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Transcript

What’s next for the SCOTUS conflict-of-interest controversy · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Thursday, March 31st. I'm Shumita Basu.
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  Duarte Geraldino, Narrating: And I'm Duarte Geraldino. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  Basu: Should a Supreme Court justice be held accountable for the actions of their spouse? It's a complicated question made more complicated by recent reporting about Ginni Thomas. She's a conservative activist who's married to Justice Clarence Thomas. She pressed the White House to overturn the 2020 election. Her texts to President Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, are now in the hands of the committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
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  Geraldino: Now some Democrats are questioning whether Justice Thomas can truly be impartial in cases related to the 2020 election or the insurrection.
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  Kyle Cheney: Impeachment has been floated by, say, just two lawmakers that I'm aware of.
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  That's "POLITICO's" Kyle Cheney. He told us Representatives Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have suggested impeachment.
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  Cheney: Others have said he should resign. Others have said he should face censure, which is just a reprimand. And I think most have said we need to learn more, and in the meantime, he should recuse from anything where it's even the appearance of a conflict, so anything related to the January 6th committee going forward.
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  Basu: For context, Justice Thomas was the lone dissenting vote earlier this year, when the Supreme Court gave the January 6th committee access to Trump's White House records. He was also one of two justices who said they would have considered a challenge some GOP-led states brought against election procedures in states that Biden won. No one has produced evidence that Justice Thomas knew about his wife's contact with the West Wing or that it influenced his decision making.
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  Geraldino: Cheney told us it's very likely that the January 6th committee is going to call on Ginni Thomas as a witness.
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  Cheney: And the real question is, which we don't know the answer to, is how central do they view Ginni Thomas to the investigation? Is she just sort of a fringe player who happened to have access to Trump's White House, but whose testimony may not be that valuable? Or is she someone who could shed new light on some of the substantive concerns they have about Donald Trump attempting to overthrow the election?
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  Another unknown is whether she would agree to testify and how the committee would react if she doesn't cooperate.
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  Basu: Cheney tells us this story shows how few rules there are around what Supreme Court justices can and can't do.
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  Cheney: The way it is right now, it's kind of the Wild West. There is no code at all that the Supreme Court has to follow. It's self-policing. And while that may have worked throughout history, this is a clear and glaring example where it may not have.
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  Geraldino: Filling up your tank is expensive right now. Oil prices are high, in large part because Russia invaded Ukraine. Paying so much for fuel is making drivers angry, and some politicians worry that anger might hurt them in the next election. "The Wall Street Journal" reports President Biden is expected to announce that the U.S. will release oil from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. A lot of what happens in global markets is out of lawmakers' control, but they can control taxes at the pump. A few states have already suspended gas taxes, and there are more proposals at the state and federal level for gas tax holidays.
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  Basu: The "Journal" looks at how the new debate over gas taxes cuts across the usual partisan lines. Some groups that normally get behind tax cuts are fighting to keep gas taxes in place. Republican leaders in Congress mostly want to keep the federal gas tax in place at 18.4 cents a gallon. But at the state level, Republicans have joined up with Democrats to support temporarily suspending state gas taxes. They say drivers need relief at a time when prices are going up on pretty much everything.
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  Geraldino: Some big business lobbies, like the Chamber of Commerce, are campaigning against gas tax holidays. The construction industry is especially opposed. Here's their argument: Gas taxes pay for improving roads and bridges; taking them away threatens infrastructure. And according to opponents, it may also be unfair. When gas taxes fund roads, the money is coming from drivers, the people who use the roads. But when the money comes from other tax revenue, people who don't own cars end up paying for roads they don't drive on.
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  Basu: "VICE" looks at a different question: Do gas tax holidays actually save people much money? An economist who studies this question says the evidence is mixed. A key reason is this idea of asymmetric price transmission. It's easy to think of this as "rockets and feathers." It kind of goes like this: When taxes go up, gas stations raise prices right away, like a rocket.
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  Geraldino: But when a tax holiday happens, gas stations lower prices much more slowly, kind of like a feather floating down from the sky. This is all about businesses wanting profit. They're quick to pass on higher costs to consumers. Lower costs, not so much. For gas tax holidays, the data shows prices at the pump do go down, but not as fast or as much as you might think.
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  Basu: U.S. home prices soared during the pandemic. But the real estate boom is uneven. Many Black neighborhoods are being left out. And one reason is the power of appraisals and the potential for bias. Recent research from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Brookings Institution shows homes in Black neighborhoods are consistently valued less than comparable ones in white neighborhoods. And this adds up to around $156 billion in lost equity.
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  Geraldino: Take Kym and Steve Taylor. They own a six-bedroom home in Prince George's County, Maryland. This is one of the wealthiest majority-Black counties in America. The Taylors bought the home for $1.45 million in 2015. Reporter Tracy Jan from "The Washington Post" explains what happened in their appraisal.
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  Tracy Jan: They were shocked, in 2021, at the height of the real estate market, that their home appraised for just $1.15 million. Six years after they bought it, at the height of the market, their home was $300,000 less than what they had paid for it six years earlier.
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  The Taylors had plans to use the equity in their home as collateral to expand their business. The lower appraisal number, though, meant that they had to change their plans.
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  Jan: The Taylors aren't alone. Appraisal disparity is a huge problem all across the nation, in many communities, and especially affects minority communities, Black communities, such as the one in Prince George's County in which they live.
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  Basu: Home appraisals are supposed to be independent and objective, but Jan points out documented biases. For example, research shows that in Black and Latino neighborhoods, appraisers look at comparable homes in a narrower geographic range than they do in white neighborhoods. When homes are undervalued, Black communities lose out on tax revenue and families lose out on capital that they can use to invest in themselves.
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  Jan: In this country, a lot of our generational wealth is built up through home ownership, and that equity is passed on to future generations. There is a huge disparity between Black and white home ownership. In fact, the Black home ownership rate has not budged.
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  Geraldino: "The Post" talks to Black homeowners who are frustrated that their choice to raise their families in Black communities has economic consequences.
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  Jan: The Taylor's experience perfectly illustrates the devaluing, the undervaluing of Black communities. Prince George's County is a sought-after place. A lot of Black middle-class and upper-middle-class families choose to live there because they're surrounded by other people like them, in terms of role models for their children.
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  As Jan puts it, some families say they wanted to live in a majority-Black neighborhood because they thought their kids would face less discrimination. But the numbers show whole communities are experiencing discrimination of an economic kind.
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  Astronomers have found the most distant star ever seen. And it might hold the key to understanding the origins of the universe. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope show a star believed to be from 900 million years after the Big Bang. That's billions of years older than the star that used to be the most distant one ever seen.
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  Basu: Yeah, this story is so interesting because studying stars is like looking back in time. "National Geographic" speaks to the NASA scientist who co-wrote the paper describing this discovery. And she calls it our best chance to see what a massive star was like in the relatively early days of the universe.
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  Geraldino: Now that they've found it, to learn more, astronomers can aim some heavier technology at it. It's possible it could be a pair of stars, rather than just one. Follow-up observations using the new Webb Space Telescope should be able to reveal more. Now the scientists in the piece, they sound pretty stoked to see what else the star can tell us.
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  Basu: Usually, for a really visual story like this, we would tell you to, you know, go look at the pictures. But to be honest with you, it's kinda just blurry, pixelated space stuff.
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  Geraldino: It's something shiny in the distance.
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  [SHUMITA LAUGHS]
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  Basu: You can go see those pictures and find all the stories we talked about today in the Apple News app.
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  Geraldino: And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners.
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  Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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