DEMOCRACY FORUM ASKS,
HOW DO YOU RESPOND TO A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS?
“THIS IS NOT AN ESOTERIC CONVERSATION.”
THIS IS COMMUNITY RADIO.
PART I
“This is Not an Esoteric Conversation”
In March 2025, WERU’s Democracy Forum began a series of “Constitutional Crisis” programs. The premise was direct: “While ordinary life goes on for most of us, some Mainers are living in fear. This is not normal.”
Produced by the League of Women Voters of Maine (LWVME) in cooperation with WERU and hosted by Ann Luther, LWVME Treasurer and leader of the organization’s Advocacy Team, these shows bring listeners monthly discussions with local and national leaders who examine the current “not normal” events that challenge people’s safety and freedom and who report on the responses through which people find protection and hope. The opening program was dedicated to “How to Stand Up, Speak Up, Push Back.” Subsequent programs defined the scope of recent Federal policy changes and then honed in on particular Constitutional issues: health care, civil liberties, free and fair elections, free speech, the expansion of Presidential power.
At the end of October 2025, I spoke separately with Ann Luther and with Amy Browne, WERU’s News and Public Affairs Manager, about this series, about Democracy Forum’s 20-year broadcast history, and about WERU’s commitment to public service programming.
The following interviews have been edited for length, sequence, and clarity.
Diane
Ann, thank you for speaking with me today.
Let’s start with what inspired you and the League of Women Voters of Maine to dedicate a series of Democracy Forum’s programming to this “Constitutional Crisis.” How did this series come to be?
Ann
The League has been a nonpartisan organization for 105 years. We’ve never endorsed candidates or political parties. But, as the current Federal administration emerged, it became clear to us at the League, not only here in Maine but at the National level, that the policies of the current administration presented grave threats to our Constitutional order. We’ve all been deeply concerned and outraged every single day by what’s happening.
So, our National partners at the League of Women Voters broke [that] 105 year tradition, came out and said, ‘This is a Constitutional crisis.’ And, although we’re non- partisan, we’re not neutral; and being non-partisan does not mean that we can’t speak about the outrages that are being perpetrated.
We’ve been doing this show for 20 years. The beginning of this year was the first time in those 20 years that we invited guests who were afraid to come on the radio and say what effect Federal policy was having on their work. And so we [thought], ‘This is not normal.’
People are afraid, if they come on the radio and say publicly that Federal policies are damaging their constituent’s welfare, whether it’s a food bank or a domestic violence shelter or health care, that there would be retribution, that there would be more damage done to the exact constituents that they were trying to help and protect. This led us to think we’re going to have to do some shows that talk about what exactly is going on in these various spheres.
Diane
Let’s talk about the series design, the sequencing of the shows. Your first show was about action, about what can be done, how to respond. You jumped right in. Why did you choose to start with that?
Ann
That show was, ‘How to Stand Up, Speak Up and Push Back,’ about civil resistance. March was at the start of the No Kings protests. Resistance was just getting off the ground. We were thinking less about the strategic arc of the series and more about what was happening in Maine right then and how we can give people information about whether to participate in this or not. We were thinking about Erica Chenoweth (author of Why Civil Resistance Works), who had been a guest on our show in 2021, and her research that 3.5% of the population can change the world.
Diane
Then, for the second program, you went to, ‘Are we in the midst of a Constitutional crisis?’ and linked that to the refrain…this is not normal.’ How did those themes apply to your Maine community?
Ann
Oh, boy. I can’t even tell you how many lawsuits our state is engaged in right now, suing the Administration for this, that and the other thing. We’ve had money awarded. We’ve had money taken away. We’ve had money come back. We’ve had curtailment of services. Our food banks, our support shelters, our warming shelters, our domestic abuse centers, all of these have had funding cuts.
Now some of them are getting their funds re-awarded. The University of Maine had funds pulled and then put back. We ourselves, the League of Women Voters, had an AmeriCorps grant that we sued over. Our grant got pulled, and then it got reinstated. So, the nonprofit sector, those aspects of it that have relied on federal funding, have been through a deeply unstable period, and their clients have been put at risk.
Diane
And that conversation focused on how many of these disruptive policies were being promulgated by Executive Order, bypassing Congress, and raising Constitutional questions.
Ann
Yes. We [focused on] the courts and defiance of the courts, the sectors that were affected by the cuts. We were trying to get at, if the people who are running food banks and running warming shelters and domestic violence shelters are afraid to come on, who could we get to come on that will talk about the devastating effects of this?
Somebody from the Maine Library Association had been speaking out about the cuts to their funding. And God bless the librarians. They are not afraid of anybody. They are going to say what they have to say. So a librarian came on. We had farmers come on, and one guest from Maine MorningStar, a press angle, a survey of what reporting had done in Maine. And then Samuel Bagenstos (Professor of Law at the University of Michigan), who had been in the Federal government, came on and talked from his perspective. He was totally hair on fire.
Diane
In subsequent programs, you’ve focused on single issues. Can we go through some of your thinking about those specific subtopics. You started with health care.
Ann
Yes. Our government is making us sick. Right then, they were cutting lots of funding; and people that we knew were suffering with very serious illnesses. The ALS funding was cut. The clinical trials for ovarian cancer were being cut, the CDC, the vaccines. Our rural hospitals are on very, very shaky ground. This is not normal, right? These all came up because of what happened to be going on in that moment, what we thought people would want to talk about.
Diane
And that led to consideration of civil liberties? Was something going on in Maine to trigger that as a subject?
Ann
This was right when ICE and immigrant detentions were starting to heat up, and we were having some experience of that in Maine. We wanted people who had experience defending immigrants to come on and talk about that. And Barbara McQuade, a Professor from Practice at Michigan Law, had been a Federal prosecutor; so she was a law and order enforcement, prosecutor side. Then Molly Curren Rowles, Executive Director of the ACLU Maine, and Sue Roche, Executive Director of the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, were defending the immigrant rights side. This was all about living in fear, about people being swept up, how to defend against that, how to protect our
people.
Diane
You followed with consideration of free and fair elections. That discussion focused on how lowering confidence in the election system is its own suppression strategy and included alerts to watch for ballot referendum questions because a rash of anti-voting legislation was being proposed.
Ann
Joyce Vance (Professor of the Practice of Law, University of Alabama School of Law) and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows were our guests. We have great elections in Maine, and we’re going to have to fight to keep them because there is going to be an assault. We have a voter suppression ballot initiative on our November ballot. We are working to defeat that question. We have to stand up and insist that we’re going to have free and fair elections.*
Diane
And your next program was then dedicated to current challenges to free speech. One of the guests, Professor Timothy Zick from the William and Mary Law School, talked about how he has taken on the task of keeping track of every Executive Order that has addressed free speech issues. And the discussion emphasized how, despite the Administration frequently losing litigated cases, media and institutions were all-too-often caving in.
Ann
Yes. Timothy Zick said his tracking is pages and pages already, so much that it’s impinging upon his life. He’s having trouble keeping up. And, in November, we’re doing our next Constitutional Crisis show about the Unitary Executive and Presidential overreach.
Diane
Listening to you talk and listening to the programs, I hear those steady themes that run through the series: not only that this is not normal, but the number of times you’ve referenced that this is the first time you have had guests afraid to come on and talk. And that idea goes back to that first show, back to the struggle of trying to figure out how to respond. A guest on that show talked about people being both hit with a sledgehammer and thrown off balance by chaos and people not knowing what to do.
Ann
And every single day, isn’t it some fresh assault. [We are] absolutely off balance the whole freaking year, every day.
Diane
Something else that struck me is that many of the guests have a national scope that makes the programs widely informative. But you also always have that balance of people who talk about local issues.
Ann
That has been a formula that sort of evolved for us, to invite somebody with a really big picture, the theory, the concepts, the academics, the scholarship, and pair them up with somebody from Maine who is living that out, somebody who’s what I would call a practitioner in Maine.
And we always end with, ‘And what can we do?’ We always bring it back to, are grounded in, what can ordinary people do, what should we all be doing right now. This is not an esoteric conversation. We are the League of Women Voters.
Diane
So, let’s turn to a broader picture of the program. Democracy Forum has been running for 20 years on WERU. What is the history of the program, both your involvement with the program and with the League of Women Voters?
Ann
I was fortunate enough to be able to retire from a day job in the early 90s, and I became involved with the League of Women Voters at that time. WERU was in my community. Two women had a show on Sunday evening called Women’s Windows where they featured spoken word by women, music by women.
They invited me to come on with another longtime LWV leader to do an interview about the League. Soon after, they cooked up this idea that the League of Women Voters should do a public affairs show in Presidential election years, featuring topics that people needed to be informed about in order to cast their ballots. So we did it in 2004, 2008 and 2012, and then we did it again in 2016, the year that Trump won.
After that, we [discovered] there was so much to talk about that we had to keep going. We approached the station, and they were very grateful to have us. So, since 2016, we’ve produced a monthly show.
Diane
And had you done any radio before this?
Ann
No, no. I went to training at WERU–if you’re going to be a host on a public affairs show, here’s what you have to do, here’s what you must never do.
Also, my local league has a team of between 10 and 15 people that meet every week, and the second half of that meeting is all about planning the radio shows. That group picks the topics. They advise about what questions they would like to hear answered. They help craft the arc of the conversation. They research the guests.
Diane
It’s apparent that at every step the program demonstrates how community radio works and that how it works is why it is so important.
Ann
I hear from people all over the WERU broadcast area. So I know our listeners are following the conversation. But the other thing I also know for sure is that the 10 or 15 people that are helping put this show together are having conversations and thinking deeply about issues that they would not be thinking about in this way if they weren’t working on the show.
Diane
Absolutely. It’s the doing and the local urgency that engages thinking in a broader way.
Democracy Forum airs on WERU on the third Friday of the month from 4:00-5:00 PM (EST).
*Question 1 of Maine’s November 2025 Referendum Election Ballot asked:
“Do you want to change Maine election laws to eliminate two days of absentee voting, prohibit requests for absentee ballots by phone or family members, end ongoing absentee voter status for seniors and people with disabilities, ban prepaid postage on absentee ballot return envelopes, limit the number of drop boxes, require voters to show certain photo ID before voting, and make other changes to our elections?”
Maine voters said “No.”
Yes–175,751
No–315,008
Blank–1,249