Special: Supreme Court set to decide pregnancy discrimination and free speech, secret 2016 primaries and an unusual ally against ISIS

GWEN IFILL: Hello, and welcome to the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra, where we pick up where we left off on the weekly broadcast. I’m joined around the table by Ashley Parker of The New York Times, Nancy Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers, and Pete Williams of NBC News.

We want to start at the Supreme Court, where the justices heard arguments on some pretty interesting topics this week, including whether pregnant workers are adequately protected on the job.

Pete.

PETE WILLIAMS: Right. There’s something called the pregnancy discrimination act passed by Congress. Now, it obviously means that you can’t discriminate against workers when it comes to giving a promotion or raise and say you’re not going to get a raise because you’re pregnant.

The hard question here is what about people who are in jobs that require physical labor. And this involved a woman who became pregnant while working for UPS.

MS. IFILL: Peggy Young.

MR. WILLIAMS: Yeah, Peggy Young. Her doctor said she shouldn’t lift anything more than 20 pounds. Now, she said that’s not a problem for me. I pick up little light packages at the airport. But UPS said I’m sorry, we can’t accommodate you. She says that UPS told her to come back. She was too much of a liability while she was pregnant.

So the question is, when you make some accommodations for some workers, do you have – is it discrimination not to make it for pregnant workers too? And what her lawyer –

MS. IFILL: There’s already an anti-discrimination law on the books -

MR. WILLIAMS: That’s right.

MS. IFILL: - from `78.

MR. WILLIAMS: That’s right. So – by the way, UPS has since changed its policy, and they now say we wouldn’t have done what we did. But the problem here is that UPS basically says we treat pregnant – said we treat pregnancy like you breaking your ankle at home, like an off-the-job injury. We would give accommodations to people who get injured on the job, but not off the job, and not people who get pregnant.

So what about the fact, though, her lawyer said, that, OK, but you do make some accommodations for people who, like, get convicted for drunk driving, because that deprives them of their Department of Transportation license, so they get some sort of light duty?

The problem for the Supreme Court is trying to find a way to – probably what they’ll end up saying is if you’re going to have any class of workers at all that you give a break to for light duty, you can’t say no to pregnant workers. And they’ll probably have to – if you don’t do it for pregnant workers, you’ll have to probably go to court and explain why.

MS. IFILL: I liked that crack about the broken ankle, by the way. I picked up on that. I know what you were saying.

MR. WILLIAMS: (Laughs.)

MS. IFILL: I want to ask you about another court case which involved online threats in Facebook.

MR. WILLIAMS: Yes.

MS. IFILL: And it’s a completely whole different world once again. The justices keep getting pushed into this technological wonderland.

MR. WILLIAMS: Right. So, again, we have another case – you know, sometimes the Supreme Court decides what the Constitution means. These are two cases of interpreting federal law, statutory interpretation. And this one is a law against making threats.

The question is, what’s a true threat? And this involves a man whose wife left him, took the two kids away. He became despondent and started posting some pretty bizarre things on Facebook, thinking about ways that he could kill her. She got worried, got a restraining order. He wrote on Facebook, fold it up, put it in your pocket. Will it stop a bullet? Those are just some of the things that he said.

The government prosecuted him. And he said, wait a minute, you’re using the wrong standard. He was convicted at trial, and the judge said to the jury the test is would a reasonable person looking at these messages consider them a threat? His lawyer said to the Supreme Court, no, that’s not the test. The test should be what was in the sender’s mind? What did he intend to write?

The Supreme Court didn’t seem to like either one of those tests. They’re going to try to come up with something in the middle that will stop genuinely true, scary threats, but leave some, as the justices would say, some breathing room for – you know, they actually talked about Eminem. They talked about rap music and not making the law so harsh that it would stop that kind of expression.

MS. IFILL: I would have given money just to listen to Justice Roberts quote Eminem. It would have been worth my whole week of work.

MR. WILLIAMS: (Laughs.) I could have gotten you in.

MS. IFILL: You could have gotten me in.

Ashley, I want to ask you about something which is just under the surface here, which is while we’re all watching everybody ramp up for 2016 and decide how they’re going to fight this battle, whether to get in or not, there’s a whole `nother 2016 primary season which has already begun.

ASHLEY PARKER: Yeah, there’s a ton of sort of million behind-the-scenes, quiet primaries for, for instance, Mitt Romney’s money network. He had a very good, strong finance team. And if you believe that Mitt Romney is not going to run again, like most of us don’t think he’s going to run again, people are –

MS. IFILL: Even though he’s still leading polls, (such as ?) these polls are worth anything at this point.

MS. PARKER: No doubt, yeah - leader in the polls. But he had – Spencer Zwick was his finance guy, so Spencer is getting courted by all of these campaigns to see, you know, would he be up for coming on? What could he do with donors, not only individual people but groups, whether it’s Americans for Prosperity or individuals like Sheldon Adelson? You have all these campaigns reaching and wooing him.

And one thing that was most fascinating to me is that normally, in one of these sort of invisible primaries that then becomes visible, you wanted to score a big image guy, right. So if you were the Democrat, you wanted to land a David Axelrod, or for a Republican, a Mike Murphy.

Now what people are going to be looking for and want to boast about is what digital team they get and what analytics team. And that’s what people are going to be looking at. Oh, did you get Deep Root Analytics or did you get Targeted Victory? And that’s sort of the new metric for cool in campaigns I think we’ll start to see.

MS. IFILL: Oh. Well, something fun and new to track this year.

And Nancy, I want to wind up by talking to you a little bit about Iran, because one of the interesting things in this ever-evolving plot against ISIS is strange bedfellows. Are we now on the same side as Iran in this fight?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Kind of.

MS. IFILL: Kind of.

MS. YOUSSEF: This week we saw this manifest in that Iran used F-4 Phantoms and dropped – did airstrikes in eastern Iraq, hitting ISIS targets. And we’re hitting –

MS. IFILL: This is the first evidence we’ve had that they have been –

MS. YOUSSEF: That’s right.

MS. IFILL: - overtly involved.

MS. YOUSSEF: That’s right. Their airstrikes are a lot smaller than U.S. airstrikes. The U.S. has been focused in the west and the north. And so both sides are going after the same enemy, ISIS. It’s one of the reasons that Ash Carter will inherit a complicated job, because it’s hard for the U.S. to make a concession that Iran, who was attacking U.S. troops just a few years ago, is now a needed ally in this, in confronting ISIS.

MS. IFILL: For the record, we don’t acknowledge that we are in league with Iran in any way right? No.

MS. YOUSSEF: No, because, again, it gets very, very messy. In the same way – and this came up during Hagel’s term as secretary – the U.S. effort in Syria is arguably helping Assad. This is – these are the strange – because, by going after ISIS, since ISIS is not only a threat to rational stability, but it was a threat to Assad, and if ISIS is defeated, presumably, potentially, Assad can survive the uprising against him.

MS. IFILL: In the meantime, we are still at the negotiating table with Iran about their nuclear stockpile.

MS. YOUSSEF: That’s right.

MS. IFILL: This is very complicated.

MS. YOUSSEF: Yeah. Yeah. And you really see it play out in terms of not only how we talk about it, but how announcements are made, how they talk about the strikes, even how they talked about learning of Iran’s strike in Iraq. Who told you? The Iraqis told us. Well, didn’t you see it? Well, we have eyes. Did you talk to the Iranians? We don’t talk about it. What did they hit? We know, but you don’t need to know. OK, so that’s the kind of –

MS. IFILL: I like the way you acted that out. That’s really rich.

MS. YOUSSEF: Yeah, that’s how it really went down at the Pentagon this week. So -

MS. IFILL: (Laughs.)

MS. YOUSSEF: But, yeah, it’s made very, very strange bedfellows. And this is a complication of the Middle East, particularly in the post-Arab spring. The shifting borders, shifting leadership, the destruction of the status quo, and everybody vying for people has created strange bedfellows, and people trying to defeat the Sunni extremists.

MS. IFILL: Fascinating. Well, thank you very much for watching it for us.

Thank you all as well.

We’re going to get off the air now. Stay online and read my take this week in which I wish for a magic wand to solve life’s problems. You have to find out what that’s all about. You can look at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

And we’ll see you next time on the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra.