No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump pulls dangerous stunt amid federal indictment

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

Donald Trump gets federally indicted and takes dangerous steps in response to it. Brian interviews MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about that indictment, whether it’ll ultimately redound to his benefit, and about her new podcast, Deja News. And we’ve got a clip from the new series on YouTube called Democracy Watch with Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias, where he discusses the bombshell new Supreme Court decision that may very well flip control of the House to the Democrats and a dangerous move by Texas Republicans.Check out the full episodes of Democracy Watch: www.youtube.com/briantylercohenShop 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 Donald Trump's indictment and the dangerous steps he's already taking in response. I interview MSNBC's Rachel Maddow about that indictment, whether it'll ultimately redound to Trump's benefit, and about her new podcast, Dejan News. And I've got a clip from my new series on YouTube called Democracy Watch with Democratic Super Lawyer Mark Elias, where we discussed the bombshell new Supreme Court decision that may very well flip control of the House to the Democrats. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.

So, obviously, a historic moment with Donald Trump. becoming the first former president in U.S. history to be indicted by the Justice Department. This comes in the aftermath of him becoming the first former president to be indicted by the Manhattan DA's office, and he'll most likely become the first former president to be indicted by the DOJ again for inciting an insurrection on January 6th, and in Fulton County, Georgia for pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to find 11,780 votes that didn't exist. So, yeah, I would say that we are officially in the find-out phase. Now, the most important part here, does Donald Trump have a defense?

according to the charges, not on God's green earth. Remember, his defense all long has been that he declassified everything because he had the right to declassify everything. Now, first off, no, he did not have that right. I spoke about this on last week's episode, but basically Trump had the power as president to begin the process of declassifying most things, but there's still that statutory process that has to be followed.

Like, you don't just do it by Fiat, and you certainly don't do it by thinking it. And I can go into more depth, but frankly, it doesn't matter. It's moot. And here's why. In the indictment, it says this. Quote, in July 2021, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, during an audio-recorded meeting with a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff, none of whom possessed a security clearance. Trump showed and described a plan of attack that Trump said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.

Trump told the individuals that the plan was, quote, highly confidential and, quote, secret. Trump also said, quote, as president, I could have declassified it, and quote, Now, I can't, you know, but this is still a secret. So that's it. His defense was predicated on this idea that he declassified everything. And then the questions became, did he have that power? What processes have to be followed by a president to declassify? But that's all moot because it wasn't even declassified.

And we know that because he himself admitted it. And then he also admitted, like the biggest idiot on the planet, that he then showed that classified material to people who weren't authorized to see it. I mean, like, it really truly. truly is amazing how, on one hand, there is whatever Trump says in his own defense, but then on the other hand, there's what Trump actually did and how those two things are the polar opposites of each other. So again, he's got zero defense in this case, and he knows he's got zero defense. And so he's pivoting now to his tried and true tactic of trying to stage

a violent mob. He took to truth social and posted a photo of the courthouse where he'll be arraigned on Tuesday, along with the address and the words all hands on deck, Trump document, hoax rally and wrote, see you in Miami on Tuesday, with the implication, of course, being be there will be wild. Now, a couple things here. First off, anyone dumb enough to show up to be part of another violent Trump mob deserves what's coming to him. Like, I'm sorry, but the DOJ is already arrested over a thousand people who broke into

the Capitol on January 6th, so the idea that they won't be better prepared this time to do it again, just defies logic. And second, all of this is to what end? Like what? Does Trump think that prosecutors are just going to not move forward with his trial if a bunch of cult members go and get themselves arrested on his behalf? Like, look, the only thing more pathetic than these attempts to protect himself by Trump is that he has fans who are willing to ruin their own lives for a guy who would not lift a finger for them if they were on fire and he was carrying a bucket of water. But the fact is that if Trump seems especially desperate right now, that's because he should be. He has no defense. He's contending with a home run prosecution, 37 charges. Honestly, his best hope would be to throw his support behind some other Republican candidate who would then promise to pardon him.

But one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that as long as he's got breath in his body, Donald Trump will never voluntarily seed power to anyone. And so instead, he'll continue to run for office and he'll continue to contend with a boatload of state and federal charges. And if that means he'll be running for president from a courtroom or the inside of a prison cell, which by the way, he legally could do, then so be it. Like Trump and his supporters were big fans of locking up politicians who mishandle classified documents. Let's see if that commitment to justice remains now that Trump's the one who's been indicted for it. Next up is my interview with Rachel Maddow. Now you've got the host of the Rachel Maddow show and the host of the new podcast, Deja News, Rachel Maddow. Rachel, thanks so much for taking the time.

I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Of course. Now, I actually interviewed Jen Saki on a Thursday morning last month. And Thursday afternoon, Trump got indicted in the Manhattan DA case. And she very kindly offered to do a pickup shot on Friday morning. But I'm glad that we scheduled this interview after Trump's latest indictment because not exactly a topic you can skate by. Although you never know. By the time we're ready to post this, there might be another one. Might be another one, exactly.

So on that topic, is there any planet on which this redounds to Trump's benefit? Or is that just wishcasting by the right? Because that's the message that they're trying to convey here. I mean, sure, definitely, you know, I mean, we've seen, we have it, we now have experience with a former president and current presidential candidate being indicted. It happened two months ago to the same guy. And so we can actually look at the real world impact of that and see that it does appear to have benefited his poll numbers, benefited him in a way that maybe stepped on the, sort of stepped on the launches of his. Republican presidential rivals, at least in the sense that it kept him in the center of the news and it gave them all awkward questions that there's no right answer to from a Republican

political perspective in terms of what they think about his criminal liability. So yes, we've seen it help him already. Now, should it help him? No. In the long run, is it a good thing to potentially be in prison and to be in trial and multiple venues for serious criminal charges? Maybe. Maybe. But I mean, if it's going to help them in the long run, it means that in Republican politics, it's an asset to be a criminal. And that is a really, that's a really radical political party. I mean, that then says less about the candidate and his alleged criminality than it does about the party that wants to reward something like that. If that makes somebody's go up in the esteem of your party, then your party is choosing that as one of its core values. And

that's, I mean, I feel like this is a moment, not so much for Trump. Like, we kind of know what Trump did and who Trump is. It'll be interesting to see this play out. But this is a real question for the Republican Party. This is, is this your standard bearer? Is this who you think should represent your party to the country and the country to the world? Yeah, and I do think that they already have answered that question so many times over that, you know, it's just kind of us imposing our views onto them by virtue of asking, is this really who you are? Could this be who your standard bearer is? Is this, you know, when he did the access Hollywood tape, when he did, you know, all of everything that he's done. And we've come back and said, how could this, how could this be someone that you're willing to prop up? And every time they've answered the same way. So I think, you know, we're imposing our our values onto them by virtue of asking. But I think in terms of of their values, they've already answered that question. Yeah, but I mean, moments like this, you know, real benchmark moments, you got a, you know, three-inch headline, you know, on the front page of all the national newspapers and everything.

It'll be, this is a moment in history. And what we do here will be, you know, studied generations later in terms of how the country reacted to this. But I think you can also think about it in terms of the way that other countries around the world, other political actors around the world, look at this. And if we are going to have one of the two governing parties in the United States led by somebody who is potentially going to be governing from jail, or at least from the docket, and they are celebrating, not just tolerating it, but celebrating the fact that he has been charged as something that signifies his virtue and his power and what he has to bring to the country. That's a real radical moment for our country and governance and whether or not we're

going to sort of keep the constitutional framework that we've got in which everybody's, you know, in which all the branches of the government are co-equal and everybody follows court orders. You know, a big boon for him in terms of his rise has been the media. And recently, we've seen a lot of shakeup in the media, even in just the last few weeks. Fox's primetime numbers are down significantly as their viewers revolt against that network for firing Tucker and generally trying to figure out how not to get sued. CNN's numbers are down as their viewers

revolting against the network for just arbitrarily deciding to lunge to the right. Meanwhile, MSNBC's ratings have surged. Your show has been number one in its time slot for cable news for both all adults and in the demo for two months straight. Can you talk about the media environment today and why these networks are trying to lead

with these very blatant, inauthentic strategies and it feels like strategies as opposed to just leading with your values i mean i don't i'm i'm a i'm a bad commentator on these on these things because i'm in the middle of them um you know it's like the the the one person who can't tell you the the temperature of the water is the person who's been swimming around in it for a while like oh feels it feels like body temp to me so i'm not great at at media analysis i will also say though that my experience having been through a lot of ebbing and flowing in ratings and in the relationship between the three major networks in terms of

how many who's turning it, who do tuning in and why and who's in turmoil and who's stable and all these things is this, it's kind of like the, you know, it's it's like the weather in San Francisco. If you don't like it, wait a minute. Because it's about to be something else. I do think that these things are temporary. I feel like the networks tend to find their equilibrium after moments of chaos. I don't feel like we've seen radical change in the cable news landscape specifically over the course of my career. I think things change a little, but not a lot. And so we'll see how it shakes out in the long run.

We definitely are at a moment when you know, you look at the ratings on any given day and it's weird. It's just it's not it's not what you would have expected a year ago for sure. And it's certainly, I think, not what you'd expect a year from now. But everybody has to make their own decision. I think the old arguments about whatever happened to objective news, why do we have to have people where we know whether they're conservative or liberal, I sort of feel like at least we're kind of done having that facile, reductive argument anymore. And I do think that the conversation is joined and people are struggling with the question

about how to deal in the free press with a major political figure who wants to abolish the free press. Like, it's just, you know, it's the same thing about contending in the criminal justice system with someone who believes the criminal justice system should be dismantled and that there shouldn't be an FBI and there shouldn't be a rule of law and that we shouldn't have to follow judge's orders. Like, when you are in an oppositional relationship or at least a sort of coverage relationship with somebody who wants to undo what you are doing, who wants to make you disappear, who just decided that the process is illegitimate. You have to reckon with that. You can't just treat them like anybody else. Yeah. Well, to that point, what was your reaction to the Trump Town Hall, for example?

Like how, I know this is the question that's constantly asked, but how should media outlets cover a guy who is clearly a major news figure, but as soon as you give him any attention, because he is that figure he'll exploit that attention to basically perpetuate dangerous propaganda to undermine the very system that he's running to lead yeah I mean that's that's the that's the that's the there isn't an easy right answer to it but I do think that's the right question and that's the start of that's the start of getting to the to a healthier answer with it I mean I will say though that the there is a difference between giving someone attention because they are a contender for political office and polling very highly and somebody who's you know has a good shot at leading

their party or getting potentially back into the white house you have to pay you can't pretend somebody like that doesn't exist you have to pay them attention as a political figure as a political contender but there's a difference between giving someone attention and giving someone the floor right you also don't have to effectively make them a host or an anchor or a character in your on your on your air you you cover them you don't um You cover them, you don't hand them to mic. Yeah, I think like I've had to reconcile with the fact that, you know, I've had issues in terms of like the overbearing coverage of Donald Trump before. And I think the difference that I try to do when I'm, you know, when I'm doing my coverage of him on my YouTube channel is to basically ask people as opposed to just giving him a platform, a megaphone to spew his bullshit.

Are you leaving, after watching my broadcast, coming away with more inaccurate information? or more accurate information. So you can cover him. It's not the act of covering him. We're not going to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that he doesn't exist. But by virtue of doing it, are you leaving coming away more ill-informed or better informed by virtue of listening to what he said? Yes. And I think that's exactly right. And I think that sort of discipline is not that hard to teach. It's not that hard to explain. It's an easy to recognize principle that people could adopt without too much graduate school, you know? And the idea is, you know, if, If he has said something, if he has proposed something about, you know, he's proposed to ban the entry into the United States of people who are Muslims, you know what I mean? Like, you can cover that and there's ways to cover it that absolutely add to people's understanding about what is important about the fact that he has covered it. You don't necessarily need to play his speech in which he denigrates Muslims and purports to justify what he's doing. what might be helpful is to talk about how this matches other types of leaders in other countries or in other eras who have reposed these sorts of things, what it might mean, why that is an unconstitutional thing, what will happen when that gets into the court system, and what it means to Muslim communities to have this sort of rhetoric out there. You can cover all of those things in a substantive way without giving him the platform to advance the kind of attacks on those communities that he's trying to effectuate by floating that policy. It's just, you know, it's, I think your principle there, is is simple and true. You know, I can't imagine a world where Trump actually gains support

by virtue of being federally indicted, which is what he was here. And considering, and that's considering the guy already has enough issues winning an election, but now having to contend with a federal indictment might seem to suggest that his support would actually contract if he were to run in a general election. Would the rest of the Republican Party be better served not to rally around the guy, which is of course what they're doing? Or do they just have no choice here given the hold that Trump has on the base? I mean, political parties exist for a reason, right? We don't just have people freelance and run on their own without attachment to parties, even though some independent candidates try

every now and again. That hasn't generally been our system. And that's in part because the parties are supposed to do something. The parties are supposed to have a role in vetting and elevating appropriate candidates who stand for their values, who represent not just the best of what the country has to offer as a governing class, but specifically what the party believes ought to be sort of their best shot at leadership. And so the Republican Party abdicating its role and saying we are totally neutral among all the candidates. And whoever wants to run, whoever likes that, if enough people like them, then great, we will attach ourselves to that candidate in a value neutral way we have nothing to say about it i mean it's just it's it doesn't have to be that way i mean

it's within living memory you know the republican party detached itself aggressively from david duke who was you know running in in louisiana um and it made a difference to have the republican president at the time say you know what that's not who we are and that's not the kind of candidate who we are attached to and no republican should support them i mean that's happened before you know even in in more recent living memory you might remember the issue with Congressman Steve King of Iowa, who was getting more and more aggressive and overt in his white supremacism. And this era's Republican Party said, you know, Steve King, you can't actually function in Congress anymore. We're effectively de-endorsing you. We're taking you off your committees. And we're going to fund a challenger to you.

We don't support you anymore. The parties exist for a reason. It is not just fundraising. The parties exist to vet candidates. at a very basic level and to make sure that we don't have people who are totally inappropriate to the job aspiring for the job with the party support and so you know they can decide they can make they could make a substantive decision about Donald Trump they've decided not to but it is within the realm of possibility and I think that's a question that probably should be asked more rather than assuming that they're powerless in this yeah and I would also add that Another responsibility of these parties is inherently is to win elections and to have some type of a platform that would lend itself to garnering more support. And the irony of what's happening now with these parties by virtue of seeing that they're espousing positions that are losing them support, but still opting instead to pretend that they've won, even despite not doing the work that it takes to win them, and just pretending that they won in Texas and Georgia and Michigan.

in Arizona and Wisconsin is kind of so antithetical to what the point of this all is, which is, you know, again, to propose an agenda that will garner them those votes and then govern effectively. But now they're doing the opposite. They're proposing agendas that are so extreme. They're proposing abortion bans and LGBT bans and interstate travel bans and book bans and vowing to cut earned benefits and not doing the work of making themselves accountable to the people that they're supposed to represent because they feel like they don't need do anymore because when push comes to shove and it comes to election time, they're just going to say that they won anyway. And that kind of is like for the first time we're seeing like what happens when

a party kind of goes off the rails from what it's supposed to be doing inherently. Well, I think there is a, I mean, just in political science terms, there's a relationship between the unpopularity of your agenda and the degree to which you want democratic accountability for your policies, right? Like if you want to do stuff that's really unpopular, you don't want to be democratically accountable for the reaction to those policies. And so I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a surprise that we're seeing counter-majoritarian moves. Like, you know, in Ohio where Republicans are saying, oh, people can no longer vote about what's in the Constitution or we're going to make it harder for people to vote about what's in the

Constitution because if we let Ohio voters do that, they're going to undo our abortion ban. So, therefore, we'll make it harder for people to cast that kind of a vote at a popular referendum. I mean, you play with the mechanisms of feedback when you don't like the feedback that you're getting. And you can do that, you know, you can sort of game the system in the short run, but in the long run, if you're doing stuff that people don't want you to do, then you're going to have a problem in a democracy. And either you then try to undo democracy or you adjust so that you're more in line with the will of the people. Now, as far as the 2024 race goes, we've now watched the Republican field blow up to the point that we're effectively reliving

2016, with the irony being that all of those Republicans are running, presumably because they think that Trump shouldn't be the next president. And yet, by virtue of there being so many candidates, they are effectively doing their part to hand him the nomination. Now, your new podcast, again, is called Deja News, comes out Monday, June 12th. It looks at the ways that history repeats itself. And you're obviously going a little farther back than 2016. But this still does prove the thesis of that theory that history repeats itself to a pretty staggering degree. Were you struck it all by the extent to which even recent history is repeating itself with regard to the Trump of it all? And speak about Dejaune's here. Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of

Deja News is that when things have happened that seem crazy, that seem unprecedented, that seem like we have to invent a whole new way of responding to this because we've never contended with anything like it, there is sometimes something else in history, especially, you know, something from another, not just another era, but maybe another place that can give us a frame of reference in terms of what it's looked like when something like this has happened before. And so episode one is, there's a parallel in history in another country of something very much like the January 6th attack on Congress that happened in another country. And in that other country, it actually worked.

It did stop the transfer of power. did install a pro-fascist right-wing government to replace a elected center-left government. So that's helpful to me to understand these things. And, you know, I think there's a way in which there are processes in our political system that by nature recur. Like, we're going to have a field of candidates running for a major party nomination every four years on both sides. It's like, that's just going to happen.

And so that is less a sort of historical echo than it is like, you know, is there a learning curve? The last time this very unusual sort of pro-authoritarian Republican populist candidate was on the ballot, look at what happened when there were 16 other Republicans running against him. Okay. Well, now he's on the ballot again. There's going to be at least 10 other Republicans who are running against him. Have they learned from the last time this happened in 2016? They had a dress rehearsal in terms of what it means to run against him. I do think, actually, that if you listen to the way that some of the candidates are talking about this primary,

it's clear kind of who gets the lesson of what went wrong in 2016 and who didn't. All the candidates who, when asked about Trump, say, I don't want to talk about Trump. I'd like to talk about what I bring to the table. You can tell they were asleep in 2016. The candidates who actually are trying to run by running against him, by saying, here's why he shouldn't be the nominee. I think that's the obvious lesson of 2016. And so few people were willing to do that in a sustained way in 2016. We'll see if they can sustain it in 2024. Yeah, well, we'll, well, we'll see if the Asa Hutchinson's out there catch fire in the

Republican primary. But what do you think about Asa Hutchinson versus Chris Christie, though, right? So like, Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie are both going to be minus one, you know, less than one percent candidates. But both of them want to contend enough to mount anti-Trump candidacies and to keep anti-Trump attacks alive in that primary process. Not a bad strategy, particularly if everybody else is going to be going, oh, well, you know, I don't think that we should be persecuting him, but I would instead would rather cut the deficit. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, let's finish off with this. You know, I listened to the pilot episode, which again will be out on June 12th. Was there in particular that you're especially partial to oh that's a good question i mean it's going to be it's a

limited series so this is just six episodes um and the first one comes out monday june 12 they'll come at every monday thereafter and i don't want to give you the topics of the other ones because i feel like part of it is like there's there's definitely a spoiler effect in terms of doing this thing but i mean i i you know i i kind of love all of them the first the first one there's a reason that we put it first no we didn't know that the former president was going to be indicted before you know I guess he's going to be arraigned the day after the first episode comes out which is just crazy timing but in terms of contending with radical movements that are trying to undo democratic institutions like yeah

this is helpful so I think we have we sort of hit it on the we sort of hit the bull's eye in terms of modern resonance so I'm happy really happy that that one's first but I hope that all of them I mean again the the idea is if history doesn't to everybody in terms of contextualizing what's going on in the news, but to the extent that it is something that works for you and that helps you understand what's going on, all of these historical analogies that we're going to bring to the fore through this podcast, I think they can just make us calmer and more confident and better informed with contending with things that can otherwise sort of feel overwhelming.

Yeah, well, we'll leave it there. That seems like a great place to stop. So of course, you can check out Rachel Maddow. MSNBC. And trust me, you will want to download Dejan News wherever you listen to podcasts. Rachel, thank you so much for taking the time. It's been great. Thank you so much. This is fun. And now here's a preview of my interview with Democratic Voting Rights Lawyer, Mark Elias. We're lucky enough to be able to do the first episode here in the immediate aftermath of a pretty bombshell Supreme Court ruling. You represented one of the plaintiffs in what became

Allen v. Milligan. So first, can you talk about that case and how the court ruled? Yeah, so this is a really, really important case if you care about voting rights and redistricting. The state of Alabama, when it drew the new lines for its congressional districts, created one seat that allowed black voters to elect their candidate a choice. We looked at the law, thought, you know what, there really need to be two seats that allow black voters an opportunity to elect based on the population and the history of voter discrimination in the state. And that case went to a three judge panel, three judges originally appointed by Republicans, two by Donald Trump, and they agreed with us. Well, from there, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And today, in a five-four decision, the court agreed that the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, protects the voters in Alabama and requires the creation of a second district. Okay. So what are the implications now for Alabama's maps moving forward? are we going to are we going to see that second majority minority district and also does that count for both the federal districts and the state legislative districts yeah so this was about the congressional districts so we'll see that in the congressional districts we're also probably going to see that in a couple of other states almost certainly in louisiana where my firm also sued uh to create a second um a minority opportunity district uh also in georgia my law firm brought a lawsuit and i expect

Each of those states, you'll see the court order, the creation of an additional majority opportunity district, minority opportunity district. And then the real test is gonna be states like Texas, where my firm and others are involved in litigation and where you could see a number of seats, Hispanic and black opportunity districts created. Okay, so is there a world in which the court

doesn't add additional minority opportunity districts in these states that you've mentioned. You mentioned Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas, like, or will the Milligan precedent now basically ensure that this is what happens? Yeah, so I think the Milligan case makes sure that that will happen in Alabama, really, and also Louisiana. I think Georgia is a half step behind in that the court there has not yet ruled, although I think it is likely to rule following this precedent that the same is true in Georgia.

and Texas is a little bit more fluid. Now, this is kind of a jaded question here, but if anything has come out of watching this political meltdown over the last few years, it's that you become jaded. But why would the court rule this way? Because at least from my perspective, this is a pretty unaccountable branch of government. The conservatives on the court are exceedingly political,

and they've allowed their partisan affiliations to color most of the rulings that they've passed down thus far. So why kind of allow this, so to speak? Yeah. So look, I think there are a few things going on here that may explain the coalition that you saw in this case of the three liberals, Justice Kavanaugh and the Chief Justice. The first is remember that when the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, that was pretty traumatic for the country. And the court got a lot of blowback. And that opinion had been authored by the Chief Justice. And in that opinion, he went out of his way to say that nothing in that case would affect Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is what we're talking about here. So part of

this may be that the Chief Justice feels like he needed to stay in that lane. Interestingly, Justice Kavanaugh seemed to lean in on the idea of precedence and the fact that in stare decisis and the fact that this interpretation of the Voting Rights Act goes all the way back to the 1980s and didn't want to overturn that. Now, that's kind of interesting. in light of what we saw with Dobbs and elsewhere. But maybe, you know, maybe the court just felt like in this area, the law has been so settled that this is where we wind up. Now, you've spoken about the Voting Rights Act.

What is left of the Voting Rights Act at this point? And how do we salvage it? Yeah. So there are several parts of the Voting Rights Act. The part that got gutted was a provision that basically said, if you're in a state with a history of voter discrimination, before you change your election laws or your districting, you have to get those pre-clear to make sure that you don't continue to discriminate against minority voters as you have in the past. That's what got gutted. The part that has remained in effect that was really at issue in the court decision today is a provision

that applies nationwide. It doesn't just apply to those places with histories of voter discrimination. And what it basically says is that when, for example, you draw congressional districts, if you have a history of racially polarized voting where whites are essentially preventing minority voters from elected candidates of choice, and you have cohesive groups of those minority voters that conform a majority in a district, you have to give them the opportunity to elect a candidate of choice. Now, the most worrisome news out of this legislative session in Texas focuses on Houston's Harris County that voted for Biden over Trump by a 13-point margin.

So not exactly some conservative bastion here. Now, House Bill 1750 eliminates the position of election administrator and Senate bill, 1933, gives the Secretary of State the authority to take over election administration. So what does this mean and what's the practical effects of these laws? I mean, people talk a lot about election subversion. If you look it up in the dictionary, this is it, right? This is literally the Republican legislature and the Republican governor. deciding that they don't like the way people in Harris County, which as you point out is Houston, a very democratic area of the state, they don't like the way in which they administer elections

and they vote. And so what they have done is they have set up a situation here in which, number one, they have hobbled the county's ability to administer elections by doing away with this position of nonpartisan election director. And the second thing is by giving this extraordinary power to a partisan appointee to effectively take over the county and its administration of elections. Okay, well, I guess the obvious question here is what could the worst case break glass scenario be with these laws and effect, with these partisan actors now running things? Sure. So, you know, Republicans like to say that they want to make voting easy and cheating hard. What they've actually done here is make voting hard and administering elections

even harder. The worst case scenario is that because they have hobbled Harris County in the way in which it administers elections, they in fact have less good accessible elections. And wait for it, the Republican Secretary of State then uses that as a pretext to then say, you see, we need to step in and we need to take over here. And in close elections, that kind of stuff matters. I mean, remember, this is the same state that Republicans went to the U.S. Supreme Court after 2020 to argue to throw out the election results in three other states. So, you know, this is a very worrisome thing in a state that is still Republican, but is trending more and more Democratic over time. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how you really know that they drive home the state's rights

point is when one state tries to unilaterally throw out the election results in four other states because they weren't happy with the results. Right. Classic federalism. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, sticking with Texas for a moment, Texas along with a number of other red states have passed a bill facilitating the state's exit from the data organization program called Eric. So what does this mean and what are the implications of this? So this is probably the best illustration of right-wing conspiracy theories, election deniers, and Republican officials all winding up together. because Eric is a system that Republicans used to love. And by used to, I mean like three months ago, they loved Eric.

Why? Because Eric was a system that allowed state's databases to talk to one another to remove from the roles, people who had died, people who had moved, people who are no longer eligible to vote. It was a Republican dream. But somehow it got caught up in this crazy online conspiracy that somehow it was being secretly controlled by George Soros. not true. And therefore, you started to see Republican states leave Eric. They're literally leaving the system that allows them to effectuate the purges that they are so eager to effectuate. Well, yeah, that's the thing. If the point of this bill is to purportedly reduce voter fraud, then how could pulling out of that system where this data is shared among states do anything but hinder those states' ability to actually identify instances of fraud?

That's literally the only purpose of Eric. was to allow states to prevent fraud and mistake and bloat on their voter rolls by letting there be a comparison so that if Mark Elias was registered in Virginia and then he moved to Texas, the Virginia database and the Texas database would know, okay, we now see him in two places. We need to remove him from one place. They are literally shooting themselves in the foot over their main talking point because some right-wing conspiracy theorist on the internet hold them a lot. Well, could the motive here be more insidious in the sense that you basically take away

the program that was used to kind of prevent this type of fraud and then it allows more fraud to basically flood the zone and then you can point to that fraud, that increased amount of fraud, as evidence that there then is fraud and you have to take all of these crazy measures like allowing partisan officials to take over election administration roles? Yeah, I do think that there's something to that. I think even short of there being more fraud because I don't actually think they'll be more fraud. What it does is it allows them to say, well, we don't have any way to know that this isn't fraud. So now we need to adopt, you know, vigilanteism by people, by private citizens.

We need to adopt these racially discriminatory laws. We need to enable more voter purges because we don't have any other way to do it. Well, the reason you don't have any other way to do it is you exited from Eric. which was the other way to do it. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think it's a recurring theme here to watch Republicans break something and then point to the thing that they just broke as evidence that government doesn't work

and that they need to shrink the size of government, all while not telling you that the only reason it's not working is because when you put incompetent people in charge, that's how things break. Correct. So, yeah. That's well, but they are literally breaking the system so that then they can complain that the system is broken.

To get the full interview with Mark, check out my YouTube channel and scroll down to the Democracy Watch playlist. Okay, 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. Thank you.