Watch The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell Highlights: April 10

Well, it's not Donald Trump who did this, it's the 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump and put the power of Supreme Court nominations in Donald Trump's hands for four years and it's the 62 million people who voted for George W. Bush or who volunteered for his campaign or helped in some way, which meant they voted indirectly for Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alo, who wrote the opinion on Row's change versus Wade, and it was the 49 million people who voted for George HW Bush who indirectly voted for Clarence Thomas. to serve on the Supreme Court, where he waited for decades to vote to overturn Rorow v.

W, now many of those Republican voters did not want this to happen, most voters had every right to suspect that Donald Trump's position on abortion as a presidential candidate was just a political stance, he was not the first George HW Bush and the Bush family were supporters of Plant Parenthood until George HW Bush had to change his position in 1980 to become Ronald Reagan's running mate for the vice presidency, an act of maximum cynicism in politics, no. someone who worked in American politics believed that George H. W. Bush of Connecticut was actually opposed to abortion; It's simply what he had to say to get on the Republican list, which that year ran on an anti-abortion platform that the candidates never emphasized but made sure that anti-abortion voters knew.

It was the most cynical public act we had seen so far from a candidate. presidential or vice president the first of President Bush's sons did not have to engage in a public change of his position when he became a politician for Texas Governor George W. Bush fully aligned himself with the absolute anti-abortion policy of the Republican Party that The next Republican running for president was forced by Republican policy, not principle, to align with the party. on abortion it was m Romney who led a losing Senate campaign in Massachusetts against Ted Kennedy claiming to be to the left of Ted Kennedy on abortion and other issues, then Mitt Romney won the Massachusetts governorship running with the same position on abortion abortion of all Democrats in Massachusetts.

Mitt Romney was completely pro-choice as governor of Massachusetts and then, when he ran for president as a Republican in 2012, he did an about-face and became as anti-abortion as any Republican, so when Donald Trump says as he did this week that the Republican position on abortion is just political, he means it and he is not the first to think so cynically about Republican abortion Politics The

last

time the Republican presidential candidates debated abortion was 24 years ago, when John McCain wanted to ban all abortions. with exceptions for rape, incest and life of mother and George W Bush did not seem to understand his own position without exceptions George, do you believe in the case of exemption and abortion of abortion for rape, incest and life of mother?

So you know it's interesting. You were talking about printed material that was mailed. Here's one that says George W. Bush supports the pro-life plank. Public relations table. Yes, in other

word

s, your position is that you believe there is an exemption for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. but you want the platform that you are supposed to lead to have no exemptions, but I will, the platform talks about that, it doesn't talk about what should be specifically in the Constitutional Amendment, that is, it has no exemptions. and you know it very well let me finish let me finish the scam the platform talks about a constitutional amendment it does not refer to how that Constitutional Amendment should be defined it is not like that John you read the platform has no exceptions I think We need to keep the platform as it is.

This is a pro-life party. End, please, can I finish, please, please? We need to be a pro-life party. We need to say that life is precious and that is what our platform is about. That's why we should leave it the same: George W. Bush, the man who became president, clearly didn't know what he was talking about, but neither did John McCain. During that campaign, a journalist asked John McCain if he would tell his then 15-year-old self. -years that he couldn't have an abortion if he got pregnant John McCain said no. He would discuss this issue with Cindy and Megan and that it would be a private decision that we would share within our family, obviously he would encourage her to know. that that baby would be raised in a loving family, the final decision would be made by Megan with our counsel and advice and I think it is a very private matter, yes it is a private matter, all the responsible people agreed with that answer, but in It really wasn't like that.

John McCain's position as a candidate and that meant that John McCain was in favor of banning abortion for everyone except his daughter, so John McCain was forced to resort to Republican damage control by calling reporters saying that he had expressed wrong what I think I was saying and what I intended to say. This is a family decision, the family decision will be made by the family, not just Megan, that didn't clarify anything of course, except that Republican elected officials, especially presidential candidates, don't mean what they say about abortion, they never do. they have done, they have always been pretending and none of that. ever wanted to deal with the reality of their position on abortion that we are dealing with now and the people of Arizona are dealing with tonight after being thrown back to the year 1864 to live by a law written by a man no one elected at all . when Arizona was a territory half a century away from becoming a state, making America great again now means making America great as it was in 1864, when the Arizona Territory was fighting on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War to preserve slavery in America and impose laws on women, doctors and nurses that everyone in Arizona has to live with tonight, Democrats in the Arizona state legislature tried to repeal that law today and Republicans blocked it, so the Republicans in Arizona today actively made the decision that People in Arizona should live like it's 1864 and it's not even a state, so journalists can and should harass Donald Trump during the election campaign about five-year prison sentences. prison that doctors, nurses, support staff and drivers in Arizona face now, but you should also stand outside George W.

Bush's home in Texas and demand an answer from him. Is this what he wanted when he elected Samuel Alo to the Supreme Court? Or was George W. Bush simply playing the abortion politics game like all Republicans? what he did before him the game was never winning the game it was keeping the game going if you were against abortion you had to vote for republicans as long as they kept the game going because they were the only ones who at least pretended they wanted to stop stop it secretly, Republican politicians didn't want abortion to stop because then you wouldn't have to vote for them anymore.

To stop abortion, you wouldn't have to contribute money to their campaigns. You couldn't ask for a more powerful lesson. how much your vote matters and how long your vote matters your vote lives after you long after you Millions of people who voted for George HW Bush and who therefore voted for Clarence Thomas to be on the Supreme Court to overturn Row versus Wade are now dead millions of those voters have been dead for decades their vote is still alive after them in the hands of Clarence Thomas on the United States Supreme Court it didn't seem like a life-changing election in 1988 when Michael Dukakis was running against George H W Bush I I didn't know anyone who thought the country was going to take a major turn for the worse because of the outcome of that election, the stakes seemed about as low as they could get in a presidential election, but as I said before on this show repeatedly, whenever the stakes are low in a presidential election, you always have to remind the United States Supreme Court and therefore the Democratic voters who simply weren't enthusiastic enough about Michael du or the Republican voters that they voted for a guy who used to support Planned Parenthood, the truth is that at that moment they couldn't have known that they were going to profoundly change life in the United States decades later with their vote for George HW Bush or the decision simply not to vote the same in 2000.

When George W. Bush ran against El Gore, the stakes didn't seem like much, which is why enough people voted for Ralph Nater as a third-party candidate in Florida to give the Electoral College thanks to the decision of the Supreme Court of defeating George W. Bush of the The Bush family of Connecticut, who claimed to be Texans, could not be true staunch Texas conservatives. Could it be that the stakes shouldn't be so high? It turns out that a vote for George W. Bush was a vote for Samuel Alo to take a seat in the presidency. The Supreme Court, 20 years later, wrote the opinion that overturned Row v.

Wade, so yes, you can and should blame Donald Trump, but you should blame the people who voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016 and you should blame the voters who voted for George W Bush and the voters who voted for George HW Bush before that, because if Michael Dukus had won or if Al Gore had won, then Donald Trump could have put three right-wing justices on the Supreme Court and They still wouldn't have a majority. For voters who voted for Joe Biden four years ago and are no longer with us because they lost to cancer or other illnesses, their votes will live after them for probably another 30 years until Katangi Brown Jackson serves as president.

Supreme Court of the United States your vote will live after you if you will live on the Supreme Court your vote will live in the hands of 40-year-old federal judges appointed by Joe Biden who will serve for another 40 years your vote will decide which century we are going into we will live in an era of legal and constitutional Enlightenment or we will live in 1864 your vote does not refer only to the next four years the importance of your vote has never been clearer not only as a vote to preserve democracy in this country We already knew that your vote to elect Supreme Court justices is nothing less than an exercise of incredible intergenerational power that will live on long after you, Professor ROV, are trying to teach the Supreme Court, uh, history, they certainly present themselves as if they know all this, but very often they seem to stray into their own historical adventures, well, it's true, Lord, all kinds of claims are made about history, often on partial or even misleading bases, and it is the task of historians, uh, yes We write as individuals or collectively as we do in this report to find a somewhat more complicated, richer but also more precise explanation of what the mental world that the framers of the Constitution occupied was and how they thought about executive power in the way they did, so it's basically our job to disseminate the historical record so that both the judges and the American body politic, you know, intelligent educated citizens understand the richness of that history, uh, and therefore we will be better able to recognize the misleading of the claims pending in the current litigation.

You, as a historian, have debated with yourself and been in debates about what this meant, what they were trying to do, and you used your professional tools to try. research to get the answers to that but in your report uh you say that sometimes history speaks ambiguously but here it speaks with incomparable clarity uh it speaks to that clarity and how valuable that is in a situation like this, I think clarity derives from The fundamental fact that the desire and concern to limit, we might say, limit an executive power, was the main motive, really a dominant theme in British and American political thought in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In a sense, that is what The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its aftermath accomplished in Britain for 18th-century American colonists due to the nature of their dealings with royal governors, and to some extent the British monarchy shared those concerns. and when they started writing constitutions both in 1776 at the state level and then in 1787 at the national level, the question of what to do with executive power, how to think about it, how to enhance it but also how to limit it, was really one of the main concerns, I think. it was actually the most difficult concern that they faced, you know, we spend a lot of time these days, as you know, as your previous segment suggested worrying about the Supreme Court and the bases of judicial review and the different theories of interpretation, we spend a lot of time worrying about Jerry's partisan leadership of Congress, but designing a national Republican executive in the 1780s was a really difficult problem, but the only thing that really held together the founding generation, both the framersof the Constitution as well as the ratifiers, was his conviction that the chief, the president's main task is Article Two of the Constitution, says that he must ensure that the laws are faithfully executed and it is that obligation, in reality, the best term to use here, it is that responsibility that really underpins the entire framework of thought. on the executive branch at the time the Constitution was written to obtain the kind of widespread claims about presidential immunity from legal restrictions, particularly in a self-serving way, when the Constitution itself and our entire electoral system do not grant the president any authority. on the conduct of the election simply shows the absolute outrage of the claims made by Trump and his lawyers.

Well, Donald Trump was very upset by your report and decided to comment on it tonight, so we're going to listen to this and I want imagine I want you to imagine a Stanford student standing up in one of his classrooms and saying this, let's listen to this, this is not at all what the founders had in mind, this is not what they wanted to think, this is not where they wanted us to be, the founders wanted the president. have immunity so the president can feel free to make decisions, uh, what grade does he get, professor? enough, I mean, I always thought Trump played a terrible joke on the American people when he took the inaugural oath, you know, J January 20, 2017.

I doubt he ever read the Constitution. I certainly believe he has never studied it. Uh, he's never discussed it. It's just that you know, it's a pathetic situation, uh, you know, for so many tragic and threatening reasons, we have a president who is constitutionally illiterate and politically incapable of dealing with the responsibilities of his office? Hello everyone, MSNBC has a new and improved app you'll get real-time alerts and analysis live blogs in-depth essays

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