No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Kevin McCarthy's Speaker gamble backfires spectacularly

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

Kevin McCarthy wins the Speaker's gavel, but the Republican hostage takers got plenty in return for it. Brian interviews Senator Amy Klobuchar about the long-awaited overhaul of the Electoral Count Act and what’s being done to prevent another Taylor Swift concert ticket debacle as far as Ticketmaster is concerned. And Democrat Lucas Kunce joins to discuss his big announcement that he’s running against Josh Hawley for Senate in 2024.Donate to the "Don't Be A Mitch" fund: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dontbeamitchShop 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 long road to Kevin McCarthy's electionist speaker and what the Republican hostage takers got in return for it. I interview Senator Amy Klobuchar about the long-awaited overhaul of the Electoral Count Act and what's being done to prevent another Taylor Swift concert ticket debacle as far as ticket master is concerned. And I'm joined by Democrat Lucas Coons to discuss his big announcement that he's running against Josh Hawley for Senate in 2024. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen and you're listening to No Lie. So it took 12 years and 9,000.

ballots, but we got there. Kevin McCarthy has finally won the Speaker's gavel in what was honestly one of the biggest displays of dysfunction and pandemonium that I have ever seen. There's a photo going around from an AP photographer named Andrew Harnick showing one Republican lawmaker physically restraining another Republican lawmaker who was apparently lunging at Matt Gates for holding up the Speaker's election after the 14th ballot on Friday night around midnight, which I think is a pretty good microcosm of the entire last few days. But the fact that the whole process took so long was owed to the fact that a faction of far-right extremists within that party, and that includes Matt Gates, Lauren Bobert, Biggs, Harris, and some other House

Freedom caucus members, who decided to hold the election hostage until they could exact concessions from McCarthy. And I don't think that we have the final updated rules package yet, but just according to reporting, those concessions include one member of the Republican House being able to introduce a motion to vacate, which is basically a no-confidence vote against the speaker, meaning that if just one of these lunatics is unhappy, they force a vote and we're back in the middle of this mess all over again. It includes committee spots for the holdouts, including three spots on the Rules Committee,

which is responsible for deciding what legislation ultimately makes it to the floor. And most importantly, and this is according to Moni Raju from CNN, the holdouts wouldn't agree to a clean debt ceiling increase, meaning that they're going to tie conditions to the debt ceiling. And if those conditions aren't met, then we would default on our national debt, which means the U.S. and the global economy would crater and markets across the world would plunge.

That has never happened before, and there's good reason that's never happened before because it doesn't exactly make sense for our own government to create our own economy. But then again, it's been a century since the last time. The majority party took 15 ballots before they can even agree on the speaker. So there's really no rule book here. And because McCarthy was just so drunk with ambition to become speaker, he relented on all of these points, meaning that he's going to occupy a now-bucked. powerless role as Speaker, having handed this dangerous faction of extremist Republicans a ton of

committee spots where they'll have the power to sink our economy if they choose to. But hey, at least Kevin McCarthy gets a sign above the Speaker's Office, and at the end of the day, that's what really matters here. Now, in terms of this whole process and the shit-showness of it all, it might seem to the rest of us like the once-in-a-century humiliation that it was. But for these extremist Republicans, the Lauren Boberts, the Matt Gates's, the dysfunction isn't a problem. It's the point. Like, they're not looking to fix anything because the goal is breaking it. These Republicans have been running for years on the idea that the government isn't the solution. It's the problem. And in order to prove that it's the problem, they have

a vested interest in breaking it. And so that's exactly what they themselves are going to do. And then they'll point to the thing that they just broke as evidence that the government can't work. But if the government isn't working, it's because someone is breaking it. And that's what these people did. That's what they're doing right here. Like, in a way, when you have people who aren't susceptible to shame and who traffic in chaos like these people do, it really is a win-win for them. Because on one hand, if McCarthy and his allies cave, then those holdouts get rewarded with committee spots and all this leverage and power. And if the McCarthy allies don't cave, then they get the dysfunction that they thrive off

of anyway. And they get to go on TV and build their brands even more. So either way, they come out of this on top. I hope that McCarthy feels the pain as the result of this, because he emboldened these very people every step of the way. He couted to them and refused to condemn them, all because he was so desperate to curry favor for the eventual speaker's vote, with the irony being that those very people he empowered used that power to basically castrate him. Kevin McCarthy will come into office as the weakest speaker in U.S. history.

And you know what? It's because he did it to himself. This is the whole leopard face-eating thing, right? You don't spend six years nurturing the leopards-eating people's faces party and then get to act surprised when the leopards eat your face. face two. And look, I spoke about this a couple weeks ago, and I think it bears repeating now because it played out way quicker than I thought it would. I said in the last December episode that there's a silver lining to Republicans taking the House, and that is that people will be

able to see the difference between the two parties in real time. They'll be able to see firsthand the difference between what happens when Democrats have full control of government, which is that, you know, we got an infrastructure upgrade and a gun safety bill and domestic semiconductor manufacturing jobs and veteran health care, climate spending, lower prescription drug costs, capped out of pocket costs for seniors. And now they'll be able to watch a Republican House with the same size majority that Democrats had threaten to crater the U.S. economy over, you know, an investigation into Hunter Biden's dickpicks and a hearing over pronouns. Like, this isn't going to be Republicans from the minority pretending that they'd be these responsible stewards of government.

It's going to be Republicans from the majority trying to impeach Joe Biden over what color shirt he's wearing, because they won't be able to help themselves. Like, you were kidding yourself if you think that the dysfunction that we just witnessed over the past week is going to be a selling point for Republicans in the next election. Now, before I go to the interviews, just one more thing here that I think is worth mentioning, and that is that we heard from Hakeem Jeffries for the first time as minority leader in the house. And that guy, without a teleprompter, did this.

But I also want to make clear that we will never compromise our principles. House Democrats will always put American values over autocracy, benevolence over bigotry, the Constitution over the cult, democracy over demagogues, economic opportunity over extremism, freedom over fascism, governing over gaslighting, hopefulness over hatred, inclusion over isolation, justice over judicial overreach, knowledge over kangaroo courts, liberty over limitation, maturity over Mar-a-Lago, normalcy over negativity, opportunity over obstruction, people over politics, quality of life issues over QAnon, reason over racism, substance over slander, triumph over tyranny.

understanding over ugliness, voting rights over voter suppression, working families over the well-connected, xenial over xenophobia. Yes, we can over you can't do it and zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation. We will always do the right thing by the American people. The entire alphabet, A to Z, no teleprompter. And then, here's the best part. Kevin McCarthy took to the lectern after Hakeem Jeffries, and here's just a small sampling of the genius oratory that followed. My most favorite spot in this building is not in this chamber.

It's in the chamber they met before in Statuary Hall. it's my favorite place to take people on a tour you see it's where Abraham Lincoln served just a one-term congressman sat in the back I like to go to that spot and I like to stand where he stood I like to do it at night when people aren't around

I like to look over and look at the clock because that's the same clock and same view that Abraham Lincoln saw. As a Congress, we can only operate if we cooperate. My door will be open. I'd like you to come by. I want you to see as you'll walk down the hall

a large portrait of Lincoln. I want you to go into that conference room. I want you to see another portrait. My members know of this. It's of Washington crossing the Delaware. You all know the story. It happened on Christmas, 1776. There was no iPhone to take a picture.

Woof. It took Kevin McCarthy 15 rounds to get elected speaker, but I think the cruelest thing to happen to him was that he had to follow Hakeem Jeffreys for this speech. So, look, it's going to be a long two years, but who knows, if the speaker election was any indication, maybe the Republican Party's own dysfunction is going to stop them from doing too much damage to begin with.

Next up is my interview with Senator Amy Klobuchar. Now we've got the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar. Thanks for coming back on. Well, thanks, Brian. It's wonderful to be on. So a lot to get to on the legislation front. But first, what's your response to the general dysfunction that we're seeing from Republicans? They've spent days.

As of this recording right now, this is, we're at Thursday right now, and they've still yet to nominate their speaker. So can I get a general response to what we've seen in the House, which is this more than once in a century inability to elect a speaker of their own party? I think a lot of people around the country, including people in my own state that I've seen in the middle of a snowstorm, people are somehow making it through and going to work. And they're like, what is going on out there? we have a lot to do this here. Of course, there's the obvious issue of the debt ceiling, but there's workforce issues, there are public safety, all kinds of things we got to work on. And there they are in front of just our country, but the world, unable to put in place their leader. And I think that they better get their act together soon because just as we watch governments

having issues in other countries, and it affects. how people feel about the United States, and it affects how people feel within the United States with Donald Trump's still looming out there. It really, they've got to get their act together and come together because I just, I literally can't believe this, but I am just keeping on doing what we're doing out here in Minnesota and waiting for the, I guess, the white smoke to come up from House of Representatives. Do you think that there's some lesson here in not emboldening far-right extremists who, you know, who traffic solely in hostage-taking? Do you think that anything like that is going to stick as far as Republicans are concerned?

Well, it certainly hasn't affected them. Even Donald Trump endorsing McCarthy doesn't seem to affect them. But I do think it's so scary when you think about the fact that we have crises that happen in our country, whether it's a flood, whether it's a financial crisis, whether it is a moment that we must come together, like funding for NATO and our efforts with Ukraine, there are moments where we have big time come together across the aisle. And what scares me about this group and that they've been emboldened by Trump and its forces

and allowed to keep pushing the Republican Party is that they don't seem to have a respect for those big moments where you put differences aside. As Nancy Pelosi said, what would happen if these guys were in charge on January 6th? Let's switch gears out now to something a little more, to something a little more productive. And that was that there was some really big legislation tucked away in the omnibus package. And one of those pieces was legislation to overhaul the Electoral Count Act. That was the only voting legislation that we've been able to get in this past Congress.

Can you give a rundown of what this overhaul to the ECA does? This was so important to get done, Brian. Of course, we tried very, very many times to pass more broad voting rights legislation, and I'm going to continue that fight with the Freedom to Vote Act. But at the very least, we need to get this done. We couldn't risk having another insurrection or another trigger point where a mob could feel like they could stop the will of the people. And that's exactly what happened on January 6th.

So what this bill does is, number one, makes clear the role of the vice president, is ceremonial, that in fact, electoral counting is just that. They're counting the votes in the state, and you remember the hanging Mike Pence moment. We cannot have a repeat of that. Secondly, makes clear that you have to have 20% of the members of Congress in each chamber in order to allow for a vote on an objection, that one rogue senator, as Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz did, and one rogue representative can't just slow down everything. They could technically slow down the votes on all 50 states, even where their candidate had won.

They could make it go for hours and hours and hours. So that's clear. Third, you can't do these fake slates of electors that are put in place afterward. And then finally, there has to be a straightforward appeals process. And is there any appetite for any more voting rights legislation moving forward, even with Republican majority in the House or your Republican colleagues in the Senate? Well, I think it's going to be tough. We know there was some Republican support with Lisa

Murkowski to the John Lewis voting rights reauthorization and reform. But there was not a lot of depth in terms of other senators that would support it. In the past, even when George Bush was president, this was fully bipartisan, unanimous votes on these bills. And yet, this has now become a weapon, which I think is unbelievable when our democracy depends on people being able to easily vote. And remember, this is yes about voter suppression, but it's also about efforts to make it more difficult to vote.

Why would you do that if you are in a free democracy? Why would you have requirements in place, like was put in place in Georgia, where they tried to deny Saturday voting? Why would you do that if you want to make it easier to vote? So I'm still hopeful that at some point national standards will pass. I think it'll be really hard with this Republican House. And now finally, what would a conversation with Amy Klobuchar be without talking about antitrust?

So one of the major issues this year has been Ticket Masters monopoly over ticket sales that obviously came to the forefront with the whole Taylor Swift situation. Is anything being done to address this issue? I mean, this is something that touches everybody. Everybody at some point wants to go to a concert, right? but if there's only one company that services all of this, and if it's impossible to get any tickets other than just getting them on resale for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times the price or more, then it's not really serving the American people in the way that it's supposed to.

Well, that's exactly right. And in fact, Ticket Master Live Nation, 70% of the market share for the ticketing of large events. That's a monopoly under any definition. What happened was that when these two companies merged, there was a consent decree that put limits in place. So there is a tool that the Justice Department or the FTC can use in really policing their conduct. But what you saw with the Taylor Swift concert was not a singular issue. When you have one company dominating everything, there is not as much of an incentive to reduce prices. certainly not. They have all these hidden fees. There's not as much as incentive to innovate or to get things right. And so that's why we're going to be holding a hearing on this within the next month or so. That'll be very important to be able to gather the information as this ongoing investigation is already occurring over at the Justice Department. The other thing that could be helpful, and I'm working on this as well, is legislation to make

ticket prices more transparent. Just as we have passed bills with airlines and the like, you've got to really allow consumers to know what's going on because the prices for so many of these concerts, the markups are just unbelievably big. And that just shouldn't be happening. We saw during the pandemic, America United around music and performances with the Save Our Stages bill

that I led with Senator Cornynett. Biggest investment in the history of America in the art, to allow performances to go forward. There was an interesting thing that happened in the pandemic. People missed going to concerts and plays, and they miss seeing each other and that communal moment of where everyone is watching the same artists,

whether it be country Western or Pitbull or Taylor Swift. And so what we're excited about in taking on this issue is just this newfound love of or re-love, maybe we should say, rejuvenated interest in the arts. Now what happens in terms of whether whether we find out that this that the consent decree that Live Nation and Ticketmaster were under wasn't followed? Like what are the consequences to not following the rules set forth by that decree? Well there are damages in place that under that consent decree that the Justice Department can basically um assess fines major

major fines. So you've got that going. Then you have got new conduct that maybe rises to the level of saying this is discriminatory. You have the potential of looking at the approval of that merger, which I've voiced concerns about way back. That's what happened with AT&T, and it took a lot of years, so it's not easy, but where they unwound what had been already allowed and approved for, because it was both a horizontal and a vertical monopoly. And by the way, this is what's going on now with Tickham, and Live Nation. They not only have that 70% for large events when it comes to market chair on tickets. So they are selling the tickets. They are also promoting with Live Nation. And then wait a minute, that's not enough. They own a bunch of venues. And of course, these venues then

it is very hard for some of the smaller venues to compete or even equally sized venues when you have a monopoly owning them. And in this case, just use the AT&T analogy, horizontal monopoly means like Pepsi and Coca-Cola merging. Vertical monopoly means owning the things under them. So here you've got one company owning a number of venues while the independents are trying to compete, then you have them horizontally having control

over so much of the ticketing. And so it's kind of the recipe. the recipe for when these mergers need to be looked at again. So, you know, I can't, I don't know exactly what the department is doing. That's going to be up to them. That's, you don't have electors interfering in that. But what we can do is give them the information they need to do their jobs and look at passing legislation ourselves.

And the last thing I'll say is, if we could pass a broader bill, given these court decisions that have made, it very difficult to take on these mergers to change the burden so that for big mega mergers like Ticketmaster and Live Nation was, to be able to say, you have to show this actually doesn't hurt competition instead of the government having to show that it does. You have burden big companies when you come forward with these mergers that way back to Adam Smith and the founding of this country, there was major concern about what Smith once called.

of course the invisible hand philosopher once called the unbridled power of the army of monopolies. So this has been around for a while. It used to be rail and all kinds of steel trust and things like that. And now you're dealing with tech monopolies as well as Ticketmaster and many other new ones on the block. Well, I hope that we can see some actual enforcement because otherwise if there's just fines or or something like that, then this mega monopoly will just look at this as the cost of doing business and they just incur those fines,

but it's a small price to pay for the fact that they still completely own the market. Thanks, Brian, for bringing that up. Yes, my fines, I mean not just slap on the wrists, right? Like you wouldn't have big fines, but beyond that, you want to have some kind of enforcement and rules of the game going forward, or you're going to just start seeing more and more

of these independent venues, not being able to compete consumers having a mess when they try to get tickets and prices going up. And so if Taylor Swift fans are the things that bring this to the public eye, it is fine by me. Yeah, we'll take it. Yeah. Okay. And one other thing I want to say when I was going back to your election question, you know, there's still maybe work that can be done on protecting election officials as well as continuing on the state levels, not only to bring cases, but also to fund efforts and to look at new state laws to protect. Because if it's going to get blocked because of the Republican House and I will be, of course, reintroducing the bill

as will my colleagues and we're going to be pushing, you never know when things change in Washington. No one thought the Affordable Care Act could pass for years. No one thought we'd get the infrastructure bill. Eventually you do, so you never give up. But at the same time as we're dealing with what I would predict would be obstructionism on election bills, we can push these things on the state basis. Okay, let's finish off with this. In terms of mergers moving forward because we've seen such an explosion of anti-competitive behavior by these corporations, and that's what's at the heart of all of this. Is there any legislation making its way through the pike that would strengthen our antitrust

oversight more from what we have now? Because, I mean, it's one thing to try to go back and fix a lot of what is very clearly broken, but these mergers and acquisitions are going to continue to move forward. And it doesn't seem like further down the pike where these are actually happening and being approved that anything's changing. It's just kind of trying to fix a lot of the issues that have already happened. Well, you have to do both. And you correctly identify the issue here is that there's been a change in antitrust law, right? And some of these ultra-conservative judges have adopted rulings and philosophies that have led to really narrow interpretations,

and it's difficult to prove up a case. So all through history, when that kind of thing would happen, the laws would be adapted to change with the changing tides of our economy. And part of that is tech, right? We don't have any rules of the road. My bill was the first one that passed through a committee in the Senate. We've recently had some success on merger fees to get the agencies more funding. That's what we got done at the end of the year, a bill that I led with Senator Grassley. But if you really want to make some changes to change where the status quo going forward,

to me, you need to change the burden, as I pointed out, on who has to prove things up. So you make it easier to overcome some of the obstacles put in place by these really narrowing Supreme Court cases that have been coming through now for years, making it nearly impossible to go after some of these mergers. And so that is what I would do. And you could use the same standard for discriminatory conduct. So it is relevant to the Ticketmaster issue because you could say, hey, this is discriminatory. And you guys, the burden's on you to prove that you're actually not hurting competition by your conduct. And this should be something, by the way, that should be bipartisan considering, you know, actually.

I mean, Republicans spend so much time assailing the Democrats as socialist and communists. Well, if you're capitalist, this is the heart. This is the backbone of capitalism is to make sure that we have. A healthy, competitive, yeah. It is actually Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican president who rode this antitrust issue right to the White House on his horse. It's Senator Sherman of the Sherman Act was a Republican. And these bills, most of the bills I brought up, not everyone,

but nearly all these antitrust bills are bipartisan. And this idea of having an even playing field for our news organizations when they are folding daily so that they can better negotiate for prices. A child privacy, privacy laws, those are bipartisan, the work that Center Blumenthal and Blackburn have done with me on the App Store bill because you shouldn't be charging outrageous rates that Apple and Google charge. And then finally, this idea that you shouldn't be self-preferencing your products, that's exactly what is going on right now where Amazon and Google and others are putting their products

at the top of their search engines or their platforms, and it's making it harder and harder for small businesses, why the National Federation of Independent Businesses, not exactly, as you point out, a radical organization, has endorsed my bill, and we've had over $200 million spent against us. That's a minimal amount. Over thousands, 2,700 lawyers and lobbyists, I have two lawyers.

I know the odds, easy, but my time will come. We will get this stuff. because you already seeing action in places as far along as Australia to Europe right now. Big change is going on there. And I think American consumers deserve to have the same protections. Yeah. Well, thank you for, you know, for working on this stuff. This is stuff that impacts regular people.

I mean, we spend so much time talking about nebulous bullshit. This is stuff that actually has an effect on our lives. So thank you for working on this. It does. Thank you, Brian, for caring about this. And we did have one success at the end of the year that the, that the monopolies can't move their suits to other states. And we got that done.

That was a Lee Klobuchar bill and handled by Joe Neguse and Sicilini Buck in the House. And then we've got the merger fees, which is going to bring over $100 million into the enforcer so we can hire some lawyers to be able to handle all these cases at the FTC and at the Justice Department. So that was a big game changer, too. I did an amendment that got, it was, 88 votes to make the change. So we do go into next year with not getting one of these huge bills spun, but setting the stage for 88 votes. Let's see what we can put up next.

And who knows, maybe by the time this episode airs, we will actually have a functional house with a speaker, but no promises. So with that said, no promise, but we continue to watch it and make some more popcorn tonight. That's right. That's right. Well, we'll leave it there. Senator Klobuchar, thank you so much for taking the time. It's always great speaking to you. Thank you, Brian. Now we've got Democrat Lucas Coons. Lucas, thanks so much for taking the time. Yeah, thanks for having, Brian. I'm really excited to be here.

So I know that you've got an announcement, so I won't step on your toes. Floor is yours. Thanks, man. Yeah, I'm running for U.S. Senate to knock Josh Hawley out of that building. You'd think he'd kind of want to go anyway after you saw him skittering out of there a couple of years ago. But hey, you know, it's going to be up to all of us to make sure it finally happens for good. Now, you announced this on January 6th. I'm assuming that wasn't by accident. No, it wasn't by accident at all. I mean, I'm a Marine who served my country and to watch a guy like this, just a complete

fraud and coward, you know, inside a mob when he thinks it was going to get him some power, you know, pump his fist up there. And then the second things get real, you know, the dude runs out the back door and runs away from the problem that he created. Like, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. And it's, you know, Missouri's the show me state. The dude has shown us all what he is and who he is.

And I'm telling you right now, man, I'm going to make sure everybody in Missouri knows that guy's a fraud and a coward, and we're going to knock him out of there. So with that said, what is Holly standing in Missouri right now? I mean, he's kind of a little bit unknown in many ways. And otherwise, it's just that, you know, he was involved with that. And so I think, depending on where you are on the spectrum, you may have different feelings.

But the thing that all Missourians hate is to be embarrassed. You know, we hate somebody basically to act as a coward and we don't want to be represented by somebody like that. And so, you know, like I said, I think we're going to focus very heavily on that. The fact that he's a fraud, he's a faker. He says he cares about working people and makes a decision after decision that doesn't work for working people. We got to expose that, right? It's fake populism. It's going to run its way across the country.

And Missouri's the front lines and the fight for democracy again. against these fakers who are using things like that to get elected and not actually help people, but just divide us. On the issue of January 6th specifically, do you think his participation in all of this because he was such a central player in January 6th? Do you think that hurt him in Missouri?

I think that hurt, the thing that hurts him the most is the fact that he was just such a faker in it, right? Like, like, just, if that video hadn't come out by the January 6th committee, I don't know where he would be, but like, that's embarrassing, right? Like, this is a guy who is writing a book about masculinity and publishing it in May to tell everybody else how to be a man. And, like, he couldn't even stand up to the crowd that he incited and, like, ran away.

That's terrible. It's embarrassing. Again, I mean, the guy's just creepy to be telling everybody who, like, how they should be a man anyway. Now, you ran for Senate in Missouri last cycle. Is Holly weaker than Eric Schmidt, who just won this past cycle? Yeah, I mean, Holly's weak, right? Eric Schmidt did not have a reputation as a coward. He didn't have a reputation as a faker or a phony in the same way that Josh Hawley does. I mean, the guy, you know, I mean, his dad was the president of a bank. He went to the fanciest prep school in Missouri. He went, you know, when he graduated from law school, he went to one of those elite corporate law firms, one of the biggest ones in the country.

Like, now he's pretending to be a working person. Like, he doesn't know anything about what it's like to live in a working class family or neighborhood. I mean, and people want someone who knows that and understands that. And so, you know, for me, like, that's where I grew up. I grew up in a working class neighborhood. We went bankrupt from medical bills when my sister had to have a surgery growing up. And we got taken care of the community around us. And, you know, I have a lifetime of service in the Marine Corps to pay that back, Iraq and Afghanistan.

And the contrast between Holly and I couldn't be any more clear. And, you know, Schmidt doesn't have the same level of just fakeness that Josh Holly has. It's gross. Like, it's really gross. With that said, I mean, you may have a similar background, but, you know, we are living in a time where our political affiliations are so calcified here. So how do you reach those people? How do you make them recognize, even people on the other side of the aisle, even independents, that you have more in common with them than someone like Josh Hawley who spent his life, you know, as pampered as it gets, basically? Yeah, so in our campaign, I'm running to change who has power in the country, to empower every day.

Missourians and Americans, like the ones that took care of my family when we went bankrupt. And that's what people in Missouri want. People in Missouri have been trying to claw back power for a long time. I mean, people look at the state as a red state. But when you look at the ballot initiatives that we have passed in this state, they are all populist and some would even call them progressive, right? We hiked up the minimum wage through ballot initiative over Josh Hawley. We overturned right to work 68 to 32%.

The only state in the union that overturned right to work by ballot. initiative. Josh Hawley was on the wrong side of that. We did medical marijuana legalization. And then this last year we did recreational marijuana legalization. We expanded Medicaid. We've done all of these things. We've tried to grip back power. And we just, we have to have candidates, though, that everyday Missourians understand trust and that have a record service. And, you know, 13 years in the Marine Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's there. I'm there. And you will see that in the past, if you look at previous results, that's worked, right? Like Jason Candor, when he ran for U.S. Senate in 2016, he lost by 3% in a year that Donald Trump won by 17.

Donald Trump ain't even 17% popular anymore. Like, that gap is now surmountable. You just have to have the right people. Now, what do you say to people who concede that we've got a tough Senate map in 2024? We're defending seats in Montana, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada and suggest that resources are better spent elsewhere other than a state like Missouri. Yeah, I'd say Missouri is the front line in the battle for democracy. This is a state where up until 2016, most of our statewide elected officials were Democrats.

We were winning statewide and we have lost it to fake populists like Josh Hawley. And if we're ever going to defeat them, if we're going to crush their brand, if we're ever going to make sure that the Democratic Party is the party of working people for real, like we have to beat them. They like Josh Holly's number one mission is to make the Republican Party. the party of working people. And if we don't, if we don't win here, if we don't invest here, if we don't fight back against that narrative, we're gonna lose it. And with that, could go the presidency,

you know, the Senate for many years, and everything else. I mean, it's the front line for the fight for democracy, and we gotta make it happen. Like, this is a brand issue for Democrats nationally that has to be solved. I know when you were running for Senate last cycle, you weren't running against Holly,

but did you hear anything from Republicans who, you know, who may be sour on Holly just because of what we, we know about him that have kind of lent themselves to your decision to ultimately decide to run in this cycle? Yeah. People don't like him. They think he doesn't care about the state, which he's proven.

I mean, he hasn't brought any money back to this state. They think he wants to control their lives. You know, he wants to control you in the doctor's office. He wants to control you in the bedroom. He wants to control when, how you work. I mean, he wants to control what the definition of a man is. Like his books coming out saying that a man, and the only real man is one who's made in the image of him.

Like that is creepy and crazy, right? It's nuts, and people see that that's nuts. And so, yeah, I hear about it all the time. They're like, and Republicans here don't like him. I mean, he doesn't get along with them. He doesn't do anything for them or with them or anything else. He just cares about Joshua Hawley. That's the irony of this whole, like, small government thing

shoved down everybody's throats by Republicans, is they claim to be small government, and yet at the same time, if you don't follow all of their exact same theocratic principles that they espouse themselves, and all of a sudden, they just try to shove those same principles down your throats, which is, you know, the ultimate irony of all of this. Lucas, what are you running on? Like, what's your principal message here to voters?

It's that we need to change who has power in this state and this country and give it back to everyday people. You know, everyday people in Missouri have been doing the right thing, like I said, on the ballot, trying to claw back power for themselves. And what you see is us being betrayed over and over again by our generic politicians like Josh Hawley. I mean, he, you know, sits by, he prattles on about how child. China is a threat all the time, but never says a word when Chinese corporate conglomerates are buying up our farmland, right?

He talks all the time about outsourcing, but he was totally down with the new NAFTA. He says he's for workers, but he was supportive of right to work. Like, the guy's just a fraud, and so we are running on all the real issues that people need. You know, invest in the next generation of energy here. We want to talk about good jobs. We want to talk about actually investing in Missouri, and Josh Hawley doesn't care about any of that. What's an issue specific to Missouri that you think would be effective in terms of differentiating you from Josh Hawley? Because you look at somebody like Mary Peltola out in Alaska who flipped what had been for decades, a red state, and she spoke about fish.

She spoke about issues that were very specific to Alaska, and she ultimately ended up flipping that state. So what's like a Missouri-specific issue that you intend to focus on here? Yeah, so, you know, my dad worked for the Missouri Department of Conservation through the years. And if there's one thing that unites Missourians, it's conservation of our fisheries, our wildlife, and our natural areas. And so that's something that, again, for a guy who doesn't care about the state, like Josh Hawley, he doesn't care about those areas. He doesn't want to help. He doesn't want to keep them clean. He doesn't want to keep them free of pollution.

He doesn't want to make sure that they're open and enjoyable for everybody in the state. So that's kind of a niche issue that you wouldn't think of, but it's going to be good. Foreign ownership of land is another one where the guy just, you know, he doesn't do anything on that. And then the last one is, you know, he's been taken ever since he was AG and all the way up for a long time. He was taking money from people who were stripping our state for parts, you know, and sitting by. Well, again, our farmland was sold overseas, but also company after company in Missouri, headquartered here, was sold overseas. I mean, Monsanto was sold to Bayer in Germany. He's another good example.

Smithfield to the Chinese conglomerate. We got Anheuser-Busch sold to InBev. And these are issues where local communities have really felt a lot of pain. And honestly, this is the great irony is that the people who cause them the pain, the people like Josh Holly, have been able to redirect them in a divisive manner to hate all the wrong people that aren't the ones causing their problems. And so, and again, I mean, you ask about why Missouri is important. Like, that's why it's the front line of the fight for democracy, because the Josh Hollies of the world have been able to twist the narrative to plate all the blame on everyone except themselves. and the people who fund their campaigns. And if we don't attack that narrative

and call them out for what they are, we're in really big trouble. Lucas, how can we help your campaign? You can go to Lucascoons.com. You can donate there. We gotta donate link. You can spread the word on Twitter. I know you've done that.

Thank you, Brian. And anyone here, yeah, spread us on social. We gotta get out there. Like Josh Holly is vulnerable. He's not really well liked. He's, again, a fraud and a coward. The state doesn't like that sort of thing. And so we gotta fund this campaign to hit him on,

Punch him in the face day after day after day and make sure that every single person in Missouri knows that and when they do, they're not going to vote for him. Awesome. We'll leave it there. Lucas, thank you so much for taking the time. And for anybody watching and listening, make sure you spread any news about Lucas so that more people out there get to know exactly who he is and especially given the fact that Josh Hawley is vulnerable

and that, you know, if nothing else this past election showed us that extremism is being reputed at the ballot box by both parties. So Lucas, with that said, thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Brian. Anytime. Thanks again to Lucas. 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, interviews captured and edited for YouTube and Facebook by Nicholas Nicotera, and recorded in Los Angeles, California. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app. Feel free to leave a five-star rating and a review, and check out Brian Tyler Cohen.com for links to all of my other channels.