No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Pete Buttigieg shreds Marjorie Taylor Greene over State of the Union antics

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Biden has a watershed moment at the State of the Union. Brian interviews Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s SOTU stunt, how dangerous the issue of IVF is going to be for the right, and some major wins that he’s overseen on the infrastructure front.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 Biden's watershed moment at the State of the Union, and I interview Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about Marjor Tellegrine's State of the Union stunt, how dangerous the issue of IVF is going to be for the right, and some major wins that he's overseen on the infrastructure front. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. All right, first off, a quick note, this is episode 200. I remember early conversations at the beginning of 2020 about what this podcast would look like. The plan then was to travel all across the country and talk. to politicians. And then, of course, five minutes later, we found ourselves immersed in the depths

of a global pandemic and just killing each other over toilet papers. So this show has been almost exclusively remote for these last few years, except for this week, ironically enough, when I went to D.C. and interviewed Secretary Pete in person after the State of the Union. So anyway, to everybody who's listening right now, thank you. Thank you for taking a little bit of your time each week. I absolutely appreciate it. Okay, let's get into it. Here's the deal. The State of the union speech rarely, if ever, moves the needle. But here's my argument as to why it will this time. So the first reason is that Republicans do this thing where they lower the bar so much for Joe Biden that so long as he doesn't literally die at the podium, he'll exceed expectations.

Like they spend day after day, week after week, month after month, explaining how he's in cognitive decline, how he doesn't know his own name, doesn't know where he is, that when he comes up and inevitably delivers a home run of a speech like he did this past week, that's not only a win onto itself, it also demolishes their talking points. And that's what happened here. Like, I've watched a lot of Joe Biden speeches. This one was easily his strongest and came at the perfect time, by the way. Like he was dynamic and energetic and strong. Everything that Republicans have been promising, their insulated viewers that he's not. In fact, right wing media and Fox hosts have been claiming that he must have been on something, that he took something.

I'll tell you what, if the suggestion is that Joe Biden was so dynamic that he must be on some upper, that's a win. Honestly, given what they say about him on a nightly basis, suggesting that the guy is on speed is about as complimentary as you could possibly imagine from those folks. So that's the first reason. The second is that he set up an agenda for himself and the Democrats that is hugely popular. He started off the speech with a defense of democracy in Ukraine, popular among all Americans, except of course the pro-Putton faction of the GOP, Then he went hard into a defense of IVF and vitro fertilization. Again, hugely popular and imminently under attack by Republicans, most of whom support a nationwide bill that would make the Alabama law

that endangered IVF into a national law. And then, of course, economic issues, eliminating late fees and junk fees, making sure that billionaires don't get a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries. And then, of course, the issue that we've spoken about a lot, the border. Biden called on Republicans to pass a conservative border bill that one of their own conservative senators negotiated. The line he used was, we can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it.

Which kind of gives the game away for Republicans, because as we've discussed, they don't want a solution. They want the fight. To them, the issue is more valuable as a cudgel to wield against Democrats than any solution would be, even though it's them who melts down

over the five-alarm fire that is the dangerous border. Apparently, it's dangerous enough to complain about, just not dangerous enough to actually bother fixing. And if all of that is the platform that Democrats are going to run on between now and November, that is a winning formula. Democracy over autocracy is a winning message. IVF and abortion and women's reproductive rights is a winning message,

continuing to tout the record economy and the ways in which Democrats are working to deliver wins for regular people, especially in contrast to what a Trump administration would do, which is basically just more tax cuts for billionaires and to start a trade war, that is a winning message. Now, granted, in fairness, we would be remiss not to at least give some, airtime here to the Republican argument in all of this. So here's Katie Britt. First of all, we see you.

We hear you. And we stand with you. For all of those folks out there who are into the whole act two of a horror movie thing where the kids meet the weird Stepford wife lady who exists somewhere in the uncanny valley,

at least Republicans have that going for him. Like, I'm sure that that resonated with at least 10 of people out there, you know, who were into the whole whispery thing she was doing. Really compelling stuff. So overall, I think a major win for Joe Biden on exactly the areas that he was weakest on. And I do think, for some voters who have been sucked into the right-wing media machine's narrative, this speech will work magic in terms of cluing them back into reality.

Next step is my interview with Pete Buttigieg. I'm joined now by the Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg. Thanks so much for taking that time. Good to see you. So I guess this is insofar as two years. years can be a tradition. This is our tradition now in our post-state of the union wrap-up. So let's get the bad stuff out of the way first. Marjor Tilly Green entered the chamber, decked out, in full Donald Trump regalia. What was your reaction to seeing that on a night like

last night? Yeah, I noticed it when we were coming in. And look, politics is always in the air at these things, but I don't think I've ever seen somebody in campaign apparel or with, you know, campaign signage at a state of the union address. I don't know what the rules are for members of Congress, that's for them to figure out. But look, I think it just emphasized the extreme politics of some House members and teed up the president to give a message that, you know, while he was very straightforward, even aggressive about the contrast, at the same time, what he laid out was something that most Americans agree with on issue after issue after issue.

And I think, you know, some of those antics just bring that into relief even more strongly. Well, there was reporting that Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, had called for decorum prior to the night happening, which I guess was a little bit of a fool's errand when you run the Republican House conference. But there were interruptions nonetheless. So what was the feeling like in the room? Was there a – and this has now become like a regular phenomenon. Was there a sense of like exhaustion with it from within the room? You know, it's happened often enough that I think when you're in the room you're always kind of waiting for it. ready for it. But part of what we saw is none of that shook the president. And, you know, all

of that kind of goes on. There's chirping, there's chattering, there's even some, some just inappropriate interjections from the back benches. But none of it really took away from the message that the president was there to deliver. And again, I think a lot of that traces back to the fact that on issue after issue, whether it's infrastructure or whether it's a woman's right to choose, what the president had to say is deeply in line with what most Americans, if not necessarily necessarily most House Republicans already believe. With that said, there were fewer interruptions than there were in previous years. What does it say that Republicans didn't seem to test their luck in the same way that they did last year?

I think they kind of learned their lesson last time, right? It turns out for all that they say about the president, he's pretty quick on his feet in those moments, and it's just not going to reflect well on them. And I think most of them absorbed that lesson. You know, you did see some of them, I think at one point he kind of, tested them on what seemed to be them doubling down on a commitment to tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, just in the kind of back and forth that was going on. It turns out under President Biden, typically when that sort of thing happens, he comes out the better for it. I think most

of them realize that. Can you speak about just more broadly? I mean, you know what their attacks are over his age, over, you know, there's these constant claims that he's in cognitive decline. Can you speak about what the state of the union address did to kind of rebut those claims? because a lot of those claims kind of exist and fester in darkness, like without the light of day, because they don't often actually see him and hear from him. And so speak about what last night actually did to kind of neutralize those claims. Yeah, I think what was most important was this.

You know, a lot of us who work with him have been saying, this is somebody who is on top of his game, knows what he's doing, and we see that when we're in the room with him. And then there's been this weird counter discourse saying, oh okay how come that's only behind closed doors and so tonight was a good chance to demonstrate no the same person we're talking about being in the room with when there's five people in the Roosevelt room is the person you saw in front of hundreds of people and speaking to tens of millions of people in from from the well of the house or the the rostrum at the house of the representatives it's

the same person with the same intensity the same focus the same strength and the same clarity And I'm glad he had a chance to demonstrate that last night in the speech. You know, generally, Republicans stand for at least some stuff, right? They'll stand up and applaud for the basic stuff, for veteran health care, for health care for Americans, for lower costs, just the easy stuff, the gimmies. They didn't stand for anything. Yeah, it was kind of weird when he's talking about, you know, the achievement of bringing back manufacturing jobs to the Midwest, right? And you see, like, Republican House members from the Midwest kind of sitting like with body language that says, I don't like that. It's a strange thing.

And I get, look, there's this political dynamics, and, you know, you decide whether to get up, whether to clap or not, can't tell somebody else what to do. But again, I think most Americans are cheering for the results. Most Americans are definitely cheering for the fact that when you want a job, you can generally get a job in this country, that unemployment's the lowest has been in 50 years, that we do have manufacturing coming back. I don't care if you support one party or the other politically. These are good things. And I think it's good for the president, not just on his own behalf, but on behalf of the country, to take a bit of a victory lap on those achievements, even while he's talking about the problems we have in front of us and what he wants to do about him.

One of those issues was the border and the border bill that was put forward. Do you think that he had done an effective job then in drawing that contrast between Republicans coming out and saying constantly for years, decades, that we need some fix to the border? border. And when a conservative Republican, James Lankford, who, by the way, C-SPAN, their cameras, went right to him while he was talking about it. And I think at one point he even, like, agreed with the president as he was speaking to draw that contrast between the fact that they say they want this done and when they're actually given the opportunity to pass a bill, they don't take yes for an answer. Yeah, I think it demonstrated the most important dynamic we have here, which is that

some congressional Republicans have decided that they would rather have the issue be bad so that they can beat the president up about it as a political issue, then team up with the president on a bipartisan basis to actually improve conditions. The conditions at the border are not something that any of us are happy with. And maybe you'll say that our administration hasn't been perfect on that, it hasn't got everything right, all the more reason that if there's a chance for a compromise and a tough compromise where the basis of both parties, ours and the other, were upset with some of the compromises that it took to generate this package, and yet they did it.

And yeah, just to be clear, you know, Senator Langford's name may not be a household name. We are talking about a very conservative Republican who found a way to work across the aisle only for the rug to be pulled out from under him and everybody who teamed up on this. And from what we can tell, it came because the former president told congressional Republicans to stop cooperating, stop trying to solve the problem, so that the problem could just fester. Another moment that I believe was the most powerful moment of the evening was when the president directed, like, directed his speech right at the Supreme Court justices and basically warned about the consequences of not just Dobbs,

but its resulting decision of basically banning IVF. I mean, that was the predicate for the Alabama Supreme Court decision. What was the feeling like in the room when he did that? Well, I think you could feel the president invoking what Americans believe, most Americans anyway, and express in their preferred choices filtering through to the dynamics that the court should be conscious of. The court by design is supposed to be an apolitical institution. And yet part of why regard for the court in the country has diminished is that it has come to feel more and more like it is a political institution and has made political what are viewed

as political choices. And look, if it were not for President Trump, keeping his promise to take away the right to choose through the court. We wouldn't be worried about things like access to IVF. Alabama's the first place where access to IVF was withdrawn. I do not think it will be the last. And I think the president was right to raise that these are the things that are at stake in who gets to make those decisions, whether it's in Congress on the court or throughout our political system.

And speaking about those regular issues that impact people was a recurring theme throughout this speech. What did it, I guess, what was your takeaway from the fact that, you know, while Republicans are focusing on nebulous issues, that the president was speaking about IVF and Roe, which impacts regular people, about shrinkflation, which impacts regular people, about eliminating junk fees and late charges in banks, which, again, impacts regular people. You know, I think the president's North Star has always been everyday life. You know, I actually heard some of the Republican senators sitting nearby snickering at him,

no pun intended, when he was describing a bag of chips or a Snickers bar, being shrunk by these companies that want to sell less for the same price, which I think shows that actually he's the one who's more in touch. This is about everyday life. All politics is about everyday life. And frankly, my side of the aisle, God bless us, are sometimes prone to getting lost in the alphabet soup or the names of the bills and the numbers and the statistics and the policy details.

So I appreciate that sometimes against some of the currents of our own party's rhetorical style, The president kept it down to the basics. What matters is not the $1.2 trillion or the number of $46,000, which is how many projects we have going out there, it's that this project got somebody a job, that project got somebody a better bridge in their community, that someone's everyday life gets better or gets worse depending on the decisions that are made in the White House,

in the Congress, and in the courts. You had just alluded to those 46,000 projects. Can you speak about the material impact that those are having across the country? because a lot of times, like, we don't, you know, it's very easy for our national news cycles to just focus on, you know, the major top line bullshit of the day. But this is the stuff that, to our earlier point, actually impacts people. Look, sometimes, as my public affairs director says, sometimes good news is no news. And so we have a responsibility, I think, to make sure that we do cut through the BS and talk about real things happening as a direct result of President Biden's leadership and those in Congress who chose to support him on things like the infrastructure. And what that means in small communities that are getting a streetscape fixed that's going to help mean fewer fatal car crashes,

or in some of what I call the cathedrals of our infrastructure, like the I-5 bridge that I visited in Vancouver, Washington, that is 107 years old and is a vital link for people's commutes and for their supply chains that is going to get fixed now, replaced actually. Or the Blotnik Bridge in Superior, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota that goes across that river, across that state line, and is at risk of closing within a few years, if it doesn't get fixed, finally going to be fixed because we brought them a billion dollars made possible through the president's infrastructure package. And even if you're not into roads and bridges, it's shaping lives. We're not just building infrastructure, we're building livelihoods.

I was just out in the Pacific Northwest talking about that I-5 bridge with workers and talked to a working mom who's in one of the building trades saying how this project is the difference that will mean that she is able to, to actually see her children most nights. Another guy who was a returning veteran from Iraq and Syria who believes he would be a statistic if he had not found the union, the sense of purpose that comes with it, and the work opportunity that has made him now

the first in his family to own a home. That's what this is about. And that's just from the process of building the project, let alone the finished product that everybody gets to actually use and benefit from. That's why we're doing all this work. Can you talk about going into these communities as it relates to, like, folks' partisan affiliations

and what it does to see the administration in there. Because, you know, a lot of these communities, what it looks like, I mean, I've seen videos that have been produced as a result of the bipartisan infrastructure law. And these don't look like, you know, liberal cities, right? These are blue-collar communities, which, to the naked eye would seem, you know, would seem like their working-class communities

would vote red. So what's it like to go to these places? Like, what's the reaction from folks? What I love is we can put into practice the saying that there's no such thing as a Republican road or a Democratic bridge. And I've been to rural communities where we meet with local officials, county officials, you know, the kinds of small towns where every mayor or county commissioner has a day job as well. And I've seen some grown men with tears coming into their eyes about some of the projects that we're finally bringing to their communities. And many of them, I'm sure, are Republican. I don't know. I don't ask. It's not that important. What is important is that I want people to see that the work that the president has led

that was bipartisan, often. We got many, not most, but many Republicans to cross the island Congress and work with Democrats and the president of the cabinet to get this done, that it means better life, better every day life in these communities, red communities, blue communities, purple communities, and that's the point. I feel like Republicans very often capitalize on folks who claim that they're the forgotten Americans, what's it like to go into these communities and actually be the administration that is remembering them, even though other administrations who kind of sees on this talking point

that they're remembering the forgotten Americans don't. Yeah, I think the point is that actions speak louder than words. Just a couple of days ago, I was addressing the national gathering of the UA union, that's pipeliner, plumbers, pipe fitters, steam fitters. And they were talking about the promises that were made to them under the last administration that, you know, President Trump promised you're going to get an infrastructure bill, promised he would fix their pensions. Promise after promise, none of it happened, which is a good example of what it means to actually be forgotten. We've been able to deliver on that. The president obviously

delivered on the infrastructure bill, also a pension reform that was very important for the building trades. Project labor agreements happening across the country that mean more of those jobs will be good paying. Provision called Davis-Bacon, which has to do with the wages on construction sites, those going up. So, yeah, the exact same people who were being appealed to as forgotten. And look, I come from the industrial Midwest. I think a lot of us from so-called flyover country did feel forgotten by both parties for many, many years. But what's so exciting now is it's not just talk. It's policies, not just promises.

It's jobs, not just generalities. And that's landing. How have you sold the importance of something that people don't realize is missing until it's gone? Has that presented a difficult issue for you? Because people don't realize that their roads and bridges need. help until the roads and bridges need help. You know, the nature of infrastructure is most of the time you're not supposed to have to think about it. I like to think about this stuff, but the whole idea of a road that works is it just works.

Just like the whole importance of clean, safe drinking water coming out of your tap is that you never have to get up in the morning and spend one ounce of your energy while you're getting your kids ready for school worried about whether clean safe drinking water is going to come out of the tap. But it turns out a whole lot has to happen precisely so that you don't have to worry about that. And it's okay for that to play out in the background, except when we're making choices about the policies that are gonna make or break these kinds of improvements. I think it's also true around our rights and freedoms.

You know, we have grown up with the assumption through most of our lifetimes that the only direction that America would go in is toward more rights and freedoms. Certainly over the years, over the decades, the eons, and certainly into my lifetime, where something like my right to get married, is relatively new, but secured in 2015 that wasn't there before, it allowed us to believe that every generation could know it's going to have more rights and freedoms than before.

But part of what the president brought up last night is that when the right to choose has been taken away, as promised, by the former president and his appointees, when books are being banned in the United States of America, when IVF and accident, to birth control or on the chopping block. It turns out a lot of rights and freedoms that we took for granted are not at all secure, are not at all safe. And that's a big part of what's at stake in the conversations happening in this city right this minute. And what does that look like with a Biden administration in 2024 to 2028 versus a potential Trump administration? Well, without getting into campaigns or elections, what I'll say is that the president laid out

a freedom agenda and talked to. about freedom and democracy being expanded, not withdrawn. What does that mean in practical terms? It means measures like codifying Roe v. Wade. The Republican appointed Supreme Court may have taken it away, but Congress could act in order to create and protect those rights. He talked about the Equality Act, and I appreciate him not forgetting that

because that's still incredibly important, unfinished business for the LGBTQ-plus community. He talked about the Voting Rights Act, named for John, the original Voting Rights Act, but also the John Lee. Lewis Act that would expand access to the vote, which is the most important thing. It is your vote, not your weaponry, that makes sure that the government works for the people and not the other way around. And he talked about how to expand that. So I think you'll see more of where

that came from this year and into a future Biden administration. Perfectly put. We'll leave it there. Secretary Pete, thanks for taking the time. Thank you. Thanks again to Secretary Pete. Again, to everybody listening right now, thank you for sticking with me for 200 episodes here. To my producer, Sam, thanks for dealing with me for 200 episodes. And that's it for this episode. Talk to you all 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 in 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.