Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast

For National Voter Registration Day, we take a look at the state of voting rights and ballot access ahead of the 2024 presidential election season. On Today's Show:Andrea Hailey, CEO of Vote.org, talks about registering to vote and issues affecting voter access ahead of 2024 and Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, talks about the voting rights nationally and in New York State.

As the United Nations General Assembly meets this week at its NYC headquarters, we kick off Climate Week with a look at the aims of climate protesters, and their detractors. On Today's Show:Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now and environment correspondent for The Nation magazine, talks about related events in the city, including Sunday's climate march, plus introduces his group's journalism awards, which honor the best climate journalists and their work. Plus, Amy Westervelt, climate journalist and the executive editor of Drilled, a multimedia climate accountability reporting project and one of Covering Climate Now's climate journalists of the year, talks about her work and how it fits into climate coverage.

  With an influx of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from various countries continuing to arrive in the US, we explore the nuances of immigration law.  On Today's Show:Julia Preston, contributing writer for The Marshall Project, talks about why a possible work-permit solution isn't accessible to more asylum seekers, New York City officials' calls for a "decompression" strategy, and news that a federal judge has ruled DACA unconstitutional.

As Congress returns from summer recess, they face several important issues, including averting a budget-related shutdown, and whether the GOP can impeach Biden for his son's dealings. On Today's Show:Annie Karni, congressional correspondent for The New York Times, discusses this development and other headlines in Congressional news.

Naomi Klein, activist, professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, and the author of books including The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, is so often confused with conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf that she's used this experience as the premise for a new book that explores the blurred identities and destabilizing meanings in our broader politics and culture. On Today's Show:Klein speaks with us about her new book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023),

As the United States copes with new migrants and refugees from South and Central America, we look at how refugees from the war in Ukraine are being received around the world. On Today's Show:David Miliband, president and chief executive officer of the International Rescue Committee, talks about his recent trip to Ukraine and Poland and the refugee crisis that is a result of Russia's war in Ukraine.

Many of the current union strikes are leveraging their workplace power to get what they want in their contracts, including a possible shift to a four day work week for themselves — and potentially everyone else. On Today's Show: Jane McAlevey, organizer, senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, columnist at The Nation and co-author of Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations (Oxford University Press, 2023), talks about labor news, including the latest on the WGA and SAG AFTRA strikes and the UAW negotiations, and the overall state of organized labor today.  → Check out Jane's latest here: "The NLRB’s Recent Decisions Are Good News for Workers" (The Nation, 9/4/2023)     

Education is a critical policy domain that's often left to local municipalities to navigate.  On Today's Show:Listeners call in to share their views on education, what sorts of federal policies they'd like to see, and what the role of politics should be in decisions about teaching our children. 

On today's show:U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) discusses her actions around the big influx of asylum seekers in New York and other cities, the prospect of a government shutdown at the end of this month, term limits in Congress and more.

The Biden administration announced which drugs that will be part of its price negotiations for patients on Medicare. On Today's Show: Jonathan Cohn, senior national reporter at HuffPost, lecturer at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the author of The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage (St. Martin's Press, 2021), talks about how it will work, how it will affect out-of-pocket costs for patients and what could go wrong.