Debating who should fill the next Supreme Court seat; taking an in-depth look at the cyclical nature of violent crime in America and weighing the pros and cons of mosquito extinction.
How choosing a Supreme Court justice changes the 2016 campaign
The debate over whether it should be President Barack Obama or his successor who appoints the next Supreme Court justice is heating up.
Writing in today's Washington Post, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid says by refusing to approve an Obama nominee to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the GOP-led Senate would "aim a procedural missile at the foundation of our system of checks and balances." But Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch tells CNN that the Constitution doesn't specify a "time constraint" for approving a new justice.
The No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, said today that he expects Obama to select a consensus candidate who could get bipartisan support. But Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texan who has practiced before the high court and is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, has vowed to filibuster any nominee.
It also remains to be seen what strategy President Obama will employ in choosing his nominee — will he choose someone with a liberal record, knowing that the Republicans are all but sure to block the nomination?
If Obama goes liberal, does that fire up Republicans and boost turnout? Or does he choose someone moderate, possibly even someone who's been nominated before by a Republican president? And does that backfire on Republicans if their delay the nomination regardless of the nominee?
Meanwhile, a wild presidential race becomes even more important, as each party knows the stakes for the Court's future. At stake are Affirmative Action, gun laws, campaign finance restrictions, and the reach of Presidential power.
With Files from the Associated Press.
Guests:
Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the School of Law at UC Irvine and an expert on constitutional law
Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
Marcia Coyle, Chief Washington Correspondent, The National Law Journal; as a lawyer and journalist, Coyle has covered the Supreme Court for 25 years; She’s also the author of “The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution;”
Josh Gerstein, Senior White House Reporter at POLITICO who’s been following the story
Rory Cooper, GOP strategist and managing director at Purple Strategies, a political consulting firm in Washington, D.C. He was also the communications director for former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Celinda Lake, a political strategist and president of Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm based in Washington DC
When and why violent crime rises in America
New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, St. Louis have all experienced a spike in violent crime in the last few years.
Los Angeles is no exception. LAPD found that violent crime jumped 20 percent in 2015 from a year ago, and property crime also climbed 10 percent.
In his new book, criminologist Barry Latzer looks at the cyclical nature of violent crime rates. The late 1960s saw a dramatic spike in violent crime across America, Latzer puts into social context the factors that drove the surge, and what eventually brought it down.
The book provides a framework to think about what’s been happening in major cities today, and offers a blueprint to address the problem as California implement a series of criminal justice reform measures to reduce jail population and penalties.
Guest:
Barry Latzer, author of “The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America” (Encounter Books, 2016). He is also a professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Crime doesn’t pay...or does it? DC looks to Richmond, CA model to incentivize good behavior
Rather than locking up repeat offenders, the city of Washington D.C. is considering an alternative that would incentivize them to behave.
Earlier this month, the D.C. Council passed the NEAR Act, a bill that would, in part, pay offenders a yearly stipend to stay in behavioral health and job placement programs. The most likely candidates would be criminals who have previous offenses involving firearms and who police consider a risk to reoffend.
Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who represents Ward 5 in D.C., says the city needs to start looking at its crime problem through the lens of public health, and he hopes this program will be a start. It’s modeled off of a program that was implemented in Richmond, California, which has seen a marked decrease in homicides ever since.
Still, it’s unclear whether the unanimous support Councilmember McDuffie won from his colleagues on the D.C. Council will translate into action. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has said she is concerned the bill doesn’t actually present a provision to fight crime and that the plan isn’t a balanced approach. There are also sure to be issues raised around funding the program and implementing it in a city the size of Washington D.C.
Do you think incentivizing good behavior is a sustainable crime prevention model? What concerns, if any, do you have about the optics of the program?
Guests:
Kenyan McDuffie, member of the Council of the District of Columbia, representing Ward 5, and author of the NEAR Act
Eugene O’Donnell, professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice; former NYPD officer and former prosecutor in Kings County, New York
The practicality (and possibility) of eradicating mosquitoes to stop Zika, other viruses
Before the Zika virus emerged as a major health crisis, mosquitoes have long been the deadliest creatures on the planet.
Estimates on the number of people who die from mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and yellow fever range between 725 thousand to 1 million per year. As recent advances in methods of genetic engineering open up the possibility of eradicating mosquitoes from the face of the earth, are there compelling reasons why humans shouldn’t intentionally cause the extinction of the insect species? Especially given that out of 3,000 varieties of mosquitoes on earth, only about 200 of those bite humans.
How close are we to the ability to wipe mosquitos off the planet? Is isolated eradication of the varieties that carry deadly diseases a realistic option? What roles do mosquitos play in our ecosystems? How much of a threat is the Zika virus to Southern California?
Here are some important takeaways:
Larry Mantle: Could you possibly genetically modify genes in a way that would eradicate a type of mosquito?
Anthony A. James: On principle, yes it is. And in fact, there [has] been a couple of applications where people have developed systems that cause the mosquitoes to die when they get the genes that people have engineered.
Larry Mantle: Would there be an environmental harm in doing this? If you were to take away a particular type of mosquito, might that take away a food supply?
Anthony A. James: Well, let’s look at the example. For example, Southern California, where the two mosquitoes that are of interest here are Aedes aegypti and another one called Aedes albopictus. Aedes aegypti is actually native to Africa, the jungle reasons of Africa and Aedes albopictus comes out of Eastern Asia. Both of those are invasive species to southern California. So if we were to remove them from southern California we actually would not be doing any harm to the ecosystem here. In a sense, you could think we would be actually fixing it by removing them.
Larry Mantle:If [a] genetically modified mosquito is introduced with the impact of eradicating the other two species, is there a chance that then the genetically modified mosquito could live on and become an invasive species?
Anthony A. James: So, we would actually design it so that they don’t persist in nature. We would like to think of it as a fail-safe approach where you have the ones that you release are only good for one generation and pass their genes on to the wild mosquitoes and the next generation and they expire. So it would be something that would not be maintained in the population. We call that self-limiting.
Larry Mantle: What is the estimate of how many of the genetically modified mosquitoes you’d have to release into southern California to actually eradicate the species?
Anthony A. James: Well the good news –at this point— [is] not very many because we don’t have large numbers of these invasive mosquitoes yet. And so, I’m guessing it would be somewhere in the tens to maybe one hundred thousands-- depending upon the target area. But the thing that we’re really looking at is only releasing male mosquitoes, which don’t feed on people. So, we wouldn’t be putting females out that would be biting people as well.
Guest:
Anthony A. James, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at UC Irvine specializing in gene modification as a tool to combat mosquitoes that carry deadly diseases. He is currently working on a new plan to prevent the Zika virus from becoming a health threat in Southern California