Special: New GOP Candidates Set to Enter 2016 Race, Lethal Injection Case at the Supreme Court, Trans-Pacific Trade Negotiations and who is Marilyn Mosby?

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra.

MS. IFILL: Hello, and welcome. I’m Gwen Ifill. I’m joined around the table by Alexis Simendinger of RealClearPolitics, Michael Fletcher of The Washington Post, Joan Biskupic of Reuters, and Janet Hook of The Wall Street Journal.

The week ahead promises a significantly more crowded presidential race, as at least three, maybe more, Republicans jump into the deep end. So what are we watching for? Who are we expecting, Janet?

MS. HOOK: Well, we’ve got a retired neurosurgeon named Ben Carson is going to jump into the Republican race; as well as Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard; and Mike Huckabee, who ran for president before. He is the former Arkansas governor. So let’s just –

MS. IFILL: And lost the Iowa Caucuses before he won the Iowa Caucuses.

MS. HOOK: Right.

MS. IFILL: One of the most unfair moments of the campaign.

MS. HOOK: You have a good memory.

MS. IFILL: I do, I do.

MS. HOOK: So anyway, so we’ll call these the second-tier candidates, maybe third-tier, you know. This is going to be a really big, diverse, kind of crazy field of Republican candidates. And we started out with the three senators announcing – Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz – and now we’ve got the outsiders running. And before you know it, we might have the front-runners announcing, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.

MS. IFILL: Can I ask you a little bit about another – yet one more Democrat who’s been sniffing around the edges. We talked about Bernie Sanders during the regular broadcast. Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, former mayor of Baltimore, came back to Baltimore this week in the middle of all the upheaval, and it’s unclear whether he did himself any favors.

MS. HOOK: Yes. Well, you know, a couple weeks ago, most of the time when you’d ask people about Martin O’Malley, they’d say, Martin who? Now maybe more people know Martin O’Malley’s name because he’s been in the news about this, and I don’t know whether being the former mayor of Baltimore is a great credential these days. So I can’t see that this whole focus on the turmoil in Baltimore’s going to help him. But it was kind of an act of honest loyalty to a city that he cut short his trip in Europe to come back. I mean, his family does still live there.

MS. IFILL: That’s true, that’s true. I remember that, that he also was in charge of the police department at a time when a lot of these problems were beginning to percolate. So it’ll be interesting to see.

MS. HOOK: That’s right, that’s right. A lot of people kind of hold him responsible for the deep-rooted causes of some of the problems that the city’s experiencing.

MS. IFILL: Well, since we’re talking about Baltimore, let me turn to Mike Fletcher here because one of the interesting people who burst onto the scene this week who we had never known of before was Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney in the city of Baltimore who brought those charges against the six police officers and kind of made quite – kind of became the most famous prosecutor in the land overnight. What do we know about her?

MR. FLETCHER: Right. Very young woman, had served as assistant –

MS. IFILL: Yeah, for – 35. (Laughs, laughter.)

MR. FLETCHER: Really young. (Laughs, laughter.) Exactly.

Has worked as an assistant prosecutor and was an insurance lawyer, and then ran for state’s attorney and was not even given a shot. And one of the – it was interesting, one of her key ads was talking about losing a cousin when she was growing up in Boston to violence. Her cousin was mistaken for another – for a drug dealer and killed by a 17-year-old, and that became kind of the centerpiece of her campaign. And she managed to ride that to victory; it was a complete surprise. She just took office in January, and you know, here she is now in the – in the international spotlight.

MS. IFILL: And it is not insignificant that she is the child of not one, but two police officers, her mother and her father, and the granddaughter of another police officer.

MR. FLETCHER: You have one of the pioneering African-American police officers in Boston, I want to say. But she’s interesting now. Even in bringing these charges, she’s faced a little controversy because the lawyer for Freddie Gray, the young man who died in police custody, was a big supporter of hers.

MS. IFILL: Billy Murphy.

MR. FLETCHER: Billy Murphy, a former judge in Baltimore, mayoral candidate in Baltimore, kind of a figure around town, one of the best-known lawyers in the city. So that’s going to be interesting to sort of watch that play out kind of on a local level.

MS. IFILL: And she’s married to a lawmaker, right?

MR. FLETCHER: And she’s married to a member of the City Council, so.

MS. IFILL: Yeah, so, huh, everything’s a very small city, really, when it comes right down to it.

OK, Joan, I wanted to take you to the Supreme Court, or you take us to the Supreme Court, because there was another case which kind of got overshadowed by the gay marriage case, but it’s about lethal injections and it comes from Oklahoma.

MS. BISKUPIC: That’s right. This case tested the drug cocktail, the three-drug cocktail that states use to inject defendants to kill them. And the key – the first drug that’s given is a sedative. And the question was, can this alternative sedative be used in executions, or does it amount to cruel and unusual punishment because it doesn’t actually do the trick and put the inmate in a coma-like situation enough so when the other drugs are injected they don’t cause severe pain? And it could have been sort of a technical argument, but it went far beyond that during the hour-long session this week, with the justices talking more about attacks on the death penalty. The conservative justices were saying, you know, we get these kinds of challenges all the time about whether the – you know, some lethal injection is going to cause too much pain, and at one point Justice Samuel Alito – a conservative appointed by George W. Bush – said, should the judiciary really countenance all this guerilla war against the death penalty?

MS. IFILL: Wow.

MS. BISKUPIC: And that kind of escalated things. So it was an incredibly testy exchange. It moved far beyond just what’s in the three-drug protocol, that states are – states were having trouble getting the first drug, the key first drug. That was what it’s all about. And some of you might remember about a year ago, year ago to this week, an Oklahoma inmate, Clayton Lockett, started writhing in pain as he was being executed, and that became a very big deal, obviously.

MS. IFILL: Was Justice Alito suggesting that cruel and unusual is not a standard?

MS. BISKUPIC: No, what he was suggesting was that – as I understood it from listening – is that, look, the Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty. Stop trying to attack it and undermine it was sort of the message he was communicating. But these challengers had, frankly, every right to come in and challenge it –

MS. IFILL: Yeah, that’s –

MS. BISKUPIC: – as cruel and unusual in the way it’s being carried out, through the lethal injection. And there was all sorts of talk about, OK, well, is there something better than lethal injection, should we return to firing squads, should we do – you know. And so, as I said, the tensions really escalated, and it was interesting that he took it as such an affront. But you know, these challengers are doing more than just saying we don’t like the death penalty, they’re saying we don’t like it in the way it’s administered.

MS. IFILL: You know, more than one state has actually debated or reinstituted the shooting –

MS. HOOK: Firing squad.

MS. BISKUPIC: Firing squad.

MS. IFILL: – so this is not so far off-base –

MS. BISKUPIC: No, but that was – you know, as Chief –

MS. IFILL: – the fact that it would even come up in an argument.

MS. BISKUPIC: – Chief Justice Roberts said, I think the way – the reason most people – most states move to lethal injection is because it appeared to be more humane. And you were talking earlier about Anthony Kennedy being the swing vote in most of these cases. He didn’t say much in this, except for the fact that – the little he said indicated that he’s going to find no problem with the lethal injection as it stands now. But we shall see in late June.

MS. IFILL: OK.

Let’s go back to trade, because we promised the viewers at the end of the regular program that we would talk about this because, you know, that was supposed to be the big story of the week, in fact, which is the president and the prime minister of Japan gathered in the Rose Garden. There was a state dinner. There was a speech to the joint meeting of Congress for Prime Minister Abe. And the whole idea was to build up momentum for this Trans-Pacific – trade – Partnership, which make Democrats – many Democrats just crazy and doesn’t bother Republicans at all, and the president’s trying to get it passed. Strange bedfellows.

MS. SIMENDINGER: It is – it is strange bedfellows. It’s a fascinating issue as an economic issue, as a global issue of course, but it is this trade pact. There’s two separate things that are happening.

One is, with Congress, the president wants what’s called fast track trade authority, which means let me negotiate and finish this trade pact, and Congress can vote it up or down – you can say yea or nay – but you can’t amend it. As we all know, Democrats, this, over time, you know, makes them crazy. And their concern about this is that the trade negotiation, the pact that would end up at the bottom of the – of the whole process, would outsource jobs, would cut wages, would hurt the environment. The president’s arguing to his own party no, no, no, and he has said directly to Elizabeth Warren, you are wrong, the data is wrong. The White House put out a report today that said, you know – economic report, very green eyeshade-y report that basically was trying to say jobs would not be outsourced on net, the net effect of this.

So here we were. The president is trying this week to push this forward. Really, his partners are the Republicans. He met for lunch with Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker (sic) –

MS. IFILL: – who hates it.

MS. SIMENDINGER: Who hates it. And basically, I think she told him I’m not serving up a whole lot of votes for this in the House.

MS. IFILL: Harry Reid hates it. But if you are the leader of any of the Asian nations who want to – and some non-Asian nations – who want to sign on to this deal, they just – what they want is some assurance that if they sign on, that Congress isn’t going to muck with what they’ve got.

MS. SIMENDINGER: And the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a 12-nation pact, and it takes a long time to negotiate and it’s been going on for years. And the – you know, the president’s argument is, look, we’re not going to get all these countries to agree – if each one of them has to work it through Congress, we’re never going to get there. And he is really strongly saying the net benefits here are clear. I just covered the AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka – who is dying for Hillary Clinton to say something about trade, but she’s gone mute on this issue – and he’s saying, you know, this is a movement. We are fighting this. We want to, you know, press every Democrat, every candidate, not to go for this.

MS. IFILL: She has gone mute because she remembers NAFTA. She was there. (Laughter.)

MS. SIMENDINGER: Yeah.

MS. IFILL: She remembers what that fight was like, and looks like we’re about to have it again.

Thank you all very much, and thank you for watching. And while you’re online, check out Gwen’s Take, in which I post some of my answers to your questions. And we’ll see you again next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra.