Latest / The Chuck ToddCast / Chuck’s Commentary - The Military Reveals Trump Has Been Lying About The Iran War + Why “Tax The Billionaires” Isn’t That Simple

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Chuck’s Commentary - The Military Reveals Trump Has Been Lying About The Iran War + Why “Tax The Billionaires” Isn’t That Simple · The Chuck ToddCast

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2:03
Speaker 1: and welcome to another episode of the Chuck Podcast. This
2:05
Speaker 1: is I Guess the Holiday Week. I say, I guess
2:08
Speaker 1: a holiday week? Right when you have the big holiday,
2:11
Speaker 1: in this case, the fourth of July coming on Saturday.
2:15
Speaker 1: You know normally when it's in the day of the week, Right,
2:19
Speaker 1: if it's a Monday, Tuesday, fourth of July. The Friday
2:24
Speaker 1: before becomes the start of a long five day holiday weekend.
2:27
Speaker 1: Right if the fourth is on a Wednesday or Thursday
2:32
Speaker 1: or Friday, then it's usually the following weekend. This one
2:35
Speaker 1: feels like because either you end up with a short weekend,
2:39
Speaker 1: you do Friday through Monday, and come on, it's the
2:41
Speaker 1: fourth of July. We can't have a three day weekend
2:43
Speaker 1: for the fourth of July. We got to make this
2:45
Speaker 1: one of our longer holiday weekend. It's a five, a six,
2:48
Speaker 1: or a seven. So I think the Saturday means that
2:52
Speaker 1: for many of you, the holiday weekend is going to
2:56
Speaker 1: possibly start today on Monday, some of you Tuesday, and
3:00
Speaker 1: definitely I think July first is sort of the unofficial
3:03
Speaker 1: end of the business working week, at least in my
3:06
Speaker 1: little unofficial survey of people I've talked to you about this.
3:08
Speaker 1: So the point is we are essentially entering in to
3:13
Speaker 1: a little bit of a holiday mode. That doesn't mean
3:15
Speaker 1: the news cycle is going to be a lull, and
3:18
Speaker 1: in fact, it doesn't mean in some ways it may
3:20
Speaker 1: even become sort of more front and center. You may
3:23
Speaker 1: have to go out of your way to avoid news
3:24
Speaker 1: if you're going to try to do that. Obviously, if
3:26
Speaker 1: you've tuned into me, you don't want to avoid news
3:29
Speaker 1: and information. You kind of want to know what the
3:31
Speaker 1: heck is going on. First, let me give you a
3:33
Speaker 1: little programming note beginning this week. I know you're normally
3:37
Speaker 1: up that I update three days a week. I'll be
3:38
Speaker 1: updating two days a week Mondays and Thursdays. I'll be
3:42
Speaker 1: doing my big podcast Drops and Today being starting this
3:47
Speaker 1: coming week, and we'll be operating this way throughout the
3:49
Speaker 1: entire month of July and for the first half of August.
3:53
Speaker 1: It's my way of sort of going from fifth gear
3:56
Speaker 1: down to fourth gear. But new Sphere is still going
3:58
Speaker 1: to be every week those of you that look forward
4:01
Speaker 1: to that. This week I interviewed Susan DelBene, the d
4:05
Speaker 1: Triple C Chair. I will share a little bit more
4:08
Speaker 1: of what she had to say in my next episode
4:10
Speaker 1: on that. I kind of want to let you guys
4:12
Speaker 1: have an opportunity to consume that on your own. So
4:17
Speaker 1: and I also have my new sports history podcast, Dynastic.
4:20
Speaker 1: A new episode is going to be dropping in the
4:23
Speaker 1: next few days and the timing is very appropro We
4:27
Speaker 1: do a deep dive of the dynasty that is Wimbledon,
4:31
Speaker 1: So I just thought I would get all of those
4:34
Speaker 1: a little bit again. The big news being we will
4:37
Speaker 1: do two drops a week for the next six weeks
4:40
Speaker 1: as we try to ratchet down a little bit. So
4:43
Speaker 1: let me give you a rundown of today's episode. Look,
4:46
Speaker 1: I didn't plan on doing more in Iran, but I
4:47
Speaker 1: have a little bit on Iran, a little bit on
4:51
Speaker 1: the fight over the billionaire's tax and sort of what's
4:54
Speaker 1: realistic politics, what's dumb politics? There, a little bit on
4:58
Speaker 1: a fascinating interview by my friend John Carl of Zuwan Mamdanni.
5:03
Speaker 1: He is absolutely comfortable being the face of the Democratic Party.
5:06
Speaker 1: In some ways, I feel like, in his own way
5:08
Speaker 1: said bring it on, which is going to create more
5:13
Speaker 1: tension inside the party. But it is exactly in some
5:16
Speaker 1: ways he wants to lean like he's daring the right
5:19
Speaker 1: to make him the face. I think he sees an
5:21
Speaker 1: opportunity here. And we're also going to give you a
5:26
Speaker 1: little bit of preview of a huge primary not in Tuesday,
5:28
Speaker 1: because that's one other thing I left out. We are
5:30
Speaker 1: going to do an election live stream on Tuesday night
5:32
Speaker 1: for the Colorado primary because Colorado is suddenly this might
5:36
Speaker 1: be the most fascinating Colorado primary in over a decade.
5:40
Speaker 1: Michael Bennett's path to the governorship there suddenly doesn't look
5:43
Speaker 1: so sure the way it looked two months ago. Is
5:46
Speaker 1: John Hickenlooper in trouble? Could he lose a primary? It's
5:50
Speaker 1: not totally out of the question. And then, of course
5:51
Speaker 1: you have Diana to get, the longtime member of Congress
5:54
Speaker 1: from the Denver area. She's being challenged by a DSA
5:58
Speaker 1: candidate and most has actually showed her trailing there. So
6:02
Speaker 1: there are a lot of storylines to dig into in
6:05
Speaker 1: the state of Colorado, and so I'll be doing a
6:06
Speaker 1: mini preview there. But look, let me start with what
6:11
Speaker 1: was a really disturbing set of breaking news alerts that
6:14
Speaker 1: we all received over the weekend on our phone. There's
6:18
Speaker 1: a ceasefire, at least we were told in the War
6:21
Speaker 1: of the Ron. Now you got to hold onto that
6:23
Speaker 1: sentence because the United States government spent this past weekend
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Speaker 1: bombing the country that were supposedly at peace with two
6:29
Speaker 1: nights of air strikes Friday and Saturday against a nation
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Speaker 1: we signed a deal with eleven days earlier. So we
6:35
Speaker 1: probably should be honest about the language we are here.
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Speaker 1: This isn't a ceasefire. There's plenty of fire, there's not
6:40
Speaker 1: been no there's been no ceasing, and it's in fact
6:43
Speaker 1: more fire than ceasing. But it's not the actual Actually
6:46
Speaker 1: the story I want to tell you today, the collops
6:48
Speaker 1: of this cease fires, frankly, was almost expected. Ceasefires are
6:52
Speaker 1: fragile in nature. It's not uncommon for them to break,
6:55
Speaker 1: especially when you have nothing really signed. Here. They signed
6:59
Speaker 1: a I think they a DOCU, signed a memo of
7:02
Speaker 1: understanding that just means they and I think what we've
7:05
Speaker 1: learned is they don't understand the memo they signed, the
7:08
Speaker 1: Iranians or the US government. But the story today is
7:12
Speaker 1: is who broke the story? Because for the weekend, the
7:14
Speaker 1: United States military, not a reporter, not a leaker, not
7:18
Speaker 1: some Democrat on a Sunday show, the United States military
7:22
Speaker 1: doing nothing but its own job, accidentally fact check for
7:26
Speaker 1: President of the United States, and in doing it, they
7:30
Speaker 1: revealed that he's been lying to you about this war
7:33
Speaker 1: for the better part of a month. I don't think
7:36
Speaker 1: that was the intent of the military. In fact, that's
7:39
Speaker 1: what makes it so devastating, and the reason I want
7:41
Speaker 1: to single this out is because if there has ever
7:43
Speaker 1: been a line that American voters basically just refuse to cross,
7:48
Speaker 1: it is accepting a lie about war, whether it's WMD
7:52
Speaker 1: in Iraq, whether it's Vietnam, and now whether it's here
7:57
Speaker 1: with Iran. Because we now and I know it is
8:01
Speaker 1: not news to people that Donald Trump lies to you, right,
8:04
Speaker 1: it's sort of you know, it comes to him as
8:07
Speaker 1: easily as breathing. Okay, I understand that. But there's little lies,
8:15
Speaker 1: there's big little lies, and then there's big big lies.
8:18
Speaker 1: This is a big, big lie. Here's how it happened.
8:21
Speaker 1: So this weekend, Central Command did what militaries do after
8:25
Speaker 1: they conduct to strike. They put out a statement. They
8:28
Speaker 1: listed the targets. They were routine, they were bureaucratic. There
8:31
Speaker 1: were taliatory targets. Look, the Iranians broke this ceasefire too,
8:35
Speaker 1: and I just want to imply that this has been
8:36
Speaker 1: a two way street here. This is attack counter attack.
8:40
Speaker 1: But the statement that the military that Suencom put out,
8:44
Speaker 1: you know, it was very sort of, like I said, bureaucratic.
8:46
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing that you might scroll past.
8:49
Speaker 1: The list though, reads like this US forces hit Iranian
8:52
Speaker 1: defense sites. They hit coastal radar, they hit surveillance infrastructure,
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Speaker 1: communications systems, surface to air miss systems. The statement also
9:02
Speaker 1: said they hit drone storage facilities and mine laying capabilities.
9:07
Speaker 1: So follow all that away for a second. Now, I'm
9:09
Speaker 1: going to go back in time, not that far back
9:11
Speaker 1: in time, just three weeks. Three weeks ago, the President
9:14
Speaker 1: of the United States told my friend and longtime colleague
9:18
Speaker 1: Kristen Welcome the following. Here's what he said about the
9:23
Speaker 1: very same Iranian military. Quote their navy is gone, their
9:28
Speaker 1: air force is gone, their anti aircraft is gone. And
9:31
Speaker 1: he went on. He said he'd demolished the air force,
9:34
Speaker 1: he'd the anti aircraft. He said they had no radar.
9:37
Speaker 1: He said his word, they had nothing. Nothing. So I
9:42
Speaker 1: have a simple question, it's the only question that matters
9:44
Speaker 1: this week. How do you bomb nothing? Is this a
9:48
Speaker 1: Seinfeld war? We bombing nothing here? You can't blow up
9:53
Speaker 1: an air defense system that doesn't exist, right, You can't
9:56
Speaker 1: strike coastal radar belonging to a country that, in the
9:59
Speaker 1: President's words, has no radar. You can outrun two nights
10:03
Speaker 1: of sorties against an anti aircraft network that is quote gone.
10:08
Speaker 1: So one of two things are true. There's no third
10:11
Speaker 1: option here, so we're going to walk through both. And
10:15
Speaker 1: I know, trying to make the case that the president
10:17
Speaker 1: is full of shit it's not very hard, but I
10:21
Speaker 1: do think it's important when you see it when it
10:26
Speaker 1: literally is being shoved in your face and it's about war,
10:31
Speaker 1: because the president doesn't get to escape out either door.
10:34
Speaker 1: On this one door number one, Aron reconstituted a destroyed
10:38
Speaker 1: military in eleven days. That's possible. I guess if the
10:44
Speaker 1: president didn't lie, then then this is what had to happen.
10:50
Speaker 1: They had to rebuild their radar, their air defenses, their
10:53
Speaker 1: drone depots, their mind layers, all of it in less
10:56
Speaker 1: time than it takes most of us to get a
10:58
Speaker 1: passport renewed. Are they that good? If that's your story? Okay,
11:04
Speaker 1: but understand where you just admitted. You've admitted that the
11:08
Speaker 1: quote obliteration never took. You've admitted you bombed a country
11:12
Speaker 1: into a setback it shrugged off in under two weeks.
11:16
Speaker 1: That's not a victory. That's a receipt for twenty nine
11:19
Speaker 1: billion dollars, thirteen dead Americans made out to a regime
11:23
Speaker 1: that was back on its feet before the ink on
11:26
Speaker 1: your peace deal was even dry. Or let's go through
11:33
Speaker 1: door number two, the simpler one, the Okham's razor door.
11:38
Speaker 1: The military. The Iranian military was never obliterated, the radar
11:43
Speaker 1: was never gone, the nothing was always something. And the
11:48
Speaker 1: President stood in front of the country and the cameras
11:52
Speaker 1: and to Kristen Welker and described a war that wasn't
11:55
Speaker 1: the war we were actually fighting. Either Iran is a
11:59
Speaker 1: phoenix for the commander in chief is a liar. And
12:03
Speaker 1: notice both of those answers or stories he does not
12:05
Speaker 1: want told. That's the trap sent com by doing nothing
12:11
Speaker 1: but its paperwork, sprung this trap on their commander, on
12:15
Speaker 1: the our commander in chief. Now, of course this is
12:17
Speaker 1: a pattern. If this were a runoff, yeah, okay, maybe
12:21
Speaker 1: you give the president propaganda war benefit of the doubt,
12:24
Speaker 1: fog of war's real early claims get walked back. It
12:27
Speaker 1: can happen. But we know this was no slip. This
12:31
Speaker 1: is the style of Trump. Go back to the word
12:34
Speaker 1: that's defined the entire war from day one. Obliterated. President
12:38
Speaker 1: used it the very day of the original strike back
12:40
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty five, Iran's nuclear sides completely and totally
12:43
Speaker 1: obliterated his Defense secretary went further and said Iran's nuclear
12:47
Speaker 1: ambition had been had been obliterated, as well as if
12:50
Speaker 1: you can bomb an intention, And then he just kept
12:54
Speaker 1: saying month after month, September, October, November, December, January, seeing
12:59
Speaker 1: and actually category cataloged all over this, the same word
13:03
Speaker 1: on a loop, like a man reassuring himself, if you
13:05
Speaker 1: say it long enough, maybe it'll become true. Beatle juice, beatle,
13:08
Speaker 1: just beatlejews obliterated, obliterated, obliterated. Meanwhile, his own government's early
13:13
Speaker 1: intelligence assessment found the strikes hadn't destroyed the core of
13:17
Speaker 1: the program and had set it back a few months.
13:20
Speaker 1: And then of course he fired the person that gave
13:22
Speaker 1: the honest assessment. His own NBC interview got fact checked.
13:25
Speaker 1: In real time, half of Iran's unconventional navy was still floating.
13:29
Speaker 1: The very fast boats now harassing tankers in the strait
13:32
Speaker 1: of horror moves, the ones that pulled us back into this.
13:35
Speaker 1: So when I say he's been lying about this war
13:37
Speaker 1: for a month, I want to be precise. The weekend
13:40
Speaker 1: strikes are just the cleanest, most undeniable example, using the
13:45
Speaker 1: military's own words and facts. Because this time. The lie
13:49
Speaker 1: wasn't contradicted by a leak, by a reporter, by a politician.
13:53
Speaker 1: It was contradicted by the bombs themselves. So here's the
13:58
Speaker 1: part that should stick in your throat. He didn't just
14:01
Speaker 1: claim he'd won. He threw himself a party, remember, on
14:04
Speaker 1: his eightieth birthday, in front of a UFC cage set
14:07
Speaker 1: up on the south lawn of the White House like
14:10
Speaker 1: it was a bouncy house. The President announced, and he
14:13
Speaker 1: wanted it on his birthday because he needed the headline
14:15
Speaker 1: right that the war was over. And he I think
14:17
Speaker 1: Docu signed it again right, he posted the deal with
14:21
Speaker 1: Iran was complete. Days later, he signed a memorandum at
14:25
Speaker 1: Versailles because he wanted to make because you know, there's
14:28
Speaker 1: no historical significance to signing really bad piece deals at Versailles. Anyway,
14:33
Speaker 1: he called Iran quote called it Iran's unconditional surrender. It's
14:39
Speaker 1: quite a phrase. Hold it next to this weekend's footage
14:42
Speaker 1: of American aircraft striking Iranian air defenses and tell me
14:46
Speaker 1: which one is describing the real war. For the record
14:51
Speaker 1: that Iran called the same document a record of US failure,
14:55
Speaker 1: and the deal reportedly hands to Tehran twenty four billion
14:57
Speaker 1: dollars in unfrozen assets line on three hundred billion dollars
15:01
Speaker 1: more for reconstruction. It's a strange looking surrender, and it
15:07
Speaker 1: certainly looks conditional if it is a surrender. Surrenders don't
15:11
Speaker 1: usually come of a check. Now here's where I'm going
15:14
Speaker 1: to use loose some of you, and I want to keep,
15:16
Speaker 1: but I want to keep some of you. Anyway. You
15:18
Speaker 1: can believe this war was justified. You can believe Iran
15:21
Speaker 1: how to coming and the strikes were necessary. Then a
15:24
Speaker 1: nuclear Iran was the greater danger. And what they've been
15:26
Speaker 1: doing in the Middle East. You know, they're basically, if
15:29
Speaker 1: you're going to do this, go all the way. And
15:30
Speaker 1: I'm not here to take that from you, because that's
15:33
Speaker 1: a real argument, and reasonable people are on both sides
15:36
Speaker 1: of it, because that's not the failure. The failure isn't
15:41
Speaker 1: the decision. The failure is the execution of the decision.
15:46
Speaker 1: And now it's a debacle. So it doesn't matter which
15:49
Speaker 1: side you're on, whether you think we should have done
15:52
Speaker 1: it and we just did it badly, or we should
15:55
Speaker 1: never have done it at all because we just opened
15:57
Speaker 1: up a can of worms. The fact is everybody's right
15:59
Speaker 1: now because of the complete and utter foolishness and mismanagement
16:06
Speaker 1: by this administration. This makes the Keystone Cops look like
16:12
Speaker 1: Patton's Army. We spent twenty nine billion dollars, and that's
16:17
Speaker 1: a low ball figure, by the way, because it conveniently
16:21
Speaker 1: leaves out repairing our own bombed out bases in the region.
16:25
Speaker 1: We lost thirteen Americans, We signed a ceasefire that was
16:28
Speaker 1: taking on water inside of two weeks. And through it all,
16:31
Speaker 1: the one consistent thing, the one reliable feature of the
16:34
Speaker 1: entire war, has been a commander in chief telling the
16:36
Speaker 1: public a version of events that the facts on the
16:38
Speaker 1: ground keep refusing to confirm. It keeps lying about a
16:42
Speaker 1: war and an a war. That's not a small thing,
16:46
Speaker 1: it's the whole thing. And previously, when American presidents get
16:49
Speaker 1: caught lying about a war, it's it that's over. A
16:54
Speaker 1: democracy cannot consent to a war. It is being lied
16:57
Speaker 1: to about way of costs that they keep hiding from you.
17:02
Speaker 1: You can judge, can't judge a victory that has to
17:05
Speaker 1: be bombed back into existence every couple of weeks. So look,
17:09
Speaker 1: we're trained to think of the fog of wars is
17:12
Speaker 1: the thing that keeps the truth from reaching us, the chaos,
17:15
Speaker 1: the distance, the enemy's deception. Right, We're not going to
17:20
Speaker 1: be very trustful of statements coming from the Iranian regime.
17:24
Speaker 1: But this time the fog isn't coming from Tehran. It's
17:27
Speaker 1: coming from the podium at the White House and the
17:30
Speaker 1: podium at the Pentagon. And the most honest account of
17:34
Speaker 1: this war, the truest, clearest document we got this whole month,
17:37
Speaker 1: wasn't a speech, and it wasn't a press conference. It
17:40
Speaker 1: was simply a target list written by the people dropping
17:43
Speaker 1: the bombs. Read it closely enough, because it's not a
17:47
Speaker 1: press release. It's a confession that the President of the
17:50
Speaker 1: United States has been lying this entire time about everything
17:56
Speaker 1: that has happened in Iran, going back to the summer
17:59
Speaker 1: of twenty Maybe that doesn't matter to enough people, but
18:05
Speaker 1: this is why I don't think this. You know, he
18:07
Speaker 1: thought he was going to memory hole this war and
18:11
Speaker 1: he was going to be able to move on and
18:13
Speaker 1: play around with Cuba and somehow say pay no attention
18:16
Speaker 1: to the mess I created in the Middle East. Look,
18:18
Speaker 1: I got gas prices down. Finally, here's the thing. Aron's
18:27
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Speaker 1: eight eight eight seven eight nine seven seven seven seven.
20:05
Speaker 1: You can also visit CCPG dot org slash chat. In Connecticut,
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Speaker 1: you can visit the MD gamblinghelp dot org. In Maryland
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Speaker 1: for help, you can visit gambling heelplinema dot org. You
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Speaker 1: can call eight hundred three two seven five zero five zero.
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Speaker 1: In Massachusetts, you can call one eight seven seven eight
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20:33
Speaker 1: any gambling concerns. Finally, you can also call one eight
20:36
Speaker 1: seven seven seven seven zero seven eight six seven if
20:39
Speaker 1: you're in Louisiana. I want to move to another topic here.
20:47
Speaker 1: It's one that I sort of that I get the
20:53
Speaker 1: desire of future Democratic presidential candidates to jump into it.
20:58
Speaker 1: And that is this idea of tech sing billionaires. And
21:03
Speaker 1: the thing is is that And I look, I'm gonna
21:06
Speaker 1: I'm gonna just a little wonky warning here. Okay, there
21:10
Speaker 1: is a there is a rational way to do this.
21:14
Speaker 1: The dumb, irrational, shiny mental object way is to do
21:18
Speaker 1: what both gaven Neuwsom and Rocanna are arguing about. And look,
21:21
Speaker 1: there's a fight between the two of them over this
21:23
Speaker 1: California billionaire tax. But I actually think all of this
21:28
Speaker 1: gets it something bigger than this one proposal, because my
21:31
Speaker 1: first reaction to the whole thing was pretty simple, and
21:34
Speaker 1: I tweeted the following, Man, our politics are dumb. I
21:37
Speaker 1: get it. It's hard to sell the idea of simply
21:38
Speaker 1: fixing our tax code to get rid of the loopholes
21:41
Speaker 1: that exist only for the wealthy. But that's the real
21:43
Speaker 1: scam and issue. How about closing all the wealthy loopholes
21:46
Speaker 1: that Congress is essentially sold to lobbyists for the last
21:49
Speaker 1: thirty years. I promise you would likely get the super
21:52
Speaker 1: rich paying more than they do now rather than doing
21:54
Speaker 1: this class warfare cosplay. And I stand by the core
21:58
Speaker 1: of that, But I want to be more precise. Right,
22:00
Speaker 1: that was sort of hot take jackassery that I can
22:03
Speaker 1: all of us can get do sometimes at social media,
22:06
Speaker 1: but I was sort of you know, you just you know,
22:07
Speaker 1: you're scrolling and you're like, ah, this is god, this
22:09
Speaker 1: is stupid. Nobody we're having a fight over something that
22:13
Speaker 1: is just it's never going to work and it will
22:17
Speaker 1: only make things worse than their tax code. So I
22:20
Speaker 1: want to be more preciser. This is not an argument
22:22
Speaker 1: that billionaires are over taxed. No, they're under tax Okay,
22:26
Speaker 1: they're not victims here. This is not some poor billionaire segment.
22:30
Speaker 1: The issue is that when politicians reduce tax policy to
22:34
Speaker 1: slogans billionaire tax, wealth tax, death tax, fair share, the
22:38
Speaker 1: slogan starts doing the work that actual policy design is
22:41
Speaker 1: supposed to do. And what happens is we got a
22:45
Speaker 1: tax code full of tunnels, trapdoors, exemptions, carve outs, and
22:48
Speaker 1: escape patches. Because when you do these sort of one
22:50
Speaker 1: time ideas the billionaire's tax, or we're just going to
22:53
Speaker 1: do this thing here, well, as soon as they try
22:55
Speaker 1: to implement the top line thing, there's like eighteen different
22:59
Speaker 1: un intended consequences below it. So then they write all
23:02
Speaker 1: these loopholes to minimize the unattended consequences that their headline,
23:07
Speaker 1: you know, beat their chest. Policy idea gets implemented, and
23:13
Speaker 1: it doesn't really do what they say it does. In fact,
23:17
Speaker 1: I'm going to use a slogan that the right wing's
23:19
Speaker 1: been using for a long time. Right think about one
23:21
Speaker 1: of the most effective tax slogans of the last half century,
23:24
Speaker 1: and it's been the biggest ripoff of the American government
23:27
Speaker 1: in the last half century. It's called the so called
23:29
Speaker 1: death tax. Politically genius, morally sounded simple, why should the
23:33
Speaker 1: government tax you because you died? Right? But as policy rhetoric,
23:37
Speaker 1: it actually helped make serious inheritance tax reform toxic. And
23:41
Speaker 1: while everybody argued over the emotional slogan, the real machinery
23:44
Speaker 1: stayed intact. Essentially, what they've done is it's allowed the
23:50
Speaker 1: super wealthy to put off ever paying taxes, and then
23:54
Speaker 1: when they die there is no tax bill. Here's how
23:58
Speaker 1: it works in plain English. If you buy stock, land,
24:01
Speaker 1: or a business or some other asset for a million
24:03
Speaker 1: dollars and it grows to fifty million dollars, that forty
24:06
Speaker 1: nine million dollar gain is usually not taxed until you sell,
24:10
Speaker 1: but if you die while holding it, your errors often
24:13
Speaker 1: get to reset the value to the market price at death.
24:18
Speaker 1: So a huge amount of lifetime appreciation can simply disappear
24:23
Speaker 1: from the capital gains tax system. It's not conspiracy theory.
24:27
Speaker 1: That's simply how the tax code works. It is the
24:31
Speaker 1: greatest loophole for the wealthy ever created, and the Congressional
24:35
Speaker 1: Budget Office has actually put some numbers on. Just changing
24:38
Speaker 1: the taxation of assets transferred at death would raise about
24:42
Speaker 1: two hundred billion dollars over ten years under a carryover
24:45
Speaker 1: basis approach, or about half a billion dollars over ten
24:49
Speaker 1: years if accrued capital gains were taxed at death. So
24:54
Speaker 1: before anybody invents a new slogan, maybe we should just
24:56
Speaker 1: simply start there. Then you add the other obvious stuff.
25:00
Speaker 1: There's the pass through business income where some high income
25:03
Speaker 1: owners use these escorps limited partnerships to avoid the Medicare
25:07
Speaker 1: payroll tax, the net investment income tax. Right CBO says,
25:12
Speaker 1: if you just close that one, it raises a half
25:14
Speaker 1: a billion over ten years if you raise long term
25:17
Speaker 1: capital gains and qualified dividend rates by just two percentage points, right,
25:22
Speaker 1: so that people living on dividend income have to have
25:25
Speaker 1: to actually pay their fair share. That's another one hundred billion.
25:29
Speaker 1: Then there's that carried interest like ordinary income. Just treating
25:33
Speaker 1: carried interest like or ordinary income, that's another thirteen billion. Again,
25:37
Speaker 1: people getting bonus money without having to pay the tax
25:41
Speaker 1: rate that most of us have to pay. Add those
25:45
Speaker 1: up with the inheritance tax reform, and you've already somewhere
25:48
Speaker 1: between seven hundred billion in over a trillion dollars over
25:51
Speaker 1: ten years. And that's before you even get to a
25:56
Speaker 1: full universe of tax expenditures, which are based spending programs
26:01
Speaker 1: hidden inside the tax code. There's another two point three
26:05
Speaker 1: trillion dollars in that arguably. So when people say tax
26:11
Speaker 1: the billionaires, fine, well, I think we're all listening. But
26:14
Speaker 1: my question is, how are you going to do it
26:15
Speaker 1: where it actually doesn't f up the tax code even
26:18
Speaker 1: more and doesn't actually create more loopholes for the rich
26:21
Speaker 1: to the only the rich as the ability to hire
26:25
Speaker 1: the people to take advantage of. Are you closing loopholes
26:27
Speaker 1: to let wealth grow on tax Are we fixing the
26:30
Speaker 1: rules around borrowing against your own assets and then suddenly
26:34
Speaker 1: not having to pay taxes on that? Are we stopping
26:36
Speaker 1: gains from being erased completely at death. Are we treating
26:40
Speaker 1: labor income and capital investment income more consistently okay, Meaning
26:47
Speaker 1: the same person earning a million dollars a year innivitent
26:50
Speaker 1: income does not pay at the same tax rate than
26:52
Speaker 1: the same person earning uh, just regular old paychecks. Are
26:57
Speaker 1: we going to clean up this pass through income mess
27:01
Speaker 1: that was manufactured by Congress with their various LLC reforms?
27:07
Speaker 1: Are we just creating a new political brand that lobbyists
27:10
Speaker 1: will immediately start carving exceptions into, because that's the pattern.
27:15
Speaker 1: Step one is pass the slogan. Step two is write
27:19
Speaker 1: a new giant tax bill. Step three, every industry and donor, class,
27:23
Speaker 1: lawyer and accountant lobbyists in Washington gets to work to
27:26
Speaker 1: find a loophole that protects them. And then step four.
27:31
Speaker 1: Ten years later, normal people are still paying taxes out
27:33
Speaker 1: of every single paycheck, while the people with the best
27:36
Speaker 1: accountants are playing by a completely different set of rules.
27:44
Speaker 1: Now look onto this Newsome versus Kanna fight. Specifically, they
27:48
Speaker 1: both have a point and both sides are also performing here.
27:51
Speaker 1: Conna's point is, don't tell voters you support taxing billionaires.
27:53
Speaker 1: In theory, while opposing the actual billionaire tax in front
27:56
Speaker 1: of you. All right, fair politicians love future tens courage.
28:01
Speaker 1: I'm for the bold thing later somewhere else when the
28:04
Speaker 1: votes are different. Right, But Newsom's point is not crazy either.
28:08
Speaker 1: The state level billionaire wealth tax is different from a
28:11
Speaker 1: federal reform of the tax code. California relies heavily on
28:15
Speaker 1: high earners for revenue. If you design a one time
28:17
Speaker 1: wealth tax that encourages the most mobile taxpayers to move,
28:21
Speaker 1: you may get a big hit of cash in year
28:23
Speaker 1: one and then suddenly have a weaker tax space for
28:25
Speaker 1: the next ten years. That's not defending billionaires. That's simply arithmetic.
28:30
Speaker 1: So the real question should not be who has the
28:32
Speaker 1: better slogan. Questions should be what policy actually survives contact
28:37
Speaker 1: with lawyers, accountants, mobility, litigation, and Congress. And this is
28:43
Speaker 1: why I'm skeptical when either party starts branding tax policy
28:47
Speaker 1: on a bumper sticker. The death tax put us into
28:51
Speaker 1: this mess. The income inequality issue we have in this country,
28:55
Speaker 1: arguably at its core now, is how this death tax
29:00
Speaker 1: has been absolutely manipulated by the rich in this country
29:05
Speaker 1: to put off ever paying any capital gains until they
29:08
Speaker 1: die and they won't have to pay it once they die.
29:12
Speaker 1: Billionaire tax can obscure the details of how wealth is
29:15
Speaker 1: measured when it's taxed, how liquidity works, whether people can move,
29:20
Speaker 1: Trust me, people will be it will avoid the billionaire
29:23
Speaker 1: tax with all sorts of different shell games, right. And
29:27
Speaker 1: that's the thing. When you try to layer on top
29:30
Speaker 1: of this tax code, you actually make the tax code
29:33
Speaker 1: more complicated and easier to manipulate. Fair share can sound great,
29:38
Speaker 1: but unless you define the base, the rate, the timing,
29:41
Speaker 1: and actually reform the tax code, it's a slogan that
29:45
Speaker 1: pulls well. And that's it. So don't stop taxing, you know,
29:49
Speaker 1: let's let's actually fix this thing. If the structure says
29:53
Speaker 1: wages get taxed immediately, but wealth growth can be deferred
29:57
Speaker 1: for decades, borrowed against, passed through, enity tax to prefer raids,
30:01
Speaker 1: erase to death, fix that. That's the billionaire tax that
30:06
Speaker 1: they're getting away with. Fix that. Don't single out even more.
30:13
Speaker 1: You're just allowing the abuse to continue. If the structure
30:18
Speaker 1: says Congress can create a loophole, then Congress will create
30:21
Speaker 1: a loophole and lobbyists will find a way to protect it.
30:26
Speaker 1: And if a billionaire tax is just really shorthand for
30:28
Speaker 1: fixing those things at a federal level. Great, say that,
30:31
Speaker 1: write that, score that, but don't sell this class warfare
30:35
Speaker 1: costplay while leaving the same old loophole machine untouched. Our
30:38
Speaker 1: politics are dumb and the slogan airing is making it dumber.
30:42
Speaker 1: And I'm sorry. The tax reform isn't simple. I wish
30:46
Speaker 1: it were simple and quick, but there's no new idea
30:50
Speaker 1: we need here. Just stop the bullshit in Congress. Write
30:54
Speaker 1: a tax code cleanly and enough. You know, Just let's
30:59
Speaker 1: put the lie to this death tax, because that that
31:04
Speaker 1: is the big problem. The money's already there, the math
31:08
Speaker 1: is there. It's the loopholes that are preventing us from
31:11
Speaker 1: having what appears to be a fairer system. And the
31:17
Speaker 1: real question is are politicians serious about closing loopholes are
31:20
Speaker 1: simply renaming them? A few more things I want to
31:22
Speaker 1: get to socialists the rise of the Democratic Socialist. Mom
31:25
Speaker 1: Donnie did a bit of a victory lap and he
31:28
Speaker 1: was with my friend John Carl And there's a few
31:30
Speaker 1: things that I found interesting about the interview. One was
31:35
Speaker 1: Mom Donnie leans in and he wants to be the
31:37
Speaker 1: national face of the DSA movement, and he doesn't mind.
31:40
Speaker 1: In fact, let me and he also believes Tuesday began
31:47
Speaker 1: that essentially what happened on Tuesday in New York City
31:50
Speaker 1: was the beginning of the debate about the future of
31:54
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party for the presidential race twenty eight. You know,
31:57
Speaker 1: rarely do you have a local politician say no, no, no, no, no,
32:00
Speaker 1: please don't nationalize this, this is about us. Mamdani's been
32:04
Speaker 1: doing just the opposite. Let me just read you a
32:07
Speaker 1: few of the quotes. Here's one here. Well, a lot
32:12
Speaker 1: of pumit's ask me, this is Mamdani, a lot of pumitas.
32:14
Speaker 1: Ask me about this race and what it means and
32:16
Speaker 1: how to think about it. And at the core of
32:18
Speaker 1: Tuesday's results was a message from Democratic voters across the
32:21
Speaker 1: largest city in the United States of America about the
32:23
Speaker 1: kind of politics they want to see. And we know
32:25
Speaker 1: that we oppose the cruelty of the federal administration. What
32:29
Speaker 1: is it that we stand for beyond that? And then
32:33
Speaker 1: he was asked, are you okay with Republicans making you
32:37
Speaker 1: the face of the party, making you the Democratic Socialists
32:39
Speaker 1: the face of the party, And Mam Donnie says, let them.
32:43
Speaker 1: We don't have to ask ourselves what life looks like
32:46
Speaker 1: if a socialist win. I won last November, and over
32:48
Speaker 1: the course of these last six months, what we've delivered
32:50
Speaker 1: for working people are the very things we were told
32:53
Speaker 1: were impossible. We've delivered free childcare for two year olds
32:56
Speaker 1: for the first time in New York City history. We've
32:58
Speaker 1: delivered tens of millions of dollars back to tenants who
33:01
Speaker 1: were taken advantage of by bad landlords. We've delivered one
33:03
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty five thousand potholes being paved. And we've
33:06
Speaker 1: done all these things while also delivering the lowest recorded
33:09
Speaker 1: crime in our city's history. That's what it looks like
33:12
Speaker 1: to have democratic socialism. And what you're seeing is that
33:15
Speaker 1: the New Yorkers experienced this for six months and made
33:17
Speaker 1: the decision that they wanted to see more of it
33:19
Speaker 1: on the national stage as well. That's quite the story
33:22
Speaker 1: Mandani wants to tell. Like the reality is, he won
33:26
Speaker 1: in three primaries in what was already his base, in
33:29
Speaker 1: the strongest parts of the city that he was in before.
33:32
Speaker 1: There is no evidence that this has expanded beyond there.
33:35
Speaker 1: In fairness, but it doesn't matter what the evidence says, right,
33:39
Speaker 1: he is saying, nope, I'm the national leader of this movement.
33:43
Speaker 1: This is happening. I'm in the largest city. We are
33:46
Speaker 1: not just a faction. We are making a statement. It's
33:50
Speaker 1: there's no if, fans or butts. And look, he was
33:53
Speaker 1: asked about whether you know, he was not born in
33:55
Speaker 1: the United States. He was asked whether he wanted to
33:57
Speaker 1: see a constitutional amendment to allow somebody who wasn't born
33:59
Speaker 1: in the United's dates run for president. Said no, leave
34:01
Speaker 1: the constitution alone, which in itself was an interesting interesting
34:05
Speaker 1: He didn't say there needed to be anything done with
34:07
Speaker 1: the Constitution, which I found quite surprising in that answer.
34:12
Speaker 1: But it shows you is he planned to be the
34:15
Speaker 1: leader of this movement without having to worry about being
34:20
Speaker 1: the candidate for president the United States. That I think
34:25
Speaker 1: is fascinating on that front. Now, he was asked directly,
34:30
Speaker 1: can a democratic socialist be elected president? Mom, Donnie said
34:32
Speaker 1: the following, I think a democratic socialist can get elected
34:35
Speaker 1: anywhere across this country for any position. What I think
34:37
Speaker 1: we need to bring is a focus on working people.
34:40
Speaker 1: And then he's asked if that's the direction the party
34:42
Speaker 1: should go in in twenty eight and he said the following,
34:45
Speaker 1: I think the direction that the party should go in
34:47
Speaker 1: is how best to fight for working people. I think
34:49
Speaker 1: we need to have a platform and a vision that
34:51
Speaker 1: doesn't sound as if it was cooked up by consultants,
34:53
Speaker 1: but instead one that you would say in response to
34:56
Speaker 1: someone who's asking, why can't I afford my rent? Why
34:59
Speaker 1: can't I afford my groceries? Why can't I afford my childcare?
35:02
Speaker 1: We need to make clear who we stand for, how
35:04
Speaker 1: we're going to stand for them, and that we're actually
35:06
Speaker 1: willing to fight for them when the going gets tough.
35:14
Speaker 1: So there you go. Two other things that jumped out
35:16
Speaker 1: that'll be of concern to some of you out there.
35:20
Speaker 1: One was Mondani was asked again about the what happened
35:23
Speaker 1: to Congressman Dan Goldman who lost one of the primaries
35:25
Speaker 1: that he got involved in. Uh He basically he was
35:29
Speaker 1: not quite refused service for coffee, but was refunded because
35:33
Speaker 1: essentially he because he support he supports he voted to
35:41
Speaker 1: give military aid to Israel. I don't want to assume
35:44
Speaker 1: that they just did it because he was Jewish. I
35:47
Speaker 1: think it that they said it was about his position
35:49
Speaker 1: on Israel, and so John Carl asked him the following question,
35:55
Speaker 1: do you have a problem with I mean the idea of,
35:57
Speaker 1: you know, an establishment like that saying they're not going
35:59
Speaker 1: to serve somebody if they support Israel, And Mom Donnie said,
36:05
Speaker 1: I've said that I have political disagreements with Congressman Goldman.
36:07
Speaker 1: I do believe that that's a response that goes beyond that.
36:14
Speaker 1: I have to tell you. He technically said he didn't
36:19
Speaker 1: agree with the what was done to Dan Goldman, but
36:22
Speaker 1: that's some weak defense tea there. He did go on
36:26
Speaker 1: to say that he admits that anti Semitism is on
36:29
Speaker 1: the rise compared to the size of the Jewish population
36:32
Speaker 1: in New York City and that that was a real problem.
36:34
Speaker 1: The other thing he said, oh, is that he did
36:36
Speaker 1: not believe Israel should be a Jewish state, and so
36:41
Speaker 1: he qualified, yes, Israel has a right to exist, but
36:46
Speaker 1: not as a Jewish state, which was and he went
36:51
Speaker 1: on to say it would not support any nation that
36:56
Speaker 1: does that. He singled out Saudi Arabia. I assume he
36:59
Speaker 1: will be asked about the Vatican, which is technically its
37:02
Speaker 1: own country as well on that. So he is look,
37:07
Speaker 1: I think Mam Donnie as a performer is very good,
37:12
Speaker 1: and I think he does a pretty good job of
37:14
Speaker 1: trying to the most controversial things he stands for. He
37:18
Speaker 1: tries to rush off very very carefully, and there's a
37:22
Speaker 1: bit of teflon that he has right now. But make
37:26
Speaker 1: no mistake, he is leaning into being the face of
37:29
Speaker 1: democratic socialism and in some way it may be move
37:35
Speaker 1: over AOC. He is move over Bernie. That this AOC
37:40
Speaker 1: may be Bernie's heir apparent on the ballot, Mam Donnie
37:43
Speaker 1: is going to be Bernie's heir apparent sort of in
37:47
Speaker 1: sort of being I think more of the godfather of
37:50
Speaker 1: the movement itself. This episode of the Chuck Podcast is
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Speaker 1: Because the three Democratic socialists that won those primaries in
39:55
Speaker 1: New York this week, certainly, you know, got a reaction
40:02
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40:09
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40:31
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40:34
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40:40
Speaker 1: you have Mamdannie, bring it on, make me the face,
40:44
Speaker 1: and you have Trump going I love it, enjoy watching.
40:49
Speaker 1: This is in some ways, this is the contrast each wants.
40:54
Speaker 1: They don't want any of this pesky nuance that most
40:57
Speaker 1: of us have and that live in between the thirty
40:59
Speaker 1: five yard lives. These guys love the bright color contrast
41:05
Speaker 1: between the far left and the far right. So the
41:12
Speaker 1: fact that he says enjoy watching it's not the words
41:15
Speaker 1: of a man who's afraid of what's happening in New York.
41:18
Speaker 1: That's the voice of a man who thinks he just
41:20
Speaker 1: got a gift, and by the weekend he'd move from
41:24
Speaker 1: calling them communists to calling them godless communists, and that
41:27
Speaker 1: they're coming for your churches. So let me lay out
41:30
Speaker 1: the trade. These two ends of our politics, if quietly
41:33
Speaker 1: worked out, I think once you see it, you won't
41:36
Speaker 1: be able to un see it. For an extremist faction
41:39
Speaker 1: to win either one of them. It doesn't actually need
41:42
Speaker 1: you to love its ideas. It needs you. It just
41:45
Speaker 1: needs you to believe the other side is worse. It's
41:48
Speaker 1: the whole engine. Fear of them is more reliable than
41:52
Speaker 1: faith in us in the defining nature of our politics
41:56
Speaker 1: for this century right, which means the most valuable thing
41:58
Speaker 1: a democratic socialist can have is a frightening Republican to
42:02
Speaker 1: point at who's moving from nationalism to fascism. And the
42:06
Speaker 1: most valuable thing this president can have is a frightening
42:08
Speaker 1: socialist point at that he can accuse of being a communist.
42:12
Speaker 1: So they point at each other on purpose. Right now,
42:15
Speaker 1: the single best ally the DSA has in American politics
42:18
Speaker 1: is Donald Trump. And the single best ally Donald Trump
42:21
Speaker 1: has right now is the DSA. They are not enemies.
42:24
Speaker 1: They are each other's reason to exist. Every time one
42:26
Speaker 1: gets scarier, the other gets stronger. That isn't a conflict,
42:30
Speaker 1: It's a partnership and a product. Their partner to manufacture
42:33
Speaker 1: is our fear. Okay, the founders saw the zelops coming.
42:38
Speaker 1: They assume some faction would always show up convinced it
42:41
Speaker 1: alone had the truth, and they built the big machine
42:45
Speaker 1: to contain it. Two chambers, separated powers, staggered terms, massively
42:51
Speaker 1: huge size of House or representatives. The whole point was
42:56
Speaker 1: so that no single faction left or right could seize
42:59
Speaker 1: the whole government, and that part still holds. Nobody installs
43:03
Speaker 1: socialism because three candidates one in New York City. Nobody
43:08
Speaker 1: installs fascism because a small movement, captured a party, the
43:13
Speaker 1: overnight takeover of the whole thing. The document is genuinely
43:16
Speaker 1: still in the way of that. As we've seen, Trump
43:19
Speaker 1: has not been able to install this nationalist that some
43:24
Speaker 1: believe is fascist sort of vision of government. Stephen Miller
43:28
Speaker 1: has a vision he'd like to install, but he's been
43:30
Speaker 1: prevented by that pesky constitution, which maybe bends at times,
43:35
Speaker 1: but it hasn't broken just yet. But that's not the
43:39
Speaker 1: threat that's actually on the table. The threat on the
43:41
Speaker 1: table is smaller and a lot more achievable, because a
43:44
Speaker 1: concentrated faction doesn't need to capture the country. It just
43:47
Speaker 1: needs to capture a caucus, the leadership of one block,
43:51
Speaker 1: the agenda of one party, in one chamber. And there
43:54
Speaker 1: the Founders left us more exposed than we want to admit,
43:57
Speaker 1: not because they failed, but because we stopped finishing what
44:00
Speaker 1: they started. So here's a safeguard. Most people forget. Madison's
44:06
Speaker 1: answer to faction was never just separate the powers. It
44:10
Speaker 1: was scale. His argument, and you can read it right
44:13
Speaker 1: now in Federalist ten, was that the cure for faction
44:18
Speaker 1: was more factions fill the chamber with so many competing
44:21
Speaker 1: voices so many rival interests that no single concentrated group
44:25
Speaker 1: can ever run the table. The danger was never a
44:29
Speaker 1: faction having a voice. The danger was a concentrated faction
44:34
Speaker 1: having a voice far out of proportion to its actual size.
44:38
Speaker 1: The protection was supposed to be the sheer multiplicity of factions,
44:46
Speaker 1: and that depends on a chamber big enough to hold it.
44:49
Speaker 1: He cared about this so much that for Madison it
44:52
Speaker 1: became actually the very first thing he tried to write down.
44:56
Speaker 1: When they sat down to draft the Bill of Rights
45:00
Speaker 1: amendment they listed first before free speech, before religion, before
45:03
Speaker 1: the right to bear arms. Wasn't about any of the
45:05
Speaker 1: freedoms we think of today. It's about the size of
45:07
Speaker 1: the House of Representatives. They literally called it article the first.
45:11
Speaker 1: And to understand why it's sat at the very top,
45:13
Speaker 1: you have to understand what people were actually afraid of
45:16
Speaker 1: in seventeen eighty nine. The fear wasn't a king anymore.
45:20
Speaker 1: The fear was simply distance that the House was meant
45:24
Speaker 1: to be the people's chamber, the one part of the
45:26
Speaker 1: federal government citizens elected directly. Remember at the time, we
45:29
Speaker 1: did elect senators directly then, And the anti federalist looked
45:32
Speaker 1: at it and said, if you let those districts get
45:34
Speaker 1: too big, if you let one representative speak for too
45:36
Speaker 1: many people, the people's House stops belonging to the people,
45:41
Speaker 1: becomes a club. Madison took that seriously enough to answer
45:44
Speaker 1: it across three different Federalist papers. Was not a footnote
45:48
Speaker 1: to him, it was close to his entire argument. So
45:52
Speaker 1: he wrote an amendment to guarantee the House would always
45:54
Speaker 1: grow with the country. The formulas stepped up over time,
45:57
Speaker 1: one representative for every thirty thousand people at first, easing
46:01
Speaker 1: towards one for every fifty thousand as the nation got bigger,
46:04
Speaker 1: but the principle underneath never moved. As America grows, the
46:07
Speaker 1: House would grow with it automatically. It would have been
46:11
Speaker 1: the one piece of the Constitution that scaled itself forever.
46:16
Speaker 1: So the Chamber could never drift too far from the
46:18
Speaker 1: people inside it. But it never passed, not because anyone
46:23
Speaker 1: defeated it. That's actually the part that matters. That three
46:26
Speaker 1: things happened. The first is just human nature. The amendments
46:31
Speaker 1: about rights, speech, religion, due process. They were more popular,
46:36
Speaker 1: they were more exciting, they got people more fired up,
46:38
Speaker 1: and the states rushed them through. People didn't like process
46:41
Speaker 1: back then. Either, the structural one, this boring one I'm
46:44
Speaker 1: telling you about a PORSCHEMD math, Well, it lagged behind.
46:48
Speaker 1: The second is almost embarrassing. Somewhere in the drafting a
46:51
Speaker 1: single word got transcribed wrong and it broke the formula.
46:55
Speaker 1: So for a sketch of the nation's growth, the math
46:58
Speaker 1: literally contradicted itself. It called for more representatives than it allowed.
47:04
Speaker 1: At the same time. It was a clerical mistake, but
47:07
Speaker 1: enough to make a cautious state legislature pause. And the
47:11
Speaker 1: third was just bad timing. As Vermont and Kentucky joined
47:14
Speaker 1: the Union, the number of states needed to ratify it
47:17
Speaker 1: kept climbing, and the amendment kept falling short of the
47:19
Speaker 1: moving target. It came with win one state and then
47:23
Speaker 1: everybody moved on. But you know what's funny about this.
47:31
Speaker 1: It was never voted down. You know, like the argument
47:34
Speaker 1: for the Equal Rights Amendment was never sort of unfinished.
47:37
Speaker 1: You could finish it. It still sits out there. It's
47:43
Speaker 1: never been killed, it's been stranded. It's an amendment sitting
47:46
Speaker 1: there and because the founder set no deadline article, the
47:49
Speaker 1: first unratified sits out there to this day. Now here's
47:54
Speaker 1: what you bother you. We didn't even need the amendment
47:56
Speaker 1: to fix this. Congress did set the size of the
47:58
Speaker 1: House by ordinary law, and it's always done this, and
48:01
Speaker 1: the House did grow seat by seat for over a century,
48:04
Speaker 1: right until nineteen thirteen. That's the year we hit four
48:06
Speaker 1: thirty five. And then in nineteen twenty nine Congress passed
48:09
Speaker 1: the law that simply frozen at nine four to thirty five.
48:12
Speaker 1: It's not in the constitution a statute, it was a choice.
48:16
Speaker 1: The founder's very first instinct was to keep the People's
48:19
Speaker 1: House growing with the people. And it wasn't beaten down
48:22
Speaker 1: by an enemy, and it wasn't ruled on constitutional We
48:26
Speaker 1: just had powerful politicians afraid of the people and afraid
48:31
Speaker 1: of losing their power. So that is what choice built.
48:35
Speaker 1: We froze the House at four thirty five. Country kept
48:37
Speaker 1: growing anyway, and from about one hundred million to about
48:41
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty. Now the districts didn't multiply the
48:44
Speaker 1: way Madison wanted. They just swelled, and now you have
48:47
Speaker 1: outsized influence. Right now, you have these nearly million population
48:55
Speaker 1: in sized districts. And when the district gets that big,
48:58
Speaker 1: and that's safe, we know just a small faction can
49:01
Speaker 1: take over the district and a low turnout, closed primary
49:04
Speaker 1: like New York City, that's the whole ballgame. And that
49:07
Speaker 1: it looks like that somehow that the Socialists are taken
49:10
Speaker 1: over the Democratic Party. I'm not saying they're not a
49:12
Speaker 1: huge influence, but this was a very small sample size.
49:17
Speaker 1: And that's the thing actually worth worrying about. This is
49:19
Speaker 1: not about worrying about communism on the left or fascism
49:22
Speaker 1: on the right. I do think this machine is going
49:24
Speaker 1: to stop those two things. But what it no longer
49:27
Speaker 1: can reliably stop is a determined few capturing the leadership
49:30
Speaker 1: of a caucus. Because we shrank the people's House relative
49:35
Speaker 1: to this people, and until we do, until we get
49:39
Speaker 1: more people feeling like they're represented here, you're going to
49:42
Speaker 1: have this sort of race to the extremes, this sort
49:45
Speaker 1: of back and forth like this. I'd like to think
49:48
Speaker 1: I know that the extremists. Look, we always stamp out
49:51
Speaker 1: extremism in this country. May take us longer than it should,
49:54
Speaker 1: but we always do it. And I think some of
49:59
Speaker 1: these folks now get it, and so they're just trying
50:01
Speaker 1: to take over. Right. The right figured it out and decided, hey,
50:04
Speaker 1: let's just take over a faction of the Republican Party
50:06
Speaker 1: and we can take over to the party. And now
50:08
Speaker 1: the DSA looks at Trump and Mega and says that's
50:12
Speaker 1: a blueprint and they're pursuing it. So the two ends
50:18
Speaker 1: of our politics already understand this. It's why they keep
50:20
Speaker 1: pointing at each other instead of the thing that actually
50:23
Speaker 1: decides it, the size and the shape of the room.
50:29
Speaker 1: The cage was never locked from the outside. We've been
50:30
Speaker 1: sitting in it for over one hundred years, calling it permanent.
50:35
Speaker 1: And I do think this fear of rise of nationalism
50:38
Speaker 1: and socialism would be a lot more mitigated, and we'd
50:43
Speaker 1: have room for a lot more voices, as Madison wanted,
50:48
Speaker 1: if we simply expanded the size of the house. You
50:50
Speaker 1: probably didn't know I was going to go from New
50:52
Speaker 1: York City primaries back to my hobby of horse of
50:54
Speaker 1: expanding the size of the house. Before we go, quick
50:56
Speaker 1: little preview of Colorado and why you should tune in
50:59
Speaker 1: on Tuesday night. It's just I know it's just one state,
51:01
Speaker 1: but you've got Michael Bennett. I think there's two marquee
51:05
Speaker 1: races that we're going to be following. You got Michael Bennett,
51:09
Speaker 1: us sitting US center running for governor pretty heavily contested
51:12
Speaker 1: Democratic primary against the sitting A G. Phil Wiser, and
51:15
Speaker 1: I have to tell you, the sitting AG's essentially made
51:19
Speaker 1: a fascinating argument that has really put Bennett in a box,
51:22
Speaker 1: essentially going, hey, Michael Bennett's been a great US senator.
51:26
Speaker 1: He needs to be fighting Trump from Washington. The reason
51:30
Speaker 1: it's a brilliant way to go after him is you're
51:33
Speaker 1: essentially saying, hey, he's running away from the fight without
51:35
Speaker 1: saying he's running away from the fight. You're reminding people
51:39
Speaker 1: he's from Washington without using it as a negative. And
51:42
Speaker 1: you're allowing people who like Michael Bennett to have a
51:46
Speaker 1: permission slip to vote against Michael Bennett. When you put
51:49
Speaker 1: all that together, I've seen some up there. There was
51:52
Speaker 1: sort of a similar There was a similar vibe to
51:57
Speaker 1: this back during the there was a famous race where
51:59
Speaker 1: John sitting senator John Carey faced the sitting governor Bill
52:02
Speaker 1: Welld for a US Senate seat, and they both had
52:05
Speaker 1: high favorable ratings and literally people who voted for Kerry
52:08
Speaker 1: had like a you know, fifty five to sixty percent
52:11
Speaker 1: job apppal rating, a well that was essentially one of
52:14
Speaker 1: the arguments some were making is wells, you know, wells
52:16
Speaker 1: great governor, let's not send him to the Senate. And
52:20
Speaker 1: it was the idea was to essentially give that swing
52:22
Speaker 1: voter a permission slip to vote against somebody they like. Anyway,
52:27
Speaker 1: it's a we'll see what happens here. It's not quite
52:30
Speaker 1: been a left right contest. This really has been a Washington,
52:34
Speaker 1: non Washington contest. And as we know, Michael Bennett's the
52:38
Speaker 1: one carrying the heavier load here being from Washington. And
52:42
Speaker 1: the Senate race features so John Hickenlooper is being primary
52:46
Speaker 1: by a state senator named Julie Gonzales, and she's run
52:49
Speaker 1: a very much a generational change argument, very much from
52:54
Speaker 1: the left. She's not necessarily a sitting DSA candidate like
52:57
Speaker 1: the race I'm about to describe with Diana de gatt,
53:00
Speaker 1: but she's hit from the left. She trounced him at
53:03
Speaker 1: the convention. In order to make the primary ballot Colorado,
53:06
Speaker 1: if you get a certain amount of support at the
53:08
Speaker 1: state convention and automatically qualifies you for the ballot, you
53:11
Speaker 1: can't avoid that and just petition to get on the ballot.
53:14
Speaker 1: Hicken Looper decided not to contest the convention endorsement. I translation,
53:18
Speaker 1: he knew he was going to lose that to the
53:20
Speaker 1: more progressive person, which in and of itself should tell
53:22
Speaker 1: you something. The state party has essentially farther to the
53:26
Speaker 1: left than where Hickenlooper is as a Democratic Senator. So
53:31
Speaker 1: you know, look, we've seen in the past insurgent liberal
53:35
Speaker 1: or progressive candidates in Colorado do really well at these
53:38
Speaker 1: conventions and then sort of sort of get stuck at
53:40
Speaker 1: about thirty five, thirty six, thirty seven percent and not
53:43
Speaker 1: be able to break through unless it's a super credit primary.
53:47
Speaker 1: But I definitely think Kickenlop's going to get held under
53:49
Speaker 1: sixty And the question is is this a single digit
53:53
Speaker 1: race and how correlated will be the Phil Weiser vote,
53:58
Speaker 1: Julie gonz vote between the GOV and the Senate primaries
54:03
Speaker 1: Michael Bennett and Hick and Looper. On that front, the
54:07
Speaker 1: marquee national race really is Diana de Gett, longtime Democratic incumbent.
54:11
Speaker 1: She is getting a DSA chair and official melat Kiros,
54:16
Speaker 1: twenty nine year old Democratic Socialist candidate. Plenty of polling
54:21
Speaker 1: is show on her head. So you know, one week
54:25
Speaker 1: coming one week after the success of the Socialist in
54:27
Speaker 1: New York City to get another one. You know, it's
54:30
Speaker 1: one of those where the narrative can you could exp
54:34
Speaker 1: we can all explain it away, but the narrative is
54:36
Speaker 1: going to grow, and the Socialists are going to look
54:38
Speaker 1: like they're definitely on the march here inside the Democratic Party.
54:42
Speaker 1: So my point is a lot going on in Colorado.
54:45
Speaker 1: We're going to be there, myself, Chris, Eliza, Jeffreys, Kelly,
54:48
Speaker 1: and the team at Decision p s HQ, because hey,
54:51
Speaker 1: there's only one place to go if you want to
54:52
Speaker 1: find out who wins before you go to bed before
54:54
Speaker 1: midnight on a given night, and it's my friends at
54:57
Speaker 1: DDHQ for my time Machine segment this week. Look, it's
55:11
Speaker 1: fourth of July week, which means there was all sorts
55:15
Speaker 1: of nominees and in fact, one that I thought about doing.
55:18
Speaker 1: Actually I can kind of do it next week. So
55:21
Speaker 1: I'm going to do it next week because there's a
55:23
Speaker 1: there's another state's anniversary sort of state b A lot
55:28
Speaker 1: of states came and you know, officially come into the
55:30
Speaker 1: Union right around this week, right around the fourth of July,
55:34
Speaker 1: particularly states that were led into the Union in the
55:36
Speaker 1: mid to late nineteenth century, and there's a there's a
55:39
Speaker 1: few pieces of interesting unintended consequences or intendive consequences from
55:44
Speaker 1: what happened back then that actually ring very true to
55:47
Speaker 1: some debates that we're having today about statehood. So I
55:50
Speaker 1: want to I decided to save that because, Hey, as
55:55
Speaker 1: I discussed with you, it's holiday week, right, so I
56:00
Speaker 1: thought this would be a bit more of an appropriate
56:03
Speaker 1: little history lesson for the week. It's the summer. We're
56:06
Speaker 1: going to go back to July of nineteen forty six,
56:09
Speaker 1: the summer we didn't know what the word adam really meant.
56:14
Speaker 1: So we're going to begin this week with something that
56:16
Speaker 1: if I simply said it without context, you might assume
56:19
Speaker 1: it was a fake story. The bikini swimsuit is named
56:24
Speaker 1: after an atomic bomb test. Sounds ridiculous, right, sounds like
56:28
Speaker 1: one of those things somebody made up on social media.
56:31
Speaker 1: It isn't. This is true. On July first, nineteen forty six,
56:34
Speaker 1: the US debtonated an atomic bomb over Bikini a Tall
56:38
Speaker 1: in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Four days later,
56:42
Speaker 1: a French engineer turned fashion designer named Louis Riard introduced
56:48
Speaker 1: a new two piece, tiny swimsuit, and he decided to
56:51
Speaker 1: call it the bikini. He hoped it would have a
56:55
Speaker 1: explosive impact on fashion, just as the atomic test had
57:00
Speaker 1: dominated newspapers around the world. This was a huge story globally.
57:05
Speaker 1: Think about that for a second. Less than a year
57:08
Speaker 1: after Hiroshima Nagasaki, someone thought that the perfect name for
57:12
Speaker 1: a swimsuit was after a nuclear bomb test. Today that
57:18
Speaker 1: seems bizarre and even a fence. But in nineteen forty
57:23
Speaker 1: six it actually made sense. And let me explain. This
57:26
Speaker 1: is what makes the story so fascinating. It's not the swimsuit.
57:30
Speaker 1: It's not even really the bomb. It's the strange few
57:33
Speaker 1: years when the world and America in particular, was still
57:37
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what the atom actually meant and
57:41
Speaker 1: what I mean by Adam? Here is atom? Okay? Donald
57:46
Speaker 1: Trump might be wowed by the idea that, wait a minute,
57:50
Speaker 1: Adam is spelled with a T and not a D.
57:52
Speaker 1: But I digress. We tend to remember the atomic age backwards.
57:57
Speaker 1: We think of duck and cover drills, fall up shelters,
58:00
Speaker 1: the Cuban missile crisis. Frankly, my parents lived through it right.
58:05
Speaker 1: They lived. They went to school during duck and cover drill.
58:07
Speaker 1: So why do I know about these things because they
58:09
Speaker 1: told me about them, right, And growing up in Miami,
58:13
Speaker 1: my dad would tell me you could see that, you
58:16
Speaker 1: could actually go down off the coast and see the
58:20
Speaker 1: military build up as it was taking place. He was
58:22
Speaker 1: in high school at the time. Mutual assured destruction. We
58:26
Speaker 1: assume Americans greeted the bomb with permanent fear, but history
58:30
Speaker 1: is never, of course, that tidy, right, That's what the
58:32
Speaker 1: segment's all about. Fear did arrive immediately, but so did optimism.
58:38
Speaker 1: At the time they existed side by side, scientists who
58:40
Speaker 1: had worked on the Manhattan Project immediately began warning about
58:43
Speaker 1: the dangers of nuclear weapons. Right if you saw Oppenheimer,
58:46
Speaker 1: that was very true to the historical record. Okay, he
58:50
Speaker 1: in particular was absolutely petrified of what he had just
58:54
Speaker 1: been A part of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
58:58
Speaker 1: was founded. The Doomsday clo would soon follow, and just
59:02
Speaker 1: weeks after the Bikini debut, John Hershey published Hiroshima in
59:06
Speaker 1: The New Yorker, forcing Americans to confront the human consequences
59:10
Speaker 1: of the bomb. In what was then unforgettable detail that
59:15
Speaker 1: all of this was happening right around the same time.
59:17
Speaker 1: It's all the same summer, same country, one culture was
59:21
Speaker 1: trying to process two completely different emotions wonder and dread.
59:26
Speaker 1: And remember, we didn't have an enemy yet with the
59:29
Speaker 1: atomic bomb, so it was really about the technology fear,
59:34
Speaker 1: not necessarily the fear of it falling into somebody else's hands.
59:38
Speaker 1: So that's the tension I find fascinating as I was
59:40
Speaker 1: digging into this because in America nineteen forty six, America
59:45
Speaker 1: still had the monopoly on all things atomic. The United
59:48
Speaker 1: States had developed the most powerful technology in human history.
59:53
Speaker 1: We had just won World War Two, the economy was booming,
59:57
Speaker 1: science had seemingly delivered civilization from fascism. The atom wasn't
1:00:03
Speaker 1: viewed only as a weapon, it was viewed as the future.
1:00:06
Speaker 1: In fact, at the time, in this small period of
1:00:08
Speaker 1: time before the Soviets tested their own nuke, people imagined
1:00:12
Speaker 1: atomic powered homes, atomic cars, atomic airplanes, atomic medicine, atomic agriculture.
1:00:20
Speaker 1: There were atomic kitchens. The word atomic itself was he
1:00:25
Speaker 1: simply being used as shorthand for modern It was just
1:00:27
Speaker 1: another way to brand. And at the time, branding something
1:00:30
Speaker 1: atomic wasn't that positive. It was powerful, it was scientific,
1:00:34
Speaker 1: it was the future. The atom was going to transform everything.
1:00:40
Speaker 1: That optimism feels a bit foreign right now, doesn't it right?
1:00:43
Speaker 1: But it was real in the late forties, and that's
1:00:46
Speaker 1: why the bikini story now makes total sense. Louis Riard
1:00:50
Speaker 1: wasn't celebrating nuclear war. He was simply borrowing the emotional
1:00:55
Speaker 1: vocabulary of the moment of the culture. In fact, he
1:00:58
Speaker 1: wasn't even first a French. A rival French designer had
1:01:01
Speaker 1: just introduced another tiny swimsuit that he called the a Tomb,
1:01:05
Speaker 1: claiming it was the world's smallest bathing suit. Playing off
1:01:09
Speaker 1: the other part of atom Well, Riard wanted to top that.
1:01:12
Speaker 1: His suit, he joke, was so small it split the atom.
1:01:16
Speaker 1: He even struggled to find a professional fashion model willing
1:01:19
Speaker 1: to wear it. As you might imagine, eventually he hired
1:01:22
Speaker 1: a new dancer to debut. The point wasn't subtle. The
1:01:25
Speaker 1: bikini was supposed to shock people, just like the bottom.
1:01:29
Speaker 1: What's interesting is that this really wasn't a French story.
1:01:32
Speaker 1: It was really an American one. The branding may have
1:01:35
Speaker 1: happened in Paris, but the emotional force behind it came
1:01:37
Speaker 1: from the American culture. We had exported something brand new
1:01:42
Speaker 1: into the world's imagination. This wasn't jazz, Hollywood, or Coca cola.
1:01:46
Speaker 1: We were exporting the atomic age, and it seemed cool.
1:01:50
Speaker 1: That may be the strangest American cultural export in the
1:01:52
Speaker 1: twentieth century, But for about two and a half years,
1:01:55
Speaker 1: it was cool. But guess what. Something very different happening
1:02:00
Speaker 1: on Bikini a Toll itself. The people who actually lived
1:02:03
Speaker 1: there were being told to leave their homes. American officials
1:02:06
Speaker 1: described it as a temporary sacrifice for the good of mankind.
1:02:10
Speaker 1: Many believe they would eventually return. Most never could. Over
1:02:14
Speaker 1: the next twelve years, the United States would conduct twenty
1:02:17
Speaker 1: three nuclear tests at Bikini a Toll. The name became famous,
1:02:22
Speaker 1: the place became radioactive, and the people disappeared from our memory.
1:02:28
Speaker 1: The Bikini really isn't a story about commercialization. It's a
1:02:32
Speaker 1: story about normalization. Human beings normalize. We normalize extraordinary things
1:02:38
Speaker 1: with astonishing speed. Sometimes we do it in months, sometimes
1:02:41
Speaker 1: in weeks. The atom had entered everyday life before the
1:02:45
Speaker 1: world had even decided how to feel about The optimism
1:02:49
Speaker 1: didn't replace the fear. The fear didn't erase the optimism.
1:02:53
Speaker 1: People lived with both at the same time. The Bikini
1:02:56
Speaker 1: is that artifact of that small period of time when
1:02:59
Speaker 1: we thought this was all really cool. The article abou
1:03:04
Speaker 1: Hiroshima the New york Er is another story, one culture,
1:03:08
Speaker 1: two completely different emotional responses, and both were real. Obviously,
1:03:13
Speaker 1: the bounced shifts Soviet Union test its own atomic bomb
1:03:17
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty nine, suddenly the Americans didn't have a
1:03:20
Speaker 1: monopoly on atomic Then we had the hydrogen bomb. Fallout
1:03:24
Speaker 1: became a household word. By the early sixties. The Cuban
1:03:27
Speaker 1: Missile crisis permanently altered the emotional meaning of nuclear weapons. Today,
1:03:32
Speaker 1: when we hear the word atomic, we don't think anything
1:03:34
Speaker 1: fashionable or skimpy. We think fright We think fear, were frightened.
1:03:40
Speaker 1: The atom didn't change, our experience with it did and
1:03:44
Speaker 1: this is a pattern that repeats itself through history. Every
1:03:46
Speaker 1: generation experiences a breakthrough technology railroad, electricity, airplane, internet, artificial intelligence, anyone.
1:03:53
Speaker 1: At first we see only possibility. Eventually we become more
1:03:56
Speaker 1: aware of the risks. Technology is not what's changed our
1:04:00
Speaker 1: relationship with it. The atomic age follow that pattern as well,
1:04:04
Speaker 1: only at the time faster, which brings me back to
1:04:08
Speaker 1: the BEGINI. Today billions of people know what a bikini is.
1:04:12
Speaker 1: Very few know what bikini told is or why the
1:04:16
Speaker 1: swimsuit carries its name right, you know, in some ways
1:04:19
Speaker 1: because it you know, bikini sounds like it stands for
1:04:23
Speaker 1: a skimpy bathing suit, and so the word feels eny right,
1:04:27
Speaker 1: feels small. Maybe that's why I enjoy these little corners
1:04:31
Speaker 1: of history so much, though not because they're trivial, but
1:04:34
Speaker 1: because they're reminders that people living through history don't know
1:04:38
Speaker 1: which part of their world future generations are going to
1:04:41
Speaker 1: find strange. What are we doing right now that somebody
1:04:44
Speaker 1: else is going to say, you, guys, did what If
1:04:48
Speaker 1: I told you today that a swimsuit was named after
1:04:50
Speaker 1: an atomic bomb test? You'd probably think I'd fallen for
1:04:53
Speaker 1: some fake history. Except it's true, because history is always
1:04:57
Speaker 1: stranger than our memory of it. Summer of night forty six,
1:05:00
Speaker 1: America and much of the world was trying to live
1:05:02
Speaker 1: with two ideas that seemed impossible to hold together today,
1:05:06
Speaker 1: that the atom might saved the future and then it
1:05:10
Speaker 1: might destroy it. For a brief moment, both as far
1:05:14
Speaker 1: as this country was concerned, thought it was equally possible.
1:05:19
Speaker 1: Maybe when you're staring at somebody's bikini. First of all,
1:05:22
Speaker 1: don't be staring at somebody's bikini, but realize why would
1:05:28
Speaker 1: maybe take a second to realize where the name came from?
1:05:37
Speaker 1: Ask Chuck, so a little last chuck all right. First
1:05:44
Speaker 1: question comes from Heather g in La and she asked,
1:05:47
Speaker 1: do you see somebody jumping into the twenty twenty eight
1:05:49
Speaker 1: presidential race prior to the midterm election? So it is
1:05:55
Speaker 1: there is quite a few examples of people announcing their
1:05:59
Speaker 1: president campaigns literally the week of the midterm elections that
1:06:04
Speaker 1: Thursday and Friday. Maybe they show up on a Sunday
1:06:08
Speaker 1: show the following Sunday. But whether it's a campaign, an
1:06:12
Speaker 1: exploratory committee, officially throwing whatever you want to call it,
1:06:16
Speaker 1: that has been what the what the? And usually it's
1:06:21
Speaker 1: somebody who who is in the one percent category that
1:06:24
Speaker 1: tries to because you know, there's there only could be
1:06:28
Speaker 1: one person who announces first. Right, the question this time
1:06:32
Speaker 1: I think this is a fair It's like, well, since
1:06:34
Speaker 1: everybody kind of knows that that's the pattern, usually that
1:06:37
Speaker 1: means someone's going to try to one up it, right.
1:06:42
Speaker 1: Do they announce on election night itself? That could be?
1:06:46
Speaker 1: Do they announce the weekend before that could be the
1:06:51
Speaker 1: downside of doing this, though, if you're if you're a
1:06:54
Speaker 1: very prominent person supposedly working on something, is to look
1:07:00
Speaker 1: like you care more about your politics than what's happening
1:07:02
Speaker 1: at the moment in your party, et cetera. And I
1:07:05
Speaker 1: think that that's that's the fine line. I think anybody
1:07:09
Speaker 1: that wants to be the nominee is not going to
1:07:12
Speaker 1: do it before the midterms, but somebody that just wants
1:07:14
Speaker 1: a little bit of attention and wants to see if
1:07:17
Speaker 1: they can, you know, maybe even if it if it's
1:07:20
Speaker 1: divisive virility, but it gets maybe that it elevates their name,
1:07:23
Speaker 1: wreck their name idea a little bit. If you're a
1:07:25
Speaker 1: little lesser known, you know, if you're like i've heard
1:07:30
Speaker 1: Josh Green, the governor of Hawaiis said he's not ruled
1:07:35
Speaker 1: out running for president, you know, maybe maybe somebody like
1:07:38
Speaker 1: him would have to do that. I remember Paul Songas
1:07:41
Speaker 1: got in super early because nobody knew who he was
1:07:44
Speaker 1: at the time. You know, at the time he was
1:07:45
Speaker 1: a former one term senator from Massachusetts and nobody how
1:07:50
Speaker 1: do you say your name? You know, the t coming
1:07:52
Speaker 1: for the s and all that business. So uh it
1:07:55
Speaker 1: is I think if you have somebody that jumps in
1:07:59
Speaker 1: before the midterms. It's someone in that in that category
1:08:03
Speaker 1: sort of seeking a little extra attention because they won't
1:08:07
Speaker 1: be able to stand out announcing after the midterms. Right
1:08:10
Speaker 1: after that, they'll just be one of eighteen candidates that
1:08:13
Speaker 1: are thinking about running for president. By the way, one
1:08:15
Speaker 1: little aside here on that, because I was watching Newsom
1:08:22
Speaker 1: and ro Kana go back and forth on this California
1:08:25
Speaker 1: billionaire tax, it made me think, like, you know, there's
1:08:27
Speaker 1: probably a better way to spend the midterm if you
1:08:30
Speaker 1: want to be if you're really serious about running for president,
1:08:34
Speaker 1: and you're serious about also being the leader of the party,
1:08:36
Speaker 1: why don't you do something more tangible? You know, I
1:08:42
Speaker 1: it I'd like to see a presidential candidate. And you know,
1:08:45
Speaker 1: whether you're from Team D or Team R. Right, if
1:08:47
Speaker 1: you're from Team R, you know you're you want to
1:08:52
Speaker 1: you want to go. Maybe you set up an entire
1:08:58
Speaker 1: independent expenditure campaign and you Glenn Youngkin become the face
1:09:01
Speaker 1: of it, and you do everything you can to get
1:09:03
Speaker 1: Michelle Telfoy elected to the United States Senate in Minnesota.
1:09:07
Speaker 1: Or you're Ram Emmanuel and you go to you know,
1:09:12
Speaker 1: or your Andy basher, or you're somebody and you go
1:09:16
Speaker 1: to a red state like Mississippi or Kansas and you
1:09:21
Speaker 1: do the same thing, and you do in the message
1:09:23
Speaker 1: being you're trying to expand the map for your party.
1:09:26
Speaker 1: You're trying to show you're both the party leader. But
1:09:28
Speaker 1: then you're also trying to contrast you're going to a
1:09:30
Speaker 1: red leaning state in that case, in the case of
1:09:32
Speaker 1: the ours be a blue leaning state. But actually do
1:09:36
Speaker 1: something to help your party. Don't don't just sort of
1:09:42
Speaker 1: chase the empty calories of social media to go viral
1:09:45
Speaker 1: on clips about a billionaire's tax or about Somali's in Minnesota.
1:09:51
Speaker 1: Why don't you actually try to help your party do
1:09:55
Speaker 1: better in the midterms. Why don't you try to help
1:09:57
Speaker 1: your party register new voters. Why don't you try to
1:09:59
Speaker 1: help your party expand the map. Why don't you try
1:10:02
Speaker 1: to help your You know, that's that's the type of
1:10:08
Speaker 1: work that probably gets more rewarded down the road. You
1:10:12
Speaker 1: won't get the immediate impact, but I mean, you know,
1:10:16
Speaker 1: it's the difference between you know, to me, the empty
1:10:22
Speaker 1: calories of trying to just bullshit rhetoric on billionaire's tax
1:10:27
Speaker 1: is like essentially taking taking peds and just trying to
1:10:32
Speaker 1: and trying to take a shortcut to look like you're
1:10:35
Speaker 1: working out versus starting up a campaign in a Mississippi
1:10:39
Speaker 1: or a for a Democrat or a Minnesota for a
1:10:42
Speaker 1: Republican that's actually doing the hard work without using, you know,
1:10:46
Speaker 1: artificial means to inflate your reality. All right, next question
1:10:52
Speaker 1: comes from Graham, and he writes, Hey, love the show,
1:10:54
Speaker 1: especially the interviews. Curious, what do you think actually happened
1:10:57
Speaker 1: in that meeting between Trump and Senate Republicans that brought
1:10:59
Speaker 1: them back in line? What kind of leverage or argument
1:11:01
Speaker 1: gets senators to reverse course like that, especially if they
1:11:03
Speaker 1: were already on their way out. Thanks Graham. Well, all
1:11:07
Speaker 1: I can do is quote Bill Cassidy because he's the
1:11:10
Speaker 1: one that flipped and ran Paul. Now, both Cassidy and
1:11:13
Speaker 1: Paul simply, you know, especially Cassidy says his complaint was
1:11:16
Speaker 1: they weren't getting briefed. And if you're not going to
1:11:19
Speaker 1: brief and if you're not gonna because the whole point
1:11:21
Speaker 1: of the law is you've got to report back to Congress,
1:11:23
Speaker 1: and they never reported back to Congress. He got a briefing,
1:11:27
Speaker 1: So he basically says he gave him the vote for
1:11:30
Speaker 1: the briefing. Now the Cassidy interview there, boy, there's a
1:11:35
Speaker 1: lot to it. I'm going to save a little bit
1:11:37
Speaker 1: of it for my next episode. But he did a
1:11:39
Speaker 1: pretty interesting interview with my friend Margaret Brunnan on Face
1:11:42
Speaker 1: the Nation. It's a pretty long interview and talked about
1:11:47
Speaker 1: the meeting. He it's interesting, he's I just want to
1:11:53
Speaker 1: share a few things that Cassidy said, right. He said
1:11:59
Speaker 1: about his defeat, you know, and this is where kind
1:12:04
Speaker 1: of I think it puts your It will help explain
1:12:06
Speaker 1: where his head is at. He goes, let me first
1:12:08
Speaker 1: quote a famous philosopher, James Bond and Quantum of Solace,
1:12:11
Speaker 1: and he says, you can be judged by the strength
1:12:12
Speaker 1: of your enemies. To beat me, I had a governor,
1:12:14
Speaker 1: a state legislature, a president, cabinet officials, and members of
1:12:17
Speaker 1: Congress all coming at me. Really came down to the
1:12:19
Speaker 1: President being offended that I voted to support the constitution,
1:12:22
Speaker 1: which is what he calls his vote to convict after
1:12:31
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's actions en role in the January sixth insurrection.
1:12:35
Speaker 1: And I think he sort of you know, so, I
1:12:39
Speaker 1: think there's a little bit of he feels as if
1:12:41
Speaker 1: he was, you know, he's a bit martyred a little
1:12:43
Speaker 1: bit on that. But the most fascinating parts of the
1:12:47
Speaker 1: conversation there were about so he said, because he got
1:12:51
Speaker 1: his briefing, you know, that's what I was looking for.
1:13:00
Speaker 1: And yet he was still pretty tough on Trump. He said,
1:13:06
Speaker 1: I don't know if he said, I don't know if
1:13:10
Speaker 1: they're empty threats, referring to Trump. Apparently Trump re threatening Iran. Right,
1:13:20
Speaker 1: I don't know if they're empty threats, because you can
1:13:22
Speaker 1: certainly return to bombing. But the fact is that a
1:13:24
Speaker 1: medium sized power at this point is perceived to have
1:13:26
Speaker 1: fought a superpower to a draw, requiring some measure of
1:13:29
Speaker 1: accommodation of we the superpower, and we spend twenty nine
1:13:32
Speaker 1: billion dollars, we have thirteen American dead. We hope to
1:13:34
Speaker 1: get back to status quo aane I will say in
1:13:36
Speaker 1: the briefing last night, referring to the briefing he got,
1:13:39
Speaker 1: they would make the argument that we've actually made progress.
1:13:42
Speaker 1: If that's the case, we should all be thankful. So
1:13:44
Speaker 1: the point being is he does it. He seems to
1:13:47
Speaker 1: be both still skeptical, but because he got his briefing,
1:13:51
Speaker 1: he felt compelled to at least change his vote on
1:13:54
Speaker 1: the War Powers Act, which clearly was of importance to him.
1:13:59
Speaker 1: Is it just simply getting access to the President that
1:14:01
Speaker 1: got him to flip his vote. That's one way to
1:14:04
Speaker 1: look at it for what it's worth. He lambass Kennedy,
1:14:11
Speaker 1: and then he says, you hate the question of whether
1:14:14
Speaker 1: you regret your vote. Can you explain why you said
1:14:18
Speaker 1: yes to Bobby Kennedy as AHHS secretary. I'm going to
1:14:21
Speaker 1: reach a Cassidy's own words, of course, and I have
1:14:25
Speaker 1: before Bobby Kennedy was going to have the ear of
1:14:27
Speaker 1: the President. The President seems to be fascinated with the Kennedy.
1:14:29
Speaker 1: So either he was going to be in a position
1:14:31
Speaker 1: where there were guardrails, and I did have commitments made
1:14:34
Speaker 1: as to the kind of guardrails, or he was going
1:14:36
Speaker 1: to be appointed White House healths Are, in which case
1:14:39
Speaker 1: he would have the President's here without the guardrails. Now,
1:14:42
Speaker 1: now I had to make a decision. He's going to
1:14:43
Speaker 1: have the President's here, is it going to be with
1:14:45
Speaker 1: some sort of guardrails, whether it be a commitment to
1:14:48
Speaker 1: meet on a quarterly basis in which there could be
1:14:50
Speaker 1: regular communication, in which there could be a kind of
1:14:53
Speaker 1: an agreement that I would have. You know, obviously, as
1:14:56
Speaker 1: a chair, excuse me, I have some role in terms
1:14:59
Speaker 1: of people of the people who as system or would
1:15:01
Speaker 1: he be an unappointed, unsentate confirmed healthcares are. That's kind
1:15:06
Speaker 1: of my choice, and I chose. You can criticize it,
1:15:09
Speaker 1: but I chose to have the one with the guardrails
1:15:14
Speaker 1: and Runnan fallows up. You think it could have been worse. Look,
1:15:17
Speaker 1: it's something you cannot know. We can't go back in
1:15:20
Speaker 1: time and say him as White House are would have
1:15:23
Speaker 1: been worse. But we do know the president is very
1:15:25
Speaker 1: influenced by Bobby Kennedy. And so if that's the case.
1:15:29
Speaker 1: If that's the case, is it better or at least
1:15:31
Speaker 1: at the outset when these decisions are being made, that
1:15:34
Speaker 1: there's an open line of communication, a commitment to appear
1:15:37
Speaker 1: on a quarterly basis, with a commitment to say that,
1:15:39
Speaker 1: to preserve this and to preserve that what was better
1:15:41
Speaker 1: at the time I made the decision it was better
1:15:43
Speaker 1: to have the guardrails. You can criticize that, but I
1:15:45
Speaker 1: think again, as I'm searching for kind of the right
1:15:47
Speaker 1: diagnosis and the right care, you can criticize me, but
1:15:49
Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's quite as kind of black and
1:15:52
Speaker 1: white as people like to say. So to understand his argument,
1:15:55
Speaker 1: he's basically saying he thought Bobby Kennedy, as a confirmed Senate,
1:16:00
Speaker 1: confirmed Cabinet secretary who has to report to Congress, who
1:16:04
Speaker 1: then has his budget approved by Congress, who then has
1:16:07
Speaker 1: his staff a lot of his deputies approved by Congress,
1:16:09
Speaker 1: not all of them, but some of them, that that
1:16:12
Speaker 1: was a better way than just Bobby Kennedy sitting in
1:16:18
Speaker 1: the White House. I accept the premise that that's what
1:16:25
Speaker 1: he believed. It does look kind of ridiculous in hindsight,
1:16:31
Speaker 1: Like just I mean, the fact is you cannot have
1:16:34
Speaker 1: Kennedy's voice in these Senate confirmed positions giving credibility to
1:16:40
Speaker 1: this hopem that he pushes, and that's what happened here.
1:16:46
Speaker 1: I accept his explanation, but count me as somebody who
1:16:52
Speaker 1: completely disagrees with his diagnosis on this one. All right,
1:17:00
Speaker 1: I did my Cassidy thing, now, all right? Next question
1:17:07
Speaker 1: comes from John and Cincinnati. Was that an HBO show?
1:17:11
Speaker 1: But I digress. After the announcement of a flat five
1:17:14
Speaker 1: year eligibility rule in college athletics, I was curious to
1:17:17
Speaker 1: hear your take. What are your thoughts on the decision
1:17:19
Speaker 1: and expinditual impact? Hope you're enjoying your summer. Well, I guess,
1:17:23
Speaker 1: are we just getting rid of red shirt completely? If
1:17:27
Speaker 1: that's the case, right, are there still going to be
1:17:31
Speaker 1: medical red shirts? Are we going to do that? You know,
1:17:33
Speaker 1: this feels like every time we have a oh this
1:17:36
Speaker 1: is it, then there's always a loophole. Right. It's kind
1:17:39
Speaker 1: of like our tax code. But the five year rule
1:17:43
Speaker 1: seems as good as any I guess. Look, I go
1:17:47
Speaker 1: back to something I said. I was invited on my
1:17:52
Speaker 1: friend of mine sports podcast the other day and he
1:17:55
Speaker 1: was asking me about this, and I said, look, I
1:17:57
Speaker 1: think everything that Congress is trying to do right now,
1:17:59
Speaker 1: and everything CAA is trying to do right now, none
1:18:02
Speaker 1: of it is going to work until you have collective bargaining,
1:18:05
Speaker 1: until you have an entity where you have an actual
1:18:08
Speaker 1: entity you're negotiating with. I think, now, these are these
1:18:10
Speaker 1: are all ad hoc rules. Five year reveals, fine, but
1:18:14
Speaker 1: that's something that probably at this point, if you're going
1:18:16
Speaker 1: to be a professional league, and at this point college
1:18:20
Speaker 1: sports is a profession, well then you're going to have
1:18:24
Speaker 1: to have some labor law here, and the easiest way
1:18:28
Speaker 1: to make that happen is collective bargaining. And there's not
1:18:31
Speaker 1: a professional sports league that doesn't have it right at
1:18:34
Speaker 1: this point. I know there's probably some exceptions of a
1:18:36
Speaker 1: small sports league that doesn't. I'm not going to let's
1:18:38
Speaker 1: not get into that. But the point is of the
1:18:40
Speaker 1: major sport with the with the revenue that college football
1:18:42
Speaker 1: brings in, in college basketball, the amount of revenue they get in,
1:18:45
Speaker 1: there's no other pro sports entity that has that kind
1:18:47
Speaker 1: of revenue and doesn't have collective bargaining. I just kind
1:18:51
Speaker 1: of think that that's, you know, that's the answer here
1:18:55
Speaker 1: to these things should be negotiated, whether it's five years,
1:18:59
Speaker 1: whether they're meta red shirts, this is what collective bargaining,
1:19:02
Speaker 1: this is what a player's So now the hard part
1:19:04
Speaker 1: is figuring out is this going to be done by
1:19:06
Speaker 1: conference or you know, does it get done you know,
1:19:10
Speaker 1: as a larger entity. And I think that's unfortunately the
1:19:15
Speaker 1: mess here. But I think Congress trying to put a
1:19:18
Speaker 1: layer of law on here without a a sort of
1:19:22
Speaker 1: an agreed upon way for the players to speak, I
1:19:25
Speaker 1: just think you're just never going to You're never going
1:19:28
Speaker 1: to get anything passed. Congress is never going to be
1:19:31
Speaker 1: able to pass anything that has any legal teeth to it.
1:19:34
Speaker 1: And the only way around this is is to have
1:19:38
Speaker 1: the collective bargaining and have the direct the direct negotiations
1:19:42
Speaker 1: between the entities that run college sports and the players
1:19:45
Speaker 1: that participate in college sports, and Congress can pass some
1:19:49
Speaker 1: guardrails around it. You know, you can't do this, this,
1:19:51
Speaker 1: and this, but every other rule. This shouldn't be debated
1:19:55
Speaker 1: by Maria Cantwell, Richard Blumenthal, Roger Marshall and Cruz. You know,
1:20:00
Speaker 1: they shouldn't be deciding is it five years, six years,
1:20:03
Speaker 1: or you know when that should be done by the
1:20:05
Speaker 1: two entities with with with more skin in the game here. Hey,
1:20:18
Speaker 1: really enjoy the show. It's great. Pimpaine in for my
1:20:20
Speaker 1: windshield time. Okay, that's interesting. Curious about straight ticket voting
1:20:25
Speaker 1: since we have it here in Alabama, what do you
1:20:27
Speaker 1: think are the unintended consequences, especially when it comes down
1:20:30
Speaker 1: to down ballot candidate quality. Thanks Stephen Birmingham. PS. The
1:20:33
Speaker 1: as check jingle is my favorite. Good right? You know
1:20:37
Speaker 1: It's like I feel like I'm doing the Trump dance
1:20:39
Speaker 1: when I do it on that front, Look, straight ticket voting.
1:20:42
Speaker 1: Just I mean, it is, it is, it is small,
1:20:46
Speaker 1: it is undemocratic, right, it is designed you know, it
1:20:52
Speaker 1: was it was essentially the idea of political machines. And
1:20:57
Speaker 1: so you know anything that was the idea of a
1:20:59
Speaker 1: political machine is a bad idea to me, right, straight
1:21:04
Speaker 1: ticket voting, and I think it just ends up allowing
1:21:13
Speaker 1: parties to get cronies in, right, it allows that the
1:21:18
Speaker 1: unqualified grifter to get in and just offering it essentially
1:21:24
Speaker 1: allows people to hide behind others that maybe are unqualified
1:21:29
Speaker 1: and all this stuff. So I don't see any upside
1:21:31
Speaker 1: do it. I wish somebody would explain to me that
1:21:33
Speaker 1: there is other than to hold power and to have
1:21:38
Speaker 1: and to essentially use a tool of government to have
1:21:41
Speaker 1: more power over a democratic process. I don't see. I
1:21:44
Speaker 1: mean all I mean straight ticket voting. You know that
1:21:48
Speaker 1: that's for Putin, that's for Iran, that's for the undemocratic
1:21:53
Speaker 1: places on this earth. So I just sorry, straight ticket
1:21:57
Speaker 1: voting to me is couldn't you cannot come up with
1:22:00
Speaker 1: an the idea that you know, it's just it is
1:22:08
Speaker 1: to me, the definition of undemocratic and illiberal democracy. Nick
1:22:14
Speaker 1: in Michigan's second congressional district rites. Hey, there's a long
1:22:18
Speaker 1: bit of belief. Thank you for following my request there.
1:22:21
Speaker 1: There's been a long belief that a moderate Democrats are
1:22:23
Speaker 1: more electable. But I'm starting to wonder if that's overstated.
1:22:26
Speaker 1: Do you think the party may be overestimating the value
1:22:28
Speaker 1: of moderation. Good candidates who offer a clear break from
1:22:31
Speaker 1: the status quote generate the kind of energy needed to win.
1:22:34
Speaker 1: Thanks Nick. So it's and maybe you'll hear this as
1:22:40
Speaker 1: a familiar argument I've made before. You know, the word
1:22:42
Speaker 1: moderate does a lot. Sometimes it's everybody has their own
1:22:46
Speaker 1: definition of it. I'm looking for moderate in temperament, as
1:22:50
Speaker 1: I've always said, not necessarily moderate in politics, moderate in temperament.
1:22:54
Speaker 1: I'm looking for incrementalists who are moving forward and noteople
1:23:00
Speaker 1: that are looking back. And why do I say incrementalism,
1:23:02
Speaker 1: because look, I just you know, I'm a student of history,
1:23:05
Speaker 1: and anytime you try to take a leap forward, there's
1:23:07
Speaker 1: always a backlash. If you move things a little bit
1:23:10
Speaker 1: at a time, you can avoid backlash and bring people along.
1:23:14
Speaker 1: Social Security and the implementation of social security and the
1:23:16
Speaker 1: add ons to social Security over the years are the
1:23:19
Speaker 1: best example of that. Working of incrementalism working and suddenly
1:23:25
Speaker 1: building a massively important institution that has kept more seniors
1:23:31
Speaker 1: out of poverty than any other program we've ever come
1:23:33
Speaker 1: up with. So I start from there. You know, electability,
1:23:41
Speaker 1: whatever this means, is definitely sort of eye of the beholder, right,
1:23:45
Speaker 1: And so you can be electable and be very liberal.
1:23:51
Speaker 1: You can be electable and be very conservative. You can
1:23:54
Speaker 1: be electable and be very centrist. Like I don't, I
1:23:57
Speaker 1: don't believe the ideology. It's really to me, you know,
1:24:04
Speaker 1: it's rigidity that the voters will reject. And so to me,
1:24:11
Speaker 1: moderate is shorthand for are you a pluralist? Okay, As
1:24:16
Speaker 1: you know, I've been coming back to pluralism trying to
1:24:19
Speaker 1: make make a make an old political science term cool again,
1:24:23
Speaker 1: meaning you accept the premise that not, you know, not
1:24:25
Speaker 1: everybody's going to agree. We're going to try to figure
1:24:27
Speaker 1: out how to govern within that, within the confines of disagreement,
1:24:32
Speaker 1: and and accept that premise, and so then we're going
1:24:36
Speaker 1: to tailor our legislation so that we can minimize opposition.
1:24:40
Speaker 1: You can call that moderation. I can call that incrementalism.
1:24:44
Speaker 1: I can also you could you could call that status quo.
1:24:48
Speaker 1: I could call that progress, because do you actually want
1:24:51
Speaker 1: to make progress or do you just want someone to
1:24:53
Speaker 1: run on? So it's so I don't think. Look, was
1:25:00
Speaker 1: Barack Obama a moderate? Was he a centrist? No? He
1:25:03
Speaker 1: was moderate in temperament. Bill Clinton was moderate in temperament.
1:25:08
Speaker 1: George W. Bush was moderate in temperament. Ronald Reagan was
1:25:10
Speaker 1: super conservative but moderate in temperament. It is, you know,
1:25:15
Speaker 1: to me, the worst characteristic of Donald Trump is his temperament. Right,
1:25:19
Speaker 1: he just doesn't have the temperament to be president of the
1:25:21
Speaker 1: United States. It's his single you know. Yet there are
1:25:24
Speaker 1: a lot of other reasons he shouldn't be president. You
1:25:26
Speaker 1: could come up with grifter nature, all that stuff, but
1:25:29
Speaker 1: ultimately it's temperament. And so I just, you know, this
1:25:35
Speaker 1: is one of those where I sigh. I'm like, I'm
1:25:37
Speaker 1: not advocating for moderates who are merely mouthed. I'm just
1:25:42
Speaker 1: moderate in temperament. Look, I think mom, Donnie's moderate in temperament.
1:25:46
Speaker 1: I think he does a great job of moderating what
1:25:49
Speaker 1: are some very extreme physicians. And so, look, communication matters here,
1:25:57
Speaker 1: you know, do offering somebody a seat at the table
1:26:01
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you're a squish means you're a pluralist, and
1:26:05
Speaker 1: also means you're a pragmatist. Also means you accept the
1:26:07
Speaker 1: premise that everybody at the table isn't going to agree
1:26:10
Speaker 1: on the one solution. So I think it is well,
1:26:22
Speaker 1: let's put it this way. We haven't elected too many
1:26:24
Speaker 1: ideologues president of the United States, so I disagree with
1:26:27
Speaker 1: the premise that on overestimating the value of moderation. Right,
1:26:34
Speaker 1: the two most extreme presidents an ideology that we've ever
1:26:40
Speaker 1: elected that were ever nominated by the two major parties
1:26:43
Speaker 1: in the last say seventy years, or very Goldwater in
1:26:45
Speaker 1: sixty four and George mcgovernment of seventy two, and they
1:26:49
Speaker 1: got wiped out. One was an R got wiped out
1:26:52
Speaker 1: and one was a D that got wiped out within
1:26:54
Speaker 1: six years of each other, eight years of each other,
1:26:56
Speaker 1: an eight year span in between one of the closest
1:26:59
Speaker 1: elections we had twentieth century, by the way, and by
1:27:01
Speaker 1: the way, following the seventy two blow out, one of
1:27:04
Speaker 1: the other, two of the other, two of the closest
1:27:06
Speaker 1: elections we had in the twentieth century, and two of
1:27:08
Speaker 1: the biggest blowouts we had in the twentieth century right,
1:27:11
Speaker 1: And it was because we during the Cold War, we
1:27:14
Speaker 1: absolutely were rejecting political extremism, whether it came from the
1:27:17
Speaker 1: right in Goldwater or the left in mccovern. Now, some
1:27:23
Speaker 1: of you can say, but Trump's an ideolog. Trump's not
1:27:26
Speaker 1: an ideolog. Trump maybe enabling quite a few extremists within
1:27:31
Speaker 1: his political movement, but he sold himself as a transactionalist,
1:27:35
Speaker 1: as a deal maker. He went out of his way
1:27:37
Speaker 1: to try to not to look like, in fact, he
1:27:40
Speaker 1: is jealum. And that's his sorts of strength, the fact
1:27:43
Speaker 1: that he has no there's nothing that he is for
1:27:45
Speaker 1: other than himself, right, everything else is up for debate,
1:27:49
Speaker 1: up for sale, up for transaction, et cetera. But it
1:27:53
Speaker 1: is also why he didn't get defeated as as easily
1:28:01
Speaker 1: as Goldwater did. And so that's why I think, you know,
1:28:08
Speaker 1: I think what is electable is somebody who isn't going
1:28:13
Speaker 1: to divide? Are you? Can you be a uniter? Can
1:28:18
Speaker 1: you be moderate in temperament and being an attempt not
1:28:21
Speaker 1: to govern in a way that's intentionally divisive? Donald Trump
1:28:25
Speaker 1: tries to find issues on purpose that divide the country.
1:28:29
Speaker 1: Is that what you're going to do from the left,
1:28:31
Speaker 1: are you going to purposely right right now, the Democratic
1:28:34
Speaker 1: Socialists purposely want to divide the country over Israel and
1:28:37
Speaker 1: over Judaism. Right, if they were serious about pushing their agenda,
1:28:42
Speaker 1: they dropped the Israel stuff. Notice, you know, and that
1:28:46
Speaker 1: doesn't mean they wouldn't have the same form policy beliefs.
1:28:51
Speaker 1: But the fact that they've made that there litmus test,
1:28:53
Speaker 1: that becomes a divisive factor. Now it's good, you know,
1:28:57
Speaker 1: that is good primary politics. It's usually bad general election politics.
1:29:02
Speaker 1: So that'd be how I would try to explain the distinction.
1:29:07
Speaker 1: But maybe I don't do a good enough job. Maybe
1:29:09
Speaker 1: the voters don't. Certainly the leaders, you know, I think
1:29:13
Speaker 1: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton all understood the
1:29:16
Speaker 1: story of America is this sort of complicated things that
1:29:21
Speaker 1: you know, we're sort of we're a very diverse nation
1:29:26
Speaker 1: when it comes to ideology and our beliefs, and you
1:29:29
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, if you don't try to govern
1:29:32
Speaker 1: from the center out, even if you have conservative beliefs
1:29:35
Speaker 1: or liberal beliefs, you're not going to get anything done.
1:29:40
Speaker 1: That would be the other morning I have. I think
1:29:42
Speaker 1: that's why you see swing voters gravitate to supposedly the moderates,
1:29:46
Speaker 1: it's moderate and temperament, but what it really is is
1:29:48
Speaker 1: about are you am I going to have a seat
1:29:50
Speaker 1: at your table? And if the voter doesn't perceive they're
1:29:53
Speaker 1: going to see at the table, they don't think you're
1:29:55
Speaker 1: a moderate. And to me, that's one of my definitions there.
1:30:00
Speaker 1: I hope that helps, and I'd love to hear your
1:30:03
Speaker 1: response and retort by was you going to stick to Michigan?
1:30:06
Speaker 1: Cam Ka from Royal Oak Michigan Rights, Hey, appreciate your
1:30:09
Speaker 1: thoughtful independent approach. I believe many of our political challenges
1:30:12
Speaker 1: stem from structural issues, particularly an imbalance of power between
1:30:15
Speaker 1: the wealthy and the broader public. Do you think reforms
1:30:18
Speaker 1: aimed at redistributing power, like expanding representation, adjusting the courts,
1:30:21
Speaker 1: or limiting concentrated influencer necessary to meaningfully improve our system
1:30:25
Speaker 1: best re cards, Yes, Yes, A thousand times yes, And
1:30:30
Speaker 1: Cam I have a feeling I want to hope you
1:30:32
Speaker 1: know I answered your question in this episode, and I
1:30:34
Speaker 1: hope you really listen to the first part of this
1:30:36
Speaker 1: episode where I get through I mean, I think that
1:30:41
Speaker 1: structural reforms on our tax code could actually do more
1:30:45
Speaker 1: and accomplish more than sloganeering on the billionaire attacks. For instance,
1:30:50
Speaker 1: the representation issue right the fight inside the Democratic Party
1:30:55
Speaker 1: would be less. So if there was more, if we
1:30:57
Speaker 1: actually had expanded the table and put more seats at
1:31:00
Speaker 1: the table, where they would be more socialists, there'd be
1:31:03
Speaker 1: more nationalists, there would be more moderates, there'd be more liberals,
1:31:05
Speaker 1: there'd be more conservative there'd be more independents. There may
1:31:08
Speaker 1: be libertarians, there'd be more environmentalists, there'd be a little
1:31:12
Speaker 1: bit more of everything. But right now we've got a
1:31:15
Speaker 1: system where the two parties are afraid of different factions
1:31:18
Speaker 1: popping up. And if we expanded the size of the
1:31:21
Speaker 1: House of Representatives as the founders intended, then we'd actually
1:31:24
Speaker 1: have the more factions. The Madison argument is the more
1:31:27
Speaker 1: factions sitting at the table, actually the more one thing,
1:31:32
Speaker 1: the more honest a small de democratic process will be,
1:31:36
Speaker 1: the outcomes will be because nine times out of ten,
1:31:40
Speaker 1: people just want to know they've been heard, and unfortunately
1:31:44
Speaker 1: the system we have right now a lot it makes
1:31:46
Speaker 1: it where a lot of people, good chunk of these
1:31:48
Speaker 1: countries doesn't feel like they're being heard. And that to
1:31:51
Speaker 1: me is what we should be concerned about and I
1:31:54
Speaker 1: think it's why we're feeling as polarized as we do.
1:31:58
Speaker 1: Final question for this this Monday episode, Melaura and Bellingham,
1:32:03
Speaker 1: Massachusetts writes first time, but Malaura aspires to be a
1:32:07
Speaker 1: five timer. Well bring it up. We can't wait. I
1:32:12
Speaker 1: really appreciate your recent discussion on civics education and the
1:32:14
Speaker 1: idea of starting with the Constitution. Do you have any
1:32:16
Speaker 1: go to books, documentaries, or resources that offer a clear
1:32:20
Speaker 1: and accessible overview of the constitutional faithful listener, Malaura, and
1:32:24
Speaker 1: not beyond the Federalist papers. And I guess i'd like
1:32:28
Speaker 1: to make the Federalist papers cool again. The Federalist papers.
1:32:33
Speaker 1: Here's what I might suggest, And maybe you've given me
1:32:37
Speaker 1: a book idea, an updated Federalist papers, you know, basically
1:32:45
Speaker 1: taking all the Federalist papers and rewriting and rewriting that
1:32:49
Speaker 1: for the modern for the modern era. So it's the
1:32:52
Speaker 1: same argument, but instead of it talking about eighteen century America,
1:33:00
Speaker 1: we talk about twenty first century America. And so what
1:33:03
Speaker 1: I think what you have just made me realize is
1:33:08
Speaker 1: you know what we're missing, we're missing and how you're
1:33:15
Speaker 1: selling the Constitution in the twenty first century, because that's
1:33:18
Speaker 1: what the Federalist papers really were, right, it was a
1:33:22
Speaker 1: set of articles to just make the case for ratification
1:33:25
Speaker 1: of the Constitution. What if we just simply updated the
1:33:30
Speaker 1: case and didn't just republish the Federalist papers, but updated
1:33:35
Speaker 1: the Federalist papers so that people understood the tools how
1:33:40
Speaker 1: the Constitution works, the tools that are at their disposal
1:33:43
Speaker 1: if they choose to use them. So, I think what
1:33:48
Speaker 1: you're what I'm saying is there's not a good book
1:33:50
Speaker 1: that does exactly what I'm describing, and maybe sort of
1:33:56
Speaker 1: a citizen's guide to how to make the Constitution and
1:34:00
Speaker 1: great again. Maybe it ought to be a book that
1:34:04
Speaker 1: myself and maybe another historian friend of mine ought to
1:34:10
Speaker 1: become the authors of. Anyway, it doesn't have to be me.
1:34:15
Speaker 1: Maybe my friend Lindsay Shravinsky or at the George Washington Library.
1:34:20
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a good idea for her too. But either way,
1:34:23
Speaker 1: you've Melaura, that's a very it's a pretty impressive first
1:34:27
Speaker 1: question because she suddenly got me thinking about a book
1:34:30
Speaker 1: proposal with it all right? With that, I will put
1:34:35
Speaker 1: a pen in this one. Since last we spoke, then,
1:34:40
Speaker 1: that's have had a little bit of a it's been
1:34:42
Speaker 1: a little bit of a slump got me a little
1:34:45
Speaker 1: little bit nervous. Here. The bullpen is the bullpen, and
1:34:50
Speaker 1: it turns out if we're not scoring runs, we don't
1:34:53
Speaker 1: have the bullpen to win three to two games, two
1:34:56
Speaker 1: to one games, four to three games. That it's a
1:35:00
Speaker 1: little distressing. Of course, the big question is will then
1:35:04
Speaker 1: be buyers at the deadline and actually try to make
1:35:06
Speaker 1: a little run. All I would ask is, let's start
1:35:09
Speaker 1: to give our young guys a chance at competitive baseball. So,
1:35:13
Speaker 1: mister Lerner, let's spend a couple of bucks. Let's do it.
1:35:17
Speaker 1: Let's go get a couple of arms in the bullpen.
1:35:19
Speaker 1: Let's improve it. Let's go find a Let's go find
1:35:22
Speaker 1: somebody else we can rely on in that bullpen, and
1:35:25
Speaker 1: let's see what Let's see what's possible. Let's see what's
1:35:29
Speaker 1: possible on that front. And I have to say I
1:35:36
Speaker 1: am getting sucked into the World Cup. I know I'm
1:35:39
Speaker 1: not going to tell you the world's biggest soccer fan,
1:35:43
Speaker 1: but let's just say I gravitate towards the teams that
1:35:47
Speaker 1: like to press and like to keep going, and I
1:35:50
Speaker 1: do enjoy the aggressiveness of the American team. So man,
1:35:54
Speaker 1: let's let it ride. You know, I don't know why
1:35:59
Speaker 1: we have to face both Bosnia and Herzegovania, but we're
1:36:01
Speaker 1: gonna be and we're gonna beat both of them in
1:36:04
Speaker 1: our next match. I'm convinced of it. All right. With that,
1:36:08
Speaker 1: I will see you for the Thursday episode, and I
1:36:12
Speaker 1: hopefully we'll see some of you with our live election
1:36:15
Speaker 1: night coverage of the Colorado Primary. Tuesday night coverage will
1:36:19
Speaker 1: begin at nine pm Eastern m