Pod Save America - "Taking the gavel from Paul Ryan's hand."

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

Democrats win another special election, Republicans flail around for a response, and Trump sends Tillerson to the Rexit in a major shakeup of the national security team. Then Lovett and Tommy talk to Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. I'm John Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. It's gonna be a loose show today, guys. We're still brain addled from Texas. Favreau was not here. We had elections. So it's gonna be a fun one, I think. I think you're right, Dan. Tommy and I have a great conversation with Senator Elizabeth Warren. We asked her about this bank bill. We asked her about Larry Kudlow. We asked her about Donald Trump calling her Pocahontas. We get into all of it. So stick around for that. I'm excited. All right, let's do some housekeeping first. Pod Save America is coming to Florida in April. We've got tickets for shows in Clearwater, Miami and Orlando. There's also going to be a Love It or Leave It show in Miami, and there are plenty of tickets for that show. Also, we announced new tour dates yesterday. Pod Save America is going to be in Boston in May, and Atlanta, Nashville, and Durham in June. Love It or Leave It is going to be in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Nashville in May and June. You can find the information

about upcoming tour dates at crooked.com slash events. A presale is now open with the code crooked. Also today we are adding a DC love it or leave it on Thursday, March 22nd. So you can get tickets to that right now because John, Tommy and I are going to be heading to DC for the March for our lives. And we're going to cover that and be there for that, which is exciting. Yeah, it'd be cool. That's awesome. It was great to see all the students do the walkout yesterday. It was a pretty amazing thing to see such young people. I even saw on Twitter these elementary school kids who had prepared press packets for the reporters who came with like written in pencil.

Really? Yeah. Wow. I've never made a press packet. And as a good reminder, there's a cricket conversation this week with Julissa Arce, one of our cricket contributors, who spoke to Winter Minisey, one of the teenage organizers of the walkouts. And it's an awesome conversation, which you can check out right now.

This is also when I do my periodic, somewhat annoying plea to remind people that my book is coming out on June 19th. Yes, we still can. It is available on Amazon, Burns & Noble, IndieBound, everywhere where you get your books. And yes, we still can pre-order the book. Yes, yes, yes, we still can pre-order the book. And there are two reasons to buy it. One, it will help ease some of my ongoing anxiety. And two, proceeds from every book bought in the pre-sale period go to Swing Left. So if you don't buy the book, I will assume you're comfortable with Republicans controlling all levers of government in 2019.

That would be the fair assumption. That'd be what your behavior would indicate. And last thing, sign up for the newsletter. What a day is out. People are loving it. It's a hit. Why aren't you a part of it? Go to crooked.com, sign up for the newsletter, put your email, you get one email a day.

End of the day. It's fantastic. Right, put your email, you get one email a day, end of the day. It's fantastic. Right, Tommy? Right, Dan? I am a reader. I have no, I'm just a regular person who receives it in my inbox from Priyanka. It's awesome. Dan is a low information podcaster.

He only reads what a day. I am also in the newsletter formation Slack channel, but I've just basically muted notifications and just get it at the end of the day. And it's great. That's smart. End of housekeeping. newsletter, formation, Slack channel, but I've just basically muted notifications and just get it at the end of the day. And it's great. That's smart. End of housekeeping. All right. So we had an election. Tuesday, the much talked about special election for the 18th congressional district in Pennsylvania finally happened. After many hours of vote counting, on Wednesday, the media outlets, New York Times and others, called the election for Conor Lamb, a Marine and first-time candidate running in it, winning a district that Trump won by 20 points in 2016 by the massive margin of 600-some votes, or 0.2%. What did you guys think?

What was your reaction when this happened? Was it relief? Was it excitement? Was it, who cares because this district's going away in a few months? It's funny. Once I saw how close it was, I stopped caring because that's all that mattered, right? We showed that we could swing a 20-point district. I mean, as the night wore on, we realized it was going to be decided by a few hundred votes and that it might go into a recount, it might not. We learned everything we needed to learn. Republicans know, Republicans in the House learned everything they needed to learn. Democrats on the campaign trail learned everything they needed to learn. This district's not going

to exist anymore. But it's incredibly exciting. And it's exciting to know that we have the possibility to flip districts this red because as many people have pointed out, if districts like this flip, we're talking about, you know, a 300 seat majority is possible. Yeah, it is. We're all election junkies. So we couldn't help but watch the stupid New York Times needle and all the returns and all the, you know, Steve Kornacki on TV doing math on his iPhone. So it was exciting to see. But, you know, the fact that it was close as a victory for Democrats and the fact that Republicans pulled out all the stops. They sent Pence. They sent Donald Trump. They made a firm closing argument. And they're calling

Lamb a unicorn. They're saying he's some exceptional candidate that ran like a Republican, ran like Trump. That's not really true. I mean, this is a replicable win in a whole bunch of districts that we didn't think were winnable. He's a good candidate, but this guy didn't personally kill bin Laden. He was a military background. He's a prosecutor. This is something we can do again over and over again. So I think it's a great sign for Democrats. I logically had the exact same view that Lovett did, which is this does not matter. If we're close, then we know momentum's on our side. We know we have real potential to take the House back and do very well up and down the ballot in 2018. But as the night went on, and it got close,

I started caring more because I kept thinking about just the idea of the absurd gloating from Republicans, the Trump tweets. I was petty in my response. I was logically ambivalent, but emotionally very petty about this. So I was petty in my I was I was logically ambivalent, but emotionally very petty. No, it's also it's we're sick of moral victories, you know, and it was nice to watch Republicans try to claim a moral victory after we had done it a few times after Ossoff and other races that were close that showed how well we could do. But that actually didn't result in picking up any seats.

But that actually didn't result in picking up any seats. Everyone's talking about a wave election. Do you think that that is a good thing because everyone wants to back and be a winner and so we can maybe recruit better candidates and raise more money? Or do you worry about complacency and expectation setting and re-energizing the sort of Trump vote? It's a little bit of both, I think. I worry about this idea that it's done and we're taking the House back and therefore people – the way to think about it is in order to take the House back, we need people who vote in presidential elections and don't vote in midterms to vote in this midterm or have not previously voted and have become engaged because of Trump to vote in this midterm. And if it seems like it's a done deal and people's votes aren't going to matter, then those are the people most likely to fall off first. I think there will be some stuff around the margins that's beneficial of the idea of a wave because in terms of money, some of these business donors or corporate PACs, which I wouldn't take money from if it was me, but for those Democrats that do, they'll start hedging their bets, right? They won't just give to

Republicans because they want to have ends with the Democratic majority. But I do worry about complacency. And I do think that complacency is part of what one of the many problems we had in 2016 that led us down this path that people thought it was over. So why wait in line for hours? And it's easier to decide not to vote in a congressional election than it is in a presidential. So I do have some concerns about that. Yeah, we definitely have to drive home for people that this was 640 votes, incredibly close, everything we did mattered. Millions and millions of dollars were spent on both sides to eke out this win. And it took everyone doing everything possible to make it happen. And then that will be true in a lot of districts like this in the fall, districts that will make the difference between Paul Ryan holding onto that

gavel and us taking it from his hands, which makes me so excited. It just gets me out of bed every morning just thinking about that moment where he just puts that gavel down for the last time, and we see that gavel doesn't belong to you anymore. It is worth noting that we have another special election coming up in just about five weeks in the 8th Congressional District in Arizona, which, like this seat in Pennsylvania, has been vacated because of a Republican who had to resign over a sex scandal. Now, Arizona could be harder than Pennsylvania for some reasons, but that was a district that was Trump won by 21 points. So it's essentially the same political dynamic. So something that we thought we had no shot at when Trent Franks resigned a few months ago, there could be a real shot here. There's a good candidate who won the primary a couple weeks ago there.

So that's something to keep an eye on. It's exciting. Now, so Republicans have known for weeks that Conor Lamb winning was a possibility, and they've known certainly for weeks that Conor Lamb was going to do much better than anyone ever expected a Democrat to do in the 18th Pennsylvania District. So they had an opportunity to get their talking points together, think about their spin, prepare for how they were going to explain to the media pundits, donors, voters, why this happened. I think they got it done. They got me. I believe them. So I will let me give you some of my favorite examples of how they spun this.

On election night, Jeff Zelnick reported that according to Republicans who were watching the results of the White House, they were pleased because this isn't a blowout. For now, we'll happily take it. I also really enjoyed Kathy McMorris Rogers, who is a member of the Republican leadership in the House, who said, we aren't even in full momentum on tax reform yet. Okay. What does that mean? What did you guys – do you guys have any favorite examples of horrible spin and what did did you think of it? Were you sold on the Republican take? I mean, look, Paul Ryan going out there and saying that he ran as a conservative was pretty hard to bear. I mean, look, the thing that they can't avoid is they tried to run a tax cut message. They tried to run ads around the corporate tax cuts that Paul Ryan said is an election

winner. And they had to pull them down and just throw shit against the wall to see what sticks in the final days because people just weren't buying it. To me, that is the most devastating and important lesson of this race, because that is their signature achievement. It is their only major legislative achievement. It is what the conservative intellectual pundits, the ones that we're supposed to take seriously, said was the only way Republicans were going to be able to keep the House and maybe keep the Senate is by having this accomplishment. They can go running around the country and tout. And then, of course, they try to make this thing about corporate tax cuts. It doesn't work. And now all of a sudden it's about MS-13 and immigration. And Conor Lamb is a Pelosi

liberal, but he's also not liberal enough on the $15 minimum wage in unions. And none of it worked. If you are in a Republican blood red 20 plus Trump district, and you are pulling down ads in the final days because nothing's working, that is a very, very disheartening sign for you if you're Paul Ryan. Yeah, I love that these guys went into their Republican caucus meetings and just put their heads in the sand and pretended like nothing went wrong. I mean, their one legislative accomplishment was this tax cut. It did not work. They pulled down ads. Conor Lamb explicitly ran against it. So that would make me very worried about replicating that message in future races. There are efforts to make Nancy Pelosi the boogeyman and to scare people away from Lamb

because of his potential association with her did not work. The president coming to town multiple times to a district he'd won by 20 points didn't work. So I would be very worried that all of my bullets had been fired and there's not much left for November if I were them. But again, they're all just sort of, you know, spinning their little yarns here and saying whatever their donors need to hear. This reminds me of one of the main reasons I'm really happy Conor Lamb won, which is if we'd had to live in a world where Donald Trump Jr. could claim that his photo op of the giant chocolate bunny in the final day of voting had tipped the race in Rick Sarkoon's favor, I don't know that I could have lived in America much longer. Oh my God, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look, they can point to the fact that, you know, they can point to the fact that Conor Lamb came out in favor of the tariffs Trump proposed. Right. Which meant that his efforts to use tariffs to kind of swing this rate backfired because Conor Lamb joined Sherrod Brown and being in favor of them. They can point to that. They can point to the fact that Conor Lamb ran away from Nancy Pelosi. Right. They have that. But beyond that, I mean, this is a candidate who ran on unions. He ran on Obamacare. He ran against the corporate tax cuts. He ran for medical marijuana. He ran on some core democratic, liberal economic issues. So they just, this notion that he was a conservative or that he ran as a Republican just doesn't pass the laugh test. It's just not, it's, you know, you're in a good place when you're just, when you're seeing Republicans try to spin something and you just quote it and you're just like, look at this. This is awesome. Because they just don't have anything to say. This is such a devastating loss for them. The argument that he is pro-gun, which was touted by Paul Ryan, by Ted Cruz's people, by everyone on Fox News, is belied by the fact that the NRA jumped in with a huge buy right

beforehand to defeat this quote unquote pro-gun candidate. Yep. And it's a lesson to every Democrat who thinks they can take a couple of votes and like keep the NRA out of their district. No, you cannot. They are a Republican organization. They don't give a shit about your votes. They will vote you out.

Yeah. And they, right. Like Conor Lamb came out in favor of background checks, but I think he was squishing on some of the other issues. And, you know, I don't know whether or not that's a good strategy, but what's clear is the NRA is going to come after you, whether you're just for background checks or you're for background checks, banning bump stocks, raising the age on buying things like AR-15s. And it's a lesson for Democrats. There are these core common sense gun control measures that you should be in favor of because it's what your Democratic base wants.

And the NRA is coming at you whether you're for these specific things one way or another. If you came out for repeal of the Second Amendment and a national gun confiscation program, the NRA would spend just as much money. You mean the Fifer bill? Yeah. A gun in every pot. That one? Yeah. Exactly.

A gun in no pots. Different bill, Dan. one yeah exactly i've been a gun in no pots different build-in do you got how much do you think the republicans know their spin is bullshit like do they 100 i mean you're seeing like jonathan martin who's a great reporter the new york times who is like as well sourced in the republican circles and people like him are tweeting that boy the on the record and off the record conversations about this race are real different i don't know why a journalist wouldn't go in there and just screw a bunch of sources and report out the off-the-record stuff. But these guys know they're full of shit. Yeah, it's almost disappointing. I would like them to believe their own spin a little bit more.

I mean, you can't help, right? You can't help but let the spin seep into your brain just a little bit. And it's probably hard for them to truly reconcile. Like, the fact that this loss is so unspinable means that their circumstances are quite unspinable. And I think it's probably hard for a lot of these Republicans who look at their life outside of Congress as one they're not excited to go back to and to truly accept just how hard it will be for a lot of these guys to keep their seats. But, yeah, it seems like they probably know. I hope they don't fully know. I hope they're buying their own spin just a tiny bit.

You've been in this position after like the 2010 midterms where everything is fine. We will go on. We will soldier on. Yeah. Okay. Well, I was actually thinking about how we felt about the House at this point in 2010. Now, there were a couple – the special elections actually had gone in the Democrats' favor and that was mostly because they were in more favorable districts and Republicans had really gotten their shit together in terms of like field organizing and understanding data. So we had a big structural advantage.

So I mean we were grasping at straws everywhere to convince ourselves that it was still a coin flip or we still had a shot. And I do wonder, like, I think probably the operatives know how this is going and like the quote unquote, more politically savvy members of the Republican House. But these people live in a Fox News bubble. And that's why they believe Romney was going to win. That's why even Republican House members who have access to 538 believe that Romney was going to win up until...

They were spiritually with Karl Rove trying to argue the Ohio results on Megyn Kelly. Even Trump. Even Trump's like, hey, why isn't anyone paying more attention to the Rasmussen poll? Like the most cooked Republican-leaning poll out there.

Like these guys are delusional from the top down. Yeah, you know, we were... Which shows only that he's... has mediocre political standing. Exactly. But no, but like, this is, again,

like Trump winning is this black swan event that prevented certain kinds of reckonings. And one of the reckonings that was supposed to happen is propaganda stops working when it bumps up against the real world. And had of the reckonings that was supposed to happen is propaganda stops working when it bumps up against the real world. And had they lost and faced the consequences of that loss,

they would have seen that Fox News sent them down a bad path because it misinforms people. It doesn't just misinform people about policy. It misinforms people about politics. If you're watching something that's saying every day why Conor Lamb can't win, why such a bad candidate, why Republicans should hold the House, why Democrats can't get their shit together, and then you lose the House, that tells you that your information isn't reliable. So these guys have been coasting for such a long time in an information bubble that hasn't been popped because of our failure to win elections. Yeah, and you can see this in some of the online responses from sort of the MAGA knuckleheads,

which is, well, the poll said Hillary was going to win too. So it becomes, it's a security blanket. If you were, let's pretend like we live in a bizarro world and you worked, you were a tax cutting, racism excusing house GOP aide. How would you, would you have tried to spin this in any way? Would you have a different approach to this? I mean, I think you kind of have to do the Baghdad Bob thing if you're a press guy in front of the cameras. But, you know, then I would take the first Uber over to the White House and try to have a conversation with their political office and see if there's anything we could do

differently to shake things up. Yeah, I actually think if I don't know that I even agree with that, I think the best thing you could do is say, this is the wake up call that House Republicans needed is a tough loss in a district we should have won. And the good news is we're taking our lessons from this and we're not going to be complacent. And we're going to use everything we learned from this to make sure we keep the house right. That's that I think is a like, what is that message? Okay, then what? What do you do? I don't know. I don't want to work for these people. I want to take a take a job i want to leave i'm gonna go take a job at pharma or something yeah right the problem is none of them are gonna vote for anything right like there's no they're floating today there might be another tax cut it's like the idea of these guys voting on another big piece of legislation walking off the cliff again for paul ryan or trump feels challenging yeah i think you're basically you go out you don't try to spin the unspinable, you put out the bat signal to the billionaires and the Russians and

hope they save you. Yeah, you know, the we raised we sort of glossed over the Pelosi thing. But so the theory or the sort of conventional ways around Pelosi has been that she has been a political liability to Democrats in some of these house races. I don't think it was based on a lot of data, but Republicans were telling everyone that one of the reasons that John Ossoff lost in Georgia 6 was all the Pelosi ads. As was mentioned, they played that card here heavily, but Conor Lamont said he was not going to vote for Pelosi. And it's not clear whether that card doesn't work or that card doesn't work because he said that. And there are reports in both Axios and Politico today about thoughts that a lot more candidates are going to do that, are going to say they won't support Pelosi to sort of inoculate themselves. And that could lead to her not being speaker if the Democrats take the House back. What do you guys think about that? I think it's obviously unfair to Nancy Pelosi, right? It reminds me of the Sopranos when Tony Soprano wanted to get the heat off of him. So they made Junior the boss. So that Junior would be the person who draws all the heat and draws all the attention. You know, Nancy Pelosi is a

lightning rod because Republicans have made Nancy Pelosi a lightning rod. They chose her as the person to direct their ire against. And so she is seen as somebody who draws a lot of ire. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So there will be some figurehead who plays that role in congressional races, who represents D.C., who represents Washington Democrats, Washington liberalism. Right now it's Pelosi. I don't think it's because of anything Pelosi did other than be a effective leader for Democrats for many years. So I think it's deeply unfair. I don't feel that strongly. If people like Conor Lamb view it as necessary to run against that lightning rod to make a point, I don't think that that's a knock on Nancy Pelosi. I think that's just a reality of

what it is to campaign against Washington and the congressional district. Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, you know, everyone who's in charge in the Democratic Party will get demagogued and will get attacked. I think Joe Crowley, if he takes over, that'll happen to him, too. So, you know, I do think it's Nancy Pelosi's tough enough to not care if Democrats say they won't support her to inoculate themselves against an election. I think she will. She thinks that's fine. The reality is she's been one of the most effective speakers we have ever had. And it would be a damn shame to lose her in the Democratic leadership. Yeah, I think that's right. And it is worth noting that there is certainly some inherent sexism in this as well, because Paul Ryan is actually less popular

Nancy Pelosi in a lot of polls. And no one ever talks about the political anchor that is Paul Ryan. And I think Democrats should be willing to use him as well. And I think, Lovett, you're right. The politics of this are tricky, and people are going to have to make their own decisions. I do think if we are in a world where we have the House and maybe even the Senate and Trump as president, we're really going to want Nancy Pelosi to lead the Democrats because she will hold them together and be able to maximize our leverage to force Trump's hands on things and negotiations on things around immigration reform or an ACA package or whatever it would be. She is the best person to do that

legislatively. The politics are obviously a little tricky. She passed health care. She passed a climate bill through the House. she will always be speaker to me. All right, switching topics, because we've had no lack of news this week. So we woke up on Tuesday morning before this election even happened, to find out that our very stable genius of a president has things running very smoothly in his finely tuned machine of a white house where we learned that he the secretary of state rex tillerson learned of his firing via tweet according to the new york times john kelly had told rex tillerson on friday not that he was being fired but to cancel one of his trips and to stay tuned for a tweet. So I guess... That is so weird. What kind of warning is that?

I think Rex Tillerson, I think, was all of us, where he just was constantly refreshing Twitter all weekend, hoping for something interesting. But when that tweet finally came, much to Rex's chagrin, it announced that Rex Tillerson was leaving, that CIA Director Mike Pompeo was going to take over as Secretary of State, and that longtime CIA officer and current Deputy Director Gina Haspel was going to become the CIA Director. Tommy, as a longtime fan of Rex Tillerson's work,

what do you think about this? Rex Tillerson was awful and he had to go. There are some people saying, well, Tillerson was a moderating voice in meetings. So the change to Pompeo might mean you have a more hawkish individual in that job. That may be true. But like Trump could nominate a predator drone to replace him. And it would still be an improvement because Trump didn't listen to Tillerson. He in fact, he enjoyed marginalizing him. That means that he didn't have a say in meetings. That means foreign leaders ignored Tillerson and went around him because they knew he couldn't get things done. And then on top of all that, Tillerson made his primary focus gutting the State Department. He ran experienced people out of the building. He demoralized an

agency that keeps us out of wars and advances U.S. interests. So I am nervous about what comes next with Pompeo. It makes me very scared for what's going to happen with the Iran deal. He is hawkish on North Korea. He's been far more partisan and willing to push a policy agenda than most CIA directors. But Tillerson sucked. He had to get out of there. The guy was a disaster. I'm glad he's gone. I'm glad his terrible team is gone. Good riddance. Love it. Do you feel the same way? I like the guy. You know, just to add to that, what was so confusing about Tillerson was there were the ways in which he was obviously bad on sort of an ideological axis, in the sense that

he was refusing to appoint people to top positions. He didn't seem to be interested in using the building towards any positive ends. The building was diminished in terms of its impact in the White House policy making operation. It was a ideological decrease in the role of diplomacy writ large. But on top of that, there was a kind of inexplicable incompetence and lack of even ideological goal to the way that he was running the department it all felt like it all felt unmoored from any sort of agenda whatsoever it seemed like somebody who took the job realized it was a mistake totally had fucked up their relationship with the president uh by calling him a moron uh which forgivable uh but that not only was the department being attacked in an ideological way,

it was rudderless. No one could make sense of any of the decisions Tillerson was even making. If you get elbowed out by Jared Kushner, you are not a savvy operator. And Ronan Farrow has a book coming out about the decline of the State Department. And having seen some of the reporting he does in the book about what Tillerson was doing inside of the department, I will only say it's worth checking out for now. That's all I will say about that. Also on pre-sale on Amazon. Yes.

Also by Ronan's book. The Tillerson thing has been so weird because he was the accidental secretary of state. He was basically less qualified for his job than Dave was in the movie with Kevin Kline, because he just went to a meeting with Trump about something. I assume oil, since he was the decades-long CEO of Exxon. And days later, he was Secretary of State. And he didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know why he was doing it. And he was defeated from the get-go. The question for around Pompeo will be how Democrats handle this. A lot of them voted for him to be – so Trump has signed himself up for two confirmation fights on offices that are directly related to Russian meddling in the past, our present and future response to Russia, and just general Russia-American policy. And I don't know that that was an advisable thing to do in the run-up to a midterm just

because he was bored of Rex Tillerson. But Democrats have an opportunity here to make hay. And do you think that this is a fight we should pick? Because Rand Paul announced he's going to oppose both Pompeo and Haspel, and we'll get to her in a sec. But with McCain out of the Senate, potentially for a while now, the Republicans are short of vote to get there. So should Democrats try to defeat these nominations, use them as a soapbox? What do you guys think? Yeah, I think we should pick every single fight from now until 2020. And I think that we, you know, Pompeo, I think it'd be probably hard to argue that he's not qualified to do the job given his record. But I do think you can press

him on a whole bunch of issues. Like why did it take until today to put additional sanctions on the Russians after they blatantly interfered in our elections? Why won't Trump admit that this occurred? What are we going to do? Why, if all these technocratic experts in the intelligence community, the State Department, DOD, think the Iran deal is working and keeping us more safe, why are we getting ready to scrap it? So I would push them on all these issues. And then Gina Haspel, the fact that she ran a black site,

that is not how we should be confronting the history of torture within the CIA. She may be a great CIA officer. She may be someone that can command the building. But that is a legacy that has done, you know, incalculable damage to our reputation around the world. And Democrats should show that we still give a shit about that issue. Yeah, I would say a good standard is we should be fighting harder against Donald Trump than Rand Paul is. And by the way, this isn't just about what Democrats do. We're so deep in it, we forget how crazy all of this is. Donald Trump has not stood up any kind of defense against the interference in our election that was so effective in 2016. Our

country is currently under threat, and Donald Trump and his administration don't care about it at all. That's something that Democrats should be fighting tooth and nail about, about fighting to make sure that we have somebody at state, somebody at CIA that will do what it takes to defend the country.

But on top of that, it's not just Democrats. Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, these are guys who all claim that they're doing what they think is best for the country. They're retiring. Retirement is supposedly supposed to loosen up their muscles, you know, getting them limber for fighting for the country over party. And we should hold votes until they promise to do what bipartisan groups of senators say we need to do to defend our democracy and uphold our values in our conduct of foreign policy. I think that's right. And the Trump White House is stonewalling Congress on a bunch of really important oversight issues. Some

are related to national security, like the security clearances, some are related to corruption. But protecting the country from additional intervention by the Russians is the most important thing here. And I agree, that's what we should push for. We can also use this as a point of leverage. And Republicans should do this as well, because they're also asking for explanations and answers to questions that Trump has refused to give them and to use to demand this. And, you know, Democrats did this to Obama. When we nominated John Brennan to be CIA director, our hand was forced by some Democratic senators like Ron Wyden and others to make public certain documents or answer certain questions. And so this is why we have two co-equal branches. If the administration is refusing to be engaged in any sort of – to allow congressional oversight, then they should

use this as a chance to do something. I have some hope the Democrats will do this right. I have very little to no hope Republicans will do anything other than rubber stamp these nominees. Dan, my favorite part of this story was the New York Times report on it included this section. Just the day before, a White House spokesman berated a reporter for suggesting there was any kind of split between Tillerson and the White House because of disparate views on the Russia poison gas attack in Britain. It's just another little fun anecdote about how absolutely incompetent these guys are, top to bottom, and willing they are to lie to press. End of comment. Well, this is a good point because the New new york times reported this like five months ago that tillerson was on his way out i think we even might have made a joke about how last week about

when we were touring about how tillerson was supposed to go months ago and nothing ever came of it so we should ignore some of these personnel stories but even like the new york times reported that trump sent i think several tweets claiming this was fake news and the New York Times was full of shit only to have it be right in the end, which sort of does go to the challenge of reporting on the Trump administration because everything is both true and not true at the same time. And it all depends on who you're talking to. Yeah, Schrodinger's secretary of state for a while. He was both secretary of state and non-secretary of state. And we didn't find out the answer until we opened up the box. So in the category of true or not true, there is now a furious amount of reporting about

additional moves because Trump now feels, based on a record of limited legislative accomplishments, multiple political defeats, and historical poll ratings, Trump feels like he's finally found his sea legs and is trusting his own gut instincts right now and lessening lists to the Washington experts like John Kelly. And so there may be new personnel moves coming. He announced noted TV pundit Larry Kudlow, who called anyone who worried about the housing bubble bubbleheads in 2007 as his chief economic advisor. And there are two rumors. in 2007 as his chief economic advisor. And there are two rumors. One is that McMaster is on his way out for John Bolton, and that Scott Pruitt, this one I think is a little more sketchy, but that Scott Pruitt will replace Jeff Sessions at DOJ. And because Scott Pruitt would not be

recused from the Russia investigation, that could be a context for getting rid of Mueller. And Pruitt could serve as acting AG without Senate confirmation. Is that right? Because he was already confirmed by the Senate? For a certain period of time, but enough time to fire Mueller. Right. And that is the other thing is Pompeo can serve as acting Secretary of State and Gina Haspel can serve as acting CIA director for, I think it's up to six months, but my knowledge of the vacancy act

has deteriorated in the year since I left the White House. Understandable. How do you feel about John Bolton as national security advisor, Tommy? I mean, that's like literally the worst case scenario. This is a guy who still thinks evading Iraq was a good idea. Who is it about his hawkage on North Korea as you get? I mean, a person who learned absolutely no lessons from the Iraq war. And Larry Kudlow. Larry Kudlow? Are you kidding me? Like, what, Jim Cramer not available? Like, was Gordon Gekko not around?

If you wanted a TV star, there are better choices. If you wanted economic advice, there are countless better choices. Yeah, just do Bobby Axelrod. Yeah. I mean, this feels like a pre-November 2016 joke that became a reality. But the truth is, like, Trump doesn't care about getting good or honest economic information or advice. He cares about cable news. And he seems to view Larry Kudlow's role as like going on CNBC and making the Wall Street crowd like him. And that's just not at all what it is. And Larry Kudlow, as you said, has been spectacularly wrong since the late 70s. He's a fan of trickle-down economics, supply-side economics. He was a person who pushed for the state of Kansas to implement this massive tax cut with the promise of later growth that was an absolute disaster for the

state. So we tried all these things that these guys are going to keep pushing, and they've never worked. But here we are once again. Yeah, I agree with all that. I think that the John Bolton piece is the single scariest possibility in the two years that it's been a possibility of Trump being president. I think there is nothing more frightening to me than John Bolton being the last voice Donald Trump hears on foreign policy. And I think we are not able to spin it and we're not able to truly accept just how dangerous it would be. So I don't know what's going on with McMaster's relationship with Trump.

I don't know what he thinks he's going to do if he's told to leave. But I do think that John Bolton being named to the National Security Council would be among the most dangerous things to happen to the United States since Trump became president. And there will be no greater threat, no greater issue, no greater challenge for us as Democrats to fight back against this. It will be incumbent on Senate Republicans to hold hearings, which they won't do. I don't know. We are in this world in which Donald Trump pays no price, in which there's no consequences and no accountability. So our tools, especially for a job like National Security

Council, are pretty limited because they serve at the pleasure of the president. It's not a Senate-confirmable job. But just wanted to pause and point out just how frightening it is. Yeah, we're one good shave away from having a fucking disaster as our national security advisor. Yeah, that mustache that John Bolton has may be the last line of defense because Donald Trump will not appoint a man with a mustache to a job. So, you know, there's no positive spin on it. I don't know what to say except that it is as frightening as it seems. Yeah, I would rather have Ramsey Bolton as our security advisor than John Bolton. There's no positive spin on it. I don't know what to say, except that it is as frightening as it seems. Yeah, I would rather have Ramsey Bolton as our security advisor than John Bolton. Michael Bolton?

Michael Bolton. Michael Bolton would be actually better than all of them. Have we considered playing saxophone at North Korea? Have we tried a tenor sax? All right. On that note, when we come back, John and Tommy will talk to Senator Elizabeth Warren. And I want to point out that I'm confusing Michael Bolton. And who's the guy that always played saxophone? Kenny G. I just want to point out that I'm confusing the two of them, but nothing to be done about that now. Elizabeth Warren next.

It's going to prevent you from getting a ton of tweets from the Bolton heads out there. Yeah. Being like, how am I supposed to live without you? Stuff like that. Senator Elizabeth Warren is a Democrat from Massachusetts, a member of the Senate Banking Committee and a friend of the pod, not necessarily in that order. Senator, thank you so much for doing the show today. Oh, glad to be here with you. So Senator Senator, on the 10-year anniversary of the collapse of Bear Stearns, the Senate passed what The Washington Post described as the biggest loosening of financial regulations since the economic crisis. The bill passed 67 to 31. It would reduce regulations on more than two dozen banks. Supporters say it helps community banks and credit unions and will spur economic growth. Opponents call it the Bank Lobbyist Act. Opponents like yourself, they could set the stage for another crisis.

We've talked about this bill before on the show and among ourselves, and honestly, none of us get why Democrats are supporting this. We don't get why you would move a systemically important financial institution from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. We don't get why you'd weaken rules to prevent lending discrimination. You're an expert. Can you explain why some Democrats are supporting this bill and why you oppose it? Look, this is about everything that's broken in Washington. So it's just like you said, can you believe here we are? It is 10 years to the day from the beginning of the 2008 financial crash. And now we've got some Democrats who joined Republicans to roll back the Dodd-Frank rules and the consumer protections that have kept

our economy safe for a decade. And can I just tweak that up a little bit? I can't describe how many ways this is a bad idea. As you identified, what it's going to do, it's going to take a bunch of banks that right now, if you're above $50 billion in assets, you're on a special watch list. That's about 40 banks. And it means they get more scrutiny. They have to undergo stress tests. Why? Because they could put the entire economy at risk. undergo stress tests. Why? Because they could put the entire economy at risk. And what this bill does is it says, you know, about 25 of those 40 banks, we're just going to move them off the list and treat them like they're tiny little community banks. What could possibly go wrong? And can we just talk about what actually went wrong last time around? Does anyone remember Countrywide?

You remember Countrywide? Yeah. Countrywide was that bank that was rolling out at its peak one in every five home mortgages in America, right? And they were like grenades with the pins pulled out. These were mortgages that were the worst of the worst of the worst. And ultimately, they blew up millions of families and blew up our entire economy. So just to give everybody a little perspective, Countrywide at its peak was $199 billion.

That means under the rules that President Obama put in place, Countrywide would stay on the watch list. Countrywide itself is actually gone now, but banks like Countrywide stay on the watch list. But what this bill does is it says, hey, the next Countrywide is going to be out there with very little oversight, very little scrutiny. And in fact, the banks that are moving off the watch list collectively in 2008 sucked down about $50 billion in taxpayer bailout money. So this is about the big banks. It's about some of the giant, giant banks like JPMorgan Chase,

who are going to be able to reduce their capital standards. This is about helping out the big guys. If this had been a bill solely about community banks, count me in. I've been part of it for the last three years. We've been talking about negotiations. What can we do to help out the community banks? But no, no, what this is about is this is about helping the big guys. And it's just the reminder, you know, I think about this all the time, that when President Obama fought so hard to get these rules in place, he had to stand up to a lot of pressure from the big financial institutions. They were spending more than a million dollars a day lobbying against financial reform. But he pushed back on the basic notion that government shouldn't just work for the richest and the most powerful.

Government should work for everyone. And that's what these regulations were all about. But right now, we've got an administration and they're getting way too much help in making government once again, work for the thinnest, richest slice at the top. And that's the part that just galls me about this. Senator, first of all, congrats on announcing your presidential candidacy. I think it was well received. We don't have to dwell on it. We'll move on. But it's gonna be quite a primary. Let's talk about the bill. You are so bad. Can I just say you're badated against the policies in this bill. Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, she gave an interview yesterday where she said, you're misleading people and exaggerating what the bill does. For example, she points out that banks with assets below $250 billion would still be subject to stress tests

if regulators said they pose a threat to the financial system. And on disclosures related to race from mortgage lenders, the exemption would only be for very small lenders making fewer than 500 loans a year, which would affect fewer than 4% of the mortgages that go into this data collection. So Democrats are saying that, you know, we can have a disagreement on policy, but that you're overstating how much deregulation this is. That yes, there are places to disagree on policy, but this really is aimed at community banks. And to say that this is a bank bailout or a lobbyist gift is unfair to your colleagues. Let me hit this one at two different levels. The first is, come on, you guys know me. I am a former

professor. I footnote everything I do. So when we're talking about the reduced capital standards for the giants, don't listen to what I have to say. Turn to the Congressional Budget Office that has said this bill will increase the likelihood of a taxpayer bailout. Look at the FDIC that talks about what it means when banks are going to be able to reduce their capital standards. Shoot, this is a bill. Can you believe this? The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg actually both editorialized about it because they said it puts more risk into the system. So, you know, I agree. The facts are the facts, and we should talk about the facts. But that's what I've been doing from the very beginning, and there are a lot of folks who don't want to hear that about what the impact of this bill would actually be. But let me push on another part of what you were asking me about, and that is, you know, why be so strong on this? And I just want to say, for me, this is personal. And I mean really personal. You know, I grew up in a family. We were kind of hanging on to our place in the middle class by our fingernails. And finally, my three brothers have all headed off to the military.

My mom and dad are beginning to get a little ahead. They buy a house in what they think is the best school district back in Oklahoma, where I'm living in Oklahoma City. And we're starting to pull it together when my daddy has a heart attack. And our family just turns upside down. Our little boat is capsized. He goes a long time, no money coming in. And we lose the family car. And I listen every night when my mother closes the door after she said goodnight.

And then she starts to cry because we're going to lose our house. And we came within inches. My mother eventually got a minimum wage job at Sears. And that's what saved our home and saved our family. But I look at mortgage foreclosure not as some abstract statistic, not as some, you know, giant economic variable. I look at it as what it does to 12-year-olds across America, what it does to families, what it does when, you know, the parents are fighting with each other over whose fault it is that they can't hold it together. in 2009 to try to pull the economy out of the ditch, it was literally the case that hundreds of thousands of families every month were going through foreclosure, were losing their homes.

And so all of the fight over trying to get some regulations in place to promote some safety, to just get some security in this system, was really against that background. Yeah, it's about the economy, but the economy ultimately is about live human beings. It's about families. It's about people. It's about their hopes and their dreams and the things they worked for. And ultimately, that's what Dodd-Frank is about. That's what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is about. You know, I think of the legacies of the Obama administration, and obviously for everybody, the first thing that jumps to mind is healthcare and the commitment to make sure that every American gets decent health care coverage.

But right there next to it is trying to make this economy just a little more of a level playing field, to make it so that these giant banks don't get to gamble with the futures of millions of 12-year-olds. And so when people in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, start saying, gee, how can we roll back a piece of it or have a corner of it here or help out a group there? Yeah, I do fight hard. I fight hard on that because I think that's what's right. Well, and Senator, the question of fighting, I think, is what is also frustrating Democrats, right? I mean, I'm no economist, but the politics of this vote are abysmal. I mean, apparently Democrats want to run for office saying our one bipartisan accomplishment is helping out the big banks

vote for us. That is baffling to me. It is also baffling to me that the Democrats who voted for this bill didn't hold out their votes until we extracted some sort of concessions, like a real head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example. Do you have a sense of why more of a fight wasn't put up by those who ultimately decided to support this bill? I'll just be blunt. You'd have to ask them. And I just can't do better than that. We're going to patch in Chuck Schumer. He's on the line here all the way. No, no, listen. Actually, I want to step in on that one because Chuck really did. Chuck told me from the beginning he was opposed to this bill and that he did not want to see this bill go forward.

He voted against this bill at every turn and I believe tried to stop it. You know, look, at the end of the day, I know this is tough. I want to take back the majority. I want to take back the majority in the House and in the Senate. We need to do it. But I think the best way we do that is when we're true to our values. I'd like to flag to Senator Schumer and his team that I was just kidding. And please don't email me. All right. Senator, I want to move on because the president has been watching CNBC and it's given him an idea. He is planning to appoint Larry Kudlow, talking head with the kind of classic 80s blue shirt, white collar, which says you're about to be screwed, to be the head of the National Economic Council. Other than Trump viewing being president as an opportunity to meet his friends from TV,

do you have any response to Larry Kudlow? What do you think going from Gary Cohn to Larry Kudlow will mean for the republic? You know, this is like, I keep thinking I'm going to wake up from this crazy dream, right? I keep thinking I'm going to wake up from this crazy dream, right? That's true. But here's how I see it. There is this fundamental question about what you think is important, why you think we have an economy, what is an economy all about. So listen right now to what folks like Kudlow and others talk about. They say stock market is breaking records.

Corporate profits are beyond anything we have ever seen before. Unemployment is lower than it has been in many, many years. And you know what? They're right on all three of those. And I'm glad to see all three of them. But that's not how the economy is lived by most Americans. You know, for the more than half of all Americans who don't have a single share of stock, a rising stock market leaves them behind. For all of those people working for those giant corporations that are making record profits and who are not seeing any of that put in their paychecks, those record profits are not doing a whole lot for them. And lower unemployment, yay, except for all those families that have to work two jobs and three jobs and still can't meet the mortgage on it.

So I think of this appointment the way I watch everything that's happened in the Trump administration. It's all about the giant headlines for those who've already made it big, instead of how we make this economy work for the rest of America. Yeah. Senator, during the part of the REM cycle of this fever dream of the Trump presidency, he gave a Fidel Castro-length closing argument speech in Pennsylvania. And I noticed that he attacked you, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, and Oprah. He didn't single out, let's say, Ed Markey, Brad Sherman, Chuck Schumer, and Bob Iger. Wait a minute.

Help me figure out what's different about the group. I'm trying to figure out why. I'm working on it. We're all taller than, no, no. I'm working. I'm working on what's the difference between those two groups. Yeah. Have at it.

What do we make of this? And what's the best way to fight a misogynistic bully who happens to be our president? Okay. So the first thing is you just stand up and fight back. But I also think on this one, it is really important that we keep talking about core issues. I get it. The president's going to do, that's his job. Did you see the movie Up? Yeah. I think it's in that movie, isn't it? Where you yell squirrel and all the dogs head the other way,

right? We love dog to dog here. Exactly right. And Donald Trump's job is to yell squirrel, and everybody looks off in a different direction. You know, he's doing that at a time when there's plenty going on in this country that we need to be focusing on because it illustrates exactly who Donald Trump is fighting for. And this banking bill is actually a perfect example. Every single Republican signed up and said,

put my name on that baby to help out JPMorgan Chase, to help out banks that have a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets. Put my name on that sucker. Put my name on a tax bill that gives away a trillion and a half dollars in just plain old tax giveaways to a handful of giant corporations and to billionaires. So I feel like a big part of what's happening here is Trump doesn't want us to look at any of that stuff, who this economy is really working for, who this administration is really working for. So his plan is, you know, let's do a little insult. Let's do a little fan dance over here and see if everybody will look in that direction. And dang, I'm tired of that game.

And I think a lot of America's tired of that game. Yeah, I think we're tired of that game too, but we do want to play it for one more minute. Sleepy eyed son of a gun. So bad. You are so bad. So Senator, the president has been calling you Pocahontas for a while. Okay. And I want to stipulate that it's racist, that it's bullshit, that it's a distraction

and that your explanation is totally reasonable. And if we lived in a reasonable world in a reasonable time, we'd all move on and talk about the bank bill. But Tommy, John, myself, Dan, we all went through the experience of watching Obama's birth certificate be made an issue for years. Obama's birth certificate be made an issue for years. And finally, before the 2012 election, they sent somebody over to Hawaii with a suitcase and they got the document, they flew it back and they went into the briefing room and they said, here it is. And we made fun of Trump for it. We said, this is the long-term birth certificate. This has been bullshit the whole time. We're

done talking about this. We're moving on. Now, I recognize that it's unfair that you have to deal with this Pocahontas allegation, but you seem to get asked about it over and over again. And I would like to live in a world where a year from now, you're not talking about it at all. So why not, even though it's bullshit, get some sort of a test, get some sort of a way to dispense with it once and for all, even if it is conceding in this one instance to Trump's bullying, because then it allows you to focus on the issues so that you don't have to deal with it once and for all, even if it is conceding in this one instance to Trump's bullying, because then it allows you to focus on the issues so that you don't have to deal with it anymore. I think of this as a story about my family and where I came from. As you know, I grew up out in Oklahoma and born and raised there. And my mom and my dad were both born and raised there.

And my daddy met my mother when they were teenagers. She was this quiet girl who played the piano, and he fell head over heels in love with her. He loved to tell that part of the story. to tell that part of the story. And his parents were bitterly opposed to the relationship because my mother was part Native American. So my parents eloped and together they survived the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, a lot of hard knocks through the years. They raised my three brothers, all of whom went off to join the military. They raised me. I was the baby in the family. And, you know, they fought. They had good times.

They had bad times. But for 63 years, they hung together. And they taught me about what it means to be family. My three brothers and I know who we are, and there is nothing that is going to change that. Certainly not Donald Trump. That's a good place to go. He is a historic racist.

I hate that the coda to the Obama birth certificate story is electing that piece of garbage president. But thank you for doing the show. Thank you for fighting against this awful bank bill if there's anything people listening can or should do do we have any chance left to block this or lift it up or raise awareness anything you'd recommend oh you bet so understand the thing has now passed the senate but it's a very different bill that has passed the House. And so at this moment, you know, Civics 101, it'll go to conference. And if it goes to conference, that means there could be changes.

And if there are changes, that means there will have to be another vote in the United States Senate and the House, obviously. But it means that all that we've talked about, all the awareness that we've raised becomes very important because some senators who've committed to vote that have already voted on the bill that has passed may not want to vote the same way if the bill changes going forward. So, hey, you don't get to hang up your spurs on this one yet. We're still in this fight. And I will make sure that everybody knows what happens as this thing goes through conference and how we can all raise our voices again if it comes back to the floor of the Senate. So, nope, not giving up yet. All right. Keep fighting. That's a good message. Thanks for joining us, Senator. Thank you, Senator. Appreciate it. Take care. Have a great day. All right. Keep fighting. That's a good message. Thanks for joining us, Senator. Thank you, Senator. Appreciate it.

Take care. Have a great day. Thank you to Senator Elizabeth Warren. Thank you to you guys, John and Tommy, for filling in. No thank you to John Favreau for not being here today.

And we'll talk to everyone next week. Bye, Dan. Bye, Dan. Thank you. you