Summary: He has the most money and the highest name ID. Next up for Jeb Bush: An official declaration of candidacy on June 15. Jonathan Martin of the New York Times assesses Bush's strengths and weaknesses, eight months before the voters begin to have their say. After all, it's the right to vote that determines who our leaders are. But in a growing number of states, the two major parties are not in agreement over the voting process. Republicans have been pushing legislation that would insist people present a valid ID when they go to the polls and that would curtail early voting. The GOP says it's to ward off voter fraud; Democrats say it's to discourage minority and young people from voting. Doug Chapin, the director of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration at the University of Minnesota, discusses the various points of disagreement between the Ds and the Rs, and whether any kind of voting legislation affects turnout. When we discuss media bias, it's often from the vantage point of whether reporters lean towards one party or the other. Or if they have liberal or conservative inclinations. But there is another kind of media bias that Erik Wemple, who covers the media for the Washington Post, discusses in this week's show. The sympathetic coverage of Dennis Hastert's legal problems illustrates one kind of bias problem. Finally, in our "This Week in Political History" segment, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who was one of the most powerful members of Congress, discusses his rise and fall, nine years after he ended his congressional career. Photo via Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
