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Matt Mackowiak's Mack On Politics

Smart political talk every week from Austin, Texas political consultant Matt Mackowiak, who has served in senior roles for two U.S. Senators and the Bush administration.
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Matt Mackowiak's Mack On Politics
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Now displaying: July, 2018
Jul 26, 2018

One of our nation’s most respected legal scholars is our guest for the 92nd episode.

Randy Barnett is a law professor at Georgetown and the author of “Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People”).

In this conversation, we focus on the Supreme Court and the recent Supreme Court nomination of DC Circuit Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

We begin by examining the current status of the nomination, then turned to the fight over document production, whether a judge should be reviewed differently for an appellate court versus the Supreme Court, how the Kennedy Court may become the Roberts Court, why Trump’s judicial nominations are historically consequential and how originalism and textualism came to be.

Jul 17, 2018

North Korea is the subject of the 91st episode. Our guest is former CIA senior analyst and CSIS senior fellow and Korea chair Sue Mi Terry.

In this conversation, we begin with a gut check on where the negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea currently stand two months after the Singapore summit.

Then we delved into the issue of suspending military exercises, the return of the remains of American soldiers, what a nuclear inspection regime might look like, whether both sides agree on the definition of denuclearization, whether sanctions relief is North Korea’s primary objective, how the Iran Deal experience is part of this, and what South Korea, Japan, and China are thinking.

Finally, we explore what life is really like in North Korea and what advice our guest has for President Trump.

Jul 11, 2018

Our guest for the 90th episode is former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

He supervised Brett Kavanaugh in the White House Counsel’s office, so we began the conversation with his memory of what kind of lawyer and employee the new Supreme Court nominee was like.

We then talked about the difference between the DC Circuit Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, why the public views the Supreme Court as a political institution, what role Congress can and should play, what kind of pressures he felt as Attorney General, how he thinks DOJ is doing today under AG Jeff Sessions, what he makes of the conflict between DOJ and House Republicans and how he views the recent DOJ Inspector General report and the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Jul 2, 2018

For episode 89, we talked to Mona Charen, a syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of the new book, “Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense”.

 In this conversation we explore the many important themes in her new book: Does women’s equality threaten traditional families? What can be done about rape culture on college campuses? Is chivalry dead? Is gender a choice? Is modern feminism increasing the happiness of women?

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