No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Republicans prepare not to certify any Democratic winners

Episode Date: May 30, 2021

Republicans have filibustered the January 6 commission in the Senate, and are setting the stage to refuse to certify Democratic wins in 2022 and 2024. Brian interviews Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs about the Cyber Ninja "audit" in Maricopa County and the Republican effort to strip her of her powers. And Brian chats with longtime congressional aide Stuart Perelmuter about Marjorie Taylor Green and how worried Democrats should be about her rise.Donate here to the "Don't Be a Mitch" fund: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dontbeamitchWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CAhttps://www.briantylercohen.com/podcast/See 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 Republicans filibustering the January 6th commission in the Senate and how they're setting the stage to refuse to certify Democratic wins in 2022 and 2024. I interview Arizona's Secretary of State Katie Hobbs about the whole Cyber Ninjas debacle in Maricopa County and the Republican effort to strip her of her powers. And I chat with longtime congressional aide Stuart Perlmutter about Marjorie Taylor Green and how worried Democrats should be about her rise. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen and you're listening to No Lie. Okay, first off, this is the one-year anniversary of the podcast.

You might notice we have a different logo, did a little bit of an upgrade. We started at the beginning of June in 2020 and covered everything from the George Floyd protest to the pandemic, the election, the insurrection, the inauguration, interviewed Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Katie Porter, Pete Buttigieg. But truly, the reason this podcast can keep going is because of you. So thank you for listening. Thanks for trusting me to tell you what's going on. Thanks for sticking around this last year, and I hope you'll continue to stick around. Okay, so with that said, let's get into it. So the Senate has officially voted down the legislation to create a January 6th commission.

The vote was 54 in support and 35 against, but because we need 60 votes to move all legislation forward, those 35 votes won and the legislation failed. And of course, the only reason this legislation even needed 60 votes is because just a few Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin and Kirsten Cinema, are holding on to this idea of preserving the filibuster. And so instead of being able to pass legislation with a majority, which might be normal in, say, a democracy, Democrats now have to reach the insurmountable threshold of 60 votes to pass anything. And Republicans don't even need to show up. They simply have to not have ten defections and everything the Democrats try to pass will fail. That's the system

that's being protected by virtue of keeping the filibuster intact. Remember, too, It was Joe Manchin himself who said the filibuster should hurt that it should be painful. The filibuster should be painful. It really should be painful. And we've made it more comfortable over the years, not intentionally. Maybe it just evolved into that. Maybe it has to be more painful. Maybe you have to stand there. There's things we can talk about.

Where is that guy? Because on this vote for the January 6th commission, there sure as hell it wasn't any pain. 11 senators didn't even show up. Only 35 voted against it, and still they won. How'd that hurt for the minority party? Where did they exact even an ounce of pain in this entire process? And look, it was Joe Manchin who suggested a possible return to the talking filibuster. Why not now?

Because as it stands, the entire Senate is on recess for a holiday weekend. They didn't even have a moment of delay on their weekend plans. They didn't even miss Friday dinner. Of course, Republicans are going to block everything because there is no reason not to. There's no downside. They get the benefit of blocking Democrats' agenda, which, by the way, they'll use to attack the Democrats as ineffective on the campaign trail in 2022, and they don't suffer an ounce of inconvenience in their own lives.

That's a win-win for them. The only thing worse is that certain Democratic senators are then allowing it. And one more point before I move on from Manchin. And that's this idea from him that there wouldn't be a need to eliminate the filibuster because there would be 10 Republicans who'd vote for a bill like the January 6th commission. I'm not going to destroy my government. No, I think that those will come together. You have to have faith.

There's 10 good people. You have to have faith that there's 10 good people. Okay, well, to the surprise of no one, there weren't 10 good people. So if the whole rationale for protecting the filibuster was that Republicans would do their part by being bipartisan, knowing now that they haven't, what's the justification for keeping it? They've proven you wrong. They've made a mockery of your logic. So why continue to protect the Republican Party's power after they failed your test for doing so?

The fact is this, we're now almost a quarter of a way through this precious sliver of time where we have unified control of government. It rarely ever comes along that we've even gotten this far, given the systemic barriers against Democrats, is just a miracle. And yet now we're at this point where we are wasting time. Democrats met every single one of the demands put forward by Republicans and still Republicans voted against it. Like, we've been here before. We were here with the ACA, with the Recovery Act. with the American Rescue Plan. We can't do this again.

It has to stop now. We can't keep doing this whole Lucy pulls the football away every time. We can't keep letting them run out the clock. Our time here is limited. We're going to work our asses off to keep the House and Senate in 2022,

but part of that, a big part of that, is being able to convince Americans that you can actually govern when they show up for you. And look, clearly Republicans know that, right? The Republican's entire game plan

is to ensure the Democrats can't pass anything so that they can turn around, around in midterms and say, look how ineffective the Democrats are, vote for us instead. And so knowing that, we have to, have to be willing to use the tools at our disposal to make this work. There won't be bipartisanship. That chip has sailed.

It's over done. Joe Manchin can't be so naive to think that if they aren't willing to pass an independent commission investigating an insurrection on the U.S. capital, that they have any desire for bipartisanship on anything. They gave the game away. So if not eliminating the filibuster, well, then at a bare minimum, you know, they're not to be a bare minimum, make it so that 40 senators have to vote no, instead of making it so that 60 have to vote yes.

This way, at least, at least they have to show up. There's no reason that Republicans have 35 votes against the January 6th Commission and another 11 senators who didn't even bother to be at work that day, and yet 54 votes in favor of it still means it fails. That's not democracy. That is a broken system. That's a system that overwhelmingly favors minority rule. But look, we have to be able to see the end game in all of this.

This isn't about the January 6th Commission. We'll get a House Select Committee, which, to be honest, will probably be better because members of the party that instigated the damn thing won't be on it. This is about our failure to end the filibuster, which is the only thing stopping us from passing H.R. 1 in the Voting Rights Act, which themselves are the only thing that would stop this assault on democracy by Republicans all across the country. You can draw a straight line from protecting the filibuster to allowing Republicans to continue gerrymandering, which may very well cost us the House, and continue passing voters to

repression bills, which could cost us everything else. And at the end of the day, the goal for Republicans is this. They're setting the stage to not accept the election results in 2024 if a Democrat wins. That is the natural conclusion of this. We only skated by in 2020, despite actually winning, because a tenuous system only barely managed to hold up. Imagine if Brad Raffesberger hadn't denied Trump's demands to find more votes. Imagine if Republicans on the state board of election in Michigan, like Aaron Van Langeveld,

didn't certify the results. Imagine if Republican-controlled state legislature sent their own slate of electors instead of the ones chosen by the voters. Imagine if Congress didn't certify. The fact that the outcome of this election was the correct outcome is owed to a confluence of really, really precarious events, all managing to work out, but just by the skin of their teeth. And so 2020 was okay, but at the same time, they're already undoing all of those safeguards, those checks. In Georgia, Raffisberger's powers have been stripped and he'll face a primary challenge in 2022. Georgia's new voting law also gave the Republican legislature power to choose the head

of the state election board, which will have the power to investigate and replace local officials. Van Langefeld wasn't renominated to the board in Michigan. Trump loyalists are running for Secretary of State in five of the ten closest battleground states, and you better believe that they will have the support of the Republican Party considering Trump says jump, they say how high. Arizona Republicans proposed a law that would allow the state legislature to just override the popular vote and choose their own electors. If you think 2020 was bad, that was the test run.

That was the first go. They have changed the parts that didn't work. They've purged the people who followed the law. Think about what 2020 would look like if Trump loyalists were in charge everywhere. So look, I know this is really grim, and I don't intend on just dumping on you and then leaving. So I'll end with this. There are ways to fix this.

I'll focus on two. First, do not let historical precedent play out where the party out of power wins in a midterm cycle. That means paying attention now, staying involved and engaged, and it means when November 2020 rolls around, you and your friends and your family have to show up. A lot of these changes by Republicans rely on Democrats not showing up to block them. We don't have to have a Republican Secretary of State in Arizona

or Georgia or Michigan or Wisconsin where they're on the ballot. We don't have to lose the House or the Senate. We can't let them install the infrastructure that they need to undermine democracy, but that depends on us staying involved and not being complacent. And the second thing is to focus on doing the work now. And I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I created the Don't Be a Mitch Fund to do exactly that. It's composed of eight voter registration and voter outreach organizations in eight states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Arizona, and Georgia, where the goal is to reach people now. Not in October or November of 2022, but now, so that they're registered, so that they're paying attention, so that they're ready once it's time to go to the polls.

We've already raised $40,000 in just the last few weeks, which I couldn't be more thankful for. So if you want to donate, the link is in the episode notes. But it doesn't have to be this fun. Find any organization, any state party that focuses on these boots on the ground efforts, and donate now when your money makes the biggest difference. If you plan on donating in September or October of an election year, just know that that money is going to TV stations so that attack ads can play on an endless loop. So if you're going to donate, consider doing it when that money can go to

phone banking or door knocking or voter registration. The strategy works. Georgia is proof of that. But it does take time and money. So please don't stop fighting because we're up against a Republican electorate that believes that Democratic victories are by their very nature illegitimate. So while we got a break in 2020, it's up to everyone to work together to make sure that they don't get away with it in 2022 or beyond.

Still coming up is my chat with longtime congressional aide Stuart Perlmutter about just how worried Democrats should be. about the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the Republican Party. But first, my interview with Arizona Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs. Okay, today we have Arizona's Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs. Thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. You know, I guess we have to start with the most important thing here.

Have the Cyber Ninjas found any bamboo fibers yet? Not that I know of, but they're not going to either. Yeah, the fact that I have to say that sentence out loud, and that's a real thing that's happening right now. How many recounts or audits are we on in a number? Arizona right now. Well, I don't want to call this an audit. So I'm not counting this in the number. But after each election, each county does a post-election logic inaccuracy test, which is an audit of the equipment. And then we do a hand count audit of a 2% of randomly selected precincts. And that is a

ballot. So those were all done in every county. And then over and above that, Maricopa County did an additional logic and accuracy test and two forensic audits of the equipment conducted by federally certified auditing firms who understand election equipment and know what they are looking for. Right. So at this point, is it just a Republican effort until they can get the outcome that they're looking for, they'll just keep pushing forward these audits regardless of how insane or conspiratorial they are? Well, honestly, I don't think they're going to get the result they're looking for unless they are cooking the books, which some of the procedures that we've seen have made it ripe for that to happen. But what they're really trying to do is continue to undermine

the integrity of our elections and the public's confidence in them and lay the groundwork for future election challenges. So it's very, as comical as it is to look at this, it is also very concerning as we look ahead to the next elections. Right. I mean, building on that, you know, I know that we do joke about cyber ninjas, but how is this allowed? Because, I mean, this is a group with no actual audit experience. The founders are conspiracy theorists. One of the auditors was at the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. The auditors are using UV lights to check for secret watermarks. There are allegations that chickens ate the ballots and then the chickens were incinerated. So how is a blatantly partisan organization allowed to go near ballots? Because this

is going to happen across the country now. And any partisan hack who's mainlining Tucker Carlson can start up an audit firm, they can call themselves Patriot Eagle Freedom Defenders and then say, oh, yes, we've detected trace amounts of, you know, Pizagate fibers, and this election's all scam. And 60% of Republicans are going to believe them. So how is this something that's allowed to happen outside of official channels? Well, it started with the Republicans in the Senate issuing a subpoena. And this was really in response to their, to their base, these people in their base who were demanding it. And Maricopa County initially wasn't going to comply with the subpoena because they felt, well, and they were getting legal counsel that said, you can't turn over

this stuff. There's a whole bunch of bad precedent for doing so. And we think legally, you can't do that anyway. They went to court and a judge upheld the validity of the subpoena and the Senate subpoena powers to do this. And so instead of appealing that ruling, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors complied with it. And so here we are. Even amid all of these concerns, they're going to now have to decertify that election equipment that they lost chain of custody of. The chain of custody of ballots has been completely destroyed. But there really is no legal parameter around this kind of situation, it's really outside of the statutes and the procedures that we have for elections, we shared all of the security procedures that should be in place with the Senate. And they ignored

that. And so there's really, that's why we're seeing now, there's not enough precaution in place to protect the integrity of all these things. But they're testing the waters here and writing the playbook to try to do it in other states. And by the way, that same Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors now seems pretty livid over this. They've released a letter saying, our state has become a laughing stock. Worse, this audit is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our Democratic Republic. The Republican who serves as the recorder tweeted, I'm literally looking at our voter registration database on my screen right now. Right now, we can't indulge these insane lies any longer as a party, as a state, as a country.

And that was after Cyber Ninjas accused the county of deleting a database that contained election information, which, of course, Trump picked up and tweeted out from his blog or, or, or, or however he reaches people now. So clearly that's backfired on them. But I guess the broader question here is there seems to be two camps of Republicans. We have one who, you know, like these very Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and then the other, which are, you know, continuing to humor what we're seeing with groups like the Cyber Ninjas. So what percentage of the Republican Party would you say is in each camp?

I don't know the percentages, but what I will say, I think what we're seeing is a little bit of buyer's remorse and folks who knew from the beginning that our election was valid and fair and the results we certified were accurate, but we're hesitant to speak up because when they did, they got some pushback. when the Republican board of supervisors decided to fight the subpoena, they got some pushback, they got attacked, there were some threats, the same kind of thing that my office has been experiencing since the election. And so I think, you know, there was some hesitancy there. And I think now, I mean, I don't want to put words in their mouth, but the actions they're taking, you know, give a sense of some virus remorse. And I think what we needed, what we need more of is those Republicans, especially Republicans who know that this is a farce to speak up and say so, because if they all got up together and did it, it wouldn't be as scary. And I think it would certainly

have more impact than individuals doing that. Right. At the end of the day, it's going to need to be the Republicans who have to speak out, not just the Democrats, but it's not like Democrats have any clout in those circles anyway. And, you know, more broadly, building on what you had mentioned earlier, you know, we are seeing other states already engaging in similar behavior. In Wisconsin, the Republican State Assembly head just hired former police officers to do the same thing. This is not an audit firm, it's police officers, you know, for a 2020 recount. And so in addition to not being qualified, there's also the added threat of force against communities who've become used to this kind of thing. So really, the threat of violence not only isn't

hiding, but it's getting more pronounced. Right. I mean, since the election, when there was this widespread disinformation coming from every direction, all these conspiracy theories, many of us were saying, this is dangerous, this is dangerous. And there are people who predicted what happened on January 6th. But I think nobody in their imagination actually expected to happen, but it did. That is exactly why we are saying this is dangerous. And that should have have given us all pause and made this stop. And it clearly hasn't. And it's not off the table for something like that to happen again. In fact, there's a lot of people that are supporting this so-called audit who believe that it will actually overturn the election results. It's not going to. We know that

most of the leaders of this effort know that, but they're pushing it anyway. And it is dangerous and it could lead to another January 6th style of attack. And that is extremely alarming. Right. And by the way, without a lot of the roadblocks that had been put in place to stop these efforts from going through the first time, you know, we're seeing people like Brad Raffisberger who had opposed this in Georgia had his power stripped. Obviously, you did.

And I'm going to ask you about that in just a moment. But, you know, a lot of the barriers that had been put in place, the checks, have been dismantled by a Republican Party that seems more and more intent on pushing this big lie and really acting upon it, not only this time, but in the future. I did want to ask, because you had mentioned about the machines being basically put out of commission, because they're no longer in the county's custody, are these machines no longer safe to use? And if not, are you able to replace all this equipment in time for the 2022 election cycle?

That's exactly right. And this is something that we notified the county about. that it was a grave concern we had if they lost custody of the equipment back in February and March when this first thing, this thing was first being contemplated. And this is not just our office. Our office is the authority that certifies the equipment in Arizona. But this came from SISA and their best practices and guidelines for election equipment that if the chain of custody is lost by certified election officials and there's the potential that it was compromised, it should not be utilized in elections again. And so we're basing our notice to the county on that

guidance. And the fact is, even if the chain of cussie had just gone from the county to the cyber ninjas and nothing else happened, that would still be a problem. But what we know is that this equipment was locked in a room that nobody had access to in terms of the expert observers, the press, the public cameras, none of that happened. And so we don't know what they did to the equipment. And without knowing that and without having a way to verify if it's been compromised, then the safest thing is not to use it. So the contract for the equipment is with the county.

It's going to be up to them to resolve that with their vendor. But the reason we sent this notice now is that we are already in preparations for the 22 election. And this needs to happen sooner, rather. than later. Is that a cost that the county has to bear now by virtue of having to replace this equipment, or is it just up to the vendor to switch out that bad equipment for equipment that you can then certify? At the end of the day, I believe it's going to be the taxpayers of Arizona that bear this cost. There is some kind of written indemnification that the Senate provided to the

county so that the county wasn't going to bear the cost of any harm. And so on the basis of that, it should be the Senate that is replacing the equipment. I don't know how that's going to be resolved, but it'll be the taxpayers that end up paying for that. Yeah. So people that are hardworking people have to pay the cost for this conspiracy theory being pushed by, you know, a completely illegitimate movement. Okay, so going back to something that we touched on earlier,

a bill is now passed the State House and Senate Appropriations Committee that would strip you of your election powers for committing the crime of criticizing the audit that we were just referring to. So what exactly would this bill do? And what are you doing to fight back? So I want to make it clear. This bill is nothing more than political retaliation at me and my office for doing the job that the Arizona voters elected me to do, being good at that job. And it'll basically overturn the will of the voters, you know, if they're successful. They are, what they're doing is removing a constitutional duty of of my office of defending and of Arizona election laws and taking it and giving it to the

attorney general. So how that plays out what that means is if somebody decides to file a suit over an election law, my office will still be the named defendant and won't have any ability to act as a defendant in court and have any stay over the matter in court. And this is really problematic in many ways. I have had public conflicts with the Attorney General because I've tried to focus on what's best for voters of Arizona. And he's defended cases based on his partisan political agenda. And so that's really what this comes down to. This is unconstitutional. The duties prescribed to my office in this regard are in the state's constitution. And the legislature does not have the authority to overturn the Constitution. And so, you know, if this does end up passing, we will go to

court over it. Also, I mean, this bill would end after 2022. So it literally just targets you. You know, nothing. Nothing here is based in any semblance of governing principles. It is just a personal attack against someone who isn't deemed sufficiently loyal to this cause of defending the big lie. This didn't start with the 2020 election. It started. It started. with me being a Democrat and having the audacity to win a statewide race in Arizona. Yeah. Well, with that said, I mean, your term is up in 2022. So what's your plan?

Are you going to run again for Secretary of State? Do you plan to run for higher office? You know, I have dealt with threats, having armed protesters at my house, and I haven't caved to their scare tactics. So I certainly am considering higher office. Arizonans I talk to are tired of this partisanship, and they want leaders who are going to roll up their sleeves and get to work. So no matter what office I run for, that's what I'm going to be focused on, not this noise, not the scare tactics. But if people want to learn more,

they can go to katyhobs.org. Great. Well, I'm sorry that you're going through that, but, you know, thank you for continuing to fight for what's right here. So Secretary Hobbs, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks again to Katie Hobbs. Now we have a 14-year Capitol Hill veteran and the founder of Ad Advocacy and O.D. Action, Stuart Perlmutter. Stu, thanks for coming on. Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me. So let's jump in here.

Joe Manchin said that he didn't want to destroy the government by eliminating the filibuster. And so he didn't, and the January 6th Commission, Bill, failed. How relieved are you that the government wasn't destroyed? I am so happy we won't know the truth. about an attempt to actually destroy the government. I'm tremendously relieved. Thank you for asking. Could I just say that the poetic injustice of saying that the filibuster is for bipartisanship,

and the first time they use it is to block a bipartisan commission, there's something, I don't know, artistic about that? Yeah, it's special. Yeah, it really is incredible. Like, if you were Republican and you knew that the entire Democratic agenda could be blocked in the name of bipartisanship, so long as your whole conference actually avoids bipartisanship, what would you do? Like what Mansion's doing here isn't facilitating bipartisanship?

He's ensuring that it fails, you know? Right, right. Of course. Of course. What it does is it says, no matter how unpopular a party is, they have the ability to control the agenda. And so what is the incentive for bipartisanship if you don't need it? If you got one party, they can't get anything.

done. The Republicans can't do anything in the minority. Right. So if their stated goal is to stop Democrats, then great. And so now we've got two Democrats who are just saying, yes, we want to give you the tools to do that. There's nothing in the Constitution that says they have that tool. It is a loophole. And Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema are saying, yeah, by all means, by all means, stop me from doing the things that I want to do. Let me, let me ask you about this. This is, you know, now the issue at the heart of this and most of my focus is on the filibuster in and of itself because at the end of the day with regard to the january sixth commission i don't think this is as big a deal in the sense that i think we'll still get a select committee in the house on the january sixth commission this is

more just the principle of of being hoodwinked right by by by republicans by virtue of by republicans and these few democratic holdouts that the filibuster is just going to be used as a tool of obstruction for the next one and a half years, at which point, Republicans will turn around and say, okay, look, you elected Democrats to get all this stuff done. They couldn't get anything done. Kick them out of power. They don't deserve to be in office.

They couldn't even accomplish anything, even though the reason that they couldn't accomplish anything was that it was the Republicans who stopped them from accomplishing anything just by virtue of being able to use this tool where so long as Democrats can't get 60 votes on something, which they never will, everything can be blocked. Just as the framers intent. ended. Right. Just as the framers end. So let me, let me ask you about the, the January 6th commission.

Yeah. We're looking at a situation now where it's likely that we'll have a House Select Committee. Do you think that there's a scenario in which a select committee will actually be better than an independent commission? From a purely quality standpoint, from a purely integrity and credibility standpoint and getting the job done, I don't think there's anything, any question. There's a reason that when we had a 9-11 commission, we didn't invite al-Qaeda to be on it. Yeah. This was an insurrection perpetrated by the Republican Party, spearheaded by the current de facto head of the Republican Party and many people who are still in Congress. So do I think that it would be better that we would get more truth by not having those people be on the investigative team? Yeah, I don't think there's any question.

It really becomes about selling it to the American people, the fact that Republicans have said, we don't want the truth out there, the fact that they said, we are going to, in broad daylight, participate in essentially the greatest government cover-up in American history kind of gives Democrats permission to have a real commission and then sell it to the American people. Yeah. A lot of this is going to be based on communications and marketing. You know, I think that Republicans are going to start tomorrow in terms of trashing what they claim is going to be a partisan commission. And in two years, Democrats are going to say, well, this is how we should have done it. Yeah. That's kind of our MO. I think the irony of Republicans saying that it's partisan saying that, you know, we won't accept the findings of this commission. Do you think they'd really accepted any findings they didn't like in a regular commission?

They can't even accept the results of an election they don't like. Right. The whole point here is that Republicans don't accept findings. So to cout to this party, hoping and, you know, hoping beyond hope that they're going to accept the findings of something when the whole issue at the heart of this is that Republicans don't accept findings is just beyond me. Yeah. And it's it's not limited to what happens in the Senate chamber. They can't accept that the world is on fire. And it's burning right in front of us. They can't accept masks, keep germs from travel. from your mouth into another person's mouth, like, these are provable facts. And they're standing up there and they're saying, the sky's really green today. I mean, if there's any justice by the time we get to 2022, they will have lost credibility to the point where the historical trend of the president's party losing power in the midterm is completely turned on its head. So let's let's move over to something else here. Something just as ridiculous. We have

Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Green who are going around the country as part of their America First Tour. Now, I know that we think of them as clowns, but... It's because they're clowns. That does certainly help things along. Like, our memories are so short because we said the same thing about Donald Trump cut to, you know, kids are locked up in cages and the country's burning and we're protecting fossil fuels and, I mean, where do we even begin?

Yeah. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by scoffing at this? Yes and no, I think. I don't think that anybody's taking the Marjorie Taylor Greens and the Matt Gateses of the, and there are plenty. I mean, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, there's plenty of seriously damaged Republicans in Congress right now preaching just bonkers dangerous ideology that has no bearing on reality. Scoffing at them, I think we need to do that because of our own mental health. But I also think that, yeah, I mean, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Green is a threat to other members of Congress, and that needs to be taken seriously. But I also think that we need to recognize that they are, unlike Donald Trump, for all of his shortcomings, Donald Trump was a leader. I mean, he galvanized almost half the country. He has taken over one of the two major political parties in the country, and he is remaking it in his image.

He is a leader. Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Green are symptoms of that. They are not the causes. And here's something that is an unpopular statement, but I totally believe that it is true. Liz Cheney is a greater threat to U.S. democracy than Marjorie Taylor Green. Okay, why? I'll tell you why. Thanks for asking.

Let me ask you this question. Who is a bigger threat to American democracy? President Donald Trump or former President Donald Trump? I'd say Trump is president. Right. Of course. Of course. He had his finger on the button.

I mean, he was, he cost hundreds of thousands of lives. possibly. He cost livelihoods. He was devastating. We'll be recovering from this for a long time. Liz Cheney was empowering that throughout all this, right? She never said a word standing up to Donald Trump, never took a stand against him until he'd lost. Then Liz Cheney stood up. Now, I'm old enough to remember when the big lie was that Iraq and Saddam Hussein did 9-11. And that was perpetrated by another guy named Cheney, a guy who only attained the vice presidency because five Republican Supreme Court appointees ordered that the voting in the presidency stopped being counted. Liz Cheney isn't standing up trying to defend American democracy.

She's defending an institution that is keeping a Republican party with minority support in power. She is supporting an institution of the Electoral College. She's supporting gerrymandering. She's supporting voter suppression. She stood up on national television just last week and said she is all for voter suppression and she can't understand why anybody would be against it. She is for unlimited corporate billionaire money in politics. All the things that are antithetical to the idea of a representative democracy, Liz Cheney has always stood for. The only time she finally stood up and said, this is not okay, is when they lost. They lost the election.

The votes were counted. It was done. And then they embarrassed themselves. They tried to violently overthrow the very system that had put her and her father and her colleagues into power. That is what she is against. And she's a lot smarter than Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gates. She gets stuff done. Gerrymandering happens.

That insurrection, how many elections did that change? Zero. How many elections has gerrymandering, big money in politics, voter suppression, the electoral college changed. Countless and always, always for the party that she's defending. Yeah, I think that's really perfectly put, you know, just to build on that, she really does legitimize all of this stuff. It's easy to look at Marjorie Taylor Green and just say, okay, she's,

You know, she's a clown, don't take her seriously. I even have family members of mine who, who, you know, skew more right, who are like, wow, this woman's crazy. And it's easy to, like, write her off. But then you have the Liz Cheney's who are just, you know, actually legitimizing all of the work that they're doing. And they're doing the same amount of work, to be honest. They're doing the same degree of work behind the scenes. Like, it's not, it's just, you know, you can put a crazier face on one, right?

On Marjorie Taylor Green on Matt Gates. But at the end of the day, they're working hand and glove with each other. And just because she's more, you know, more serious, well, all of a sudden, you know, the work that she's doing is, is, is legitimized more. Well, I think that that's right. And I think that the other thing is people like Marjorie Taylor Green, when she openly stalks another member of Congress, she's, she's also risking turning some of the more sensible, if there are any remaining sensible Republicans, turning them away from the party. And that, that is a concern for Liz Cheney. Again, her primary goal is. is to build up that party that gave her family power. Right, really, really well said. All right, well, Stu, thanks so much for joining. I appreciate it.

Great talking to you. Nice talking to you, Brian. Thanks for having me on. Thanks again to Stu. 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 in 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.