Morning Joe - Morning Joe 6/23/23

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

New poll shows majority of voters disapprove of Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade

The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber. The size of the debris field is consistent with that implosion in the water column. Our worst fears confirmed. All five people, including a 19-year-old on board a Titanic tourist submersible, died while diving toward the ship's wreckage. It comes as we're learning the U.S. Navy may have actually picked up the implosion sounds on its underwater microphones. Meanwhile, there are more prominent voices criticizing the vessel, pointing out its fatal flaws. We'll go through all of it.

Also ahead, we're going to go through all of it. Yeah. Also ahead, we're going to go through Indian Prime Minister Modi's state visit and the White House and the impact it could have on U.S. relations with other world powers. Plus, two outspoken far-right Republicans trying to rewrite history on Capitol Hill will explain. And is it possible? And tomorrow marks the one year since the overturning of Roe. We'll take a look at new polling on the Supreme Court's decision. Good morning and welcome to Morning Joe. It is Friday, June 23rd. Good to have you with us. Also with us, we have the host of Way Too Early and White House bureau chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire, NBC News national affairs analyst John Heilman and former White House press secretary now an MSNBC host Jen Psaki is with us.

Also with us, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson and Pulitzer Prize winning historian John Meacham. We're going to be talking about quite a few things that are coming up in the coming weeks and some recent developments on Donald Trump and the legal problems he continues to spiral into, including, I think, what will end up being the most serious of all of them. But first, I just I just Jen Psaki had spent one year tomorrow since Dobbs, the Dobbs decision was was released. The Supreme Court says as as as John as the Johns were talking, John Meacham and and Jonathan Lemire were talking about earlier in way too early approval for the Supreme Court has plummeted to its lowest point ever. Disapproval has skyrocketed to its highest point ever.

Only 36 percent of Americans supported the decision. Sixty one percent opposed it. And if you're sitting there going, oh, my God, who could have ever seen this coming? Well, anybody that had actually been looking at polls over the past 20, 30 years would know that hardly ever. And I'm serious. It is. We've heard about overturning Roe, overturning Roe. There's always been only about one third of Americans that have supported the overturning of Roe. This has happened. It's had horrific consequences for women, for their health. We hear one horror story after another. I will say, though, this is

a political program for the most part. We try to tell people what's coming. The politics, though, just a political earthquake in a way I think very few could have imagined. Just the scale that that the tremors would be felt all the way to Wisconsin, Kentucky, Kansas and in deep red states. That's exactly right, Joe. And if you look at the recent polling from the NBC poll, you have 80 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 49 who who oppose the overturning of Roe. You have 60 percent of independents. You have 30 percent, about one third of Republicans. Those are earth shattering numbers. And in many ways, well, as you said, for a long time, there has been greater support for keeping abortion access in place than than getting rid of it. This has awakened women, men and women, independents, people of all political stripes across the country.

We saw that in the midterm elections. And it looks to be that that enthusiasm, that anger, that passion has not subsided as we're seeing these fights happen state to state. So as we mark one year tomorrow, it's just a reminder of kind of how the political electorate has also been awakened by not wanting their rights to be taken away. Yeah, and their rights. Let's just focus on that, because I think while the concept on the far right might be, OK, we have prevented the right to an abortion. What they've really done is overturned 50 years of women's health. And anybody, whether they're a Republican or a Democrat, whether they're

a Christian, whatever they call themselves and whatever they base their values around, anyone who has had a baby or knows someone who has gone through a pregnancy knows this isn't just about abortion. This is about women's health and the right to health care has been taken away for women across the country. And we're seeing it in real time. Well, and you know, the thing is, it's not John Heilman. It's not just that a 50 year right has been taken away. It's what Republicans have done with this moment. They've taken a situation that would have been dangerous for them politically, and they've made it exponentially worse with radical viewpoints that cause 10-year-old girls who have been raped to flee their state. Candidates in Michigan who

end up losing in a landslide saying that a 14- 14 year old girl being raped by her uncle is a perfect reason to have laws that would have the state compel her to have a forced birth. And you can go down the line time and again. They've made one egregious decision after another. You could look at Wisconsin keeping in place a total ban from 1849. I mean, let's be very clear here. The majority of Americans support an abortion ban at 15, 16, 17 weeks. If you look at the polling, they want abortion laws much like you see in Europe, in France and in other European countries. But right now, the Democrats, Democrats are getting free reign on this issue to point to the extremism of the Republicans and not

have to answer many questions themselves because the Republicans support such extreme bans. And it's as it was, as I said before, it's crushing them in Wisconsin judicial races. It's crushing them in Kansas. It's crushing them in Kentucky, in a lot of red states. Right. You know, Joe, it's like the thing that was so it's been so hard to get a lot of people on the right to understand and that will still make people scream when you say it is that the regime under Roe v. Wade, the system that it installed, was a compromise. It was not a system that allowed for abortion on demand at any point in a pregnancy. It allowed for laws that restricted abortion in various ways.

The trimester system that Harry Blackmun created in that ruling was itself a political compromise. It said we can restrict abortions to a limited degree in that ruling was itself a political compromise. It said, we're not going to have abortions. We can restrict abortions to a limited degree in that third trimester. And it also meant that you would not have a full overturning of abortion. You couldn't outlaw abortion. So it's like that itself was a compromise. And the right, for political reasons, kind of reinterpreted that, argued in a different way, and said that Roe v. Wade was somehow allowed abortion on demand. It never did. And so what had been a stable political compromise built on top of a Supreme Court precedent that granted a certain right, that was taken down by this decision.

And then Republicans had a choice because what the ruling did was it threw this back into the political arena. And I would say, you know, a savvy political operator looking down from on high when I said to Republicans, hey guys, go slow here. This has never happened before. A fundamental right has never been taken away before in the history of the court.

And there was a stable compromise that was in place for 50 years. If you mess around with this and try to claim ultimate victory and grab all the ground you can and have a power grab, there's going to be a backlash. And it was predictable in that sense. You couldn't predict how much energy it would unleash on the part of women who were standing up for their health and their rights. But you could have predicted the backlash. And Republicans did exactly the dumbest thing they could possibly have done in a lot of these states, which was, Joe, all the things you cited.

Do things that would be easy to campaign against because they were so outrageously radical. And that's why you look at polling even now. I discount polling. I don't care who it's positive for or negative for. I discount polling just like we discounted polling before the 22 election when everybody was talking about a red wave. And abortion was only being cited by 5% of the electorate as being important to them. We didn't believe it at the time. And everybody around this table, well, we were right.

And it's the same thing now. There may be people that have problems with this issue or that issue with Joe Biden or the Democrats. As we get closer and closer to the elections, it's going to become more in focus. And all the things that everybody from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to Ann Coulter have warned Republicans about, that they've got to get smart on abortion or else you're going to keep losing elections. Well, they aren't getting smart on abortion and the bad things. I've got to say, and I'm going to talk to John Meacham later about this. The United States Supreme Court in a political crisis, unlike any political crisis it's been in, at least in my lifetime, even after the 2000 recount, their approval ratings recovered very quickly after that. And we're respected and trusted again.

But you look at just how rigged the process has been. And I don't want to go through all the things that happened in the United States Senate with Merrick Garland and others. You look at the billions of dollars that people are pouring in now to influence this. You look at the will of the people, like 65, 70 percent of Americans being ignored. And overturning a 50 year precedent. Unfortunately, they have destroyed the credibility of the court the far right has. And my prediction is, it's coming, there is going to be reform in the judicial branch. And I don't know what that reform looks like, but I think it's going to start with the United States Supreme Court Court because their approval rating is going to just keep going down as it gets more and more politicized.

And let's face it, bought off by an element that has billions of dollars and are using billions of dollars to buy with the Supreme Court right now, that that's just running roughshod over the ethics, just basic ethical considerations. So, again, they're doing this to themselves. And when there's reform and when people talk about a new Supreme Court that that's going to be less political and more representative of the country, they can scream and yell all they want. It's going to be their fault. It won't be doing it. It's all their own doing. It won't be court packing. It's not going to be FDR court packing. This is going to be, I predict, a bipartisan group of people that are going to have to come together and say, how do we reform this court and take the vicious politics and the billions and billions of dollars now that the Federalist Society has to twist and distort this process? Again, everybody's free to do what they want to do.

But the extremism, well, they've been victims of, they would say, their own success. And they're going to pay for it, I think, politically, because any advances they've made are going to be undermined by reforms needed to take politics out of the process. We're going to have a lot more on this issue, the issue of abortion, later on in the show, what's being done. But we have other politics to get to and also legal news. While much of the attention this month has been around Donald Trump's indictment in the classified documents case, there are also new developments in special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the former president for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Yesterday, a high ranking 2020 Trump 2020 campaign official testified before a federal grand jury in the probe. Former deputy director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign, Gary Michael Brown, was seen entering a Washington, D.C. courthouse where a grand jury

has been hearing testimony about efforts to stop the peaceful transition of power to President Joe Biden. Last year, the House subcommittee investigating the attack subpoenaed Brown after finding, quote, credible evidence that he played a key role in the so-called fake electors scheme. That evidence included this text message where Brown allegedly bragged about being the one to hand deliver the alternate slate to Congress. Both Brown and the special counsel's office declined to comment on the appearance yesterday. I would ask you, John Meacham, to put this into historical perspective. But there is no historical perspective. We have a president who's actually been indicted for hush money payoffs. You've got a president who's been indicted for stealing nuclear secrets.

You have a president being indicted for stealing secrets on invading Iran. You've got a president indicted for stealing other military secrets and highly classified documents. You have a president indicted for obstruction of justice. And now you have a president. We were talking about the Supreme Court. I mean, the Supreme Court, who, again, out of control, running roughshod over the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans. And now we have this president, again, unprecedented.

But here we are moving towards, I believe, I think the most serious charges and the one that I think historians are going to be grappling with long after we are all gone, that is a president charged with conspiracy to commit sedition against the United States of America. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's you're right. Historians will be wrestling with it. And as as we all do all the time. I think citizens have to wrestle with it now, right? It's so central. And I just really believe that we have a pretty clear choice in this political season. We can choose a constitutionalist, a party that has been pretty faithful to the Constitution,

which is the party of the incumbent president. Or we can favor a party that has been shockingly but persistently supportive of a insurrectionist or a seditionist. That's not a sentence we would have said about Eisenhower and Stevenson, right? That was not something that a lot of people grew up with. But it's pretty vital. And you have to ask the question, is any policy so important that you would want to favor someone that you think is a vehicle for that policy, even if they don't and have self-evidently tried to trash the Constitution of the United States? And we could go on, but that's really kind of it. You know, it's pretty basic.

Do you want a constitutionalist or do you want an insurrectionist? And, you know, then we get into the but, but, but taxes and judges. If we don't have a constitution, taxes and judges aren't going to matter at all. That that that that's where we are remarkably right now. And again, we could we could go on. I think it's a fundamental question. And I don't it's people often say, you know, it's simple. It's not simple, but it is straightforward. That's the choice before the country. You know, it's so fascinating. You know, people come up to go, you know, you you used to be a conservative. Are you a liberal now? And I go, I say, well, what would you like to talk about?

And we finished talking about my issues ago. You're pretty conservative. I go, yes, please, please. You need to frame this correctly. And I'm dead serious about this. It's people who support democracy, constitutional democracy versus people who are anti-democracy, who are against constitutional norms, who are willing to throw constitutional norms out the window for Donald Trump, who are willing to just turn a blind eye to January 6th insurrection because of Donald Trump,

who are willing to say right now, a speaker of the House, that it's OK that Donald Trump stole nuclear secrets. I mean, this is democracy versus anti-democracy. I'm going to say, one of the things that really has surprised me over the past several years, I've been bitterly disappointed by friends who were fellow conservatives who've completely crumbled and are now part of the anti-democracy forces. And they are. You can judge them, you know, not just by their words, but more importantly, judge them by their words, but more importantly, judge them by their deeds. Judge them if they want to hold Donald Trump accountable. Now,

when Donald Trump, you take Lindsey Graham. I came in in 1994 with Lindsey Graham. I always considered Lindsey to be a friend of mine. You know, Lindsey Graham, he supported Donald Trump through Donald Trump saying he wanted his attorney general to arrest Joe Biden and Joe Biden's family two weeks before the election, supported him through all of that, supported him through the first impeachment where he held up money and defensive weapons to Ukraine, trying to get dirt on a political opponent. And then on January the 6th, January the 7th, he opposed him. And then he was chased down a national airport by three people and a hound dog.

And suddenly he went back to supporting the anti-democracy candidate. I think it's more than that. There are other. No, no. He's knowing Donald Trump. He's scared. No, it's not. Listen, everybody always says it's more than that. It's not. It's not more than that. They're not scared of Donald Trump. They're scared of

their base. They're scared to be leaders. They're scared to stand up in a town hall meeting and tell people something that people may not want to hear. Keep their head down and continue telling them that they'll be surprised if they do that that what happens, but they never take that chance because they're such cowards. But it's democracy versus anti-democracy. I've got to say, Jonathan Lemire, I've also been surprised at some of the people who I would have thought would have gone along with a crowd

who have stood up and been stalwarts, even though they're conservatives, standing for democracy and standing against their old party. Because as John Meacham said, we really don't give a damn about what your tax policy is and what judges you're going to appoint if you don't support our constitutional republic. Yeah, there have been some Republicans who have stood up to

Donald Trump. Certainly, we know, as we've noted on the show, a lot of the judiciary held against Donald Trump's efforts in 2020 to overturn that election. We are seeing now the process play out. And this testimony here is a reminder that Jack Smith can do two things at once. Yes, the attention has been on those classified documents. We've even got a court date now for the middle of August, even though that may slide some. But the investigation of January 6th is continuing. And Joe, I think you've heard the same, where there's been a growing belief that the tenor of that investigation has changed. People near it were hearing things about it. People in the Trump orbit who for a while were like, that's probably not going to happen. That's too complicated. They won't bring charges there. Now there's a growing belief that it just

may. So Eugene, with that as the backdrop here, we know we talked about how abortion was such a significant issue in the 2022 midterms. Another one was the idea of democracy, defending democracy. And it seems like this time around, especially if Trump, even with all the legal morass, is the name atop the Republican ticket, democracy will have never been more on the ballot. I think that's absolutely right. And that was that was the other sleeper issue in the last election. I mean, and every you know, some people said, yes, abortion could be important. I don't think a lot of cynics or any cynics saw democracy as being really front most in people's minds. But it but it was. And I and I hope it still is. I mean, me, what one person can do, what Donald Trump was able to do. And obviously there were forces building up in the Republican Party.

The party was changing. There's a sense in which Trump was a symptom and not a cause of the disease. But he was the vector. He was the person who allowed all these anti-democratic forces in the Republican Party, these authoritarian forces, you could call them these fascist forces, to find expression and to emerge. And you see the result. And the rest of the party is just going along with it.

It is amazing. And there has to be a reckoning, an electoral reckoning, a reckoning at the ballot box, a rejection of where Donald Trump has taken one of our two great political parties. Because it's, you know, I can't say it's never been this bad. We did have a civil war. Not to get on Meacham's turf, but the 1876 Hayes-Tilden election, that was really bad. But this is that level crisis, I believe.

You want to talk about crises. I've been at dinner parties with John Meacham where he would talk the entire night about that election. Hayes and Tilden. Hayes and Tilden. Man, quite a needle drop there, Eugene. At 23 after six in the morning he's still well can i just say i didn't bring it up let me just say robinson brought it up of course and he'll be talking about tilden and i'll be like mika let's get out of here

how do we get out of here? And John, you just keep on keeping on, don't you? All right. John, go ahead. We're about to get bored. Go ahead. Look, if you can't get to John Tyler by coffee, you just shouldn't go out. This is why Mitchum is never welcome at my house for dinner.

Right here. Insight. That's the central insight. Can I just say what my colleague and my friend just said is just absolutely important. It's very straightforward. The way to do it is beat them. Beat them at the ballot box.

Everything that we've talked about today. All men act on incentive. What is the incentive of political actors? Power. What is the source of power in a democracy? The vote. What is the only thing they're going to pay attention to?

Defeat. That's what this is. Exactly. And it may take, it may take, I mean, they've lost seven years in a row. It may take even more than that,

but John's exactly right. The way the way to stop it is by winning elections, one election after another election after another. I've got to say, though, you know, we've heard John Heilman for some time that that from from Trump's people, it's sort of the Obi-Wan Kenobi defense. Strike him down and he will only get stronger. Except that's just not the case here. As Chris Christie said, it doesn't matter if you get an indictment. It doesn't matter. It's never good for you. And it's something Donald Trump's realizing. We've got a porn star payoff indictment.

We've got an indictment for stealing nuclear secrets. We've got an indictment for stealing other military secrets. We probably have an indictment coming for sedition against the United States government. We've got in Georgia, we've got an indictment coming for his attempts to steal an election. And, you know, of course, I think the one that he may be even more concerned about is the possible New Jersey case coming for him illegally distributing classified documentation. That's going to be a heavy burden for even Donald Trump to carry into the fall. I mean, first of all, just, you know, Joe, we've run for president. It's a it's a pretty time consuming job.

And it's a you know, it's a it's a, you know, a combination meat grinder, flash incinerator job where you're like working 24 hours a day. You've got to work really hard. It's emotionally draining, physically draining. If you add a giant distraction like having to be embroiled in various legal threats and ones that whatever Trump says that he takes seriously, we know from Donald Trump's history that he's terrified at the prospect of incarceration. He does not, as any normal person would be, but he's going to be, these legal problems mount that are not political problems.

It's not like impeachment, where it's a political process. It's a thing where you could spend time in jail. You could lose your liberty in the last years of your life. He will be distracted. He will be consumed. He is a man who's getting older.

He's slowing down. There's no question about any of these things. No one wants to run for president with any kind of distraction, let alone this kind of distraction. It's a huge problem for him in that sense. And it's also obviously contributing to a thing that all savvy Republican analysts who spend time in Republican focus groups have detected over the course of the last couple of years, which is when you challenge the Obi-Wan Kenobi thing, if you strike Trump down, there will be people who rally around him. He has a loyal following in the Republican base. They all rally around him. But a larger subset of Republicans are people who thought that Trump was a successful president, but also are sick of losing and worry about the prospect of a Donald Trump who's been hobbled by indictments, by charges, by all of these things that that will make him even more unelectable,

even more likely to lose than he was in 2020. And those people are like, you know, ready. They are looking for a reason to give him the gold watch, a pat on the back, say, Mr. President, you made America great again. Thank you very much. Have a great time in Mar-a-Lago. I'll see you on the 19th hole. They want, they're looking for that. And this is, this is the thing that's going to start to wear at him is that there are going to be voters who are like, I love the guy, but we can do better against Joe Biden than this. That's the problem that these things just gradually are going to pile up on his back politically. And it's a huge problem as he goes forward. And, you know, John's talking about

distractions that Donald Trump has. Well, you know, somebody that supported him all along, sometimes to ridiculous levels, Jonathan Turley. Oh, right, on Fox, yeah. He brought the point home. Yeah. You look at the dozens of indictments he already has against him. Who knows how many more dozens of indictments will be coming in the coming months. Yeah.

One, if one of them stick, if just one of them stick, as Turley said, that's a life sentence for Donald Trump. And that's what he's carrying around every day as well. That's what he's carrying. I mean, do you think I mean, maybe there'll be jury nullification. Who knows? But will there really be jury nullification for, let's say, the one count of stealing nuclear secrets? Yeah, one count. Will it be just one count? Is, in effect, a life sentence for him? And that and also, I think Donald Trump probably hasn't processed, can't even imagine the shock he's feeling

because every step of the way, these folks on the right, many leaders and those in the media have stood by him through the most ridiculous moments where he would admit to something and they would somehow talk. This one, you saw legal experts on the right and the left, all legal experts saying, whoa, OK, this one's this one's bad. I want nothing to do with this one. This is a problem. We do have one more story pertaining to the lies pushed by some extreme Republicans about the 2020 election. Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Carrie Lake became ensnared in another lawsuit yesterday. Yesterday, Maricopa County recorder Stephen Riker is suing Lake for def of thousands of phony ballots and meddling with how the ballots were printed. By the way, this is, again, another example of gravity returning. We've been watching this for seven, eight years saying, how are all these people getting away with doing this?

How are they getting away with lying about elections? How are they getting away with with lying about what happened at Sandy Hook? How are they getting away with lying about voting machines? How are they getting away with lying about about people who are counting votes? How are they lying, whether it's in Georgia or Arizona? And it ends up they're not getting away with it. It ends up gravity is returning and people are paying for their misdeeds, for putting other people's lives in danger like this poor guy. Yeah.

Who, again, just like the ballot counters in Georgia, we're just trying to serve the country. Now, and I remember when we ran into her and she was so insistent that she won the election and kept saying it over and over and over again. According to the Associated Press, Riker is seeking monetary damages and always wants a court order to declare Lake's statements false and in order to get Lake to remove her claims from social media. Jen Psaki, this is a candidate who really kind of modeled herself after the Trump blueprint. Just lies, lies, lies, Just ram through it all with lies

and get people to believe you with your charisma. That's right. And I remember all of us talking about this probably a year ago and saying things like, and I probably said this,

she's a pretty effective communicator. She was connecting with people. She was charismatic. But as Joe just said, it's all coming back down. Gravity is pulling this all back down to planet Earth here, because what it is showing is that even the best snake oil salesmen or women out there can be held accountable by voters, by the law, by the basic values of the country. And I feel like there was a little bit of uncertainty about where the public was going to be on that

before the midterm elections and the midterm elections were, in my view, a kind of a turning point where we saw people stand up for democracy and stand up for the values of the country. But Carrie Lake is in such a different place June of 2023 than I think many people anticipated she would be in June of 2022. And that is a good thing for the country. You know, Jean, this is what I don't understand. This is a tragedy of it all. And I know of what I speak. I served, you know, I was the first Republican elected in my district since Reconstruction. Elected easily. And I kind of know what Republican electorate and what other people want.

You take somebody like Carrie Lake in Arizona. Carrie Lake didn't have to go the direction she went because she was charismatic, because she had those skills. If she had been a mainstream Republican, she could have struck out at liberals, at high taxes, at high regulation. She could have been a champion of small business owners, of entrepreneurs. She could have been a champion of parents. She could have criticized schools for being shut down too long during covid. She could have struck out against some of these things DeSantis is striking out against. She would have gotten elected governor. She would have stayed there for a very long time. I remember looking at the guy who lost in North Carolina, Cawthorn, who just would say the craziest things.

And I looked at his district one time and all he had to say is less taxes, less spending, more freedom. And he would have been in that seat forever. I don't understand. They go to extremes and politically they blow themselves up. And Kerry Lake's a perfect example of that, again, because an extraordinarily talented communicator, everybody that went out and followed her on the campaign, whether it was

Jen, whether it was Jen Palmieri, John Hyland, they all came back and said, she is really good communicating to people. She works hard. She goes everywhere. I don't get it. I just don't get it. I don't I don't get her either, because as you said, she's very talented. She's, you know, it's just as as a politician, she has the talent. She has the charisma. And I really don't get her persistence in this. Right. So she so she ran as super mega and, you know, joined at the hip with Trump. And so she lost. But she persists.

She keeps she keeps at it as if beating her head against that wall is somehow going to change things, and all it's going to do is hurt her more. So I think she is foreclosing a political future for herself that she might have had, and some would argue she should have had. I mean, she ought to be a good candidate for that state. She really, really should be. The state is changing, but it would still elect a mainstream republican and and as you said she could govern her as long as she wanted

but uh but i think it just ain't happening now it's not happening for her she goes further and further away from reality and the message i'm trying to send to anybody who may be watching here is Carrie Lake, two roads divided, right? Carrie Lake could have, after she lost the governor's race, I don't like it. I'm upset about it. There's some things that really bothered me. You know what? I'm going to, I'm going to concede. I wish my opponent the best of luck. I love Arizona that much. And I'm here to help her any way I can. She steps off the stage. And at that moment, she begins running for the United States Senate, a race that's coming up this year. And she would have been man. She would have been the favorite far and away the favorite.

But she should have to get right with like the McCain people who she insulted and the other people. I'll say it again to anybody who's listening. This is a game of addition. It's not a game of subtraction. That worked for Donald Trump on one fall day in 2016. It's never going to work again. One fall day. Stop emulating him.

Why don't you emulate somebody like, I don't know, Ronald Reagan? He won 49 states. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be up all night seeing whether I won or lost. I've never done it before. I like knowing by eight o'clock that it's a landslide. You should too. Yeah. And stop the nonsense. Play big. Play the long game. Be pro-democracy. Just a thought. Just a thought. John Meacham, thank you so much for being on this Friday morning. John and I are going to you so much for being on this Friday morning.

John and I are going to have a podcast on the election of 1876. Oh my God, please don't. All five people aboard the missing Titan submersible are believed to be dead after debris discovered near the Titanic was found to be consistent with a catastrophic implosion, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Part of the Titan's pressure chamber, along with other pieces, were found by a remote-operated vehicle about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic. The announcement came just hours after experts predicted the Titan's air supply had likely run out. A senior U.S. Navy official tells NBC News a sound consistent with an implosion was heard on Sunday shortly after the submersible lost communication.

However, that sound was not definitive, the official said. It's also not known if officials will be able to recover any remains or if an investigation into the vessel's failure will be conducted. Meanwhile, the Oscar-winning director of Titanic and submersibles expert James Cameron is speaking out after these tragic developments of the Titan. Cameron, who has made 33 dives to the Titanic's wreckage and has designed vessels that can dive to depths three times deeper, described the carbon fiber construction of the Titan as fundamentally flawed. He also said that many people in the deep diving community were very concerned about this sub. Cameron said that an implosion in the deep sea happens when the crushing pressures of the abyss cause a hollow object to collapse violently inward. If the object is big enough to hold five people, it's going to be an extremely violent event, like 10 cases of dynamite going off.

The director noted he always dove with a two-sub system in which another sub is underwater at the same time in case of emergency. We'll be following this. We have also an update for you to a story we brought you yesterday. An unlikely crew is credited with saving dozens of migrants after their boat capsized last week. As many as 750 people were reportedly on the boat that sank last week off the southern coast of Greece. It is one of the deadliest shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea in decades. The New York Times reports the superyacht named Mayan Queen 4 was about four nautical miles away when it heard the distress call from the doomed ship. Twenty minutes later, at around three in the morning, in the pitch black, the one hundred and seventy five million dollar yacht owned by the family of a Mexican silver magnate was at the scene.

Over a few hours, the crew was able to rescue 100 Pakistani, Syrian and Palestinian migrants. Incredible. And the special prosecution overseeing the 2021 fatal shooting on the set of the movie Rust, has filed a new charge against the film's armorer. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was previously charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Helena Hutchins, is now being charged with tampering with evidence. According to court filings, Gutierrez-Reed gave drugs to another person so that she wouldn't be caught with them on set. A lawyer for Gutierrez-Reed called the new charge shocking. Her attorneys last month filed a motion to dismiss her case, claiming she had no idea how live rounds ended up in the gun. Two charges of involuntary manslaughter against actor Alec Baldwin,

who was holding the gun when it fired, were dropped in April. We've seen the hearing with John Durham, Republicans trying to force a vote to impeach Biden, the vote to censure Congressman Adam Schiff. You were pretty fired up on the House floor during that vote or during the debate around the vote. During that, you said Republicans have turned the House, quote, into a puppet show. You went on to say the puppeteer is Donald Trump. Do you anticipate that Donald Trump is going to keep driving the agenda of the Republican-led House? It appears so. Because the fact is that when we had this vote, was it a week ago?

It lost the vote to censure Adam Schiff. The word is, and I don't know because I'm less forced to speak about what goes on among the Republicans, but the word is that the Donald Trump forces weighed in and now the vote changed. They took they changed it a bit, but the vote changed because they're protecting the. Unpatriotic, unscrupulous behavior of Donald Trump. More from this interview that you had with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi this Sunday on your show, Jen. But give us a sense of what more we can expect. I think this week you always see, and she would tell me that, you know, her faith often applies to how she governs and how she works with people. And you also hear like motherhood in there as she was talking to

Republicans this week and saying, you look miserable. Just stop it. You know, I mean, and they do. These people, I mean, now they're working to try and erase Donald Trump's impeachments and rewrite history. I mean, where does this go from here? What were her thoughts on that? Well, I mean, Mika, I think all of those things you just captured are exactly what we talked about in the interview and also her real respect for the institution of the House of Representatives. I mean, remember, John Boehner got emotional at her portrait unveiling because of his respect for her as Speaker of the House.

And she's somebody who is looking at what happened this past week and thinking this is not what the public elected us to do. This is also not what the House of Representatives is supposed to be doing. This is a chamber where history has been made time and time again. You can have disagreements about policy issues, but let's respect the role that we're trying to play here. So we talked about that. We also talked about, of course, the impact of the Dobbs decision one year later and the role she has played in advocating for health care access and abortion access over decades, as well as Donald Trump and her deep concerns as a former member of the Intelligence Committee, a former ranking member

about those specifics of those documents and what Donald Trump did in putting our national security at risk. So a very wide ranging interview. We're going to use a lot of it on the show on Sunday. I love it. Can't wait. Noon Eastern Jen Psaki's show. Gene Robinson. So what are you looking at today? And as we head into the weekend? Well, today, first thing I'm going to do is is see what the Supreme Court has in store for us. Of course, that big decision on affirmative action is still hanging out there. You know, are they going to release it on a Friday? We'll see. I think, you know, we all anticipate which direction that will go.

And I think it would be really bad. I think they are likely to do away with affirmative action. But we'll see. We'll see. I thought they were likely to rule the other way on voting rights. So, you know, they surprised me there, and maybe they'll surprise me again. And then I'm just, you know, drinking from the fire hose of news, and particularly waiting for the next developments, the next revelations, in the multiple investigations of Donald Trump as the grand jury meeting today.

Who's who? Who's going to show up? You know, we never know. But this is this is our this is our life and our life for the next for the foreseeable future. Gene Robinson, thank you very much. Have a wonderful weekend.