YouSaid · the spoken record

Nina Totenberg

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2020-10-26

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2020-10-26

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1. “You know, I feel a little bad about one thing here. I've beat up on the Republicans a lot and I have no more faith that the Democrats having been so burned won't be just as bad. And that's what is going to be such a blow to the courts as a bulwark of democracy, as an independent judiciary, Chief Justice Ranquist used to say that an independent judiciary is the crown jewel in the crown of American democracy. We are losing that through these partisan wars over the court. You can't expect the judges if they really are independent will do everything you want them to do. But they shouldn't be partisan pawns either.”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “It's probably not good policy. It probably isn't even good politics, and it's really bad for the country to do it unless you can really prove that something is wrong with what's happening with the system. And I think they have half a proof in the way the Democrats have been treated both over the Garland nomination and the way the Barrett nomination was rushed through, even as millions of people had already voted in the election. But that's only half or a quarter of a proof. You need more than that to change a system that has served us very well over the years.”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “The Obama White House actually did that on numerous occasions and proposed people who were Suggested by or at minimum approved by Republican senators from Republican states and they still didn't get a vote. So I see I don't want to sound one-sided about this because I don't have any doubt you're seeing this now on the left with the left insisting, demanding. That Biden, for example, adds two justices to the court or have term limits or whatever. You figure out what it is.”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It used to be that you could expand the courts because they are needed. They need more judges. And you could do that with some sort of consensus. Between the two parties and make some agreements about how they would handle the other side completely was going to lose everything. Well, the Republicans then in recent times have not just removed the filibuster for judgeships. They've removed all of the rules, every little speed bump, like the so-called blue slip, which allows the minority party to at least have a say in who's going to become a judge because they had to return the blue slip of the president, even of the opposing party, and that view had to be considered because if Senator So-and-so from Oklahoma didn't want that person appointed, he would not returning the blue slip was away. To force the White House to consult with you.”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yeah, we won't do that. You can hold me to it. I will never vote to have somebody push through during an election. And And of course that turned out to be completely. You know, that was not what he ended up doing. So when you have this repeated kind of behavior, and I have no real, I have no doubt that the Democrats will probably do something similar. I don't think they'll rush a nominee through in a matter of a couple of weeks, but they don't, they won't have to because there's not an election going on. But what will happen and probably should happen because they haven't expanded the lower courts for years is that they'll probably get rid of the filibuster rule for legislation. They'll broaden the number of judges who are serving on the courts, on the lower courts, and they'll fill some of those seats to even things out. But this will be”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Judges below the Supreme Court because Mitch McConnell was blocking people for years. Even people who were proposed by the Republican senators in their states because he wanted to keep those seats open. So this was a political power play pure and simple on behalf of a conservative and Republican minority and majority leader. So I think that that was ultimately the way you know the At each, you know, I wish I could say, you know, you heard Lindsay Graham say at the hearings closed after the vote. And he said, we didn't start this. You did. But he's also the guy who said when they blocked Merrick Garland.”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Well, it breaks my heart to say this, but I think there'll be a lot less. Respect Actually, from both sides for the court, because it will be viewed as more partisan. And I always had a lot of faith that Was institutionally sound, and that even though I personally might not like this opinion or that opinion, the court as an institution would continue, would not really change dramatically and would Continue to be sort of a bulwark of stability for democracy. And I'm afraid that's really in jeopardy now. And it's partly because all of the speed bumps, it wasn't just the filibuster, which the Obama administration finally broke down and got rid of in the last two years of the presidency”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Nomination to the first woman president to replace her. So I think what likely those two things were operating. She thought she could do this job better than anybody that Obama could get confirmed. that he would have to make compromises and that she was the right person to stay on the court and that she could tough it out. As it turned out, she came close, but she couldn't do it all the way.”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “In 2013, which would have been probably the last time she might have easily been able to retire and Obama could have replaced her. I was very surprised that Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland even from having a hearing for basically 10 months, eight to ten months somewhere in there. I thought there was enough institutional whatever to Make that happen. But she would not have been surprised, it turns out. And there were two things going here. One was, I think she felt that she was at the top of her game. You might have thought of her as. in 2013 or 2014 as being what her late 70s or 80 years old and she would not have felt that she was in peril of losing her life and she also thought I think that Hillary Clinton would run and be elected and she really wanted to give”

   2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “So, and then there was one time when she asked me not to ask her anything about what she'd said about Donald Trump because she'd had to eat crow. She'd been very unflattering about him, which is something she should not have done. She recognized quite clearly that she should not have done. And she'd never done that in front of me. And so I had had a long-planned interview with her, and it was right after she'd apologized. And I said to her the day before, I was talking to her about what we would talk about in this interview. And I said, Ruth, I'm going to have to ask you about what you said about Trump. And she said, oh, please don't do that. Don't ask me that. I said, I can't do that. That's my job. You know that's my job. And so she understood that. I asked her and she reamed me out in the interview.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And I saw her a great deal. But it never really was a problem because there were such clear boundaries. I couldn't ask her stuff about what was going on behind the scenes in the court. And if I'd done that, the friendship probably would have been over because she would have looked at me like I was out of my mind. It was just, you know, it was. And there were times when she gave interviews to other people and told them things she'd never told me, which really ticked me off.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I didn't know a lot of things. I mean, I knew that she was in the last certainly few months of her life. I knew that she was very sick. It was obvious to anybody who laid eyes on her. You didn't have to have inside knowledge. She was just so thin. So I couldn't know whether she would survive or not, but I suspected she likely would not just because she looked so terribly thin.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Husband to some to an opera, to a dinner, or invite me to dinner at their apartment with somebody interesting. And just to keep my spirits up. And she was like that all of my really most, all of my adult life, not all of hers, but all of mine.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And she was right. When he came home, I was still myself and I could take care of him and go to work and plan out how I would make sure that he wasn't in danger during the day. You know, I had. Wonderful friends who helped me in addition to Ruth, but she would periodically, in the many months in which she was in the hospital for a First in the beginning and then again a couple of years later, she would just scoop me up, take me with her and Marty and to some”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “very long time, almost five years. He had fallen down, had had a head injury. And when he was in the hospital in the beginning, he was in the hospital for a long time, for months and months. And first in the ICU. And then in rehab, and then when he finally came home. And then again, later he got sick again. And the first time she gave me, as I've often said, the best advice, life advice anybody ever gave me. She said, do not sit at his hospital bed all day. Go see him every day. Make sure he knows you're there. Talk to him. Hold his hand. go to work. Because you may not do the best, your best work, but you will do perfectly good work. And you have to keep your Be yourself and keep yourself so that when he does come home, you are still the Nina he loves and you can take care of him.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “They were close friends, but because she was a woman and because I'd known her even longer than I knew Justice, we started to be friends after all when she was in her thirties and I was in my twenties. And over the years we became closer and closer. And she was such an extraordinarily wonderful and interesting human being even in the last weeks of her life she was writing notes to people to thank them for something or other And her brain, I mean, she's considerably older than I am. I would have given anything for that recall and ability to just, even as she was quite sick at the end of her life, she had all of her marbles plus a hundred more. That all of us would love to have. And she was wonderful to me, especially when my late husband was terribly sick for.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “having a COVID brain moment and I didn't really understand the brief so I flipped the front the author was a Rutgers law professor named Ruth Bader Ginsberg and I called her up and I got an hour-long lecture And then I eventually met her some months later at some conference that was so boring that we went shopping. And over the years, we became first professional friends and then personal friends after she was President Carter nominated her to the DC Circuit and then ultimately to the Supreme Court. But by the time she was on the Supreme Court, I'd gotten to know her quite well. Just the way I had gotten to know Justice Galia quite well, who was also a close friend of mine.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, I met her when I was first assigned to cover the court. And I think 70, and it was just I was still relatively new, I think it was 71. And I was covering this case, which presented the question of whether states could have statutes that automatically preferred men over women for, in this case, to be executors of estates, which was the state law in. I can't remember if it was Idaho. I think it was Idaho or it could have been Iowa, you know, I'm having”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “They were the Democrats who were afraid to call them, they were afraid that they could be, that they wouldn't hold up under the questioning. And Clarence Thomas called it a high-tech lynching and was equally persuasive to Anita Hill, who was very young at the time and still in her 20s, as I recall. And it was the worst of all worlds. They had to have a second hearing, second round of hearings because the Republicans actually found that they didn't have the votes to confirm him without a second round. But they agreed to such a quick schedule and that they couldn't really do the job of investigation at a time when you might have actually Up with a more satisfactory answer to who was telling the truth.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “That the committee had chosen not to investigate. They did finally send the FBI to interview her. And I finally obtained her affidavit. But because they really had not investigated the hearings and because then Senator Viden, the chairman of the committee, was, I think, at a different moment in his life. And he was he wanted to be a good guy. He wanted to be loved by everybody and he didn't want to do that kind of an investigation. And so when I found out about it, which was quite late in the game, I did the story. And then, of course, as we all know, they had to have a second round of hearings, which were highly acrimonious, and they did nothing much to really investigate the charges. They had other witnesses.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Know so it was that it was the kind of thing where he was somebody I don't remember who it was it was a Republican senator who asked him a softball question which was why do you want to be on the Supreme Court? Now you and I could write the answer to that I as a reporter you as a guy who helps mold opinion but he didn't answer the way we would have said which is I injustice is important to me how the law affects people is important to me and I think I can do the job that some variation on that theme instead he said Well, it would be an intellectual feast. And I remember coming into the office after the hearing that day, and one of the newscasters said to me, one of the people who read copy pretty much said to me, what do you mean an intellectual feast? I don't want somebody to feast on me.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “And I think that have been forgotten in the dust heap of history. For example, he said that he was a believer in following precedent, that he thought it was important. And Senator Kennedy had a recording of a speech he'd given at Kenicius College just a couple of years earlier. And in that after that speech, one of the students asked him whether he thought the precedent was important. And he said, no, I don't think it's very important. So they call that the confirmation conversion at the time.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Well, it was more even more than that because he answered every question and he'd written extensively about a lot of things. So for example, he'd been against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And he had to the public accommodations law. And he had to answer those questions. And his answers were sometimes better than others. And then there was a, you know, but there were some moments also about...”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Yes and no Certainly. He was not like every. Candidate for the Supreme Court every nominee, and even most of them before. He was on the witness stand for five days. He declined to do any of the moot courts at the White House or anywhere to prepare him for this hearing. And he had no real sense of how he came off so that when he...”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “And they view money as money, not as speech. And the scholars accuse the conservative majority, the scholars who disagree with them of weaponizing the First Amendment. So it all depends whose ox is being gored, whether it's an activist court or not, but Liberal critics of this court call it an activist court because it doesn't, it's not deferential to who after all they would say who better to know about political money, campaign money, and how to restrict it so that it somewhat levels the playing field. And Chief Justice Roberts in particular has written, our job isn't to level the playing field. It shouldn't be to level the playing field. Free speech is free speech. And if it ends up helping rich people more too bad.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Restrictions on they viewed money as speech and they continue to view money as speech and that is that money is used to express speech so that limits on campaign contributions, campaign spending, campaign all kinds of campaign restrictions such as were in the McCain-Feingold law are unconstitutional. They're a violation of the First Amendment. Other people don't agree with that and I would venture to say having looked at the polling data on this that the majority of the American public doesn't agree with that a hefty majority doesn't agree with that.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Well, I guess it depends on how you look at these questions. So, if you look, for example, at the court's trajectory about in striking down a whole bunch of campaign finance laws. Those justices, and there were five, there probably will be six with Justice Barrett, those justices very clearly thought that the”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Maybe in this last term because of some of the votes, a few votes that the Chief Justice cast that were unexpected to say the least, the main one actually being the abortion decision. And mainly he, and he was very clear that he didn't agree with the whole line of abortion cases, but in this case, the court was being presented with a statute that was identical to the one that had been struck down just a couple of years earlier and he was very determined not to let the court just flip because the composition of the justices was different. And so he wrote a decision that was did not support the old decision, but said, I'm just not, I'm not going there. I am not going to change this. We're not going to just do this instant turnaround. He's a conservative man. I think in a lot of ways.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “But it was a much more liberal court, then it moved to be what we thought of as a conservative court. But I got to tell you that the conservatives of those days were very different than they are today. They were people who were most of them very active supporters of civil rights. They were Republicans of the vintage of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They were big supporters of the Voting Rights Act. They were very deferential to congressional legislation. And the court has moved steadily right over the years until, you know, I think you could have continued to say that it was center-right up until the time that Justice Kennedy retired. And then”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Well, first of all, it was a way more liberal court, even though, you know, when I started to cover the court, there were already, there was already, the first year I covered the court, Chief Justice Warren was still chief. But after that, he retired and President Nixon nominated a quite conservative judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Warren Berger, to be Chief Justice. I think the next year or the year after, I don't even quite remember, Harry Blackman was a second appointee ultimately. And I mean, we had a bunch of confirmation fights in those years, which were”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “I may have done it one more time. I really am not sure. But at some point, the news organizations that we work for now have so many platforms. There is no way you can Do all of the things that I used to do. And at least not and sleep. It would not be possible. In fact, at the moment, because the Supreme Court has so many voting cases and it keeps churning out orders in voting cases without any advance notice. And the other night my husband was on a complete rant about how I was going to ruin my health. I was working every night until 10 or 11 o'clock at night. I needed, they needed to give me help. So the next day I told my boss this, my editor, and he said, ah, sounds just like my wife.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Got a sign to do it. It was a weekly, so I had a chance to learn something about the beat. And I mean, but I still covered lots of other things for the observer, and I still covered lots of other things and lots about politics when I first came to NPR, which when I came to NPR, it was tiny. When I would call people up and say, I'm from National Public Radio, they really didn't know what I was talking about. We had one news program a day that was an hour and a half, not even two hours, like all things considered is today. And you could do, I covered campaigns, I covered, I always covered the vice presidential campaign. I love doing that. I would always go and write a big piece about the vice presidential candidates. I think the last...”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “You know, on the one hand, it was easier for me than some other people because I always wrote in a kind of narrative style and in short sentences, I wouldn't say I'm the most beautiful writer in the world, but I'm a very clear writer and I am a good storyteller. I do know how to tell a good story. I know how to make people laugh. I know how to make people cry. I'm pretty good at that craft and I was already good at that. What I didn't know anything about was how to use sound. And to this day, I learn new things about how to use sound. To this day, there are producers at NPR who will teach me something new about it.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “I remember it was during Watergate and I was interviewing the ranking Republican on the committee in the just off the house floor. And I saw this bunch of reporters heading towards us and I thought, oh my God, what do I not know that I need to ask him because they're all coming to him so something's happened and I don't know about it. they get there and they are not trying to talk to him they're trying to talk to me because Bill Scott has just had this press conference Which he denied that he was the dumbest. Now maybe that might have been justifiable except New Times magazine was in existence only two, three years ago.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “It was awful, and it was at least partially true. But what I had done was use quotes from other publications. I mean, quotes from like David Axelrod. And I didn't credit the other publications, which we are much better about these days. At the time, some of my colleagues, not on the observer, were sort of outraged. But, you know, in hindsight, I think they probably made the right decision. It was very hard. What was harder was being a woman, frankly. And you never know when something like that happens either in hindsight, how much of it had to do with a certain amount of Resentment Had a lot of big scoops when I Observer, and you never know how much of it was due. I was the only woman on the news desk. There was another woman at first on the culture desk and there was another woman in the sports desk. And I had had also a”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “So I got a job, I work briefly for roll call, and then I went to work for the late National Observer, which was a general newspaper, a national newspaper put out by Dow Jones, which at the time owned the Wall Street Journal. And I had a wonderful time there. And then I worked for a magazine. And then I eventually Was hired by NPR, recruited by NPR”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Don't actually remember, but they were the most. We were the most hapless robbers. They led the police on a chase with cash flowing out of their satchel so that Could catch up with them quite quickly that way.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “So I don't remember how I got the tip. I think somebody must have called and said, there's a bank robbery going on in downtown Peabody. There's only one bank. And so I called the bank and I said, hi, it's Nina Tottenberg at the Peabody Times. I understand there's been a robbery there. And the guy says to me, yeah, this is the robber.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “The police be I would do the school committee, which at the time was a huge fight over busing. I, you know, it was, I had a great time. And then I covered, then I went to work for the small community newspaper where one day I looked at the front page and every story on the front page had my line. great great great practice Finally, I went, came to Washington”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Because I thought to myself, I want to be a witness to history. I don't, I'm not the kind of person who wants to be a crusader. I want to be the storyteller of the times I live in. And if necessary, I want to be an investigator even in the times I live in. But it was a crazy idea in a lot of ways. And I was just lucky enough and bullheaded enough to get jobs my very first job was for the record American in Boston. And I was on the women's page. It was not the women's page of today, it was recipes and A few fashion stories and weddings. And I would work in extra shift so I could do other things.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “And I decided, and I was about 16 or 17 at the time, and I decided that that's what I wanted to do, which was a preposterous idea at the time because there were no women.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Well, partly, I think every woman of my age and younger was a big Nancy Drew fan, and there's a really good reason for that. There were no other women, very few women models for us to look to. When I was a teenager, I read Teddy White's book, The Making of the President.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Know this is the country for me. I don't want to live in that old world. And so he immigrated to the United States. He was, as he put it when one of my sisters put in her college application that her father was a refugee, he said, I was not a refugee. I was an invited guest of the United States government.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Played for the Roosevelts. I loved hearing him talk about that because the vice president was sitting in the front row with his shoes off, a hole in his socks, and a spatoon. And there was my dad and other famous people playing for the president. And he eventually he... He had been in Europe, he was in his early 20s then, and he had just played in Europe before he got on the boat to come here. He had just played for the King of Italy. And it was very formal. He had to borrow a cape and top hat from the Polish ambassador. He had to back out of the hall because the king was, you're not to turn your back on the king. And here he is after the concert at the White House and Mrs. Roosevelt is serving him dinner, serving him dinner on the dinner plate and handing him dinner. And he says to himself,”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Giving concerts all over Eastern Europe by the time he was 11 and 12 years old and then went to Germany to study with the most famous violin teacher of the time, whose name was Carl Flesch and became his teaching assistant in the 1930s. you know what was going on in Germany in the 1930s and he then moved to Paris and eventually came to the United States on a concert tour in 1935 and was just a huge success i mean with glowing reviews in the new york times and the washington post and he was asked to play at the white house”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “He lived to be 101 and so he was born on New Year's Day in 1911. And as a boy, his father was an architect and an engineer and was in Russia doing a job. His older sister was taken care of by some cousin, distant cousin during the day, but that person didn't like little boys. So they had to figure out what to do with five-year-old Roman. And the guy downstairs said he would take care of him because he worked at night and he was the concert master of the Moscow Opera Orchestra. So what do you do with a kid? You're the concert master. You give him a violin and you teach him violin. And within six months, he was touring with my father. So my father was a child prodigy. And he was”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Used to be the case up until really. The retirement of Justice Stevens and Justice Souter, who were, after all, both Republican appointees, ended up being viewed by Republican social conservatives as traitors really to the cause of Republican conservatism. And as a result, and even Chief Justice Roberts, you know, you heard during 2015, in the debates, you heard Senator Cruz, for example, attacking Chief Justice Roberts and characterizing in ways that you might think he was an Obama appointee. Far from an Obama appointee. It is true that he crosses over and votes with the liberals on occasion, often staking out a separate opinion for why he is doing what he's doing. But those occasions are extremely rare, extremely rare. count of them on one hand.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Especially to poor people. If you saw suddenly the court striking down state and federal gun safety laws, if you saw the court More aggressively protecting religious rights at the expense of Generally acceptable, generally applicable laws, for example, anti-discrimination laws. I think, you know, ultimately you could see a real rebellion, but I think it would take years, not weeks, not months.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “I think he does. I think he probably has a different perception of what the middle is. It wouldn't be your perception of what the middle is, and it probably wouldn't be just as Scalia's perception of what the middle is either. But he does understand some sort of basic ideas about institutional integrity. And he knows that the court is still much more popular than either of the other two branches of government. People still have a lot more confidence in the court than they do in Congress or the executive branch, or for that matter, the press, my profession. So the numbers are still, comparatively speaking, they're going down, but they're still pretty decent for the court. But that could change quite dramatically if, for example, you saw a series of cases that made abortion unaccessible in half the country.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Right, a switch in time save nine, but there isn't one justice at the moment. If we see a court of six really conservative members or even just five, that's enough. And there isn't somebody who looks like there aren't two justices who would modify their views at all to sort of stay within the Or I should say out of the crosshairs of public opinion too much and out of the crosshairs of Proposals to really change the court, which I think probably every member of the court thinks is not a good idea.”

    2020-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 415 — Nina Totenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source