No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - How to keep the Biden coalition in place

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

Brian offers pushback to anyone looking to punish Joe Biden at the ballot box. And he interviews voting rights reporter Ari Berman about the national popular vote interstate compact and whether it can be enacted, and the ways in which Republicans have come to rely on minority rule.Pre-order Shameless: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/shamelessShop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about the pushback to anyone looking to punish Joe Biden at the ballot box. And I interview voting rights reporter Ari Berman about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and whether it can be enacted and the ways in which Republicans have come to rely on minority rule. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen and you're listening to No Lie. So there's been a lot of commentary, mostly from young people and progressives, about how they're not going to vote for Joe Biden because they don't believe that he earned their vote, mostly as a result of Israel Gaza or inflate. or housing, the reasons differ, but generally fall into that category. And I've seen a lot of other Democrats lose their minds as the result of that because, well, because the country is teetering on the brink of autocracy, and if the coalition that defeated Trump in 2020 falls apart before 2024, then so does our democracy.

And I know a lot of you listening have dealt with the same thing, and it can be tough to navigate because, like, as a general societal norm, it's tough to persuade someone by yelling at them or criticizing them. So here's my take on this issue. actually pretty simple. This election is not about punishing Joe Biden. It is about us and the future we want. I want to live in a country that will protect abortion rights and contraception rights and IVF. That's about me. That's what I want for myself and my family. Joe Biden is the better vehicle to get me there. I want to live in a country that takes climate change seriously

and will take efforts to combat it and wind down our alliance on fossil fuels. That's about me. That's what I want for the future of humanity. Joe Biden is the better vehicle to get me there. I want to live in a country where the rich pay their fair share, and those in the middle and the bottom get the support they need to continue living their lives with dignity. That's about me. That's what I want for working-class Americans. Joe Biden is the better vehicle to get me there. I want to live in a country where DACA recipients aren't deported.

Joe Biden is the better vehicle to get us there. I want to live in a country where the Supreme Court isn't 6-3 or even 7-2 conservative. If Trump wins, he will replace Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito with 40-year-olds and may even replace Sonia Sotomayor. that would cement Republican rule on the court for the rest of our lives, with huge implications for abortion rights and contraception, same-sex marriage, gun rights, fair maps, the Voting Rights Act, and democracy. I don't want that for the future of this country.

So Joe Biden is the better vehicle to get me there. In all of these examples, it is not about Joe Biden, it's about me. It's about the future that I want. And look, this is not to carry water for the things he did that certain people may be unhappy with. Like, I absolutely understand and appreciate that people are. are vehemently unhappy with Israel, with Gaza, with inflation. That's your prerogative. I am by no means here trying to claim that Joe Biden is perfect because he's not.

But here's the thing. They're never going to be perfect. I've never seen a politician in my entire life whose views aligned 100% with mine on every issue. And that's how it is. That's how it goes. I'm not marrying the president. I don't pray to the president. Joe Biden is not my deity.

No politician is. They are vehicles to get me and us closer to the future that we want. You've heard the saying, voting isn't marriage, it's public transport. You're not waiting for the one. You're getting the bus. And if there isn't one to your destination, you don't not travel. You just take the one closest to where you want to be. If I were to say, I'm not going to vote for Joe Biden because he wasn't perfect on every issue.

That would be me sacrificing my future. And using my vote to punish Joe Biden is not more important than using my vote to protect my future. That's giving him all the power. That's making the election about him and not about us. Joe Biden is 80 years old. going to be around forever. Most of us are going to be around a hell of a lot longer than he will. And so what's more important? Getting a jab in to voice your dissatisfaction with some politician or finding a bus to get you closest to your destination. So look, I think progressives, of which

I absolutely consider myself, play a really important role in politics. I think we need to be here to push Biden to the left. And by the way, we have, like this notion that a lifelong moderate, white, working class Democrat in Joe Biden would be the one to cancel a hundred $170 billion in student loan debt is crazy, that he would be the most pro-climate president in history, that he would be the one to beat big pharma and finally get the government to negotiate lower drug prices, that he would be the one to sign the first gun safety legislation into law in 30 years. Biden is the most progressive president of our lifetimes. That wouldn't have happened without progressives pushing and without a president who is

willing to be pushed. If not on everything, then at least on a lot. But if the end result here is that progressives abandoned Biden because they didn't get everything, well, then there's not going to be a whole lot of incentive for any president to listen to progressives if they know that they demand absolute 100% purity and nothing less. If we want democratic politicians to continue governing in a way that is progressive, they need to know that we are a reliable block, not a fickle one. That's how we lose power. We should be doing everything we can to gain it. So if you hear these arguments from people who've soured on Biden, I think the move here is to mind them that it's going to be their country for a whole lot longer than it's going to be

Biden's and that they have the opportunity to usher in a future that may not be exactly what they want, but it's still going to be a hell of a lot closer to it than with Donald Trump in office. Next up is my interview with Ari Berman, but first, just a quick reminder, my new book, Shameless is now available for pre-sale. And look, you all know that I don't put a single piece of content behind a paywall. I don't do memberships. I don't do sponsored posts. This is the one time that'll ask you to support me. Also, the way it works is that all pre-sales go toward the New York Times bestseller list, which, as an English major, is my holy grail. So if you think you might order the book at some point, I would highly recommend doing so in this pre-order period. I'll put the link in the show

notes of this episode, or you can go to briantylercoen.com slash book. And as always, thank you. I I really appreciate it. Okay, here's my interview with Ari Berman. Now I've got voting rights reporter from Mother Jones and the author of the new book, Minority Rule, the Right Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist it. Ari Berman, Ari, thank you so much for taking the time. Hey, Brian, great to talk to you. Thanks so much. So your book is Minority Rule, as I just mentioned. Can you give us a lay of the land right now as far as the Senate and the Electoral College are concerned in terms of how much power Republicans wield as a minority party in this country? Well, we have these basic governing institutions that

violate fundamental notions of one person, one vote. You can win the presidency without getting a majority of support, as we saw with Donald Trump. You can hold the Senate without having majority support, as we've seen repeatedly with Republicans in the Senate getting a majority of seats in the body, but representing a minority of Americans. We've seen a Supreme Court where for the first time in U.S. history, five of six conservative justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote initially and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans. Then, of course, once Republicans get hold of these counter-majoritarian institutions, they try to rig them further to undermine the Democratic process even more to create

this feedback loop where these undemocratic institutions lead to more undemocratic outcomes. They're also trying something in Texas recently, where now they're saying, even though there are 254 counties in Texas, and the majority of Texas, Mexians live in seven of them. They're trying to make it so that if you want to win a statewide race in Texas, that you have to win the majority of counties, knowing full well that the only way to do that is to appeal is to win these overwhelmingly white rural counties that won't go for Democrats. It would basically be a way to cement permanent minority rule for Republicans. Yeah, it's minority rule on steroids. And that was a situation before the one person one vote rulings in the 1960s. Georgia had something called the county. unit system that gave rural counties far more power than more urban counties when it came to electing things like the governor of the state. And the Supreme Court struck down these kind of measures in the 1960s. And Earl Warren said the one person won vote cases were the most

important legacy of his court. And that court did a lot of really important things. And I think now what we're seeing is Republicans trying to move backwards in so many different ways to take away rights and democratic norms that have been established since the 1960s and onwards and go back to things like incredible malapportionment or in Jim Crow voting systems and things of that nature that we thought we'd move past, but evidently we haven't. Does it worry you that perhaps they view this Supreme Court as their way to shoehorn through a lot of these things that might not have worked 50, 60 years ago, but that they clearly see an opening with today? I think that's why the Republican Party and the conservative movement has been so focused on trying to take over

the courts because they use the courts as their vehicle to implement a radical extreme and unpopular agenda. They were never going to gut the Voting Rights Act through the normal political process. It was too popular. They were never going to overturn Roe v. Wade through the normal political process. It was too popular. So they've used the courts to do all of these things that they know they can't do through the normal course of legislation, then they appoint these justices through the most undemocratic schemes possible. And then those justices then deepen the undemocratic crisis in America in ways that benefit the Republican Party and deepen minority rule in America. So there's a feedback loop going on here in terms of getting the justices on the court

and the justices acting in a way that will create more Republicans who will then do more unpopular things. Are you suggesting that Mitch McConnell did something untoward with the way that he filled the Supreme Court? Ari, almost more concerning than the fact that we have such entrenched minority rule is the extent to which Republicans seem comfortable basically flaunting it these days. So you look at issues that Republicans are perplexingly going all in on, like the issue of abortion, despite the raft of recent elections where it's proven to be a losing issue, even in red states like Kansas and Ohio and purple states like Virginia, does the fact that Republicans are barreling forward anyway suggest that, in fact, they're not even bothering to appeal to people

anymore because they're just that comfortable relying on the ways in which they can perpetuate minority rule. Well, I don't think the Republican Party really wants to be a majority party anymore. And I think that's a big change in the Republican Party. You look at Ronald Reagan winning 49 of 50 states when he ran for president. I mean, that's inconceivable now. Donald Trump is very proud of the fact that he can get elected just by winning the electoral college. Now, of course, he blamed his popular vote defeat on massive fraud on both occasions, but the fact is they're not trying to win over the popular vote. They're not trying to win over a majority of people in the Senate. They're not trying to persuade a majority of people on the

Supreme Court. They're just using the power they have, and they're benefiting from a system that was set up to preserve the power of elite white male property owners, many of them slaveholders. And that system, which has not been changed nearly as much as we think, they've then layered on all these newer undemocratic tactics like voter suppression and gerrymandering and election subversion on top of that. So there's this undemocratic baseline that Republicans are taking advantage of. Then they're trying to make the system more undemocratic through all of these different schemes that we're talking about right now. I find it so interesting that for years their branding has been predicated on this idea that they're the party of the Constitution, they're the party of democracy, and in fact, they're not running away from or hiding from or even embarrassed at the fact that really they rely on a system that is wholly predicated in anti-democratic procedures.

Well, they want to appeal to a constitution before it was democratized, before it was democratized to give rights to formerly disenfranchised communities, before new communities have. the right to vote. They want to go back to a constitution of 1787, which is the constitution where only white men could vote, where people did not elect the president, people did not elect the Senate, people had no role in choosing the Supreme Court, where in the first election which George Washington was chosen, only 6% of Americans were even eligible to vote. That's the constitution they go back to. So when they talk about originalism, they're talking about it for a very specific reason. That was a time in which rights were curtailed. or just eliminated for so many people, poor white men, women, African Americans, Native Americans,

they weren't even really part of how we thought of democracy back then. And so in terms of talking about going back to the founding fathers, you're talking about going back to a day when so many people that have rights today did not have them at the time. And of course, if you embrace that vision, it's very easy to say we should roll back voting rights for African Americans. We should roll back reproductive access for women. None of this is in the Constitution. Well, it's not in the Constitution of 1787 because those people weren't thought of as part of democracy back then. Right. All right. Talk about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and whether you think that it being enacted is actually a viable outcome. So that's basically an end round in terms of getting rid of the electoral college because there's two ways to get rid of the electoral college.

You can do it through constitutional amendment, which is really hard because you need two thirds of the Congress and three quarters of the states. or you can have states that equal 270 electoral votes, which is what you need for a majority, to basically pledge that they're going to appoint their electoral college winner based on the popular vote. I think this is promising because right now they're at 209 electoral votes. So if they get to 270, this could go into effect. Now it's going to be challenged before the Supreme Court. Who knows what will happen? I'm sure the right wing will absolutely freak out.

But the point is, that's a lot more viable. Getting 61 electoral votes to get to 270 is a lot more viable. a constitutional amendment. So I think at the very least it's something that we should be talking more about. And there are states like Michigan that have Democratic majorities that haven't done this yet that could potentially get closer to that 270 number. And do you think that certain states who have a lot of power electorally but may not, you know, may not want to see their role in the electoral process thanks to the electoral college, they might not want to see their role diminish would be against it? Yeah, I think it's possible. I also think some red states,

could be against it, even though I don't think the electoral college really benefits them either. The electoral college benefits a small number of swing states. So basically, for 80% of the country, your vote is predetermined. So my argument is that if you're a Republican in California, which there's a lot of them, the electoral college is bad for them too because their vote doesn't matter. So basically, unless you live in one of six to eight swing states that that's going to decide the presidential election, your vote doesn't really matter. And yes, the electoral College is skewed towards wider, more conservative, more Republican states. But that said, it still diminishes the votes of many, many, many Republicans that either live in safely red or

safely blue area. So I think they should get behind this too. That's when there was an amendment in the 1960s to abolish the Electoral College through constitutional amendment. It was supported amazingly by Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce because there was such broad agreement, this was bad for America. It only survived because southern segregationists filibustered the effort to get rid of the electoral college because they didn't want black votes to count as much as white votes. That's why we still have the electoral college today. You write in the book that in 1787, James Madison predicted that the Senate would become a more objectionable minority than ever. So if this problem was so predictable, can you speak on

why it was enacted anyway? And do any other countries have to deal with a similar? issue. Not in the same kind of way. The Senate is more undemocratic and more skewed than in any other advanced industrial democracy. They either don't have senates altogether or they have senators that are much more like the British House of Lords, which is basically ceremonial. So Madison wanted the Senate to be an elite body, but he wanted it to operate on the basis of majority rule. He wanted to be based on proportional representation. He wanted the large states to have more representation than the small states if they had more people. What the small states did is they basically said, we're going to leave the union if we don't give us the same level of power. We might go join France, which is about the

worst thing you could say in 1787. And so what happened was this was basically hostage taking. We called it a compromise, but it was really more of a concession. And Madison was worried that as the country expanded westward, smaller states would have more power than ever before in the Senate and it would make minority rule inevitable. But you look at how much worse this problem has gotten. In 1790, the country's largest state, Virginia, had 13 times as many people as the country. country's smallest state Delaware. Today, California, the largest state, has 68 times the voting power of the country's small estate, Wyoming. And there's this amazing stat they cite in the book. By 2040, 70% of Americans are going to live in 15 states that have 30 senators, meaning that 30% of

the country is going to elect 70% of the Senate. So the Senate is a huge problem when you talk about minority rule becoming irreversible in America. Do you find it kind of amazing today that we actually do still have, that Democrats do have a majority in the Senate, given, like, given its structure? I do. And it's amazing that they can win a majority, but then the thing is, even when they do, it's basically impossible for them to govern effectively because of the filibuster. And I know a lot of stuff got done in the Biden administration when there was a Democratic majority in the Senate and the House. But the fact is, voting rights legislation didn't pass because of the filibuster, abortion legislation didn't pass because of the filibuster, gun control legislation. These were

things that were supported by 60, 70, 80 percent of Americans, but they were blocked by these small minorities. And the problem is the Senate is set up in such a way that it makes it difficult for Democrats to win a majority, and then the rules of the body make it difficult for them to govern once they win that majority. So I think that basically the rules of the Senate are going to have to change if Democrats want to be able to get anything done, or the Senate itself is going have to change. And you really wonder, why didn't Democrats do things like make Washington, D.C. a state when they had the power to do so. There would have been a strong moral case for doing it. Washington, D.C. has more people than Wyoming, but no real representation in Congress.

But there was also just a case for the Democrats to do it. They would have two more liberal Democrats in the Senate if they made Washington, D.C. a state. But you basically heard no talk about this in the first two years of the Biden administration. Do you think the Democrats are like not recognizing, or I guess not effectively wielding the power that they may have with instances exactly like that, like given the very precarious situation that we're in, both with anti-democratic institutions like the Senate, but also like democracy more broadly. Yes. I mean, imagine if there were, the capital of the U.S. was in Bismarck, North Dakota, but Bismarck, North Dakota had no representation. The first thing they would do is try to give representation to Bismarck, North

Dakota. I get that example because the Dakotas used to be one territory and they quite literally split it up to get four Republican senators. I mean, this happened in the 1890s. And so things have been manipulated all the time. I think what Republicans do is they think about how can we rig the system to get power. And then once we're in power, how can we further rig it to hold on to power? And I think Democrats think, oh, we're just going to fight on our ideas because our ideas are better. And that's admirable. But if you're operating in a broken system, it's really hard to get your ideas enacted. And even if they're enacted, it's hard to be able to defend them. And I think that's what we're seeing now is that, yes, a lot of policies were

passed based on Joe Biden's time and office. But the fundamental system in which Democrats are operating was not fixed. They didn't do anything about all of the anti-democratic laws that were passed at the state level by Republicans. They haven't figured out a way to reform institutions like the Supreme Court, to make things like Washington, D.C. a state, to pass fundamental voting rights legislation. So that's my main critique of the Democratic Party, is they're emphasizing democracy issues right now, more than they have before. But when they had power to actually do something about this at the federal level, they didn't do it. They've done a lot more on the state level in places like Michigan to try to expand democracy, places like Wisconsin, try to fight back

against attacks on democracy. But at the federal level, there were a lot of missed opportunities. Do you think that they'll take advantage of these opportunities in the event that they're able to keep, even a 50-50 majority with the vice president as the tiebreaker, if Biden and Kamala Harris win again in November, do you think that they'll focus on those missed opportunities heading into 2025? I do. I think if there is a Democratic trifecta in Washington in the next election, I think you're going to see them prioritize voting rights legislation again. I think there would be votes to change the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. Remember, the two Democrats that blocked it, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Cinema, they're no longer going to be in the Senate and

they're no longer even Democrats. So I think there's been a lot of movement within the Democratic Party towards institutional reform, but they have a lot of unfinished business that if they get another opportunity, I would hope they would make a top priority. And you don't think we'll have any low-key last-minute senators swooping in and saying that we actually have to preserve the filibuster as opposed to preserving democracy? I mean, who knows? But no one's talking about getting rid of the filibuster altogether. But they're talking about reforming the filibuster so that some fundamental democracy issues can pass. And the fascinating thing is, you hear all the time the filibuster is in the Constitution. It's not in the Constitution. It was basically an accident

of history when the Senate tried to end debate on something in the 1800s and didn't realize how to. James Madison actually wrote that he only wanted supermajority votes in certain circumstances, like confirming treaties, for example. He said that if you had a supermajorie, with all routine legislation, the purpose of free government would be reversed. It would be the minority, not the majority, that would rule. So the founding fathers actually thought about things like supermajority requirements. They didn't want them in most cases, but it's become the routine thing that basically any vote in the Senate now is subject to that supermajority veto.

Except I would note the issues that Republicans care about, which are judges and taxes. I mean, Republicans already did away with the filibuster in the two instances where their priorities were at stake. And so they've been able to, you know, appoint judges with simple minorities and make changes to the tax code, which of course is all they care about, legislatively speaking, also with simple majorities. Yeah, and you remember when we had to raise the debt ceiling, we also did that with a simple majority. And they exempted the filibuster from that. And so I remember Reverend Warnock talking at the Senate floor and saying, we're in an economic emergency and we just raise the debt ceiling through a simple majority vote, but we're not. And we're

not thinking like we're in a Democratic emergency and amending the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. So it just goes to show you the rules can be changed whenever someone wants to do them if it needs to be done. Just like Merrick Garland was blocked eight months before the election and Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed eight days before the election. These things can change. The thing is it always seems like it's the Republicans that are changing them for their benefit. and Democrats are defending democratic norms, even when it's preventing pro-democracy things from happening and actually leading to a subversion of democratic norms. Right. It seems like it's more of a, like, as if they're there to protect the processes

that are put in place as opposed to the broader picture, which is to defend democracy, should be a bigger goal than the processes of the Senate that are actually antithetical to democracy itself. You talk in the book about the anti-immigration platform of conservative presidential nominee Pat Buchanan. This was three decades ago, but the trends are still pretty eerily familiar today. So Buchanan warned of an illegal invasion of the country and a future where whites would one day be the minority. His slogan was Make America First Again, and he wanted to be a voice for what he called Euro-Americans. So can you speak to how not much has changed in the Republican Party's platform? And in fact, it's only gotten worse since then.

Well, I opened the book with Pat Buchanan because he was the precursor to Trump in talking about the threat of immigration and the need to do something about it. But he also talked about the decline of white power. He talked about what he called an emerging white minority. And he was really the first presidential candidate in the 1990s to talk about the threat of a majority minority future, that the country would one day be a country in which there would no longer be a white majority. And he said that that was going to be an existential crisis for the Republican Party, which was a largely white party, but also it was going to lead to the decline of white Christian America. And I think basically Trump took Buchanan's platform and marketed to a much

greater level. And when he talked about Make America Great Again, the again was before there was a majority minority future, before there was a black president, before we had things like a civil rights act and a voting rights act and immigration reform act in the 1960. It was clear that that's the kind of America he was talking about. And so I think the fear of new demographic groups, the fear of a majority minority country is what's behind so much about the current push for minority rule. Weird. I was told it was economic anxiety all this time. Let's finish off with this. What do you think is the greatest threat to democracy that we face right now and what can we do about it? I think the greatest threat right now is an authoritarian takeover of

federal government. I think it would be the kind of anti-democratic takeover that could make minority rule impossible to reverse. And I think there's been these major pivotal hinge moments in U.S. history where we decide, do we want multiracial democracy or not? I think we had that during Reconstruction. I think we had that during the Civil Rights Movement. I think we're at a similar moment today. And I think what people can do is, first off, elect pro-democracy candidates. It doesn't mean electing Democrats or Republicans. It means electing candidates that are committed to democracy. for long-term institutional reform to get rid of things or reform things like the electoral college, like the U.S. Senate, and then to work locally, to preserve democracy at the state and local level,

because sometimes that's a lot easier. We've seen states like Michigan and Wisconsin change in ways that the federal government has not. So those are really the three things I think people can do about it right now. Ari, where can we see and hear more from you? You can read my book, Minority Rule, wherever books are sold. My website is Ari Berman, author, and I'm on X as at Ari Berman and on threads as at Berms. It's so weird to have to talk about all these different platforms these days. You're in about 20 of them, so you know this is better than I do. Yeah, exactly.

Well, we were speaking off camera. I have been a fan of yours for a really long time. Very few people do what you do, which is to say nothing of how effectively you do it. So for folks watching and listening right now, please support Ari's work. Again, the book is Minority Rule, the right-wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to resist it. Ari, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Brian. Keep up the great work. Thanks again to Ari. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie,

and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to Brian Tyler Cohen.com to learn more. Thank you.