Episode #172: AHCA, SCOTUS and LBJ

With the failure to get the American Health Care Act enough votes to bring it to the House floor, Republicans have learned the difference between campaigning and governing.  Political analyst Stu Rothenberg analyzes the GOP defeat and speculates on what, if anything, the failure might mean to the rest of the Trump agenda. With a vote expected to come next week on the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch, Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights makes the case against confirmation, and says that it’s not a sure thing the Senate will decide to employ the nuclear option to lower the threshold of approval to a majority vote. Christine Mai-Duc of the Los Angeles Times prepares us for next week’s special primary in California’s 34th Congressional District, necessitated by former incumbent Xavier Becerra (D) becoming state attorney general. We talk to the Daily Beast’s Michael Daly about his longtime friend, famed newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, who died earlier this month. And we go back 49 years to the stunning announcement by President Lyndon Johnson that he would not seek re-election in 1968.  Presidential historian Julian Zelizer remembers the factors that led to LBJ’s decision. LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto Music used in this podcast: Born of  Frustration by James Teen‐C Power! by Bis Are You Gonna Go My Way by Lenny Kravitz The Forecast (Calls for Pain) by Robert Cray Band  The Passenger by Iggy Pop Stand or Fall by The Fixx This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License