Rational Security 2.0: The ‘Wet February’ Edition
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
This week, Alan, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare senior editor, Roger Parloff! They talked through some of the week's biggest national security news, including:
- “The Turn Heel State.” North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorne has sued to stop a state law inquiry into whether he is disqualified from running for re-election under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection, not by disputing the facts, but on due process grounds and in reliance on a 1872 law pardoning members of the Confederacy. What are the odds of his case and what does it tell us about the possibility of future disqualification proceedings?
- “There Never Was a Quiet Part, Was There?” Former President Trump triggered a stir earlier this week when he made statements suggesting not only that former Vice President Mike Pence could have overturned the 2020 election outcome, but that he would pardon participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection if reelected in 2024. What impact will this have on ongoing reform debates–and Trump’s election prospects?
- “He Took Home a Bronze for Dodging the Issue.” The Beijing Olympics get underway later this week, kicking off a multi-week period where Olympians, their governments, sponsoring corporations and sports fans will all have to navigate an array of tricky questions about how they should act in light of China’s questionable conduct, including its human rights record and expected surveillance of attendees. What should we expect from these games around the games?
For object lessons, Alan recommended the recent Vanity Fair portrait, "The Rise and Fall of Jerry Falwell, Jr.," for some casual bedtime reading. Quinta embraced pundit accountability and issued a mea culpa for an earlier misstatement about a notorious terrorist's history with the law. Scott celebrated the end of "Dry January" by sipping on an amaro caldo, and recommended listeners do the same. And Roger made another drink recommendation from his own family history: the hard-to-find (in America, anyway) vin jaune.
Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Alan Z. Rozenshtein is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Research Director and Senior Editor at Lawfare, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he served as an Attorney Advisor with the Office of Law and Policy in the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland.
Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Scott R. Anderson is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He previously served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and as the legal advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Roger Parloff is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. For 12 years, he was the main legal correspondent at Fortune Magazine. His work has also been published in ProPublica, The New York Times, New York, NewYorker.com, Yahoo Finance, Air Mail, IEEE Spectrum, Inside, Legal Affairs, Brill’s Content, and others. An attorney who no longer practices, he is the author of "Triple Jeopardy," a book about an Arizona death penalty case. He is a senior editor at Lawfare.
