Book Talk: Lisa Graves — Without Precedent- with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Watch author Lisa Graves' book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

In the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one's reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve.

Without Precedent explodes the falsehood that Roberts is a fair-minded institutionalist who works to blunt the worst impulses of other Republican appointees to the court when, in fact, he has led the rightward transformation of the court's jurisprudence while presiding over the most corrupt and corrupted Supreme Court in American history.

Informed by Lisa Graves's experience working on judicial issues for all three branches of the federal government, and based on years of intensive research, Without Precedent not only exposes Roberts as the reactionary politician in robes he has always been but delivers a vigorous plan of judicial reform designed to overcome the divisive, discriminatory, destructive, and anti-democratic machinations of the Roberts court.

Lisa Graves is one of the nation's foremost experts on right-wing influence on the federal courts. She helps lead Court Accountability and True North Research. She has served as a senior adviser in all three branches of the federal government, including as the chief counsel for nominations for the US Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Patrick Leahy. She resides in Superior, Wisconsin.

Graves is in conversation with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Whitehouse has earned a reputation in the Senate as a fierce advocate for progressive values and a thoughtful legislator capable of reaching across the aisle to achieve bipartisan solutions. He has been at the center of bipartisan efforts to pass laws overhauling federal education policy, rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, reforming the criminal and juvenile justice systems, protecting Americans from toxic chemicals in everyday products, and addressing ocean plastic waste. Recognizing the devastating toll of addiction in Rhode Island and across the nation, Whitehouse authored the first significant bipartisan law to address the opioid crisis, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. Representing the Ocean State, he plays a key role in crafting policies addressing climate change, environmental protection, and a price on carbon. He passed into law a dedicated fund to support ocean and coastal research and restoration and bipartisan legislation to confront the crisis of marine plastic and other waste polluting our oceans. He has worked to enact bipartisan measures to reduce carbon pollution and boost America’s clean energy economy. Whitehouse has stood as a staunch defender of Social Security and Medicare, and has made improving care and reducing costs in our health care system a hallmark of his career.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, Sheldon served as

Rhode Island’s U.S. Attorney and state attorney general before being elected to the Senate,

where he serves on the Finance Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Environment and

Public Works Committee, and the Budget Committee.

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