Rebecca Jackson

speaker

81 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Rebecca Jackson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · The 250-year experiment: America’s birthday · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

Hey.

Hey, it's great to be here.

I'd say I fall somewhere in between the two of you.

I think that from my perspective, one of the things that has scared me most recently is the fight over redistricting that we're seeing playing out across America this spring.

Another massive Supreme Court ruling was that the court curtailed the reach of the Voting Rights Act, which for decades had put constraints on politicians who wanted to rig the maps entirely in their favor.

And basically now what we're seeing is that

Both Republicans and Democrats are in this what we're calling, you know, sort of an arms race to the bottom.

And one of the reasons that I'm most worried about the fate of democracy is that in the upcoming midterms, there'll be very, very few competitive congressional races.

And that's not because there isn't disagreement on politics and policy, but it's because the districts will be drawn so carefully that candidates basically become shoe-ins.

And so

That means that Americans whose views are different from those around them, say a Democrat in rural Georgia or Republican in Boston, basically no longer have a voice in our democracy.

Robert, I agree with that.

I mean, I think if you look at J.D.

Vance or Marco Rubio, the two people most talked about as the front runners in the Republican Party for 2028, clearly neither of them command that kind of cult-like following that Trump does.

I think on the other hand, you can't talk about Article II this week without looking to Monday's Supreme Court decision in Trump v.

Slaughter, which basically gave the president in the short term authority to fire the FTC chair, but more broadly,

gave him control over roughly two dozen government agencies that were, I guess, once considered to be independent.

Even if culturally and politically we'll be able to roll back some of the president's power, I think the more it becomes enshrined in the legal precedent, the harder that will be.

Yeah, I mean, Robert, you mentioned the civil war and fights over segregation, and that's particularly vivid in my mind this week because I was just down in Montgomery, Alabama.

And I'm writing a piece for the paper this week for our July 4th edition that looks at the contrast between what they're doing there and what's happening in Washington.

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