Pod Save America - “Have some crullers, bureaucrats.”

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

Republicans don’t yet have the votes to jam through their Donor Relief Act, Trump goes all-in for Moore, Conyers steps down from Judiciary, Tillerson guts State, and Mulvaney appoints himself consumer watchdog. Then Senator Elizabeth Warren talks to Jon, Jon, and Tommy about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Cass Sunstein joins to talk about his new book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On the pod today, we will be joined by one of the great legal minds of our time and the author of the new book, Impeachment, A Citizen's Guide, our pal Cass Sunstein. And we're also gonna have a special guest calling in later. Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren. Get out of here. Yeah. Late last night, we... Did you run into her, Logan? How'd you have this happen? Yeah, late last night, they reached out because we're going to talk about the showdown. The showdown at the OK Corral this morning. The Consumer Financial Protection

Bureau. We're going to try to say the full name of it as many times as possible. Mulvaney and his... So we don't abbreviate that crap. His usurpation of power and donuts. He brought donuts. Mulvaney brought donuts, which is what we brought Elizabeth Warren the first time she was on the show. That is true. Okay, before we get to that, before we get to that, hello guys. How was your Thanksgiving?

How are my little stuffed turkeys? How are you guys feeling? How's the shame? I feel fine. I feel great. You know, everyone's in it together. Post-Thanksgiving shame. I don't feel great. Lov love it why don't you tell us about uh love it or leave it i have a space for a love it or leave it promo because it's monday we have a great episode of love it or leave it coming your way with some of my favorite guests no this is you're supposed to promote the one from uh that was over the weekend which was the second show at the Beacon. Oh, our second Beacon show was awesome.

We had Bravo's Andy. I listened to it on the fly-by. We had Andy Cohen. We had Francesca. Bravo Andy. We had Francesca Ramsey. We had Daveed Diggs. We had Muriel Borst-Tarrant, who is a Native American actor and comedian and writer who talked about Thanksgiving.

We had an a cappella group, The Vineyard Sound. Not over the top at all. Singing the Love It or Leave It theme. When we first realized that an acapella group had done the opening to Love It or Leave It, there were many texts sent between me and Tommy. John and I were not necessarily friendly, but we thought it was funny,

so we went with it. I know you guys text about me. No, you were on them. Oh, good, okay, good. My brother texted me about it and said, I just want you to know this is when it all went tough. He goes, if we need to look back at a certain moment when it went over the top, this was it.

That was for me. Andy doesn't weigh in a lot, but when he does, it's pretty fucking funny. And also, by the way, we played a game where we actually played the hardest game we ever played, which was forcing people to recognize the difference between Breitbart headlines Fox News headlines and fake Russian ads and it was a great game it was and man Peggy the entire I think it was really hard but the entire beacon was chanting her name really yeah anyways good episode positive the world yeah so the the episode that's up right now is with an Africa expert named Johnny Carson I went to the swamp to Washington DC to the United States Institute of Peace to sit down with him. We talked about Robert Mugabe. Ambassador Carson was in the Foreign Service for 37 years.

Hey-o. you know, airport in the middle of Africa. It's like, that's the kind of history and relationships you get from all these people who are now being unceremoniously shoved out of the State Department, but I digress. By an oil sea. Talked about Zimbabwe. We talked about elections in Kenya and U.S. policy generally, so check it out. And Majority 54 is up with its second episode.

Jason talks to a former CIA officer about Trump's ongoing campaign against the American intel community. Seems like he's treading into your territory there, Tommy. I don't want to talk about it. I'm going to make a video of me assembling a podcast mic with a blindfold and just direct it at Jason.

And we're going on tour again at the end of this week, guys. We're going to be in Santa Barbara Friday night. I think we finally sold out that show, but who knows? We're traveling again this week? We are. Sacramento Saturday night and Oakland, California on Monday. Huh, great.

So we have a whole tour. There's a lot to talk about, guys. Yeah, let's go. I want to start with a quick update on the most urgent topic. That is the Donor Relief Act of 2017. most urgent topic that is the donor relief act of 2017 this is uh mitch mcconnell's determination to pass 1.4 trillion dollars worth of tax cuts and tax increases through the senate by friday so this is it guys this this is why republicans have put up with donald trump's creeping authoritarianism the mafia style, the casual racism.

This is the main event. The deranged tweets. They did this so that they could wake up and make ultra-rich people even richer with a bunch of tax cuts. So this is it. This is the big event, which means that they will stop at nothing

to get this done. It is a bad bill. It is an unpopular bill. No one really likes it it it sort of breaks all of their promises it's going to explode the deficit it's going to it's like republicans could have written a bill like george w bush did that was skewed heavily towards the wealthy and how much tax breaks it gives and then just gives like sort of chump change to the middle class and to everyone else but they couldn't even get that right no they're

raising taxes raising raising over about half of all families will see a tax increase by 2027 can i tell you my favorite fucking nuts i gotta tell you my favorite part about the bill please the provisions that essentially adjust for inflation are permanent so the tax breaks they're codifying are permanent but the tax cuts the tiny little measly ones in the short term go away. But the corporate tax breaks stay there forever as well. Corporate tax breaks are permanent. So the people, every chance they got, they screwed over working people. Yeah.

So, yeah, winners, the top 0.1% get an average tax cut of $200,000. That's pretty nice for them. Corporations get a 43% cut in taxes. That's good for them. And then, of course, there's the 0.2% of multimillionaires and billionaires like Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric who get all their inheritances tax-free. Losers, 67 million households earning less than $100,000 who will have to pay higher taxes immediately.

And then, of course, like I said, the half of all Americans will see a tax hike in 2027. And another big loser, the deficit. Of course, this is not paid for. So the question, can they get this done and how do we stop them? They definitely can get this done. I mean, you know, it's playing out very similarly to healthcare,

but like healthcare was their passion. Cutting taxes is their job you know uh healthcare is like their hobby right right healthcare right healthcare is this this is taking away this is their calling this is why this is why they get into politics yes this is what this is what paul ryan when he was standing around the keg he was talking about how to you know take medicaid and turn it into tax cuts for people well Well, right. And, you know, the one-two step of this, it's step one, create a $1.5, $1.7, $1.4 trillion hole with tax cuts that are targeted at corporations and the wealthy. And then a year or two from now, come back and say, what are we going to do about this big hole?

Well, there's only one thing we can do, further cut Medicaid, further cut Medicare, further cut Social Security, and all the rest. So, you know, this is the plan care battle are not no's yet. You know, right before we all left for Thanksgiving, Lisa Murkowski in an op-ed in a local Alaska paper said she was fine with them adding the repeal of the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, which is basically partial Obamacare repeal into this bill, even though the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, says that repeal of the individual mandate would increase the number of uninsured by 13 million.

Seems bad. And raise premiums by an additional 10% year over year. Seems bad, too. 10%. Is that good politics or bad politics? So that's basically, as Republican Susan Collins said, that kind of premium increase is basically going to wipe out any of the tax cut that some middle class families actually receive from this. Now, so Murkowski in that op-ed also, and her spokesman made this clear, she's not a definite yes vote. But she wrote that op-ed about the individual mandate, I don't know, to pave the way for the yes vote.

We don't know why she did what she did. So that's Murkowski's deal. Then we have a couple of other people who are on the fence. Jerry Moran in Kansas, he was on the fence for a little bit during the healthcare debacle and he held a town hall over the break, which did not go super well,

but kudos to him for holding it in the first place because no one else is doing that. No one else does. But Jerry Moran did. And he basically told people he's undecided because he thinks it'll bust the deficit, which he's correct about. And he's not sure about adding health care into the mix. So there's a couple people like Moran. And, of course, there's Jeff Flake. There's Bob Corker. And there's a couple people like Moran, and of course there's Jeff Flake, there's

Bob Corker, and there's John McCain. Again, all three of these folks, they like giving tax breaks to the wealthy. They always have, so we can't expect them to completely change their stripes for this. But all three of them have made their concerns known about this process, which is just as bad as the health care process. No debates, no big public hearings, no nothing. And they seemingly care less about the details than they did around ACA repeal. They're just like, yeah, whatever, state and local taxes. All the deductions and things, it would seem like it would really upset New York members of Congress or California members.

They're sort of washed out in the end. Right. They're not really fighting for the things. They're not going to come to bite them in the ass during the elections. Totally. out in the end right not really fighting for the things they're not going to come to bite them in the ass during the elections totally i and and look and flake and corker particularly said that they have real problems with uh what this is going to do their deficit so basically what they're going to do here the republicans are trying to have it both ways they're saying no no no you keep saying uh taxes are going to go up on middle-class families but uh that's only if congress doesn't renew the tax

cuts for middle class families. Of course, Congress will renew tax cuts for middle class families when 2027 rolls around. Well, if Congress does do that, the deficit will increase by even more than the 1.5 trillion it's already going to increase by. So they can't actually have it both ways. And by the way, Congress has lashed itself to the mass over and over again and then crashed anyway. That's what happened with the sequester. That's what's happened with shutdowns. That's what's come close to happening with the debt ceiling. The sequester, if you remember, was this thing where they built a ticking time bomb into the budget that said if we don't come to an agreement by a certain time, there are these drastic cuts to defense, drastic cuts to discretionary spending.

And then the bomb went off and it just happened anyway. So the idea and look, you know, the idea that these guys are like, don't worry, 10 years from now, we'll fix it. Like, that's ridiculous. They want to make the corporate tax rates permanent because in fairness to them, they are they believe that fixing up the corporate tax code, cutting the rate, broadening the base, and having it be predictable might lead to further investment. But they're doing it at the expense of the middle class, of working people, of anyone who's not going to benefit from the stock increase of major companies. And small businesses.

And small businesses. So let's talk about the politics of this for Flake, Corker, and McCain. They vote no on this, right? They decide to vote no on this and tank this bill. They don't have to worry about Breitbart. They don't have to worry about Sean Hannity. They're not going to face voters again. None of them are running for re-election.

But also, I mean, the bill has a 52% disapproval, 25% approval via Fox News, that liberal organ. A lot of their base. So they might have a problem in a primary, but not a general election. Right, right. Jeff Flake and John McCain in Arizona have a lot of those, you know, it's a growing suburban population there that are going to face a lot of these tax increases. tax increases, like suburban people and swing voters in suburban districts are going to face tax increases all over the country, which is why it's yet another reason why this is awful politics for the Republicans. So, you know, John McCain gets so much credit for his no vote on health care reform, which

he should have, which he deserved. And, you know, there was a quote today where he told Mike Pence during the health care reform debate, I'm not going to vote for something called skinny repeal. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Well, this is this would be voting for skinny repeal. And so all of that goodwill that John McCain rightfully earned after his health care vote, it should be taken away if he votes yes for this. be taken away if he votes yes for this because again it's not like we

expect him to vote for liberal policies but he has exclaimed that he doesn't want something that increases the deficit he doesn't want something that's out of regular order he doesn't want something that's skewed too heavily to the wealthy and this bill does all of these things by Corker Flake McCain Collins

by their own ideological test nothing to do with Trump at all by their own ideological tests they should be all voting no at all. By their own ideological tests, they should be all voting no on this, but they're afraid to. I mean, the other thing too, just like sort of stepping back from it. It's not like America doesn't have problems that could be addressed in the tax code.

You know, this is... You've been taught, you've been... It's crazy. It's a crazy thing to do. Like corporations are sitting on tons of profit. The reason they're not investing, the reason they're not hiring more, the reason they're not raising wages is not because they don't have money on, you know, just money in their bank accounts.

Economic insecurity in the middle class, people trying to fucking get jobs and expenses, all the problems that we talk about all the time. Like this is a bill to make them worse. It is complete. It is like there's just no reason for it. There's no reason for their tax plan to be this terrible. It doesn't simplify the tax code. The favorite Paul Ryan talking point is that it could fit on a postcard and make it easier for everybody. That's just not the case. This is bizarre sunsets. Things phase in, they phase out, they screw over people at certain levels. They change the way all

kinds of deductions and state and local property taxes or state and local income taxes are taxed at a federal level. It's a disaster. And there are good reasons. Like if you did something like whatever, revenue neutral tax reform, which involved not raising the deficit, and you had a principle that said we're not going to be regressive. We're going to make sure the benefits accrue down. You could get Democratic votes for getting rid of a lot of these tax breaks, which there are good arguments for getting rid of them.

There are good arguments for simplifying the tax code. But there's no good argument for telling people that are living in an expensive place, oh, you're going to pay a little bit more for your house so that the DeVos family inherits more when they die. Yeah, it seems like the only guiding principle for this tax legislation is that they needed to give a huge and permanent tax cut to corporations. And however they had to pay for that, whoever they had to raise taxes on, they were just going to go ahead and do it. And the donors and the billionaire donors, they needed that this is payment coming due. So they have to reduce the estate tax because they all want that. Because they need the donors to be on board because they're also, they've allowed themselves to believe that it is much more difficult to vase voters if they don't pass

anything than if they pass something that raises taxes on those very voters. They have convinced themselves that this is true, so that's their problem. There's another reason McConnell wants to get this done by the end of the week. The government runs out of money on December 8th and will shut down. McConnell and Paul Ryan need Democratic votes

to keep the government open. And if the government shuts down on December 8th, they cannot pass these tax cuts. And they will not pass these tax cuts by the end of the year. And so this week, Donald Trump meets with congressional leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, to see if they can't strike another deal. So there's a lot of moving parts to these negotiations on the government, but on the agenda here is possibly funding Obamacare, funding those cost-sharing reduction payments, passing something like the Alexander Murray Bill that will stabilize Obamacare. There's passing the DREAM Act that will basically save undocumented young Americans from being deported. Both Lindsey Graham and Jerry Moran said they were interested in doing that. Maybe there's a deal on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I mean,

Democrats can walk in there with a long list of demands. The question is, what should those demands be? And what should our message be around this? So far, Schumer and Pelosi have sort of danced around saying they don't want to say, we'll shut the government down, which is right, partly because it wouldn't be the Democrats just shutting the government down. Republicans control all three branches of government. If they wanted to find the votes to keep the government open, they could do that. They can't because they got a bunch of crazies in their caucus. It's also just a strange game theory thing, which is the more amenable Pelosi and Schumer look right now to compromise,

the more likely Republican hardliners will draw a line in the sand and force McConnell to go to them. So because if Pelosi, if Pelosi and Schumer were out there saying we're not voting for anything, unless we get this, this, this, we get stabilization, we get dreamers, we get all the rest. All of a sudden, McConnell can take that just literally print that out and show it to whatever Mark Meadows and say, help, if we don't do this, look what they're going to get. So there's a game that they're playing, which I understand. Yeah. But, I mean, what everyone should know is if we can even delay.

So basically the Senate Budget Committee is voting tomorrow on this tax legislation. Corker and Flake sit on that committee. So that could tell us something right there. On Thursday, McConnell hopes to have this up for a vote. something right there. On Thursday, McConnell hopes to have this up for a vote. If we can even delay this to next week, there is a chance that we get to December 8th, and then we're talking about government shutdowns, and then they're going to have a hard time passing this. And if we delay it a couple weeks after that, that is when the new senator from Alabama will be seated, which we'll talk about in a second. So, what is the status of the thing they're actually going to pass?

Has there been any leak about what the compromise is between the House and the Senate yet? There has not as of yet, no. So, right now, if the Senate passes something Thursday, they would have to go into a conference to resolve the differences between the House legislation and the Senate legislation which are vast but not you know irreconcilable but unless one thing that could happen over the next couple days is mcconnell and ryan and a couple other people could just work out a compromise that then mcconnell puts on the floor as their bill and then they could just pass it all right there so we don't we haven't heard anything yet uh new about that in order to stop this, go to, easiest thing to do, go to trumptaxscam.org. It will give you the numbers of senators to call. It will give you, if you're in a red state or a blue state, it will help you get in touch with friends in red states or in purple states to call

those senators, to call wavering senators. It will show you events that are in your area that you can go to. There's like a national day of action happening today. There's protests that are going to be happening all week long long but it's all on that website go to trumptaxscam.org to figure out how you can help so let's talk about the senate race in alabama roy moore roy moore hero so this morning donald trump the white house announced donald trump will not be going to al to Alabama to campaign with alleged child molester that is Roy Moore these distinctions are so stupid yeah you're all in buddy he's all getting pissed off and tweeting every morning he's all in the tweet from Sunday the last thing we need in

Alabama in the U.S. Senate is a Schumer Pelosi puppet who is weak on crime weak on the border bad for our military Jones would be a disaster Jones being the man who prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan members who murdered four young women. This race is a national, it's a billboard from the GOP that says, Republicans to women, fuck you. We don't care. And children. Roy Moore's campaign strategist, Dean Young, said, and I quote, We believe Judge Moore.

We don't believe these women. It's just that simple. And y'all can keep trotting them out if you want to, but we're not going to talk about that. He refuses to even gauge on the subject of the fact that Roy Moore is accused of sexually assaulting or molesting children over the course of many, many years. It's an evil campaign. And I want to just talk for a second about sort of the strength of the evidence here against Roy Moore. Because we will, in a couple of minutes, talk about problems on the Democratic side as well. But there is no comparison, Republican or Democrat, to what Roy Moore has been accused of here.

Nine women have come forward on the record two are trump supporters one is a republican there are supporting witnesses who corroborate these women's stories there are documents that prove that moore is lying about his denials he was banned from the fucking mall okay like he was banned from yeah from william salad and slate wrote up a really great list of all i should say that's where i was paraphrasing from to give him credit i thought jake tapper summarized as well like roy moore started with a presumption of innocence like everyone does but he has since forfeited it by lying by making assertions that are demonstrably false by having witnesses and documents and self-incriminating statements come forward. I mean, there are not both sides to every issue. No, there's a very clear set of evidence indicating that he did what these women alleged he did. Right. And there's a

New York Times story a couple days ago about sort of Trump's evolution on this, if it wasn't evolution at all. So Trump believes Moore. He's angry with his daughter, Ivanka, for saying that there's a special place in hell for people like Moore. And he thinks Moore's being wrongly accused. He thinks it's all made up. It's all about him. And we found out, Tommy, you were especially angry about this. We found out that now Trump is telling people that the Access Hollywood, it's made up just

like the Access Hollywood tape is made up. He's trying it out. He's trying it out. He's throwing it into conversation. He's like, you know, like this Access Hollywood tape, which was also fake. He's like, I'll have a cheeseburger, a Diet Coke, and the Access Hollywood tape was fake. The Access Hollywood, that is,

just seeing like, how does, what's your face do when I tell you that the Access Hollywood, oh, oh, you're with me. I'm powerful enough that if I say the ex was hollywood's favorite you can't tell me i'm being crazy this is another one of those times when maggie haberman having a bug in his bedroom has been like incredibly valuable he said it to a senator he's been telling it to staffers and aides it's the thing he's like he's trying to convince himself he believes this because he clearly views the roy moore allegations as somehow the same as the accusations made against him which were on tape.

And he knew that it worked out for him. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he knows what he knows. He believes what he wants to believe. You know, like the idea that Trump like Trump's relationship with truth and what he thinks about it is so attenuated at this point. Like, I don't I think that he believes what he's in the moment is going to believe. And in this moment, he finds it useful to believe that Roy Moore falsely accused.

People keep pointing out, though, like that when you stack up the lies big and small and i would call this a big lie and you and you add to that all the little lies about how oh i don't watch tv as he live tweets fox and friends i don't play golf as their instagrams of him at a golf course like every weekend they are pathological liars like this is a definition of what that means they lie constantly for no reason with no regard for facts or like our intelligence you know it is horrific and you know what and we've been so it's like because everyone believes that and trump knows that everyone believes that politicians lie and that people politicians in both parties lie so he just does it because he

thinks everyone thinks we're all liars anyway so i might as well just tell the biggest whoppers that I can. It's gross. And there is a chance that it could all work here in Alabama. It is an incredibly tight race. Doug Jones has made up a lot of ground in the polls, and Roy Moore has obviously fallen a lot since the scandal, but it's tight. I think Jones is 0.8% ahead in the RealClearPolitics average. This could go either way. Ultimately,

this boils down to cynicism. Donald Trump is being a cynic, same way Mitch McConnell is and all the rest. They want to attack Doug Jones. They're trying to say in every way, vote for Roy Moore even though he's a pedophile because we need this seat and we can expel him. If we could dispose of two fictions about our politics, it would so greatly help heal

our country. The first is they all do it. They're all bad. They're all the same. The second is my vote doesn't matter. If people would stop believing those two things, I think it would be the most important thing that ever happened to our politics. I think that's right.

Especially that last one, that my vote doesn't matter. If you are, they are, the numbers of Democrats, there are enough people in Alabama that could easily end this whole thing. Easily. Easily. Easily.

Easily happen. In a low turnout race like this, you could get a couple thousand people in various places and tip an election on any given day, especially in a special election, when you're going to see like 14% turnout. Yep. Look at what happened in Virginia. Look at some people who turned out for the first time. Look at the young people who turned out for the first time. Virginia is very, very different from Alabama, which will, of course, get lost

if for some reason Roy Moore wins. But that doesn't mean that people in Birmingham and people in Montgomery can make a big difference here. People in the suburbs of Alabama can make a big difference, go to the polls,

and make sure that Roy Moore is not the next U.S. Senator. We can win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it can change everything. It can change everything. I think it's one of the most important elections. You know what? And we shouldn't have said,

like, John Ossoff's race, I know that got a lot of people excited because it was one of the first races in the Donald Trump era. An extra Democrat in the House of Representatives, it would have mattered. It would not have mattered nearly as much as what happens if Doug Jones takes the seat.

The scale of what hinges on this election is hard to comprehend. It's so much bigger than any of the special elections that we've seen. Because a lot of what comes after matters, too. It's hard to say this. But we'll look back and what happened with Doug Jones could very well have tipped the direction of the country. Yeah. The stakes haven't been bigger in any election we've seen since 2016,

but it's also the challenge is harder for Democrats than any challenge we've seen since 2016. So pay attention. All right. Let's talk about John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi's appearance on Meet the Press. We must discuss this. I'd like to just state that that was a very, very, very bad answer that she gave on Meet the Press. Yeah, you think? Let's tell everyone what happened. So Nancy Pelosi's on

Meet the Press. She's asked if Conyers should resign. Conyers, again, you might have missed the story. This was a BuzzFeed story right before Thanksgiving. It was revealed that he settled a wrongful dismissal suit in 2015 with an employee who accused him of sexual harassment. Pelosi's answer, she said, we are strengthened by due process. Fine. Then John Conyers is an icon in our country. Bad. Very, very bad. Don't need to say that. He's done a great deal to protect women. Again, not what you say when someone's accused by women. Asked if she believes the women, Pelosi said, I don't know who they are. Do you?

They have not come forward. So one has not come forward because of a confidentiality agreement in the settlement. And if John Conyers wants, he can release her from that confidentiality agreement so she can speak. And he should do that. Another one has not come forward. Another one filed a lawsuit. And he should do that. Another one has not come forward. Another one filed a lawsuit. Another woman that was later dropped. She has not come forward.

A third woman has come forward and gone on the record in the Washington Post, Melanie Sloan, who said that she does not believe she was sexually harassed, but was verbally abused and harassed throughout her time in Conyers' office, including one time when he called her into his office and he was sitting there in his underwear. It's disgusting. Which, you know. including one time when he called her into his office and he was sitting there in his underwear. It's disgusting. Which, you know. We should also note that these confidentiality agreements exist because the House has a terrible way of dealing with cases about sexual harassment. Yes, whereas everything is hidden.

The institution protects the members. The institution protects the members. They pay for the members to have a lawyer. The accusers have to get a lawyer themselves. And then when they're settled, the public doesn't know about the settlement, even though the fact that the public's taxpayer dollars are used to pay the settlement, which seems to me like something

that should be changed immediately. And during the process, you're expected to go to work. You're expected to show up at work as normal. Like if you've sort of brought an allegation, you're expected to, as this is all unfolding, just work every day. So we should say, so right after that appearance, there was an uproar, as there should have been.

And Pelosi's office immediately put out a statement. Almost simultaneously, Conyers announced that he was stepping down from the Judiciary Committee, of which he is the ranking member, while the investigation proceeds. And Pelosi in the statement said, While the investigation proceeds, and Pelosi in the statement said, zero tolerance means consequences. I have asked for an ethics investigation, and Conyers has agreed to step aside as ranking member. No matter how great an individual's legacy, it is not a license for harassment. If she had just given that answer on Meet the Press, we probably would not be talking about this today.

So she clarified it, so great. I think the question is, because some people are saying, no, no, no, Kanye should resign right now. I do think, and Tommy, we talked about this sort of last week when we were talking about these ethics investigations. Whether the ethics committee investigation process is good enough or not, I do think we need some sort of process here when someone is accused of sexual harassment because we've now had this problem where for the longest time, women don't come forward because either men don't believe them or don't want to believe them or powerful men silence them. And so no one was hurt. And a lot of people didn't come forward. And I don't think we can go from there to a situation

where someone is accused of sexual harassment and then Twitter is the judge and jury of what happens, right? Like, I think there needs to be an ethics committee process, an investigative process with teeth that is bipartisan, that is swift, that is credible, that brings justice. You know, like, I do think we need something. Well, there's a bill that's been put forward to try to fix the process, which is clearly, clearly broken. I think what you're saying exactly right. I think that because for so long, there was no process that made sense, that there was no way for allegations to be taken seriously. We're kind of learning about all these things that happened over many, many years in which there were absolutely no consequences at all.

And we're processing that as a culture. You know, Van Jones was on Love It or Leave It. And he talked about his work with prisoners and talked about his work with people that have done terrible things. And he talked about the difference between an on-off switch and a dimmer switch. And I think we're at the beginning of figuring that out, right? What Connors is accused of is different than what Roy Moore is accused of, right? How we react to these things does require us to look at each case individually. And they hold different positions. Yeah. In Roy Moore's case, the election is the judgment on what ultimately happens here.

Conyers holds office, and there needs to be a process for office holders who are accused of these things to figure out what happens next. So, like, I can't imagine a scenario where John Conyers should keep his seat and not resign. I can't. I can't either. But I at least want the process to tell us that. And it's not a call for a bullshit process. It is a swift, credible, bipartisan process, and it needs to happen very fast. And I think that the urgency, that there is incredible urgency in getting to the right

outcome. But I think that because we're all online, because these things sort of play out on Twitter, that there's Twitter time. And the urgency of Twitter time is actually completely unimportant. It is urgency of Twitter time is five seconds, right? It is very, very important that Nancy Pelosi gets her statement, right? It is less important and does not make her equivalent to people defending Roy Moore that she fucked up on meet the press and then had to fix it later, you know, right? She's not Donald Trump, right? All right, let's move on to a section that I titled a look at our bud Budding Kakistocracy,

which is the word used for a government run by the worst, least qualified, and unscrupulous citizens. This is where I jammed a whole bunch of things in that we could talk about. First, I want to talk about a story. Tommy, this particularly got you annoyed over the weekend. You were texting about it, which is Rex Tillerson gutting the State Department, which is, I think, particularly egregious because it is so hard to get people to care about the story. Why don't you talk about it a little bit? Rex Tillerson has sort of made it his sole job to cut jobs at the State Department,

to cut the funding of the agency he leads by as much as a third, which Congress has told him is ridiculous. And I think we don't have a great sense as a country about what diplomats do. So, I mean, I just think you have to remember that diplomats allow us to project power all around the world. They're not fancy people in Paris hosting cocktail parties. They're people in countries like Pakistan that are constantly liaising with the government, that are meeting with opposition parties, that are providing us unbelievably important intelligence about what's happening on the ground that we can't get from the CIA or other places because these are sort

of like diplomatic conversations and also like observations about political and economic things that are happening. Like there was all this talk about how we missed, quote unquote, the Arab Spring. There was no phone you could intercept to know that a fruit vendor in Tunisia was going to light himself on fire and start this regional upheaval. You could have a really credible diplomat who was out in the field meeting with people, seeing this tension boiling over and thinking that like this was a tinderbox. So that's what we talk about like how this is going to weaken us abroad and it seems like there's no real constituency for slashing state other than they think the military is cool and tough and let's talk about that and uh liberal weenies work in the state department so let's gut that agency but it is harming us and every threat

it's a direct threat to our national security. And you have people like Michael Hayden. Michael Hayden, who ran, he was the CIA director for Bush, is talking about how dangerous this will be. Four-star generals. Every military commander you talk to talks about how much they like working in partnership with the State Department. It's just, it's baffling. It's baffling and fury. I saw they were cutting embassy security, too.

Yeah. I mean, again, like, in case you thought Benghazi was anything more than just a political bullshit attack like tillerson wouldn't even meet with the person that heads up the embassy security division at the state department blew him off it reminds me a little bit of how fox news can be a conspiracy a zone of conspiracy because it's protected by the truthful journalism that kind of holds up our whole democracy around it. Like, we live in the protection of an international order that we built over half a century and was not perfect. The United States makes terrible and evil mistakes, but it created a period of growth and stability and positive change unrivaled in human history.

And they don't respect it. They don't respect it. And even though, you know, Donald Trump's fortune, which he has cobbled together internationally, has depended on that order, same for all the various benefactors here, they just refuse to see it. It sucks. The other agency that is in the middle of some turmoil right now is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Richard Cordray is the director of the CFPB, as the acronym goes, and he has stepped down to run for governor of Ohio. He has appointed Leandra English as the deputy director. appointed Leandra English as the deputy director. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act says, which set up the Consumer Bureau, says the deputy director shall serve as acting director in the absence or

unavailability of the director. Trump, however, decided to install Mick Mulvaney, who's the head of the Office of Management and Budget, which is a White House office, which is under the White House, saying that the Federal Vacancies Act allows the president to install a temporary acting head of any agency who's already been confirmed by the Senate. And so what happened? Both of them showed up at work today. Mick Mulvaney has called this agency a sick, sad joke, but he did bring them donuts this

morning. He also sent out a memo telling people- Here you go. Here you go, you useless weasels you anti-american bureaucrats this one's got jelly have a have a cruller bureaucrats like an industry that does nothing but help protect us from like giant institutions right like big banks now the agency has returned tommy you're right, $11.9 billion to nearly 30 million consumers from banks and financial institutions and debt collectors and predatory lenders that tried to cheat them. And Mulvaney's making an ATM as deputy.

Like, he doesn't give a shit. It is ridiculous. And so we're going to talk all about this, but we have an expert who's going to be joining us to tell us all about this. It is the expert. It is the woman who set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the first place. Not just set it up, it was her brainchild when she was a Harvard professor before she was a U.S. Senator.

Elizabeth Warren is going to join us and talk all about this. So, when we come back, we will have the Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren. And we are back with the Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren. Senator Warren, how are you today? I'm doing good. How are you guys doing? We're pretty good. We're good.

Mick Mulvaney did show up at our office, too, claiming he runs this as well. So we're trying to figure that out. A little frustrating. And why not? I mean, once you've decided you can show up anywhere and just declare yourself in charge, you know. What else is he going to hit next? Elementary schools, you know. I can't believe he used the donut trick.

That was our trick for you when you were on Pod Save America. We brought you Dunkin' Donuts and now he thinks he can stroll in there. That's right. It's unbelievable. That's right. And you guys, you know, I put this on you because you taught him the power of the donut. Dunkin' Donuts is in our DNA. You bet. So just to start off, let's talk about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and why it matters and what it's accomplished so far, because it is, like so many things in Washington, unfortunately abbreviated all the time. And I saw someone on Twitter seeing CFPB, and they were like, does that have to do with the college football playoffs?

So talk about what it is. Okay. So let's start when it didn't exist. Okay. So back when, in the bad old days, like in the run-up to the financial crisis, there were all these different laws that were supposed to be out there, consumer protection laws, to make sure that people didn't get cheated on mortgages and credit cards and so on. The problem was all of those laws were spread among about seven different agencies in Washington. And for none of those agencies was consumer protection their first job. So, you know, the guys at the Fed were like, we do monetary policy because we're

cool, you know. And the guys over at the OCC were like, we make sure the banks stay profitable, and so on and so on through the agencies. And the consequence of that is that consumers starting, you know, a whole lot in the 80s, and then much more in the 90s, and then into the 2000s, just keep getting tricked and trapped and pinched and cheated on one financial deal after another, in particular on home mortgages. And so people end up with these terrible home mortgages. We know the banks packaged them up, made a bazillion dollars selling them, a bazillion dollars repackaging them. And then it turned out those little mortgages were kind of like grenades with the pins pulled out. And they started blowing up. And when they blew up, they took down the whole

economy. So part of what President Obama did when he comes into office is he says, you know, we got to get the economy stabilized. That was his first job. But he said, we got to change the rules so stuff like this doesn't happen again. And the idea was, let's create an agency, the consumer agency, and let's pick up all those consumer protection laws and maybe fill in a couple of gaps and put one agency, make them responsible for making sure to stand up to the big Wall Street banks and to make sure that consumers just don't get cheated. So that's what the president was able to sign into law as part of Dodd-Frank. He asked me to come in, and I set the agency up for about a year. Once the agency was up and running, I went back up to Massachusetts.

And that little agency has been out there doing its job. It's kind of, you know, it's the little engine that could. And so far, in the six years that it's been up and running, it has forced these giant financial institutions, I hope you're sitting down, to return more than $12 billion directly to people they cheated. and it's handled about a million, million two complaints against the companies. And that's begun to change the world. It means not that everything's perfect, but it means there's really a cop on the beat so that families can take out a mortgage or a credit card or a student loan and know that they've at least got a fighting chance to have a level playing field and that they're not just going to get robbed when it happens.

So that's what the agency has been up to, and it's been pretty darn successful, which is why it's pretty darn unpopular in some corners. And it's pretty user-friendly too, right, for a government agency. I know that there's basically just a hotline you can call up if you feel like you've been cheated by a credit card company or bank or payday lender. And you can reach someone and they take care of your claim. Oh, call up. You are so old school. I am.

You can actually just go online. Even better. Even better. And, in fact, let me give the little plug here. If you think you've been cheated, like your bank popped a $10 fee on you or your student lender charged you the wrong interest rate, anything that you think went wrong, you go to CFPB, CFPB.gov. And one of the things that will pop up is complaints. You can click on that complaint button and get a little form, fill it out. And here's how it works.

It's actually really cool. It goes straight to the agency. You give them all the information. The agency then tags it and sends it straight to the bank or mortgage company or credit card company or whatever it is that you're complaining about, and a clock starts running. And the agency keeps up with whether or not they respond to you and how they respond and whether or not you're satisfied by that response. And here's a really cool feature.

If you want to, you go there and look, and you can sort the information on complaints. You can find out which banks get the most complaints. You can find out what kind of products. Gender, in gender, the most complaints, you can see who gets the best response rate. That is, if someone's complained, does the company come back and fix the problem and do it quickly? So what this is really about, this is the part I love, it actually is making markets work better. So better lenders, the ones that don't cheat their customers, actually don't, they have a chance now to say, hey, I'm doing better than those other guys. I don't show up in this complaint database. Those guys

over there are the ones who've had thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of complaints against them. Not us. We're the good guys. Come do business with us. This is a way, ultimately, to empower consumers and to drive markets so they're more efficient. Don't you just love hearing a Democrat say that? That is good. Senator, you told the Washington Post that if Mulvaney takes over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it would change every calculation that every giant bank makes in their executive suite when deciding just how close to come to breaking the law.

What did you mean by that? Well, think of it this way. One of the jobs of the consumer agency is to enforce the law. Now, law enforcement has a lot of decisions that get made behind closed doors. And over the last five years, like I was just talking about, six years, with Rich Corddry at the helm, the consumer agency has gone after some pretty darn big fish, like you remember Wells Fargo and the fake account scandal and plenty of other big lenders, and been pretty aggressive in leaning into them and saying, you cheated people here, you cheated people there, and here's the deal. You're both going to have to give back the money and pay a penalty for cheating. You put a different director involved, and the question is, you got a guy like Mulvaney who's already said he doesn't believe in the agency. He doesn't think

they ought to be doing that kind of thing. How does the calculation change inside the consumer agency? The part you and I can't see, the part that takes place behind closed doors? How many investigations don't get pursued or get pursued lightly or only gently? How many times do they say, well, let's be a little easier. Let's let them just apologize and back up. Let's, you know, give them a little slap on the wrist, whatever. And as soon as the big banks, the big corporations say, oh, new cop on the beat, very different from the old cop, then their calculation about whether to, you know, run close to the edge by adding an extra $15 fee on this or recalculating interest rates or not supervising your employees about whether they're opening fake accounts or whatever other kind of scam they come up with.

It just changes. That's the whole point is that guys who are driven to say profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, and we'll go as close to the line as we can, so long as we think we're not going to get any pushback from a cop on the beat, those are the guys who are going to take advantage of consumers. And how do I know that? I know it because they did. I know it because they do. And so if the agency is run by somebody who thinks the big problem is those poor giant banks are being pushed too hard not to cheat their customers, if that's the change that gets made, it's going to reverberate not only through the executive suites at the big banks. It means ultimately through every household in America that now is just a little bit more likely to get cheated. So one of the things at stake here and to your point, one of the reasons they want to put Mulvaney there is to enact that ideological agenda.

The agency was set up to be independent. Republicans have objected to just how independent the agency is. Can you talk a little bit about why that's important and how that impacts the legality of what Mulvaney is doing? far. Yeah, exactly. So that's when the first banking regulatory oversight agency is enacted into law. So Congress says, we're going to have some oversight over the banks, and they establish what becomes the Office of the Controller of the Currency. And one of the insights that Congress had even back then is, you know, if you're going after big banks, you better make it independent of Congress. Because if you can cover it kind of in the political sphere, we're not so sure they'll be as tough on the big banks as they ought to be. So the funding was set up independently. That means they're funded through fees and other mechanisms, not through the ordinary budget process.

And they were given independence. The OCC, for example, has a single director. Now it's confirmed. It's nominated by the president, that director, and confirmed by Congress. But then that's it. It goes out and acts independently because that's what helps keep the markets honest. That's what helps keep us safe. And we know that they're not in Washington, the Fed, the OCC, the FDIC, the main regulators there. So the CFPB is the same kind of thing. Congress built it to be

independent. The president has one power where the CFPB is concerned, and that is to nominate the director. Then Congress has one power, and that is to confirm that director. After that, it is an independent agency, just like other independent agencies in government. Now, that doesn't mean there's no review. There's an Administrative Procedures Act. There's all kinds of things it has to do internally. But the point is to try to remove it from some political influence. So the concern right now is that Donald Trump didn't just pick somebody who hates the agency and has said that pretty publicly. He's picked somebody

who already has a job working for Donald Trump and who can be removed if he doesn't do that job in a way that Donald Trump likes. And so there are a lot of folks out there who are really concerned that the real point here is not just to get somebody into the agency who can blow it up, but to get somebody into the agency who is directly beholden to Donald Trump. And now, just to kind of increase the factor of how much we ought to be worried about that, this is an interim appointment, which means even under Donald Trump's calculation, under the Vacancies Act, it will only be for about eight months. But at the end of that eight months, they can appoint somebody else. And at the end of that eight months,

somebody else and somebody else and somebody else. So what we really need here is we got to take seriously this interim appointment and make sure that the president does what he is legally entitled to do, what Congress set up, and that is to nominate a director and then have the Senate vote on that director, have the Republicans belly up to it and say whether or not they want a director that Donald Trump has picked. Somebody who's pro-consumer, I hope that's the case, or somebody who's pro-bank, in which case, let's call them out for it. But that Donald Trump doesn't get to manipulate this agency through the back door by claiming that he's got an interim director who works directly for him and is also running an independent agency. Yeah, so you just alluded to the more

alarming development, in my opinion, which is even if Leandra English wins this court fight, Trump could presumably find a Republican to appoint as director who could get 51 votes in the Senate because the Republicans control the Senate and then do the same type of damage. And then, you know, it's a five-year appointment. So why does this fight matter so much that we're engaged in right now? And what do we do about the seemingly the greater danger, which is that we have a director of the agency that is there for five years and we can't do anything about? So look, it's both hands. One is interim could last forever, effectively, and we don't want that to happen. Nobody should want that to happen, right? We want him to have to name someone and then Congress to appoint. So interim matters. It's not automatically limited. It's only limited when there's a nominee who goes forward and ultimately gets confirmed.

nominee who goes forward and ultimately gets confirmed. The second part is to say, look, that's what the confirmation process is about, is Donald Trump gets to name someone and then the rest of us get to have a big public discussion about that person. Do you remember the guy, Puzder, who was named to be head of the Labor Department? Do you remember him? Oh, yes. Yeah, he didn't last too long. Do you remember he is not the Secretary of Labor? And you remember why. People took a close look at him and said, whoa, hold on. And not only did he have Democratic opposition, there were Republicans who faded away and said, I'm not doing this one.

And so we got a different Secretary of Labor. He might not be the guy I would choose, but he's sure in the first guy that they came up with. Or look at Betsy DeVos. She made it through. I get it. She is now Secretary of Education. But boy, are the American people paying attention to what she does, right? That was a hard-fought battle, which really forced both Donald Trump and 50 Republicans to stand up and say, yeah, I'm good with a Secretary of Education who doesn't believe in public education. And my view is, you make them get out and say that in public. And let's do the same thing around this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Maybe they'll think twice about who they want to put in charge of it. This is an agency. This is government that works for the people.

It's not out there for the giant banks. It's not out there for the student loan scammers. It's out there for the people, and it's producing results every single day. Look, I'll put it this way. We didn't get this agency just because President Obama said he wanted it. The banks were totally opposed to it. They spent more than a million dollars a day lobbying against Dodd-Frank, and right at the center of their bullseye was no consumer agency. But the president said, we're going to do this agency. He stood behind it. He stood firm when, I'll be blunt, people in his own administration were like, yeah, how about we throw that under

the bus in returns for some other things we'd like to do? And the president said, no. Not us. Not. Good for you. Not these three. No. But he was great on this. He stood strong. And here's the deal. People all across this country got engaged. And that's how we got the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So now it's proven what it can do. Now it's out there fighting on behalf of families. Now it's got a lot bigger fan base than it had before. But that means we got to step up and defend this agency. We got to be in this fight. We got to be in this fight to make sure that Donald Trump follows the law and doesn't just get to put his guy in and override what Congress said in Dodd-Frank would be the succession plan.

And when the time comes that Donald Trump nominates someone, we need to make our voices heard. If we like the person, great. And if we don't, we need to be loud. So just talking about this sort of legal issue, it feels like it's already been diffused into, oh, liberals say it's English and conservatives say it's Mulvaney. You know, you were there at the inception of this agency and the reasons it was made independent. Dodd-Frank was written with a secession plan. How clear cut is this legal argument? Is there any valid validity to the argument that the Trump lawyers are making that he has the right to make this appointment? So look, all I can tell you is how I see it. I understand that there are lawyers on both sides.

That's why they should go to court. But I'm just going to give you straight how I see it. There was a point earlier in the drafting of the CFPB where it said, we'll use the Vacancies Act to fill in the blank when a director is not available. And that was deliberately taken out, and new language was put in to say, nope, here's going to be the deal. There's a director, and if the director is unavailable, deputy director has the powers and duties of the director, becomes the acting director. So in other words, you couldn't ask for something more deliberate. Congress thought about doing Deputy director has the powers and duties of the director, becomes the acting director. So in other words, you couldn't ask for something more deliberate. Congress thought about doing it through the Vacancies Act and said, nope, what we're going to do is we're going to do our own succession plan.

At the same time, the Vacancies Act also has its legislative history. As you know, the Vacancies Act dates back decades. As you know, the Vacancies Act dates back decades. And what it says is that it applies to all of the agencies that are in place at the moment that the Vacancies Act passed. But going forward, the Vacancies Act applies unless Congress decides to do its own succession plan, which is exactly what they did in the case of the consumer agency. So, you know, don't listen to me. Larry Tribe jumped on this first and said he thinks that the statute is pretty clear here. And a lot of lawyers have jumped in to say so. Now, have jumped in to say so. Now, I get it that Donald Trump's administration says, no, no, no, they get to, quote, fill a vacancy. But look, there ain't no vacancy here. Once you read Dodd-Frank, the very minute, the second that Rich Corddry said, bang, I'm out of here, I have now resigned, said, bang, I'm out of here. I have now resigned. Goodbye. At that instant, by operation of the law that Congress wrote, Leandra English became the acting director. So there's no, there's not like this moment of vacancy, where Donald Trump gets to jump in. And if he's going to claim, well, he gets to use the Vacancies Act here,

it really is where you guys started this, what was it, 20 minutes ago. And that is, what else do they get to come in and declare themselves in charge? Right. That's what makes it seem so dangerous. Yep. One last question. We'll let you go. The government runs out of money on December 8th. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan need Democratic votes to keep it open. Under what condition should Democrats give Republicans the votes they need to keep the government open? What's on the list of demands for you? Should we pass the DREAM Act?

Should we fund Obamacare? And if Republicans refuse to do those things, should the Democrats withhold all of their votes and shut the government down? So look, we are in the middle of negotiations, but let me put it this way. The President of the United States said that Congress should vote on the DREAM Act. And I'm with him. Congress should vote on the DREAM Act. We should do it right now. We don't have to do this later in a budget act. We could do it this week. Put the DREAM Act on the floor in the Senate. Put the DREAM Act on the floor, a clean DREAM Act in the House. I think the votes are there in both the House and the Senate. Let's pass it. Let's send it on to the president and let him sign it into law. After all, the United States

made a promise to these young people. When President Obama said, come out of the shadows President Obama said, come out of the shadows, and we will give you a chance to go to school, to take jobs, to join the military, to serve your country, to be a part of the only home that most of you have ever known. It was the right thing to do, and it was a commitment. He committed our country, and I believe we have to honor that commitment. So for me, I'm ready to vote on the DREAM Act right now. If the Republicans don't want to put it in the budget, I'm cool. But I want to vote on the DREAM Act before we get to the budget. And then we can sit and do all of our numbers around the budget. We can talk about the other

things that need to be in there, of course. We have to support the Affordable Care Act. The American people do not want us to roll back health care coverage for 25 million Americans. I'm ready for that fight. But what I'd like to do is let's honor our promise to the dreamers first. Senator, before you even do that, I really would urge you to go get some Dunkin' Donuts, get in the car, drive to CFPB. That's really all that you need to take over. You have the same legal claim as Mick Mulvaney. You were supposed to run it from the beginning. I think it's time.

You guys are fabulous. Have a Dunkin' Donut on me. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. And good luck with the fight ahead. All right. Take care. All righty.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. On the pod today, we are joined by one of the great legal minds of our time, Obama's former regulatory czar and the author of the new book, Impeachment, A Citizen's Guide. Cass Sunstein. Cass, how you doing? I'm great. Pleasure to be here. Hi, Cass.

Hi. It's a pleasure to have you on. It is a pleasure. Okay, so you write a book at a clip of like one per week, I think. You write books like we tweet. I mean, I'm looking, I'm on your Amazon page. It's really unbelievable. Well, most of my books are 20 letters or they're short books. They're really tiny. Right, right. That's smart. What made you decide to write this book on impeachment? You know, we bought a house in Concord and while I studied the Constitution for a long time, hadn't really thought about the American Revolution, and I'm kind of surrounded by artifacts of the Revolution. And that made me think, well, what was impeachment

about? And if you read the Declaration of Independence, it's completely like articles of impeachment. And if you look at the history in the 18th century, it's two ideas are on fire in our little country. One is self-government, and the other is the equal dignity of human beings. And I think we've missed that slice, the slice between Paul Revere's ride and when the Constitution got ratified. And kind of the best window onto it is impeachment. That was the shots fired around the world that everybody heard in 1740s and 50s when we started impeaching people who were following orders from the crown. And that gave a window onto our country. I think it gives you really a sense of what American exceptionalism is. And that's what got me into impeachment.

So, Cass, I've seen you describe the book as about our country, about our struggle for self-government and the relation between impeachment and that struggle. What does that mean? And what does that history tell us about this moment in time when we have a president that a lot of people would like to see impeached? Well, it tells us we're the boss. So that's the first thing. There's no they. We don't have a king. We wouldn't have had a constitution, by way without impeachment so the first thing is we the people those aren't just words those are a commitment, a promise

and the second thing which I think really connects what happened in the founding period with the civil rights movement with the movement for gay rights and same sex marriage with the women's movement with what's happening now with respect to sexual harassment,

is there was an idea we're all not subjects, we're citizens, and the idea of equal dignity was on the loose. And impeachment, you know, it's right near that part of the Constitution that forbids titles of nobility, and that's not a coincidence that the idea is that you don't have any princes or kings here. And for those who are concerned about the current person who's doing various things from the White House, it's completely legitimate to say, you know, we're in charge and there was a war fought to put us there. And we have some mechanisms to make sure that's real. And we have some mechanisms to make sure that's real. So you've seen this debate about collusion, emoluments and other issues where there's this question as to whether it's just a political wrong or a legal wrong.

And, you know, then you see the debate turn to what high crimes and misdemeanors should mean, whether it needs to be, you know, a legal crime for a president to be impeached. Where do you fall down on that? When someone does something that may be egregious, that violates the spirit of the Constitution, but may not be technically illegal, what do you think? Yeah, I follow Hamilton and Madison, and they were completely clear. Name drop. Name drop. I follow.

I never met them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're not ambiguous on this. Are you talking about the musical? It's so weird to take your guidance from a musical. That's dispiriting. Well, I tried to write a little theme for the musical, and I kind of sent it to Hamilton, New York, New York,

and I haven't gotten a response yet. It's a little theme, and in the little theme it quotes Hamilton from the Federalist Papers, who says it's an abuse of public trust, doesn't have to be a crime. Is that the start of a rap lyric, do you think? It can be. It can be.

Kind of the way I said it makes you think it would completely work. So just the rhythm of my own cadence. So they could do it. The Hamilton cast could do it. But the idea that Hamilton was pushing, which was not unusual to him, they all thought this, was if the president abuses the pardon power, and here Madison said that, that's an impeachable offense. If the president procures a treaty by lying, and this was said by a prominent founder during the ratification debates, and lying to the Senate to get the treaty that way, that's an impeachable offense. And by the way, that's not a crime. If the president invades civil rights and civil liberties, it was said in Massachusetts, that's an impeachable offense. And these weren't contested claims. So the idea is that if you have an abuse of presidential power, that's an impeachable

offense. And it doesn't matter if it's a crime. Yeah, that's interesting. I heard you talk about how you think that what happened with Comey and how Trump fired him and why he fired him is probably not an impeachable offense, but that firing Mueller would be or any abuse of the pardon power to cover up for how he fired Comey would be impeachable. Can you explain that? Yeah. So the Comey discharge, at least there's an account, which is that any new president after what happened would be reasonable in getting rid of everything, to fire him isn't an abuse of the authority the president has to choose his own FBI director, not necessarily. But if you fire someone who's investigating you

or your White House apparatus or your campaign for potential interaction, let's say, with the Russians, that's getting really near the line. And I think the way to put it is the impeachment clause, actually at the convention, the talk was about procuring the office by corrupt means, and there the specific reference was corrupting the electoral college. But working with a country who's not our friends to get office, that's kind of core impeachable offense. And then if you're, I'm not claiming that happened, but if you discharge someone who's

investigating that, that kind of self-insulation, that's kind of what the whole separation of power system was designed to ensure we didn't have. And the content of the separation of power system meant House of Representatives can impeach the guy if he does something of that extreme nature. and thus fired the FBI director after he had told the FBI director to please let this go, let this guy off the hook, who might be in some trouble. Where does obstruction of justice sort of fall? I know obstruction of justice on its own doesn't necessarily, you probably don't think it's an impeachable offense, but in general, what kind of obstruction of justice do you think would?

Okay, so if the president decides, I'm going to go on vacation in Paris for the next six months, that's impeachable, though it's not a crime. If the president obstructs justice by saying that someone who violated the speeding laws didn't, and that was a lie and decided to protect his friend, that would be very bad, but it wouldn't be impeachable. So obstruction of justice is a grave act. We need to know what kind of thing is the

obstruction of justice about. If it's about protecting one of his own advisors, depends on what exactly is he doing. So if it's enlisting the apparatus of the federal government to prevent an investigation of national Security Advisors for wrongdoing. That's kind of a grayish zone, but I mean that as pretty harsh talk, because impeachment is, you know, there's a very high bar for impeachment, so if you're in the gray zone there, it's pretty bad. So I think any White House would be well advised to tell the president, don't go anywhere near there if you're trying to prevent an otherwise legitimate investigation into one of your top people for what might be serious wrongdoing. So, you know, under President Bush, I'm very confident.

President Obama, I'm completely confident. And any number, President Reagan, completely confident, taught people to say don't go there. And one of the things that would be said in explaining why don't go there is that it's getting toward the impeachable territory. It's not as horrific as firing someone who's investigating you and your apparatus itself for interaction, let's say, with an unfriendly foreign country. Still not good. So here on this pod, you know, we've told people not to be waiting for, you know, sort of the impeachment fairy to come save them from Donald Trump. Impeachment clause.

Impeachment clause, right. Oh, there you go, Tommy. You're saying Merry Christmas again. Tim Allen was terrible on that. Tim Allen was terrible on that because you know we can talk about all of these legal you know reasons for or against impeachment but at the end of the day it seems like it's a political question for the house of representatives do you have any you did a lot of research on this do you have any insight into you know what the founders thought or how they hoped to prevent impeachment from purely being

used as a political tool that was sort of based on, you know, the partisan passions of the moment? Completely. So the high crimes and misdemeanor standard is specifically designed to ensure that whether it's a Republican or Democrat, you don't impeach the person just because you think they're terrible. Even if you think their policies are kind of ruining the country, you can't impeach someone for that. The high crimes and misdemeanor standard doesn't mean it has to be a crime. It means it has to be a pretty awful abuse of the power you have by virtue of being president. And that can be intruding on civil rights and civil liberties.

It can be abuse of the pardon power. It can be making war. Those are all candidates for impeachable offenses. But the political disagreement, even if it's good thing, because it's a reality check saying that we should, whatever we think of the guy, have a neutrality principle in our heads, which means would we want this person to be impeached for that act if he was our guy? And if it's something like, you know, what we've been talking about, preventing investigation of self by firing someone who's engaged in a legitimate investigation of something that would be independently impeachable, then I hope we'd all say, even if it's our guy, that guy has to go if he's doing that. So I would say it's not fully right to say this is a political issue, the issue of impeachment. That is, if a high crime and misdemeanor has been committed for this or any future president, TBD,

we need to insist that if it has been committed, it's not a matter of discretion whether to impeach the person. My reading of the founding period is you've got to do it. You can't say he's our bum and he gets to stay. You're legally obliged to say he's our bum, but he's done something so horrific he has to leave. Now, it might be the political reality is it's going to be a very heavy burden on we the people to get our representatives to do that. But for Nixon, it basically worked.

The key Republicans left him because the grounds for impeachment were so palpably there. So in the Federalist Papers, is there anything about a billionaire funding a petition for impeachment to get his ID numbers up vis-a-vis Tom Steyer, or is there precedent for it? Yes, that's in the Federalist No. 71. The Federalist No. 71. A billionaire back then meant trillionaire, so they understood it as really a lot more money than Tom Steyer has.

I should say that Mr. Steyer, I really admire his commitment on climate change, and he's done great things. Impeachment, we should have, you know, kind of reverence toward the institution and think we need an act. And just to, I get a little offense from Mr. Steyer that he's such a bum, he has to go. And that's not what the plan is about. Cass, in 2007, so 25, Cass Sunstein completed Novels Ago, or Nonfiction Works.

You came to Iowa to canvas, you were joined by a Pulitzer Prize winning expert on genocide, an economist named Austin Goolsbee. And the first door you went to, you were asked a simple question, when is the caucus? And despite that brainpower, none of you knew. Do you want to formally apologize to the Iowa team right here today, that lack of preparation? But I'll tell you, when I didn't know the answer, I had a little political skill, which is I saw the voter had a Labrador Retriever, and I actually love Labrador Retrievers, so I kind of sat down with the Labrador Retriever, and we got that vote. Congrats on your puppy, by the way.

Yeah, I saw pictures all over Twitter. And so what I want to say to that Iowa voter is thank you for not only having Labrador Retriever, but for bonding with me such that you actually turned Iowa for President-to-be Obama. That's a good story. Good ending. Imagine that. You get a knock on

the door and it's Cass Sunstein, Samantha Power and Austin Goolsby. Yeah, clueless about where to go. I'm sure they were like, oh, I've read all of your yeah. I mean, clueless about where to go. I'm sure they were like, oh, I've read all of your works. I know all about you guys. You're definitely not academic strangers to me.

Austin's papers in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, they were especially enthusiastic about. That's a real page turner. Cass Sunstein, thank you for joining the pod. Please come back again soon. Everyone, go check out Cass' new book, Impeachment, A Citizen's Guide, and so many other wonderful works by Cass Sunstein. In a year when you come back about your book

about what happens when a president refuses to recognize his impeachment, we'll probably have a lot of important questions then. Thank you very much. Enjoy it. All right. Thanks to Cass Sunstein and Elizabeth Warren for joining us today.

This is our outro. Anything else that we wanted to bring up? Jared's in some trouble. Very interesting. Several pieces all in a row. Gabe Sherman

actually had the first piece about the incredible shrinking Jared and then the New York Times and the Washington Post had them on the same day. Someone is doing some spinning

to protect our boy. To protect, yeah, because they're saying his role is being diminished in the White House now. Jared doesn't, his big portfolio of like Middle East peace and, you know, saving technology and whatever else is not really panning out. My favorite part of one of those profiles was when they said that it was Jared's idea to maybe to fire Comey then oh and then he was pretty happy when when Mueller started a special counsel because he said oh once Mueller's involved maybe these congressional committees will stop investigating us and Mueller will just go do his thing I love the tell you that Jared doesn't really not the

brightest bulb he's not the brightest bulb is he I love the idea that when you remove something from a portfolio from Jared's portfolio it's really just someone walking into his office and kind of removing a little tab from a folder because he hasn't actually done anything. Yeah, and it could be related maybe to the news we got on Thanksgiving Day. Great story by the New York Times. New York Times had an interesting weekend. Tough story about the Nazis. Great story about reporters working on Thanksgiving Day to tell us that lawyers for Michael Flynn,

President Trump's former national security advisor, notified the president's legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel's investigation. According to four people involved in the case, an indication that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating a deal. That seems like a very, very big deal. It just because Flynn was just so caught i mean he just was so screwed and somebody and also by the way the fact that flynn's son is involved means like it's not just his own future on the line it's his family's maximum leverage and the reason this is such a big deal is muller is only going to go for the deal and not prosecute Flynn if Flynn can turn on someone higher up the food chain.

And there are not a lot of people left above Michael Flynn. There's the president of the United States and Jared and I don't know who else. Don Jr. The Mercers and Putin. This is a hell of an outro, but just breaking news roy moore just got a gop write-in challenger a marine colonel with some impressive credentials but few political roots according to sam stein so boy stay tuned let's just stick on this outro all day let's record love it start reading the tweets also also read the tweets aloud guys the descendants of uh english

tyrants have gotten engaged. She's from LA. She's from LA. She's American. You do not know much about this. I don't click on it because we won the war. Emily made fun of me for not knowing much about this. What's her name? Megan Markle?

And then people on Twitter were hoping that you would rant about it. She was on Suits. I really... She was on Suits, yeah. Elijah's now videoing this because he's like, this is the content that's going to get some clicks. Forget about the CPFB stuff you guys have been doing. Rich stopped recording like five minutes ago. Couple notes on the British family.

All their assets should be seized and given away. That's one. If you've made it all the way to the outro, it's a special Easter egg for you. Two, it was really weird when William and Harry traded spots as heartthrob. William was the heartthrob. Then all of a sudden, Harry's like, no, you're not. traded spots as heartthrob. You know? William was the heartthrob. Then all of a sudden Harry's like, no, you're not. I'm the heartthrob now.

You don't think that's a hairline personality? You know, who knows the cause? I never care about a royal wedding, though I do like the crown. So that's odd. That's a contradiction. I think we've wrapped up everything, though. Great. We'll see y'all later.

Here's to Roy Moore's write-in challenger. Mulvaney's going to be here in about half an hour with some donuts, and he says he runs Crooked Media now. Mulvaney's sitting in the chair in the studio with Pundit and Leo on his lap. Yeah, I checked, and actually, this is the president's option, and so now I am the host. I am Mick Mulvaney. I am a host of Pod Save America.

These are my dogs. This is my office. It's all mine. I am Mick Mulvaney. I am a host of Pod Save America. These are my dogs. This is my office. It's all mine. I am Mick Mulvaney. All right. This is Mick Mulvaney signing off. Bye, guys. Bye, guys. Bye, guys.