KGO-AM, THE PAT THURSTON SHOW (SAN FRANCISCO) -- Pat Thurston interviews Aaron Belkin, director of Take Back the Court and a Political Science professor at San Francisco State University.
“As a political scientist, I know that democracy cannot function when courts are stolen,” Belkin says.
Belkin proposes three major initiatives to fix democracy, if Democrats hold the presidency and majority of both the House of Representatives and Senate in 2021:
- Kill the filibuster in the Senate,
- expand the Supreme Court and lower courts, and
- pass an “aggressive democracy agenda” that would ban voter suppression, gerrymandering and dark money.
Belkin says these initiatives would add 50 million voters to the rolls.
“We lose a lot of voters today through voter suppression,” he says. “We lose voters because undocumented immigrants, of course, aren’t allowed to vote. We lose voters because ex-offenders, in many places, are not allowed to vote, and also because of registration hurdles that various states have put in place.”