil Rights era that culminated with the 1965 Voting Rights Act after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Why center those aspects?

Sam Koppelman: When you talk to people about politics today, there's this predominant pessimism. The sense that we can't change the system. It's true. There's all these incredibly frustrating aspects of the way our political systems working now. If you look at how much power we have, compared to the generations before us. These women fought for suffrage at a time when women didn't have any rights at all, when they couldn't go to court. In the few cases, when they could go to court.

They were all male juries who they did that with if their husbands had been abusing them in some way, and they were trying to sue or try to get divorced. You had Black Americans who were literally risking lynchings, killings, and still kept up the fight. Many died without seeing the better America that they were fighting for. We all inherited it and benefited from it. That context feels instrumental to understanding why the pessimism that's so predominant now is an unacceptable excuse for apathy or indifference or throwing in the towel. That if people were willing to go through all of that back then.

Willing to take such huge risks weighty risks, back then when they had much less reason for hope. Then we'd better stop complaining and tweeting and giving up and we'd better get to work and start marching and start actually picking up this fight.

Brian Lehrer: Sam Koppelman, and Eric Holder with us and listeners, who has a question you always wanted to ask Eric Holder but you never had them over for dinner? Now's your opportunity. We can take a few phone calls, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet a question @BrianLehrer. General Holder again, the subtitle of the book is a history, a Crisis, a Plan. We've just done some of the history. We started with the crisis that we've been in, in this respect, since Shelby County v. Holder was decided by the Supreme Court nine years ago. Let's talk about part three, the plan.

I think it's important to say and tell me if you think I'm focusing in the right place. It's not just to oppose restrictive voting laws, like the new one in Georgia, that's become a symbol of them but to revisit the basic institutions of our electoral system, including the Senate, the Electoral College, and yes, the Supreme Court. Can we start with the Senate? Because I think that's the big one that people often don't think about. We've been talking about here a lot lately.

Every state gets two senators, no matter if it's California, with 40 million people, or Wyoming with barely 500,000. How is that equal representation under the principle of one person, one vote? It's like each person in Wyoming gets 80 votes for Senate compared to Californians.

Eric Holder: It's not one person, one vote. That's the way in which our founders decided the system was going to work as part of the great compromise. The house would have, essentially one person, one vote, the Senate would say that every state would have two senators. One of the things that we're saying there is that, when you look at the inadequacies that we now see, the founders anticipated that there would be some disparities. As we write the disparity between California and Wyoming, the states that you're talking about were incomprehensible for the founders.

One of the things that we talked about there's not going to be a constitutional amendment to change the makeup of the Senate. However, you can at least ameliorate those disparities by admitting as states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, Democratic-leaning states, I will say Republicans have won elections in both jurisdictions. If you add those four seats that at least has some impact on this misrepresentation, the disparity, and representation that we see in the Senate, in addition to the procedural things that we see that need to be changed in the Senate as well.

Brian Lehrer: The Electoral College has the same problem because each state gets the number of house members plus the number of senators as their electoral college votes. Where does the Supreme Court come in structurally? Not just in its rulings.

Eric Holder: I would just say before, leave the electoral college, our proposal there is to put in place a system under the national popular vote interstate compact. That's a long title. That would mandate that states cast their electoral votes, not for who won the vote in their states, but who won the vote nationally. As long as you get states totaling 270 votes to agree to that you essentially render the electoral college, if not meaningless, you certainly make it more representative of the way in which the popular vote would actually go. That's something that I think needs to be supported.

Up to now, we have states totaling 195 electoral votes in support of that reform of the electoral college. With regard to the court, our proposal is to expand the court, for now, to deal with those stolen seats by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans to come up with fixed terms of 18 years. The founders wanted to put people in place. They'd be insulated from political pressure for life, but people live a lot longer. Now you can serve on the court for 30, 40 years.

That's too long for somebody to be in such a powerful unelected position. Then also we propose having guaranteed appointments, such that every president would appoint somebody to the Supreme court in his or her first and third year of each term, so that we de depressurize the confirmation process and make more regular the infusion of new people into the court. That's the way in which we think the court might be restructured.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you a question that some Republican-leaning listeners might be thinking and that is, you're no longer in law enforcement. Now you're head of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. You're out there on the political front lines trying to get as favorable district lines drawn as possible for your party. The proposals that you layout, at least in the short run would seem to favor democratic representation. Why shouldn't they see it as partisan?

Eric Holder: I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree that what we would do with favor Democrats. We stood for reforms in Virginia, for instance. Doing away with a lot of unnecessary Republican-led Republican constructed voter ID things, photo ID gerrymandering, a whole range of things. What happened? Republicans won every statewide election just, I don't know, 12, 15 months ago, whenever it was. There's not necessarily a direct connection. What we are fighting for is fairness.

Let's make this a battle of ideas, a battle of candidates, as opposed to a battle of who draws lines when it comes to redistricting or a battle of who can control the levers of electoral infrastructure. I actually think, yes, if we do things in a fair way that Democrats progressives will do just fine. If Republicans don't do fine, well then maybe they need to change who they nominate. Maybe they need to change the policies that they espouse. That's what our democracy is supposed to be all about.

Brian Lehrer: John in Manhattan. You're on WNYC with Eric Holder and Sam Koppelman. Hi, John.

John: Good afternoon. Good morning. Attorney General Holder, just a question. Have you also spoken to Reverend William Barber to help him push this idea with you?

Eric Holder: You mean William Barber in North Carolina?

John: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, Reverend Barber? [crosstalk]

John: I've known Reverend Barber for some time. That is actually one of the states that is a target state for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. We have brought lawsuits, successful lawsuits in North Carolina to knock down the Republican gerrymander when we have a case that is still in the courts right now. We have really reduced the anti-democracy redistricting that Republicans try to do both at the congressional as well as state level. He is a singular person. He is a great American, and he is somebody who I admire a great deal and have worked with.

Brian Lehrer: Anthony in the Bronx. You're on WNYC. Hi, Anthony. Anthony, do we have you?

Anthony: [crosstalk] Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to ask Mr. Holder and tell him I have all the respect in the world for him about his view on Black-on-Black crime and what's going on with the police brutality?

Eric Holder: I'd say this, first off this notion of Black-on-Black crime is something that we have to focus on, but it is too often used as a political tool to justify bringing inappropriate or using inappropriate law enforcement techniques in communities of color. The vast majority of people who are murdered and who are Black are killed by other Black people. Here's the deal, 85% of all the white people in this country are killed by white people. Do we have a white-on-white crime that we're not talking about?

We have to be very careful about these slogans that then tend to lead to policies when it comes to how police conduct themselves in communities of color. My justice department stood for supporting law enforcement while at the same time, bringing lawsuits against law enforcement agencies that conducted themselves in inappropriate ways. I don't think there is a tension between good law enforcement, fair law enforcement and having people think that they're being treated fairly by people in law enforcement.

That's what we tried to strive for in the Obama justice department. We were very aggressive and we filed a record number of cases against law enforcement agencies that had abused their powers.

Brian Lehrer: Sam, to this idea that there's a crisis of voting rights today. Some people push back on that as overstated because turnout has been sky high during the Trump era, the era after the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court ruling in 2013, and African American turnout was key to both President Biden's nomination.

His election turnout was less during the 2016 election, because there wasn't as much enthusiasm or perceived urgency on the part of Democrats. How much of that do you accept? Look at voter turnout, really voter suppression is a massive problem that's obtaining massive results. How would you reply to people who bring that up like that?

Sam Koppelman: It makes sense that the people are talking about this. There's a few aspects to it. On the one hand in 2020, part of the reason there was such great turnout is because there was unprecedented efforts to expand access to the ballot box due to the pandemic. If you look at something like Harris County in Houston, they had this guy, Chris Hollins who ran the elections there and they had driven through voting every couple of blocks.

They had 24/7 mail-in ballots that you were allowed to drop off wherever you wanted to. They massively expanded the hours so folks working two jobs or folks who have disabilities could cast ballots. There were all sorts of efforts in 2020 to expand access that have started to be attacked viciously by those same state legislatures. The program that Chris Hollins ran in Houston, Harris County in 2020 would no longer be justifiable under Texas's voter suppression bill that they passed last year.

The other factor here is that with elections as close as the ones that we've seen, especially at the presidential level where states are decided by 10,000 votes, or 20,000 votes, the swing states that shape the elections. It's not about reducing overall turnout, this suppression it's about slightly shaving numbers. If you had 1% lower turnout among Black Americans in Georgia, Trump may won in 2020. It's about shaving those margins. What we've seen is since 2020, where the voter suppression didn't quite work because voters understood the stakes of the election and the pandemic enabled us to radically increase access to the ballot.

We've seen states methodically work, whether it's throwing out the non-partisans who certified the elections or passing bills, like the one in Texas designed to unwind the reforms that Chris Hollins had put in place. We've seen Republicans laser focus on making sure that next time in 2024, they'll have a far better chance of succeeding. If they try to do a similar coup and I think their intent is very clear. Taking it seriously is the least we can do to fight back.

Brian Lehrer: We are at this extremely bizarre moment where not only was Trump trying to steal an election, he was doing it on the grounds that the real winner was trying to steal the election. It would almost be funny if it wasn't so authoritarian. Attorney General, why do you think so many people believe that gaslighting?

Eric Holder: That's a hard thing to say, Brian. I think we have to at least give Donald Trump his due in this sense that he's a Carney and he's a good Carney. He has the ability to sell people on things that are totally inconsistent with what their eyes and ears and their brains tell them. It's a very dangerous thing. I saw a poll that said 44% of the people in this country believe that, the system doesn't work it's rigged, that it favors one party over the other.

That's a really dangerous thing for our democracy. It's something that has to be countered by responsible politicians of both parties, and we have to put in place these reforms that Sam and I talk about in our book, because I think that would push back against a lot of these negative things that Trump has put in the minds of people. You have to remember, 20% of the people in this country believe that the Moon landing was faked. Abraham Lincoln says that you can fool some of the people all of the time. Trump has tapped into both, I think of those constituencies.

Brian Lehrer: The Moon landing was real? Never mind. One more call Celia in Manhattan. You're on WNYC with former Attorney general Eric Holder and co-author Sam Koppelman, with their book on Voting Rights. Hi Celia.

Celia: Hi, Brian. Thank you very much for taking my call. Attorney General Holder, I think this is for you, and I'm interested in this question about state rights. The anti-abortion, states are talking about their own states rights in making sure that people are not allowed to get abortions, similar to what happened with the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850s. Where people were in which an escaped enslaved person could be returned and had to be returned if they ended up in a non-slave state.

It was nevertheless against the law for anybody to do anything, but return them to their enslaved status in their enslaved in states. In this case, these laws are saying that we will prosecute any providers in states, such as New York if you help our citizens of our state, who come into your state in order to get an abortion. Cannot we talk about states' rights? We, here in New York state and in the pro-choice state, cannot we talk about state's rights in opposition to those who are going to try to use it to make us follow their laws?

Eric Holder: Yes, I think the question that you raise and statement you've made is a very prescient one, because the reality is, let's assume that the Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade. That is not going to be the end to it. They're going to be states that are going to talk about prohibiting the mailing of morning-after pills so that women can self-medicate. They're going to go after people who provide transportation to other states.

Potentially go after doctors and other states who perform procedures on residents of the state where the abortion prohibition exists. We have to be prepared for this second round that is going to come up, and that will be before this same Supreme Court. It would seem to me if one were to look at the law in an appropriate way, and I don't agree at all with the decision to overturn Roe, but if it is states like New York, Illinois, California should have the capacity to enforce their laws.

Have reproductive freedoms in their states that are consistent with the desires of the people, consistent with the desires of those state constitutions, and that people who come to those states should enjoy those freedoms as well. My guess is, and that's why I say, I think this statement is extremely pressing, is that ultimately this is going to end up before the courts to decide how much power an abortion prohibiting state will actually have.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, Attorney General Holder, New York's congressional and State Senate districting were just thrown out as you well know by the New York Court of Appeals, court of judges appointed by democratic governors because Democrats and the legislature were too partisan in drawing the lines in the court's view. For you as head of the National Democratic Redistricting campaign or committee, I know Democrats shouldn't unilaterally disarm, if the Republicans are doing the same thing in Texas and elsewhere adding congressional seats for themselves through gerrymandering. How do we ever get to something that's actually fair and universal?

Eric Holder: I think we have to fight all around the country for fairness. Fight for processes that will lead to lines that are drawn, not on the basis of trying to save one party over the other. Now we were not involved in the New York map drawing process, and as I've said publicly, I would not have drawn the maps the way they were drawn, but I also think there's no comparison between the maps drawn in New York and the maps drawn in the states that we've actually challenged in court.

New York followed the direction of population shifts in the census, the 2020 census made it clear that Democrats were going to pick up seats and that Republicans were going to lose seats in New York. I think that Democrats went a little too far with regard to the numbers there, but the general path I think was correct.

Even the map drawn by the Republican commissioners during the commission process, added democratic seats and had a pathway to New York electing about 22 democratic members of Congress, and that's just like the map that was drawn by the state legislature. My hope will be that at the end of this process will end up in New York with maps that are consistent with the principles that I've tried to fight for, around the country. You cannot compare what happened in New York to what's going on in Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, potentially in Florida where the Republican legislatures there were not following the census data, the census trends.

They were only trying to draw lines to entrench themselves in power. Now, New York as I said, New York Democrats might have gone a little far, but at least there was a Census Bureau basis for the actions that they took.

Sam Koppelman: One additional quick point is just that at the federal level Democrats proposed nonpartisan redistricting, and Republicans rejected it. I think Democrats would be pretty happy to get rid of partisanship in this process across the board, if Republicans would just say, "Yes."

Brian Lehrer: Sam Koppelman and Eric Holder are the co-authors of, Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A History, a Crisis, a Plan. Thank you so much for joining us. I know our listeners really appreciated it.

Eric Holder: Okay. Thanks, Brian.

Sam Koppelman: Thank You.

 

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