Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The Supremes, Trump, and Voting, plus Colson Whitehead’s Harlem / Start Making Sense

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The Supremes, Trump, and Voting, plus Colson Whitehead’s Harlem / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Weiner.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Later in the hour, Colson Whitehead won two Pulitzer prizes for his novels, and then wrote three crime stories about Harlem.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: The latest is Cool Machine, and it's terrific.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: John Powers will comment he's critic it large for NPR's fresh air with Terry Gross.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But first, the Supreme's voting rights, the postal service, and Trump.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: David Cole will explain in a minute.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Supreme Court is not a Trump court, at least not on several issues, but where do they stand on voting rights as we prepare for the midterms in November?
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And what exactly did the court say on Monday in its order about the Postal Service cooperating with Trump,
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: in his effort to restrict voting by mail.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: For comment, we turned to David Cole.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's former national legal director of the ACLU, now teaches law at Georgetown.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: He also writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Review, and he's the nation's legal affairs correspondent.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: David, welcome back.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me, John.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll get to this week's Supreme Court action on the Postal Service in voting by mail in a minute, but first, the big picture.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of our friends consider the current Supreme Court to be a Trump court.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: It has three Trump nominees.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: It has a six-three conservative majority.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the court that granted him immunity from criminal prosecution.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: They permitted partisan gerrymandering.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yet, you say this is not a Trump court.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Please explain.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think just on the evidence of this past term, I don't think one can say, this is clearly a Trump court.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you have to keep reassessing as you go along.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: But this term, it delivered several blows to key Trump initiatives.
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Birthright citizenship rejected, probably, is signal, you know, single most central kind of attack on the very notion of who we are,
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: who among us are our true citizens, they reject that his position.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Six to three, they reject that his position.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: On the tariffs, his most important foreign policy initiative brought in over 100 years.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: billion dollars in revenue, they rejected it, said it's beyond his authority.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: His effort to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, they rejected that.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: His effort to put national guard troops on the streets.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: in cities like Chicago and Portland and Los Angeles, he, the court rejected that.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and if you look back more broadly, the court stopped him from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people to Venezuela.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: and they said no you can't do it until we take it up and now it looks like they may never take it up and there may be no more uh... such deportation so i just don't think you can write it off uh... as a trump court did he lose every every case no uh... and you know
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: no president loses every case in the court Biden didn't lose every case in the court.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, in order to Trump, but you know, number of the big ones were ones where the court had already pre-Trump indicated that it was moving in that direction, like in particular requiring that the president had the power to remove the heads of the
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: executive agencies without any kind of constraint by Congress.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: That writing was on the wall for that a long time ago, and the court has been moving in that direction for some time, they overturned precedent.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's wrong.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's not a Trump decision.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it is that the court has been moving that direction for a very long time.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the other thing that was not a Trump decision, similar argument is getting the voting rights act.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: This has been a long-standing goal of conservatives.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I asked AI when didn't John Roberts begin working on getting the voting rights act section two.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the answer is 1981, his very first job at the Justice Department.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: He proposed gutting section to the voting room.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was 45 years ago.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this has been his project for a long time.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Under Ronald Reagan.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it wasn't, you know, I mean, it's, again, a terrible decision.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the worst decision the court issued all of last term, but not a, not a decision that can be explained by this is just a court that wants to do
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And what did Trump call the justices after he lost the tariff's case?
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fools and lap dogs.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: That doesn't seem like if you're going to go before them again, that that would be a good idea, but maybe I'm wrong about this.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's not a Supreme Court strategist.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well we're especially interested in voting rights and whether the court will block Trump from interfering with or sabotaging the midterms.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: The first relevant case here is when the court has already decided about the deadline for counting mail in ballots.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Trump called this one a tremendous loss, reminded us what that was about.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well that's, so that was an argument that the Trump administration made, that a federal law that requires that federal election be conducted on a certain day, precluded the counting of ballots
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: mail ballots that were voted upon before election day or on election day postmarked by that date but received by the state afterwards.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Mississippi was one state among many that says, you know, if you get it postmarked by that date and we get it within a, I think it was a 10 day period or something like that, we will count it because you voted.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: by election day and they were saying no it has to be received by election day and it was a you know a clear effort to try to undermine mailing ballots which for whatever reason Trump has had a
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: then data against for a very long time, notwithstanding that heva himself is voted by mail.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, the court rejected and said, no, we read the statute to permit what Mississippi and many other states do.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: As long as the votes are all, you know, done by that date, they can be counted later.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a second, and it's much more important case, before the court as we speak, Friday, the Postal Service published new regulations that would restrict mail voting in the midterms.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is because Trump issued an executive order.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: saying the postal service will not deliver mail ballots in any state that do not provide voter data to his administration.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And two dozen states have gone to court saying they won't do it.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tell us about this case and where we stand today.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so this is another effort by Trump to mess with mail ballots and sort of by definition a mail ballot is one that goes in the mail.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he's, you know, had the brilliant idea of, well, I control the postal service, maybe I can control an ob, you know, obstruct mailing ballots through a postal regulation essentially.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you issued an executive order.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: some time ago directing the postal service to do this, the postal service has now done it.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: They have issued a rule which has been blocked.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, so even before they issued the rule, just on the basis of the executive order, 23 states and the District of Columbia went into court and said, this executive order is illegal.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: The sort of running of
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: elections, including for federal office, is a state matter subject to congressional revision, but not subject to unilateral presidential revision.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what essentially the president is trying to do here is do an end run around that.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: by not, you know, directly changing the rules about mail in ballots at state level, but using the postal service to try to stop the ballots from even getting to the states where they are supposed to be assessed for whether they are valid or not.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a clear effort to kind of use the kind of contingent fact that the mail ballot is mailed.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that the federal government controls the mail to try to interfere with how states run elections.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the lower court already said, no, the lower court already rejected the president's position.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And said, no, you can't do this.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are matters for the states and Congress, not for you the President unilaterally, and the fact that you, you know, have opposed the service, doesn't give you the right to do an end run.
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now they've issued a rule.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: They have been seeking relief from the Supreme Court already.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: They've now said it's even more urgent because the rule is there, you know, he clearly thinks that Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans because he's had a long
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: kind of partisan agenda against male ballots.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, thus far, the courts have said, no, no, you know, this is an improper end run.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll see what the Supreme Court says.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are a host of procedural questions in the case about whether the court
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: issued their orders too early, whether this rule that was now been promulgated changes anything.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not a simple case, but I do think the basic idea that you can't exploit the fact that you run the mail service to try to monkey with the rules on mail and ballots when those are supposed to be set by the states and forced by the states.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And while Congress has the authority to override them, Congress has not done so.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: what the states are doing, and so far, the Senate has refused to do his bidding, and so Congress has also stopped him in his tracks.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so that 47 million people voted by mail in the recent elections, 30 percent of voters.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Postal Service says in defense of their rule that if states don't like the policy, they don't have to use the U.S. mail to conduct elections.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: What do you think of that argument?
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's ridiculous.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, people, it's true.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could go to UPS, I suppose, and you could have, you know, each state could adopt it.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I could create it's own delivery service, just for the males, but that's not the world we live in.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Monday morning Trump's lawyers filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying, this is only about the design of the envelopes.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is not a big issue because the post office does have rules about things like mailing explosives.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is sort of like mailing explosives, they say.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, if people vote to send a message to President Trump, he might feel like it's like explosives, but no, I mean, you know, it's these rules are very Byzantine.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're they're clearly not designed to serve some legitimate purpose of ensuring that
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the mail gets delivered properly.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you need for the mail to be delivered properly?
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And address that whole you need.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they want information about the voter, which then they're gonna run against some kind of list that they've created of who they think are eligible voters.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we have to talk about this list question because Trump's idea here is to prepare his own list of approved voters.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, this has been litigated a lot.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Remind us where this idea of Reforcing the state, requiring that states hand in the voter roles, the information about every registered voter, so the Trump can create a list of approved voters.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where do we stand on that proposal?
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he has, yeah, he's sent that request, I think every state, so far, 21 courts have ruled on whether he has the authority to demand such lists, 21 of those courts have ruled against the president, not a single court has said that the president has this power and, you know, he, what is he trying to do?
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's trying to create a list.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: It'll obviously and necessarily at this stage be under inclusive and then use that.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: list to basically throw in the waste bin, eligible votes by people who are not on his list.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Again, that's enforcing voting procedures, which is a role of the states.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: The states have their lists, the states are the ones who are supposed to enforce that.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: If Congress thinks the states are not doing a good job, Congress can create some separate
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: and Congress that do this, not the President acting unilaterally and what the President is doing here.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, if both with the U.S. Postswers and with these requests to states for this data, so you can compile a list, is trying to enforce the voting law himself.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it makes sense not to give the President in the United States one person, one person of one party.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: the power to make decisions about elections nationwide, much better to have that authority diffused.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it can't be sort of concentrated by one self-interested individual, and Trump is the very definition of yourself interested in individual, who you would not trust to run an election.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now we have the latest on this story Monday afternoon the Supreme Court issued an emergency order that some of the media says gives the Supreme Court the green light to the postal service in the Trump administration to proceed with their plan to use the post office to undermine voting by mail.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: MS now called it a quote voter suppression win, close quote, but is that really what happened?
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: No.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a purely procedural decision.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: What the court ruled was that the challenge that states had made was premature.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the reason for that was that the states challenged the executive order that President Trump issued.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: The executive order itself didn't have any legal effect.
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It directed other executive agencies, DHS, the postal service,
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: to take certain actions consistent with law, but they hadn't taken those actions yet.
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so the courts said until they take those actions, there's no dispute that's right for us to decide.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the Postal Service has now taken action, pursuant to the executive order.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: It issued the rule on Friday, and that rule is before the same judge that found the executive order illegal.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: that judge is very likely to block the rule and that will go back up to the Supreme Court.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is just a kind of hiccup in the process.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It says nothing about whether the president's effort to exploit the power of the mail service, to interfere with the way states govern their elections is permissible or not.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: itself in this order said nothing here relates to the substantive constitutional objections to the president's executive order raised by the plaintiffs.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: It remains to be decided whether the executive order is lawful.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is that correct?
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: When the court finds that it doesn't have
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: the jurisdiction to decide to dispute them then by definition is not making any decision about the merits of the dispute.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was purely the threshold question of, you know, basically did the court below act too early and that the court said it did.
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's inevitable that it will come right back up to it now that the dispute is concrete because the postal service has taken action in response.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: there's actually two separate lawsuits in the same court in Massachusetts and each one got an injunction.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: The first one is on the part of the blue states.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: The second one is plaintiff is the League of Women Voters.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: The first one applies only to the states
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: which are parties to the lawsuits, but the League of Women Voters case is a national case.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're national organizations with national membership.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the question is whether the order of the Supreme Court prepared refers only to the state plaintiffs or to all the states because some states have already submitted their voter lists.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: The red states.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it refers only to the state decision and the postal service, the Trump administration
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Monday that in the absence of a stay of both the decision in the state case and the decision in the related League of Women's Motors case.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: the Postal Service can not go forward.
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is going back up.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: The court did not grant a stay of the League of Women's Belderers decision, and so the Postal Service says it can't proceed.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: The plaintiffs have gone back before the district court judge in the wake of the court.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: postal service issuing its rule.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so one way or another, this is going back up and nothing will happen.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think until the court rules on the merits.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I believe the order also specifically said this only governs the creation of the lists in the executive order by the Department of Homeland Security.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't require that any states cooperate with the executive order.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's true of the executive order.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The postal service rule may as a practical matter require the stakes to cooperate, because otherwise the mail won't be delivered properly.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But again, the court didn't address that question, and it will now be addressed.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And do, of course, I think, you know, probably quite possibly by the end of this week.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, let's talk about the schedule here a little bit.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Early voting,
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: and voting absentee ballot voting by mail begins early in September in several states.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can the postal service prepare the envelopes and the county registers a voter?
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Prepare the ballots in time for the midterm elections?
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think it's...
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I don't know, you're experiencing the pulse associated mine is not that it is the most efficient institution known demand kind and it you know, this is a massive task look it was not it was designed to mess with mail in ballots and if it creates a chaos that's what Trump wants, but I think
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the plopper way forward here is to say, look, the postal service doesn't have a role to play in regulating elections, nor does the president.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is a subject for the states and for Congress, if it chooses to act, but it has not chosen to act on this subject.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so we should, you know, just nullify this postal service order and proceed.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I will say that you're point about the,
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: mailing balding, starting soon, may play against the challengers because there's a case called Purcell that says that courts should not intervene and change the rules at the last minute in advance of elections because of all the chaos that will create.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: often with partisan, you know, looking very partisan in its application, but that's going to be an issue, I think, when I don't think it's an F, but I win.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: When the judge enjoys the rule, I think one of the arguments that the Trump administration will make is that the court can't intervene this late.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Postal Service, excuse me, is late, but the court can't, and you know, we'll have to see what, you know, whether the court takes that seriously.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you think this we may have further action this week?
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we're going to have further action from the lower court definitely this week and it will go immediately up to the Supreme Court and it will be on a very much a fast track and the presumably they're fairly familiar with the merits now because
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: of the appeal that they already considered.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I do think, and we could get a ruling this week, the problem is, as is often the case with election disputes, you've got to decide it promptly.
• 22:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're running up against the deadline.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a separate issue here, which I've been wondering about, 16 states have agreed to submit their voter rolls, the red states, and Trump, the Trump people are approving and checking the names now and apparently, they plan to go ahead and create federally approved voter lists for those 16 red states.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Does this court ruling, which is before the Supreme Court
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: apply to all the states or just the 30 states that refuse to submit their rules.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think that postal service case is going to resolve that question.
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: So because the running of federal elections is under the Constitution a state matter, states may have the prerogative to choose to, you know, enlist the help of the president if you can call it that, in this regard.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think it's deeply troubling because
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: At the end of the day, what are they trying to do here?
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: They are trying to make it hard for people to vote.
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in a democracy, we should be making it easy for people to vote, not making it hard for people to vote.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: The only justification they've ever advanced for making it hard for people to vote is this concern about voter fraud,
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: by non-citizens, which no one has ever pointed to, you know, any significant number of non-citizens fraudulently voting anywhere.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for good reason, it's a serious crime.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: You face substantial penalties.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: The likelihood that a single non-citizens vote is going to make any difference to anything is so small that it makes no sense for somebody to engage in that criminal conduct.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it hasn't happened.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that has not stopped Trump or the Republicans from using it as a pretext to try to make it difficult for people to vote why because they don't want to hear what the people think.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Another way Trump could sabotage the elections and our friends are worried about is to send the National Guard to polling places in blue cities.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: He would claim he was protecting voting places from threats that he's learned about somehow.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the court has already ruled on sending the National Guard
• 24:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was to Chicago, and the vote there was six to three against Trump and Trump withdrew the guard and did not appeal that ruling.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that stands right now.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: What is that relevant to election day?
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think it is.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's a long-standing tradition against using the military for domestic law enforcement purposes and Trump sought to get around that and the Supreme Court rejected his ability to do so.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is one statutory basis for doing so, and that is where there's an insurrection.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But a problem at the polls is not an insurrection.
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I don't think he has authority to do that.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the Supreme Court decision against him will, you know, on the Chicago case will make it very difficult for him to do so.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the federal judges will very likely stop him from doing so if he tries that.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: David Cole, his argument that this court is not a Trump court was published in the New York Review.
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: David, thanks for talking with us today.
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me, John.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Carlson Whitehead has a terrific new novel out.
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's called cool machine.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's best known for winning two Pulitzer Prizes in a row.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: The only novelist ever to do that for the underground railroad and the nickel boys.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then he changed keys in row three crime novels centering on Harlem and the furniture store owner Ray Carney.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: who also works part-time as a fence, dealing with stolen jewelry and watches out of his back room, but only when he needs to.
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: For comment we turned to John Powers, he's critic at large for NPR's fresh air with Terry Gross, where he has an audience of millions.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Last time he was here we talked about the Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: John, welcome back.
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, happy to be here, John.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: The three volumes in Colson Whitehead's Harlem trilogy cover the 60s, the 70s and the 80s.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Harlem shuffle published in 2021 was set in 1959 to 1964, the Kennedy Johnson years with John Lindsay as mayor of New York when our hero is trying to make it as a business man, as a family man, and sometimes as a crook.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: The second one called Crook Manifesto, published in 2023, was set in 1971 to 76, the Nixon Ford Abe Beam years when the city is a wreck, Harlem is being burned down, tenement by tenement.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the new one, cool machine, is set in 1981 to 86.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: the Reagan era of greed and new hi-rises with Ed Koch's mayor.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's start with Ray Carney, Colson Whitehead's Harlem Friends, Your Salesman, and Fence.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a crook part-time, but he doesn't really want to be one.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: He wants to be what exactly?
• 27:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: What he wants to be, ideally, would be a respectable businessman that sells high-class furniture through his furniture store, his very good eye for furniture, and can move in the early books with his wife to the actual place where she came from an area called Strivers Row in Harlem, which are these particularly nice houses in the middle of things that aren't so nice.
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: and his ambition in the first book is to more or less get his wife Elizabeth and himself two strivers row along with their kids and he can't do it without occasionally dipping into crime and this is problematic partly because you could go to jail for it partly because it's dangerous but also partly because his father Big Mike was just a hardened nasty criminal who was never nice to him.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: but if and so he then sometimes wonders whether he is inherited some of his father's criminal genes.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: At the opening of cool machine our man Ray is named furniture dealer of the month for the northeast region.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: How does he feel about that?
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He loves it.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think things intellectuals seldom realize that these awards mean a lot to people, and it means a lot to him in particular because he's African-American, and so therefore he would have to struggle harder to ever get that, and then of course he then has to worry also once he gets it, whether people will think he got it.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: because he was black and so on, it's a form of tokenism.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So even something that should just be unalloyed pleasure actually has a side to it.
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: As with everything in this book, there's always a side to everything because nothing is just one thing in these books.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of all three of these novels center on raise relationship with a man called Pepper.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: He comes out of the violent criminal underworld of raise father Big Mike.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tell us about the pepper of cool machine.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Of course, he's older.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: To me, he seems like a cross between mouse in the Walter Mosley novels, which is the slightly dangerous person who does all the dirty work that Easy Rollins doesn't do.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And maybe like a boxer like Sunny Liston because they people talk about they see his face and he's got this look on his face Often they just start talking he doesn't even have to beat them because in fact they know he's a tough guy He's been a tough guy and Who has a complicated relationship to Ray because he feels that Ray used him at one point.
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't like it But gradually they become almost familial by this book.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: However Pepper is an older man
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's changed his life, he's fallen in love, he needs some money, but in fact he's no longer the thuggish guy that he'd been before.
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even if he wanted to be, he couldn't be because his back is ceasing up, he's got bad guts.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's now a more decrepit version of the person who he would always think of.
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It probably is like if switching in other terms, if you were to
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: You would have a sense, oh, this isn't the guy he was before.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And over the course of the books, he becomes this exceedingly lovable figure, partly because Coulson White had his smart enough to put us in his head.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we realize that he has his reasons.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, the second book, Crook Manifesto, is his thought.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: He has a Crook Manifesto, so he has principles that he lives by, even if they aren't the principles that straight America lives by.
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: What is the crookmanofesto?
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: I found the quote, a man is a hierarchy of crime of what is morally acceptable and what is not.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's the crookmanofesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it's true.
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I remember once reading an article during a peak of the drug epidemic here in LA, where they were interviewing guys on death row, and the guys on death row were talking about how the young kids didn't have any values.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: How you'd kill somebody for $50.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was a thing that no one, it was a serious thing to kill people, they thought.
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: You wouldn't do it for a minor crime, and but that was part of the Crook manifesto.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cool machine has a great moment that plot in the middle section of the book is searching for a stolen African mask in Pepper is on the case and he finally finds it and he puts it on because he understands its power.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Colson Whitehead writes, you put it on and become something different.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: you see things differently through it, close quote.
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, why had never tells us what it is that pepper sees when he puts on the mask, but it is a very powerful moment and gives us yet another side of pepper.
• 32:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and in fact, as a literary point, there is nothing you could write that he sees that would be good enough, because pepper has been the most empirical of men, so to suddenly have him something like almost like a vision to see something clearly and understand it, our mind explodes with the possibilities of it.
• 33:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a great thing that an entire thing is great,
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: one of my favorite things as an old professor is what pepper is working working with a young woman and she talks about going to her school and watching movies.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he thinks to himself, these kids go to college to watch movies, that's why I'll never give money to the United Negro College fund.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: John Powers is a well-known professor of film studies in Los Angeles.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I've taught film, yes.
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: The biggest thing about this series that I think some critics miss is that they are funny.
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: They are really funny.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Parts are as good as Elmore Leonard, I think.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, no, they aren't.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I have all sorts of things I've marked.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was almost tempted to read one to you because I just thought it was so funny.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's he's great at one lineers.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's great at riffs.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's great little things that pay off.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then also the scenes and situations are often funny.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's such a fun trilogy.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can see how having come off the grimness of underground railroad and nickel boys that you might actually want something more fun.
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Partly for yourself, because your mind is someplace else, partly because his first books were fun.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he's a person who likes being funny and his his models for writing I mean the Thomas Pinchian influence of all the books is so evident and you know and Pinchian makes a million jokes and and why Ted does too and then does funny pop culture riffs like his thing on unlike the racial component of Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds is just really great you know and
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: The jokes are great, and it goes beyond the jokes.
• 34:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the whole thing about the furniture salesman, there's a lot of really funny stuff here about furniture because when Carnegie meets people, he evaluates them not in terms of their clothes, or their face, he evaluates them in terms of the furniture in their rooms.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he knows the brand names of the recliners and the dye netsets.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's actually a big part of his character, which kind of makes us smile, but it's also a serious thing, too.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it is.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's his business and the thing is you also then because one of the other things we've talked about is that part of what makes the trilogy great is it is a really smart, fun, posthed history of New York over a 30-year period and part of that history would be the different styles of furniture that turn up.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in each volume array is selling different furniture to people because the styles have changed and in every new volume you're reading about different
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, somebody called it a social history disguised as a crime keeper of the whole series.
• 35:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that's as a historian, I haven't said anything that's going a little too far, but there is a lot of historical awareness in here.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, there is a lot of historical awareness, but with the surreal edge, pension is the obvious touchstone, where you actually are like going under the city to see the hidden lines of power that nobody knows about, you know, is very much crying of a lot 49.
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: pension.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But anchored in very specific details of Harlem, what particular streets looked like, he's a very good subscriber without being what I always found unbearable about someone like John Updike.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Was, yeah,
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just wanted him to stop describing everything because it was like showing off how well he was noticing it.
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just wanted him to stop and I never felt that with him.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's partly because it's fun, but also he doesn't linger on it in fetishistic ways.
• 36:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can prepare this to pinch another critic called this the the writing style here, pop art Marxist noir.
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I wonder what you think about that?
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's it's very pop.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whitehead, you know, loves pop.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, he's written a zombie novel.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, they're asked in and he's working the crime novel and he's clearly knows his crime novels.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It seems inconceivable to me that pepper isn't
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: derived from mouse in the Walter Mosley, and there's a great tradition of the moral hero having to have the sidekick to do the bad stuff that needs to be done so that the audience doesn't turn against the moral hero.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: in a tragedy, Ray Carney, the furniture salesman, does the bad stuff.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, you know, in a comedy, he's got pepper to do it.
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, so he's very much steeped in pop culture.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: People are driven by economics, the basis driving the superstructure and, you know, all of these novels.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: The way Ray Carney explains this is, it's all about the envelopes, the envelopes explains the whole machine.
• 37:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, Ray tells us the envelopes are the envelopes full of cash that are the payoffs, the graph, the corruption.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: His point is there are little crooks like himself who deliver envelopes.
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: to the corrupt cops on the take, but the really big crooks are also delivering and receiving envelopes.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: The board of estimates of New York and the elected officials, they're collecting their envelopes too.
• 38:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and it's interesting that because it doesn't take place in the imaginary New York of say Batman.
• 38:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It takes place in an actual New York where Ed Koch is going around saying, how am I doing?
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And and that various older men are in fact genuine historically real older men have killed themselves because they've been caught in corruption things.
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Ray and
• 38:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Connecting with actual people in the city and of course then you get you get imaginary crux the other part In it which is almost the motto for the series is Turn baby churn great and that New York is constantly churning which then makes you think or you know if since we're talking what what was it Neo Marxist who are yes pop Marxist who are is you think of
• 39:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: both Marshall, Berman, and the Marx thing, all of the solid that melts into air.
• 39:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: What Karni sees is that is that what everything that seems so fixed keeps changing.
• 39:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe the skiss that underlies the cities there, but almost everything else is constantly churning, even if in many ways stays the same.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, let's talk about where the Harlem trilogy fits into Colson Whitehead's trajectory.
• 39:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned the previous two novels, the Underground Railroad and the Nickel Boys, which came right before the Harlem trilogy.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Underground Railroad, just three mind listeners.
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is in the slave south and then slave young woman makes a desperate bid for freedom by escaping on a literally
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: subterranean railway system, while being pursued by a relentless slave catcher.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in Nickel Boys, two black teenagers struggle to survive horrific abuse in a segregated reform school in Florida in the 1960s.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: These were big books.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: These were serious books about the oppression and suffering and resilience and strength of black people.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the new ones are
• 40:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's interesting because when he started off, he actually was doing stuff that was about race often, but the books were rainy, funny.
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were very pop.
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And many people thought there wasn't enough feeling in them.
• 40:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think was the objection of you read, but people were saying, even the one that was the autobiographical one called Saga Harbrook, which was kind of based on his own life as a rich black kid, one I really liked.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I liked that one too.
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then something happened and it's hard to know it.
• 40:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think probably even he doesn't know.
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is the complicated fact that maybe if you have been a rich privileged black guy all your life, you realize that there's part of this experience that you aren't really tackling.
• 41:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's partly if you're a really good writer, you're thinking, how can I say something that in a way that isn't just the same old thing?
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because you don't need more slavery porn, say, or Jim Crow, where you just watch endless suffering.
• 41:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think he found the way of doing it.
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: The interesting thing is that I think it's simultaneously these seem like the two least close and white-headed books of his career.
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are the two that stand out.
• 41:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're the two that are most praised and most admired.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they're the ones also that seem in some ways least like my sense of him in any case.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I then feel these last three books have a certain kind of depth to the pop fun things that he didn't quite have before.
• 41:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think maybe he had to go through the actual darkness and the seriousness of the other two in order to like somehow sort of bring it along with him because I think there is a there's more feeling I think in this than in some of the earlier books the trilogy.
• 42:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: and then it's a question of which ones you like best, you know, I know that there's a way in which our culture always rewards books about suffering, you know, in the way that Hollywood just can't stop wanting to give Oscars to Holocaust movies.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And some literary awards often go to African-American suffering.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when you consider the number of really wonderful, funny, good African-American writers who are just running about a different part of Black experience.
• 42:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you think of the fun books of Perseval Everett, who then gets his most praise ever for one of his more serious books of James.
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: more serious and the least imaginative.
• 42:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, most certainly in quotation marks almost.
• 42:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And once again, the least like him, interestingly, there's a challenge in doing that.
• 42:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I remember in the book of Daniel, where the imaginary son of the Rosenbergs, near the end of the book, says, can I do it?
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Should I do it?
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Am I going to be able to, can I describe the execution?
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: his parents being electricated.
• 43:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, can I get it together to do that?
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I can sort of imagine if you are an African-American writer and certainly if you're close and white head who's just incredibly gifted, you think, can I do this?
• 43:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can I actually go to this place and come up with something that I'm satisfied with?
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: because I think it would be easy for someone as talented as him to come up with something that the public would be satisfied with.
• 43:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whereas I think he actually was satisfied with them.
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everything I've read makes me think so.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: What would you not like about two best-selling Pulitzer Prize winners?
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I still feel like when he swings back to who he enjoys being.
• 43:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: He enjoys being the writer of the Harlem trilogy.
• 43:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: John Powers, in PR's, for share with Terry Gross.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: John, thanks for talking with us today.
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Get my pleasure.
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Start making sense.
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: A podcast from the Nation Magazine is recorded at our upstairs studio in Los Angeles.
• 44:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer.
• 44:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Richie the Ambrose is executive producer, Boskarsun Kara is president of the nation, Katrina Van Nouvelle is editor and publisher of the nation.
• 44:32
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• 44:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at thenation.com and subscribe to Start Making Sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 44:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.