well i'm john berman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture the supreme court began hearing arguments today to determine the constitutionality of obamacare on this the most corrupt supreme court in modern history have the power to decide what health care americans can forget also the postal service has been a part of american society for hundreds of years and it's been getting screwed for just as long are we really ready to let it fall victim to the republicans war labor and

a woman was brutally murdered in california over the weekend in an apparent hate crime or hate crimes the consequences of fearmonger is spreading hatred and ignorance across cable news and radio airwaves in america. you need to know this all eyes are on the supreme court as today kate croft three straight days of world arguments to determine the constitutionality of obamacare the issue at hand is whether or not the individual mandate also the core of romney care is constitutional the court can do a number of different things here they can choose not to rule on obamacare at all since the mandate doesn't kick in for two years and thus no party has been harmed yet they can rule in favor of obamacare declaring it constitutional they can narrowly strike down just the individual mandate keep the rest of the law in tact or they can do what right wing attorneys general who are in the pockets of the for

profit health insurers want them to do and strike down the wall together if that happens and fifty million americans will lose access to health care not to mention seventeen million children being denied insurance coverage because of preexisting conditions and more than one hundred. million americans will have to live in fear that their insurance company will cap them just when they need a lifesaving procedure so the big picture here is this why does the supreme court have the power to strike down laws passed by congress and signed by the president it seems like a normal thing take a lot of the supreme court and they'll decide whether to keep the or kill it but that gives the supreme court the power of kings in this nation which was not the idea of the founder it gives them more power than either the executive branch the president or the legislative branch the congress because they can strike down laws passed by congress and you can even tell the president not to implement laws that he signed do you think of pounders really intended that nine been elected people

sitting on the supreme court should be more powerful than the other two branches of government the founders intended supreme court to have the power to strike down laws the actual truth is no this was debated extensively at the constitutional convention seven hundred eighty seven they explicitly decided not to give such a power to the supreme court and the federalist papers which were written by hamilton and madison mostly john j. and and george mason a little bit but they were published in order to sell the constitution to the american people and seven hundred eighty eight alexander hamilton reassured us that we should ratify the constitution because it would prevent the unelected supreme court justices from having too much power in federalist seventy eight he wrote the judiciary from the nature of its functions will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the constitution because it will be released in a capacity to annoy or injure them it proves on contrast in confess to glee that the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three branches of power

departments of power and you can never attack with success either of the other two . but attack them with success it has done and may do again today or this week or this month as the constitution says the supreme court is only the final court of appeals if two people or companies have a lawsuit goes all the way through the courts over and over to mention it has to stop somewhere that somewhere is the supreme court just the final score and even in that capacity they can be regulated by congress they're supported to congress as the constitution says an article three section two the supreme court shall have appellate jurisdiction both as the law in fact with such exceptions and under such regulations as congress shall make some how did the supreme court get the power to strike down laws and stop presidents to become the unelected kings and queens of america answer is really simple they took it on to themselves in one thousand and three in a case called marbury vs madison when chief justice john marshall the crankiest rightwinger of that age which is why john adams appointed him on his way out of

office just to shove it in thomas jefferson's face when judge chief justice john marshall announced in that case. that that he was taking his power as supreme court president thomas jefferson went crazy he wrote in a letter to his sponsor roan who was patrick henry's father in law and old friend of his he wrote if this decision stands then indeed is our constitution a complete. a which is latin for a suicide pact the constitution jefferson wrote this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they make please because he had his secretary of state james madison had won that case marbury vs what is it going to be allowed so the supreme court took on a power that became precedent but there was so much public blowback and so many presidents were theories about this from jefferson to enter jackson it was rarely used in the first fifty years of american president enter jackson eight hundred thirty two disagree with john marshall has his decision the georgia state of

georgia could seize it in lines refuse to follow it in fact he said chief justice john marshall has made his decision to let him in force that russia could similarly lincoln and franklin roosevelt both try to regulate the supreme court as newt gingrich pointed out a few months ago. so i would just like jefferson jackson lincoln and f.d.r. i would be prepared to take on the judiciary if i could do not restrict it so from what it was doing. i never ever ever in my life thought i'd agree with newt gingrich but he's right and so is the dean of stanford law school larry kramer wrote a book entire book titled the people themselves the phrase that jefferson used when he talks about who should determine the constitutionality of laws instead of the supreme court instead we have a supreme court that has become so powerful that scalia and thomas claim they're even above the judicial code of conduct that every other federal judge has to follow a supreme court that has become the lord of our land founders didn't intend this

it's a corruption of our constitution and nothing will happen until enough people wake up this isn't a left or right issue again newt gingrich agrees with me and spread the word jefferson was right and our constitution has become a thing of wax in the hands of nine unliked of justices and now they say they have the power to decide if it will all have health care or not for more on what's its for more on what's at stake with the supreme court's hearing on health care i'm joined by congressman dennis kucinich representing mr this website is us congressman welcome. thank you and thank you for that very learned presentation about the constitutional history of the supreme court's. patient legislative branch rights then for that matter the executive branch writes thank you because i think it's so one worth saving well thank you we really you made the comment earlier today when you were in my radio show the the executive branch and

the supreme court the second and third of money have come to exceed the power of the legislative branch when you you know for those who are righteous you may think this is a theoretical discussion let me tell you something it if you have the founders having created and in article one the legislative branch the legislative branch is directly elected the executive branch isn't directly elected they have to go through elect tours but the executive the legislative branch directly elected and no want to lecture. supreme court so we're at a situation where the right of the people to be able to have decisions made by their representatives is under attack again the very fact that the supreme court is holding this particular hearing and not only is is. you could argue you know the constitution under it but health care the possibility of our joining it is thirty four countries in the o.e.c.d.

the fully developed nations of the world and in thirty three of them it's a crime to go to prison for to sell health insurance primary health insurance on a for profit basis and yet here in the united states we not only do this tomorrow dick armey and his buddies my story if what i heard today is correct are paying to bus a whole bunch of tea partiers down to the supreme court to stand out there was signs and say you know kill obamacare this is we've gone insane in this country what is the situation with health care what do we need to be doing well first of all it should be said that the supreme court in entertaining this discussion is setting the stage for undermining congress's ability to regulate health care and if the insurance companies are given carte blanche we can expect even more. raises premiums and less care for the american people more caps on the amount of money that would be spent for health care and less access to health care what i believe will happen as

a result of this health care issue going to the supreme court is the following if they overturn obamacare then it is in my estimation an opportunity for us to wake america up again on the issue of single payer not for profit health care because president obama's plan was health care reform within a context of the for profit system needed reform but not sufficient to take us to a condition where the insurance companies will not have the final say over many health care policies in this country so if they overturn it it would be sort of like an alcoholic a bottom. what everybody would say well you know what would happen is immediately if your story pointed out to be fifty million people without coverage again we go back to square one and that would also mean that people who have chilled. and with preexisting conditions would be covered that you have those who have young people twenty six and under they would be off their policies there would be limits put

back on the amount of money that would be spent for health care coverage people who need serious procedures with sign that they would have access to them any more they would be able to afford it there are many things that will happen if the bill is struck down however the paradox of all this debate is as follows. single payer which is a fact and not for profit health which is a fact in every other industrialized nation may see a revival if the supreme court goes against president obama's health care plan and if that happens i think you'll finally see a coalition coming together that will sweep the issue back into congress and once and for all the country will be set back on a path of universal single payer not for profit health care and the republicans lose a big fundraising tool. or i will overturn obamacare what happens if the supreme court upholds obamacare or or says it's several and we're going to scream take out

the individual mandate leave everything else intact well if people are not required to have health care if they're what they really be saying isn't so much a state of the individual mandate as they would be saying look the congress is not a part of regulating that despite you have somebody people who might be gaming the system and not having insurance and then if they get sick the publicans of paying for them anyway they can get away with that well now we we have to anticipate that if the supreme court says that part of this plan is ok and some of it's not that we have to also be ready to go back to the fundamental question and that is how are we going to challenge the insurance companies in the in the interim period between the time that you forward health care past and present day they have raised their premiums as an industry aggressively their profits have gone up they risen faster than the rest of the standard and poor's five hundred we have to ask ourselves are we going to continue to be at the mercy of the south care systems or the insurance

companies or once and for all we break the chains that bind us and go for a not for profit system and i had a problem with the builder begin with i reluctantly voted for it because it was reform within the context of a for profit system but the true reform is to go for a not for profit thanks to a kid to college because then it's in the u.s. thanks so much for you thank you very much we'll be right back. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old so tell the truth. i confess and i am a little get a friend that i love traveling had planned trips. he was kind of the jester. i'm very proud of the role that algis

you it's place. look. you know sometimes you see a story and seem so sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

it was through the post office republican plan to destroy the united states postal service and its half a million united employees and replace it with private mail carriers like u.p.s. and fed ex is slowly working ever since republicans in congress and president george w. bush passed a poison pill walk in two thousand and six requiring the postal service to prefund employee health benefit program to the tune of five billion dollars

a year for future employees who literally are not yet even born a seventy five year future and obligation and no other business or government agency has ever had to do the post office has been hemorrhaging cash and looking at shutting down post offices and laid off workers across the nation this week the senators expect. to take up legislation that would and sixty delivery of mail for example wipe out post offices across the nation lead and even more layoffs postal service has been around since before our nation was born and seven hundred seventy five so we really prepared to let the staple of american society go down the tubes joining me now is fred reland national president of the national association of letter carriers fred it's a pleasure and honor to have you with us well of course to be the two largest employers in the united states are wal-mart which is not unionized and the united states postal service i think it's on a six hundred thousand employees mission which is unionized the ever since reagan declared war on working people in one thousand nine hundred eighty one bustin atco

there's been this relentless war on organized labor that's seen nationally in his asian go from twenty five percent when reagan came into office to around seven or eight percent of private sector but of the eleven percent overall i believe. in your opinion is this part of this this poison pill that the republicans put in and the overpayments that the post office is made into the other federal trust funds retirement funds this is part of that i believe it is i can understand the anti-government anti-union and so i middle class agenda but what doesn't make any sense is those that have that agenda don't know if they realize their effect they're having on a thirteen point two trillion dollar industry of which the postal service is a cornerstone of the effects between seven and eight million more workers many of them private sector mostly private sector but the the the tragic reality right now is in this political season and we've seen this we've seen this in twenty five red states where rip republican governors and legislatures have laid off employees cut

you know cut benefits the more they can lay off people the worse the economy gets the worse the economy gets the less likely it is the president gets reelected it's like a political pawn. in any case what happened in two thousand six hundred we get to this point how do we get out of. well what happened two thousand and six was congress mandated that the postal service start prefunding your future retiree health benefits for the next seventy five years as you indicated dec include people who already would born yet and do so would you change your period. which is a great thing to prefund future retiree health benefits if you got the profits to do so then of course with what happened with the economy and so forth they were it became unrealistically able to do so but there was nothing in the law to stop the payments and as a result of that so all the losses that we've heard about for the postal service since that time have been attributed to this prefunding the postal service has had to take all their cash all their borrowing authority and put it into this account

where there's about forty five billion dollars right now so we're one of the richest broke companies in the country by then and in fact i remember in two thousand before the republicans came up with this bizarre idea post-offices actually talking about coming out with a fleet of electric cars for short area deliveries and some very innovative stuff because it had a small profit to get out so it's basically we have exhausted all their cash reserves for this prefunding that they could have used for those type things and other innovative ideas is is the best way for the people who are watching right now to get involved in this to contact their member of congress and the senators and say stop this attack on the president on this yesterday especially right now there is a bill in the senate seventeen eighty nine it's considered in the bill doesn't make a lot of sense because it doesn't make any sense to legislate it it's time when you have no plan for the future of the postal service there's no plan to deal with the unfair burden of prefunding there's no plan to replace the revenue that's been lost

to the internet. having a plan to do nothing but dismantle the nation's only universal communication and delivery service is not a plan it's just an indication of the leadership in the postal service that has no idea what to do. fred thanks so much for being with us and you keep up the great work making you know this is a postal service was created by benjamin franklin seven hundred seventy five and we shouldn't have to erase american history just because conservatives are afraid of unions and workers rights to call your congressmen and women and let them know that we need to preserve this critical american institution. meanwhile in sanford florida today marks one month since seventeen year old trayvon martin was gunned down while walking home from a seven eleven and now we're learning more about martin's killer george zimmerman as slate is reporting zimmerman had any history calling police on what he deemed suspicious young black men in august of two thousand and eleven zimmerman placed

a nine one one call to report a black male acting suspicious in his neighborhood three days later did the same thing this time reporting a suspicious group of black teens and in april of last year zimmerman called the police to report a black male between the ages of seven and nine also acting suspicious in either car none of these calls with zimmerman give a reason as to why the people he was pursuing were suspicious and last month zimmerman again placed a call to report a suspicious bright teenager just before shooting trayvon martin's death. just as this trayvon martin case is boiling over there's another seemingly fear driven tragedy for our nation to deal with a thirty two year old iraqi mother of five children living in california died over the weekend after she was brutally beaten and what authorities are now investigating as a hate crime. he was found unconscious line in a puddle of blood last wednesday with

a note near her reading go back to your country you terrorist authorities believe the team i was beaten with the higher on saturday she was taken off life support so might be crimes like this and the trayvon martin murder people tragic consequences of a drumbeat of fear it's constantly being heard across our so-called cable news and radio airwaves in america fashion here joins me now he's the vice president of the center for american progress editor in chief of think progress dot org and the progress report as welcome back thank you for having me terry to have you with us the the first of all do you what kind of relationship do you see between these two cases that are just so well you see what i think is a climate of fear and hate that is conditioned a few crazy killers to act out with their fear and hate i think in both these cases you saw these stereotypes and these prejudices that i think we see in larger society in called take it ical created by i believe a lot of the far right kind of governing

a climate and then you see some actors who are moved by that climate in my opinion and that's certainly what we saw in california i think zimmerman we're going to see a more details about what moved him but it seems like certainly racial stereotypes played a p. key role there. nobody is sure of the exact reason why a crime right now is lower than it's been a long long time there are some who theorize in fact the guys who wrote freakonomics that it's because we took let out of gasoline twenty years ago and we've got a generation of kids who are were brain damaged by lead but whatever it may be murder rates now they've been dropping ever since the clinton administration. most crime rates america is safer now than it's been a long time and yet there's this constant be afraid be afraid be afraid isn't that basically the only thing the right no hard right has to sell. if their alternative is to say oh and by the way we want to take away your soul security or the question is why in the period i think of great cultural change within our society we're moving from minorities to

a minority majority country by twenty fifty we're going to have a lot of agents a lot of indian americans a lot of americans and all kinds of chinese americans here constituting the majority of the united states and in this period of cultural change people are getting used to the new ways a new habits and you norms of the society that they have lived in and some are resistant to that change and i think in that context when you're resistant to it it's the role of all of us that's change advocates to make them understand that this isn't something to be fearful of there are those few and i believe that you know some of the far right we've documented this with the it's not a phobia that work people who are out there engineering and manufacturing a campaign a paper every given day to scare you about the new elements within our society i think those are the people we've got to push back on it's these instances which are educating moments to get people to understand this isn't just rhetorical games when people are saying oh muslims are a threat to america this actually could have serious and severe and then really the

worst rapper questions you can possibly imagine and even now i mean if you just flip the situation of don and look at for a moment if this woman who was beaten to death had been a white thirty two year old mother of five and she'd been beaten by a fellow with brown skin and a turban you know on all our cars on the market this would be wall to wall on fox news for the next month. and yet the fact the matter is it's getting it's not being treated as a terrorist act yeah i think that hopefully it will where in the process hope. learning who the killer is we still don't know it's not like the george zimmerman we're still trying to figure out what the details are all we know is that it was left with their suggested that she needed to get out of country and she was a terrorist so i think we learned motive through that note but we have a hard identity and i think once we start to fill in some details we're going to learn a lot more but i think you're right to suggest that there is a cable news dichotomy here certainly and used how we treat these instances and i

think that is probably the worst of corporate america influence over this because they're looking at viewers and they're looking at numbers and they don't care whether this story is right or not and they know that if they write a story about muslim terrorism in the united states it's going to get some viewers so it's going yes going to sell and unfortunately when you write a new report the justice of this which is pushing back on some of this hate i think although that doesn't sell and i think those of us on the progressive side of trying to argue there's actually not only the right cause but also a consumer base here for people who actually want to know about this we need to wake people up to this face thanks for all the work you're doing it isn't on television great work you're doing to say two interesting topics here first is the second amendment. which was passed frankly to limit the power of a standing army during times of peace and maintain a citizen militia answerable to local authorities you can read it in the constitution of the state of pennsylvania why do you need to prove what you know

how to drive before you can get a driver's license because if you don't know how to drive you can kill people with a car so why not a least license from gun owners the supreme court has already said it's totally constitutional what was george zimmerman doing with a concealed carry permit after being arrested for assaulting a cop and making dozens of crank calls to nine eleven if you drove your car into a cop car and were busted for driving dangerously on the road dozens of times you lose your driver's license the second issue is why was this law passed in florida and sixteen other states. it's a big deal it was pushed by the n.r.a. and wal-mart through alec the american what is the exchange council wal-mart is america's largest gun with the retailer the n.r.a. is the lobbyist for the gun manufacturers this raw makes it harder to sue gun sellers for selling guns to crazy people and stokes more here on our streets leading to more gun sales and more deaths since before to pass this bill

justifiable homicide rate in that state has almost tripled and will while more alec and the n.r.a. are refusing to talk to the press about their role in putting that gone into george zimmerman's and and then giving them immunity from arrest when he killed trayvon martin. sometimes you see a story that seems so for you think you understand it and then something else in here see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok. i'm sorry welcome

to the big picture. mr.