Pod Save America - “The Era of Big Government is Back.”

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Senate Democrats pass Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the fight for the $15 minimum wage continues, and Joe Manchin opens the door to reforming the filibuster. Then Virginia State Delegate Danica Roem talks to Jon Lovett about the fights over trans rights happening in statehouses across the country.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include which podcast you would like.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, Joe Biden's American rescue plan is on its way to becoming law. We'll talk about all the economic and political implications as well as what else Democrats might be able to achieve now that Joe Manchin has indicated that he's potentially open to reforming the filibuster. I just, the intensity with which I now look, not just at the coverage of Joe Manchin, but about like the individual sentences, where the dependent clauses are.

You can't trust the headlines. Not these days. Yeah. Not with this media. A lot of parsing, yeah. Later in the show, Lovett will talk to Virginia State Delegate Danica Rome about the fights over trans rights happening in state houses across the country.

But first, Lovett, tell us about how the show went this weekend. Hari Kondabolu, Ezra Klein. I pretended to be the host of Jeopardy for a bit. I almost got canceled over a joke, but I made it out and I would say check it out. You were a great Jeopardy host. Thank you so much. I think I know the joke that you almost got canceled. I think it was fine. I gasped. I gasped. Also, it's International Women's Day, and we wanted to give a shout out to our Hysteria friends and co-hosts, Aaron and Alyssa.

This week, they'll be interviewing Teen Vogue labor writer, Kim Kelly, about Amazon unionization. And friend of the pod, nominee for USAID, Samantha Power is on Hysteria. So check it out. New episodes are out every Thursday. You can subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get to the news. Early Saturday morning, after more than 24 hours in session,

the Senate passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan by a single vote, thanks to the support of all 50 Democrats. The bill now goes back to the House, where Democrats are expected to approve the changes made by the Senate. President Biden will sign the bill shortly afterwards. He had this to say at the White House after it passed the Senate. When I was elected, I said we're going to get the government out of the business of battling on Twitter and back in the business of delivering for the American people, of making a difference in their lives, giving everyone a chance, a fighting chance,

of showing the American people that their government can work for them. And passing the American Rescue Plan will do that. And, you know, it may sound strange, but a lot of senators and congressmen I want to thank, but I really want to thank the American people for making all this possible. The most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country. That's not one of your neolib shill hosts talking. That was a statement from budget chairman Bernie Sanders. Guys, why does Bernie think that?

And what are some of the highlights for each of you that haven't been talked about as much? Tommy, let's start with you. The era of big government is back, baby. I mean, this is, can I say something really big and totally unfounded, which is that this is a fundamental rejection of Reaganism, right, and the treatment of government as the enemy. It's a bit of a rejection of Clintonism, but we won't focus on that.

But, you know, it took an approach. Why not? Why not? Let's do it. I stage whispered. I don't like attacking other podcast hosts. This is a truly progressive bill. It targets money towards the poorest people. I mean, like the most exciting part of this bill might be the fact that the White House believes it will cut child poverty by 45 percent as much as 50 percent among black families.

I mean, many advanced countries, I think 17 is the statistic you always read, subsidize having a child. Canada provides up to $4,800 per child per year. The United States is finally getting in the game on this front because there's tons of evidence that suggests that falling into poverty, even for a short period of time as a child, causes permanent damage

in terms of your educational attainment, your wages, your health. So this could be an enormous, enormous piece of an even bigger bill. And I'll pause there because I'm sure you'll love it like some of the same parts I do. Yeah, I mean, I think I will say I think stepping back, there was a big fight over the minimum wage. It is actually extraordinary that the Democratic caucus was largely united around the amount, the dollar amount of $1.9 trillion, and that really didn't move very much. We'll talk about some of the other fights that played out inside of the bill, but that tells you something really positive about just how much the Democratic

caucus has shifted across the you know, across the board, Biden, Schumer, Bernie, everybody recognizes the importance of like going big and giving people like change that they can see that they can deposit in a bank that's like bold and simple. And that and they were worried more about doing too little rather than doing too much. I agree on the on what Tommy mentioned. I do think that this, it is amazing how much politics has shifted even in the past year. The fact that the child's benefit extends to people who in the past wouldn't have been able to get it because it was phased out for people as they made less money and didn't qualify for it. It becomes much more like a universal benefit, a universal basic income almost for parents with

kids. And I think that's going to be hard to walk back. So there's a lot of things like that that I think are the reason Bernie is trying to make people understand that this is more than just that this is COVID relief that also, I think, lays the groundwork for a much more progressive government. Yeah, Democrats have been traditionally in love with like tax credits and sort of complicated benefits that the child allowance is literally going to be like a monthly check of up to $300 per child for a lot of low income families, even low income families who are out of work. You know, Eric Levitz over at New York Magazine said that this bill would put more than $7,600 into the bank account of the typical family of four

when you combine the direct payments with the child allowance and some of the other benefits, $27 billion in rental assistance for those facing eviction. Dramatically lowers health insurance premiums through the Affordable Care Act. Just almost got no attention in the bill. So middle to upper income people can get subsidies for the first time on the ACA

and lower income people have even bigger subsidies than they had before. $39 billion for child care providers. And John, just one specific on that health care point. Anyone who's ever lost their job and tried to file for COBRA knows how much it fucking sucks, right? Cobra lets you buy into plans that you know, but you no longer have your employer footing part of the bill. So it's just prohibitively expensive. This bill covers 100% of Cobra premiums for two years. That's just an enormous, that's a sea change for someone that it desperately needs healthcare, but lost their job

because of this bill. And they say it's going to reduce the number of uninsured by like 1.3 million by next year. So sorry, I just wanted to add that because there's so many great pieces of this of this bill. It's it's it's enormously beneficial to people around health care. Thirty nine billion for child care providers. It's going to make all student loan forgiveness tax free, which is a huge deal. It will save the pensions of more than one million unionized workers who are about to lose their retirement. It will shore up those pensions for the next 30 years. I love Republicans trying to push that around as an attack. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, no. You're going to save people's retirements who have been working. That's a tough one. It represents the largest public investment in native communities ever by the government. I mean, this is, you know, look, I think there are bills and we're going to talk about, you know, what we didn't get in the bill. But there are bills where you compromise a lot and say, you know, well, in the end, the good still outweighs the bad. So half a loaf is better than nothing. This is not that kind of bill, in my opinion. I think this is I think this time we got most of a loaf that's pretty fucking big. The loaf is huge. I think you have to say yes. I think you have to say, OK, it seems like there

were we can there were more. But you can say like there were sort of these like three negotiations. One was over the direct payments. One was over the extension of unemployment and one was over the minimum wage. The minimum wage fight was, I think, a defeat. It was a defeat for progressives. It is fully not on the bill. We had hoped that it would be in there. That pushes that fight completely off. But as much as I think that the logic around reducing who is just reducing by 17 million who is eligible for the direct payments or changing the formula on UI, which actually kind of, we can talk about what the actual implications of that are. Like, let's remember, Republicans were the,

remember how there was a moment where Susan Collins and nine other Republicans were going to meet with Joe Biden at the White House. They had proposed 600 billion. Biden was at 1.9 billion. There was a genuine debate as to whether or not where we were gonna land was someplace in the middle

so that he could get Republican votes. Love it. A anonymous Biden advisor who clearly knows their boss really well decided to be a source for Politico not long ago and said, oh, well, I can't believe these Republicans went to the White House and the White House sort of pooh-poohed the meeting and said it wasn't really productive and that must be Ron Klain's fault. The Joe Biden I know would never do that. And clearly Joe Manchin is going to make the number come down from 1.9 to at least 1.3. Joe Manchin didn't make the final top line number come down at all. Right. That is an enormous victory. And also to anyone who wonders, OK, what was it worth to win those Georgia Senate races? The conservative estimate is

about $1.3 trillion, right? Like that's basically the delta between the bipartisan Republican Senate proposal when they had no leverage, right? They probably could have chopped it down even more if they had a ton of leverage and what was actually passed. So $1.3 trillion is what you all who fought for these Georgia Senate seats got for the American people. Good job. And where it would be aimed, by the way, just also where it would be aimed, right? Because CARES Act had $500 billion for corporations. Right, right. Exactly. And just to put our finer point on the election, you know, out of nearly 160 million votes that were cast in November, David Perdue, the Republican senator from Georgia, was just 14,000 votes away from avoiding a runoff against John Ossoff, which he then lost, which then gave us the Senate.

14,000 votes. That is how close we came to $1.9 trillion being, like Tommy said, either $600 billion or maybe nothing. Right. $600 is the generous for you. We could have had nothing if Mitch McConnell. That's the generous. That's the highest it would have been. I got to tell you, putting those Dominion machines there was like one of the most forward thinking.

Think about how much that was such a good decision. Love it. How do you think Biden's rescue plan compares both substantively and politically with the other two most recent rescue plans, Trump's CARES Act back in March of a year ago and Obama's Recovery Act in 2009? Let's do the Recovery Act first. Divide it into three parts. I was about to divide. So we would, so just so you know, like we have a joke we now basically, which is like the Recovery Act is divided into three parts because we would say that every time Barack Obama gave a speech about the Recovery Act. So the Recovery Act was $787 billion. This is 1.9. So this is two and a half times the size.

But that was also divided into, as Tommy helpfully pointed out, into three parts, a third of which were tax benefits, a third of which were relief for people who had lost their jobs or were in otherwise economic trouble. And then another third was long-term investments in infrastructure. So there's two things. One, there's just more money in this bill. It's a much bigger bill. But also that bill was designed, as John said, to kind of it, we have this $1.9 trillion stimulus gives people an additional $300 a week. This mixed the way in which unemployed and others got direct help, but it was more like $25 a week in direct unemployment insurance, at least in one part of the bill. And even still, this was also a third of the money was for a long term infrastructure

project. So it just gives you a sense that like this is much more money that will people be able to see and know that they're getting and know the origin of it, because I do think that that is one of the lessons from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And by the way, we had to pass the Recovery Act through regular order, which means we needed 60 votes for it. People forget that. And so and why did we do that? Because we couldn't find even 51 Democratic senators were willing to go through reconciliation back then because everyone was, you know, so enamored with the Senate rules. Like so for all the frustrations we have now with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, which are all legitimate, we have now with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, which are all legitimate, like we had a bunch of conservative to moderate Democratic senators back in 2009, who just didn't want to go through the

reconciliation route. And we had to find and that's why the bill was ended up being smaller, you know. And then in terms of the CARES Act, I do think that, you know, even though Trump's CARES Act was like $2.2 trillion, so slightly more money than this, it did deliver much more of the benefits to businesses than it did to individuals, more to upper income people than it did to lower and middle class income people. So this was a much more progressive piece of legislation than the CARES Act. I mean, it's also good to remember that in 2009, I think Democrats had thought that the Recovery Act would be the first but not the last stimulus bill. And then we ran into Mitch McConnell, who was happy to hurt the country if it hurt Obama politically

and benefited him, right? And to their great credit, Biden and Schumer and Pelosi, they did not make that mistake this time. And, you know, to your point about the CARES Act, like the CARES Act did a lot of good, but right, $500 billion of that bill was in the form of loans and other money to big corporations. And that had to happen. You couldn't have airlines going bankrupt, but it's a lot less targeted. Similarly, the PPP program that went to small businesses created winners and losers in ways that was not great. And so this is direct money to people. It's direct money to states, to schools.

You know, I do think the story is not written about how effective it is, right? But in the way the money is used will be uneven. So some states will take the check they get from the federal government and they'll invest it in stuff we think is important. Some red state governors will probably just give rich people a big tax cut. That's just kind of is how it is. But this is a hell of a hell of a good start if you want to get the economy running. I will say politically, too, the fact that every Republican and most Democrats voted for the CARES Act and its two point two trillion dollars in spending opened the door, I think, for more. The fact that we had a Republican president who was not just solely focused on deficits, though I can't remember one who really was once they got to office because Bush wasn't either. But the fact that the Trump administration, probably because he wasn't paying any fucking attention to legislating, actually was and because he thought that by giving people money, he could win reelection. Right. Like that's image for the brand maintenance they decided to do. I do like it's a big deal. Like we're doing like government here. You know, politics is going to ultimately lead to government. We're doing the government part right now while you're doing this Seuss part. I saw I saw Sawyer Hackett, who worked for Julian Castro during the primary, tweeted

just now once some Democrat prominent Democrat should go out and say that Fred Flintstone is racist and then we quickly eliminate the filibuster and then see what Fox News covers for the week. You joke. Obviously, like, that's a joke, but is it?

Yeah. Is it a joke? It might work. It might work. So as we mentioned, Biden and Democratic leaders didn't get everything they wanted in the bill.

We talked on Thursday about how Senate moderates demanded to lower the upper income threshold for the $1,400 direct payments from $100,000 down to $80,000. Joe Manchin made a last minute demand to reduce the expanded weekly unemployment benefits from an extra $400 a week to $300 a week, though the first $10,200 worth of benefits will now be tax deductible. And a vote that Bernie Sanders forced on the $15 minimum wage failed when eight Senate Democrats voted no, including Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema,

who drew quite a bit of attention when she marked her vote by flashing a thumbs down on the Senate floor. Tommy, let's start with the unemployment change, which we apparently almost lost Joe Manchin in the entire bill over. What do you think that was all about? I don't know. I mean, mentioned in the entire bill over. What do you think that was all about? I don't know. I mean, like, it's hard to know if he really. So the generous explanation is that he really did want to try to target as much of this bill as he could to people under a certain income threshold. Right. But like there also just seems like there's a part of his personality and his governing philosophy where he just draws these lines in the sand and then has to be dragged kicking and screaming back over them. I mean, the final changes he made in

terms of unemployment insurance, right, the $400 a week went to $300 a week. That's significant. But this that last minute wrangling, like basically what happened was to get him to yes, the benefit is going to expire on September 6th instead of September 31st. And the tax forgiveness part of this will be capped at people who make 150 grand in income, which all said and done wasn't that significant of a change when you look at the scope of the bill. Yeah, it also, Lovett, to me, seemed like, you know, listening to Joe Manchin talk about sort of these last minute wrangling, listening to the other senators who like really tried hard to convince him. I mean, it really did come close to there was apparently an amendment

from Rob Portman that was just going to take the money down from 400 to 300 without making any of it tax deductible and have a shorter time frame. And Manchin was like ready to go with that. And if Manchin did vote for that Portman amendment, it could have sunk the bill in the house. Progressives in the house could have said no. And just by like sitting down, twisting arms, talking, negotiating, compromising, like they got Manchin back, which tells me that like, A, some of the reasons Joe Manchin

is against bills or for bills or against provisions or for provisions, like make little sense. And B, like he is gettable. Like if you talk to him and sit down with him, it's you know, you can actually bring him back. And that's what a lot of the Democratic senators did. to be hard to tell when Joe Manchin has a legitimate, moderate policy view based on talking to Democrats and Republicans and finding a, I should say moderate, finding the center of the Senate, which is quite conservative, moments when he just actually kind of also believes in a bipartisan process, that he has a kind of aesthetic or kind of faith in

bipartisan behavior and wants to model it. Or three, he knows that he's going to ultimately vote for a lot of massive, very progressive Democratic priorities, as he's done in this case. And he wants to do some performative centrism, some performative moderation. I don't think he hates it when Lindsey Graham and John Thune are on the floor of the Senate joking about like, oh, no, they're going to they're going to get my friend Joe Manchin. Somebody protect Joe Manchin from these Democrats. I don't think he hates that at all. Like in this case, you end up with something where I think for some people it comes out in the wash, but not for people who make over a certain amount who won't get the tax benefit.

It seems like he might in part have been genuinely persuaded by people who said Republicans who told him in person this is too much of a benefit. It's going to dissuade people from work. We can disagree with him on that. But I think there's always with him going to be a mix of those three incentives. Tommy, what do you think we do about the minimum wage now? It wasn't just Sinema, but eight Democratic senators, Manchin, Tester, Angus King of Maine, Gene Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tom Carper and Chris Coons of Delaware. They all say they want a minimum wage higher than the current miserable minimum wage of $7.25 an hour that hasn't been raised in over a decade, but didn't make it through this bill. What do we do now?

Yeah, I mean, look, it was very, very disappointing. It is not clear to me if they voted against it because they think $15 is too high, or if it was because the parliamentarian in this instance determined that it couldn't be part of the bill. But it is frustrating. I mean, there's sort of a benchmark piece of legislation out there called the Raise the Wage Act. I think it's Bernie's bill. It is 37 Democrats who co-sponsor it, which is nowhere near enough. So, I mean, I think we're going to either have to make the case, twist some arms, try to get 50 people and find a way to do it in another reconciliation bill, or Republicans and Democrats are going to have to find a compromise that probably is closer to an $11 minimum wage increase.

that probably is closer to an $11 minimum wage increase. But if they can index that to inflation, that could be an important development in an area that's just been stuck for a decade and it really needs to be increased. Well, but what'd you think about that thumbs down from Kyrsten Sinema? I don't care. I find her logic frustrating.

I find the policy decision frustrating. I don't give a shit how she votes. Sometimes they vote with their thumbs down. I don't care. I don't care at all. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that it was a lot. I don't like I just think it's like, where do we want to where do we want to channel our energy? Right. Like, I think where we want to channel our energy now is what Tommy was just saying, which is like, OK, if you have mentioned on me, the press said every single senator, even Republican senators, wants a higher minimum wage. Right. So if you can get a compromise, even with Republicans, to get 11 or something around there that's indexed to inflation, maybe you get 60 votes for that. Or maybe as as Dan has suggested, you fire the parliamentarian quietly so that next time you do a big package like this, you get a more favorable ruling and then you see what what Democrats want for higher wage. Maybe you get 11, maybe you get 12 from them. The other thing that we can do is the Fairness Project that has won minimum wage ballot measures in nine states, red, purple, blue. They want to do more in 2022. Let's get it on the ballot in in some states. We can win in very red states there. And then, like, as we look ahead to 2022, we have a bunch of Democratic candidates we're going to nominate for the Senate. Let's make

sure they specifically support a $15 minimum wage. And one other piece of this, too, is like, we should focus on the people who voted no and try to understand why they voted no. And like, for example, Shaheen, she said basically she is worried about the tipped minimum wage given the vulnerability of the restaurant industry. Let's make an argument about that. Let's make an argument about why it's really important to about the tipped minimum wage, given the vulnerability of the restaurant industry. Let's make an argument about that. Let's make an argument about why it's really important to raise the tipped minimum wage. Sinema had a problem with the process and whether or not to do it through reconciliation. Maybe she's open now to doing a $15 minimum wage otherwise.

So like each of these people who voted no offered a different motivation. Let's understand those motivations and see which of them are gettable to get that number higher and higher and closer to 50, because the closer we are to 50, I think that the better position will be in to negotiate if it ultimately comes down to negotiation over coming down from 15 to 13 to another number, finding other kinds of compromise. For example, when it looked like the $15 minimum wage was going to come out, there was a brief moment where there was an option for figuring out a way to just do a $15 minimum wage for big corporations. That fell away because it seemed complicated and there were questions about how to administer it. But like, that is a policy idea that's been floating around for a long time. And

raising the minimum wage for big corporations would create pressure on the wage across the country. So like, there are different paths we should pursue. But like, I would say like, focusing on the actual motivation for those people and like criticize them, put pressure on them, but like understand their reasons. We're stuck with them. They're going to they're going to have jobs. There's nothing we can do. And so we need their votes. We need every single vote in a Senate that's tied right until 2022. And maybe we get some more senators if we're very, very lucky and work very hard. So you're totally right, Lovett, that like understanding what has caused these people to oppose it is much better than like I see a lot of people tweeting old statements from all these senators who voted no that said they want to raise the minimum wage as if it's like, gotcha, hypocrite. You know, it's like, well, all of them want to raise the minimum wage. Either they don't think 15 is the right amount, which I disagree with. I want 15. We all want 15. Or they didn't like the process. Right. So like understand why they didn't like it. Get everyone in a room and let's like figure out a way to do this. It just seems like the best bet. Right. Like Tester Mansion, like they are they have they have a lower cost of living in their states. So there's like a challenge there and like low cost of living versus high cost of living states. Obviously, one thing that'll help is Dan Pfeiffer's

primary challenge to Tom Carper is going to create some pressure on him to move on. Dan for Delaware. Yeah. And Delaware for Dan, frankly. let's talk about the republicans who gave a grand total of zero votes for a piece of legislation supported by 70 percent of americans and about half of all republican voters at the beginning of this process a lot of political reporters were obsessed with biden getting republican votes for this partly because republicans spun it that way partly because biden said during the campaign that he could get republicans to work with him um want to talk about bipartisanship in a second, but what happened to the working class populist party of Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, guys? Where's that? We didn't get a vote from our populist heroes on the Republican Party?

What happened, Tom? They are full of shit. I mean, Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney, I mean, back to the minimum wage, they have a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour, but it takes longer. It's by 2025. But it also ties it to an immigration reform measure to screen out undocumented workers. So their bill is not designed to just help the working poor. It's designed to be a wedge issue and probably a popular one. But in a sign of how full of shit Tom Cotton is, Arkansas, his home state, already has a minimum wage above $10 an hour. So this guy's proposing something that doesn't even help his own constituents. So I think that tells you all you need to know about their sincerity in this area. All you need to know about their sincerity in this area. Lovett, what is the unified Republican opposition to this bill say to you about the future of bipartisanship in the in the Biden era? Oh, I'd say prospects are not good, especially because, look, we talked about this.

I think the fact that like I think it's actually a bet. Obviously, I think Republicans were never going to support en masse this bill. They're just not going to do that. It tells you something about the asymmetric polarization in our country that Democrats got behind the CARES Act and Republicans party and get behind this kind of legislation. Tells you how much more afraid Republicans are of primaries in the general election and how difficult it will be to pry Republicans away from their leaders and from the base to vote with Democrats, even on very, very popular bills like this. What do you think, Tommy? I mean, like my view is, you know, Biden, obviously part of his campaign was him saying, you know, I could probably, I can deal with Mitch McConnell. The fever will break. Some of what we heard from Obama back in the day, too. Part of it was,

I think I can bring the country together around big policy goals. It feels like he achieved the latter here, even if he did not achieve the former. Yeah, look, people like the bill. The more you tell them about the bill, they like it more, right? I mean, you could make an argument about Washington polarization that the partisanship is actually worse than it was under Obama because the Recovery Act got Republican votes. Now, they're vastly different bills, so that's maybe apples to oranges. But, you know, the thing that I think is hard to understand and confusing about all of this in terms of how it shakes out is that Trump and the Republican Congress are in very different places when it comes to these issues,

right? I mean, Trump blames McConnell for the Georgia Senate loss because Democrats ran on giving $2,000 checks and Mitch would only offer $600 checks. So the future of the Republican Party is very much in doubt with this major Trump slash McConnell split. And I'm not exactly sure what what path they will chart, but it does seem like the Republican members of Congress are wildly out of step with the country and even their own voters. That's the most important point, I think, for Biden and the Democrats to keep making. Right. This whole thing has been the test for Biden to bite by a pyroson ship. It's not a test. Biden has done great here.

Biden decided to put forth a bill that most Americans, including Republicans, support. He asked Republicans for their input. He met with them. They decided that they didn't really want to play ball. Everyone in the country or 70 percent of the country still supported the bill. It's a bill that will deliver benefits to people in blue states and red states. He had a bunch of mayors and governors who are Republicans supporting it too. If a bunch of Republicans in DC want to be, you know, intransigent and just continue to oppose every single thing he does,

that's their problem. They're the ones out of step with the voters. I'd also say too that like, obviously there's a lot of different ways you can describe unity. It's an entirely nebulous concept. But one thing that was striking is like after this, after this passed, right, no Republican votes. There was a there was a Times piece that was like, you know, Joe Biden's efforts to produce unity couldn't overcome the acrimony of Washington and the bitter fight over the stimulus bill. I don't think it was that bitter. Like, it wasn't that bitter. It was it was kind of, you know, like, I, it is abnormal to have a Republican Party not interested in saving the country in the midst of a pandemic. But the actual process by which are produced, yeah, you got your usual bullshit from your Tom

Cotton saying, Oh, it's just a check for prisoners, even though they did the exact same thing with the kid, whatever. There's a lot of the usual shit. But like, this wasn't a particularly bitter fight. I actually think it was a much less bitter fight than the fight over Obamacare in a lot of respects in terms of how it actually played out. So I don't know. I think what Biden said, right, he's focused on actual policy, not Twitter, I think is having some knock on effects. That was, I mean, in the inaugural, he said every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war. That's the standard he set.

And that's what happened with this bill. There was a bunch of disagreements, but like everyone sort of moved on. We passed a huge progressive piece of legislation. Great. Dan had some great ideas in this week's message box, this weekend's message box about how to sell the American Rescue Plan.

Tommy, how do you think it, how important do you think it is to take a victory lap on this? And and do you have any any other good ideas on how to sell this thing? I think it's important to sell any accomplishment. And this one in particular, because as we talked about earlier in the polling, the more people hear about this bill, the more they will like it. Now, I do think this is a very different sales job than what Obama attempted to do in 2009, right? Because the way Biden is going to sell this bill will be in part to just continue to manage the vaccine rollout well. We haven't even talked about the fact that

this bill provides a ton of money from COVID testing and for vaccinations. People want the vaccine, or if they don't want the vaccine, they want others around them to be vaccinated so that the cases drop down and they get their lives back, right? People who get checks will probably be happy to get a $1,400 check because they need it. I do worry a bit about the people who got a check the first time during the Trump administration and aren't getting a check this time because the income threshold was changed. But, you know, hopefully Biden can hang that change around the Republicans' neck and, you know, make them own it. But, you know, look, I'm glad that Biden is saying, I want to be out there.

I want to talk about this bill. I want to sell it hard. I think that there is definitely room to criticize the ways the Obama White House did or did not sell the stimulus in 2009. But it's also just an entirely different context. Like unemployment was way higher. The economy wasn't recovering fast. Hopefully, the Biden team will be in a place going into the midterms where the COVID outbreak has just been managed completely in the country. And the economy is just is cooking again because this was a very different recession. It wasn't a big structural challenge with the

banks. It was, you know, everybody having to sit in their house because they didn't want to get sick. Yeah, I mean, it certainly wasn't for lack of trying that we didn't really sell the Recovery Act in 2009. Love it. How many times did we write the Recovery Act in 2009. Love it. How many times did we write the Recovery Act is divided into three parts? He did a lot of events after the bill was passed. He traveled all over the country, did a ton of events.

I think part of the problem is, you know, the substance of the bill. Like you said, Tommy, there's like, and Love it, you pointed this out too, that there's like tax changes that people can't really see. I saw, you know, Post had a piece this weekend that said Ed Rendell, I can't believe I'm going to bring Ed Rend had a piece this weekend that said ed randell i can't

believe i'm gonna bring ed randell up but uh he wanted obama to send a letter to every american saying what benefits they were gonna get and we said no i think ed randell was right totally donald donald trump wanted to fucking sign the checks sign the stimulus checks like i at the time i wasn't one of the people criticizing that. Yeah. Sign the fucking checks, Joe Biden. I just didn't want him to sign them. I didn't want Trump to sign them. I didn't want his name on those fucking checks. Right. It's valuable to do that. Yes. I mean, look, there was no vaccine for the predatory lending and mortgage crisis that was unfolding. And so there was no clear end in sight. And so we were very careful.

President Obama was very careful. We were very careful as speechwriters to make sure that even as we talked about all the things the Recovery Act did, we were very nervous about sounding too Pollyanna-ish about the state of the economy because of how hard things were and how long they were going to be hard. So I do think that part of it is just it's a different sort of crisis. Yeah. Jen said at the briefing this morning that a vast majority of Americans will be getting some relief by the end of this month, too. That's a huge difference in both the Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act, which like the benefits for that didn't kick in until two years. Yeah. Right. And so the fact that a bunch of Americans are going to you know, they'll know that this bill passed and then a month later are going to get relief. I mean, Biden's got an address, a primetime address that's Thursday now scheduled to talk about COVID. He's, we think has the address to Congress, his joint session to Congress, which

is like a State of the Union in the first year. He'll hopefully have that to sell it. I saw a story that they're going to be working with like social media influencers to sort of get the word out to different communities that they're doing this. So I think it's going to be a full court press. And, you know, and what Pfeiffer pointed out in his in the message box, too, is like it's up to all of us to it. Like everyone who worked so hard to organize in this election to like get friends to vote, that work continues in selling what Joe Biden actually did for people, because if people don't know that the government did anything for them, like you can't blame them for not voting again. Right. You got to you got to be explicit. Just to paraphrase Mike Tyson for a second, like everyone's got a rollout plan until you get punched in the face. I mean, some shit is

going to happen that is going to entirely change the focus of the national conversation. Maybe it'll be another Dr. Seuss related crisis or maybe it'll be something far more serious. We don't know. I hope that they're able to really focus on this bill and sell it to the American people. But like, you don't always have the choice. Fox News certainly isn't going to help you. They don't give a shit what you say. Well, Fox News are not going to like, are we going to are we going to spend every episode of Pod Save America being like now for our two minute segment on the American rescue plan? It's just impossible. It's impossible to do that. Like some of of this is going to be you know um there's some outside organizations that are gonna do some paid advertising i think that's that has to be outside um yeah i think that's that's part of it

too i think we should just need to get we gotta have to get um megan markle to say that prince philip fucking hated it that would be a good idea see now you're thinking outside the box i also do think too like one of it one of the challenges too is like i think That would be helpful. Good idea. See, now you're thinking outside the box. Get over in there. Now you're thinking outside the box. I also do think, too, like, one of the challenges, too, is, like, I think Biden also should talk about keeping up the fight for the minimum wage. Because I do think that, like, people were disappointed. And the fight over the minimum wage, I think, could, for a lot of people, until they, if they don't know more about what's in this, like, it could over, like, that defeat could overshadow the enormity of what they achieved. could over like that defeat could overshadow the the the enormity of what they achieved.

And so I think like people like Elizabeth Warren, I thought struck the perfect note when she was describing this, like how big of a victory this is. But on a couple on these key issues, like the fight continues. And I think Biden should say that, too. And I'm sure he will. And in some in even in like very online communities, people were wallowing in the defeats and then slowly figuring out what was in the bill. And you'd see Twitter from like policy reporters being like, wow, the more I dig into this, the more impactful and big it is.

It's like, yeah, no shit. Like, let's take a win. Policy reporters and activists who've been working on these issues for years, like the people, Rosa DeLauro and a lot of the organizers and activists who've been fighting for a child allowance and Cory Booker and Michael Bennett and Sherrod Brown, they've been pushing this for years and they could not get people to really pay attention to trying to fight child poverty with a child allowance. And like you talk to any of those people who've been fighting for this for a long time, they're pretty fucking excited. Yeah, they're thrilled.

Let's talk about what's next for Biden and the Democrats in terms of their legislative agenda. They have one more 51 vote reconciliation process they can use to spend money on infrastructure, climate and other economic budgetary priorities like we saw in the American Rescue Plan. As long as the filibuster remains in place, everything else has to be passed through the regular 60-vote process, probably a path to citizenship, protections for DREAMers, police reform, the Equality Act, and H.R. 1, which is the Voting Rights and Democracy Reform legislation known as the For the People Act. Prime Minister Manchin did a round of interviews this weekend where he made some newsworthy comments on both reconciliation and the filibuster.

Here's what he told Mike Allen of Axios. Reconciliation is not a team sport and it's not a healthy situation and it's something we should not repeat. After you swallow the COVID relief plan, President Biden is going to have a second package, you're laughing, but a second package, maybe even bigger, probably, focused on infrastructure and energy, climate.

That's all good. But I'm not going to do it through reconciliation. If my Democrats have bought on, my fellow Democrats have bought on that you have no Republican friends that will work in a reasonable manner, I don't subscribe to that. Would you support any kind of filibuster reform? The only thing I have even considered or thought of is basically some through the history, how it used to be. They're making them talk. There should be pain to a filibuster. There should be pain.

And what is the pain? Maybe the talking, basically. You know, you have to- You gotta read the phone book or whatever. That's it, do whatever, but make sure you have a little bit of pain. Just don't say, well, no, I'm not going to vote. I'm not going to vote for that. What other pain? Well, you have the pain basically as the filibuster, talking filibuster,

they've talked before. Some of the rules could be changed a little bit, but not to the point where just a simple majority rolls. Love it. He wants to make the filibuster more painful. What does that look like in practice and why is that potentially big news? Well, so one thing to know that I think a lot of people didn't fully understand just how codified and routinized the filibuster is right now, which is nobody has to show up. Nobody has to stand up and talk.

One staffer in a Senate office just has to respond to an email saying that they are not going to go along with the unanimous consent. Right. So it's just like an email response right now that causes this explosion in the number of filibusters. We used to talk about them as they're sort of like shadow filibusters because no one ever actually shows up and does the filibuster. It's predicated on the assumption that there will be a filibuster.

And what Manchin is saying here is let's actually force them to have the filibuster. Let's have them show up. Norm Ornstein has written in The Atlantic a number of different ways that this can play out. Some of it is just saying you have to show up and talk. Some of it is a changing from you need 60 people to say yes, as opposed to you need 40 people to say no. So if they want to have an ongoing filibuster, 40 people have to literally be in the body.

But all this is about getting rid of the assumption that every single piece of legislation requires 60 votes. So basically, Manchin is saying he is open to those kinds of reforms. And it's interesting, right, because people have been shouting questions at Joe Manchin about the filibuster for months now. He seems to be quite frustrated with it. And he's saying, will you abolish the filibuster? Will you abolish the filibuster?

And he's always like, no, never. How dare you? Stop asking. I won't even consider it. But as we've said many times, follow along with Pod Save America, that that left the room open for some kind of reforms that maybe leave some version of the filibuster in place, but gets what he wants, which is bipartisan debate, bipartisan involvement, minority involvement in the decisions of the legislature without giving Mitch McConnell a veto on every single bill in perpetuity.

Yeah, I think, Tommy, when I first heard about this, I was like, well, couldn't you see a grandstander like asshole like Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley being like, well, couldn't you see a grandstander like asshole like Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley being like, yeah, I'll sit and talk on the floor for a couple of days. But if they have to talk forever, right, or if they or if they need 40 people, 40 Republican senators, basically, to maintain a filibuster and to be on the floor constantly, that's pretty. How long can you keep that up? Like maybe that is. And then, you know, that sounds pretty good to me. Yeah. I have more questions than answers about how this process would work. I mean, could you just like stack one filibuster speech after another so that it de facto lasts forever?

I don't know that these geezers could pull that off, but it's a question I have. Does Manchin think we need a bunch of Republican votes on a filibuster reform package before he'll support it? I don't know. I know that Manchin backed a version of a filibuster reform bill like this back in 2011 that didn't pass. I mean, look, the talking filibuster is better. We should note that the context that it was it was used extensively to filibuster civil rights legislation. So there's a dark history there that may get repeated with H.R. 1. So it's not a it's not a great option, but it's a hell of a lot better than just, you know, things as they are now, where basically we could do two bills in Joe Biden's first term and they both will be reconciliation. Yeah, I think what the talking

filibuster does is the long if when the public comes to see the Senate just be at a standstill and just speeches against voting rights and civil rights for like a week at a time, two weeks at a time. And it just keeps going and going and going. Eventually, is there more pressure than there would be with the automatic 60 vote margin to at least sit down and start compromising. Right. And so maybe on H.R. one, you get like, you know, Manchin sick of this filibuster that's going forever. Cinema is you say, OK, maybe the Republicans don't want publicly funded elections, but maybe they'll do automatic voter. You know what I'm saying? Like it at least gives us the possibility for more compromise than we had with, as Lovett was pointing out, just an email that says, yeah, my senators know and we're going to have to get 60 no matter what. It's it's something and we just had nothing. So that's it's it's good news for that. I also would say, too, like.

You know, even on this question about him requiring bipartisan votes on things like infrastructure, these maximal hypotheticals posed to Joe Manchin, he is very. He is hell bent on demonstrating that he when he says he's bipartisan, he is very, he is hell bent on demonstrating that he, when he says he's bipartisan, he means it, but he still leaves the door open. And I think sometimes that is lost. Like, so he said, I am not going to get on a bill that cuts them out completely before we start trying. Trying. Before we start trying. Right. I caught that too. I did too. So, so like he is, I think that one of the reasons sometimes Manchin's positions on some of these things have been presented as like fait accompli or like kind of immovable is because I think he actually wants them to seem that way.

He wants them to, when someone does like, will you ever do this without being bipartisan? He's like, hell no. How dare you even ask me? But when he actually comes down to the governing and the legislating, he is leaving the door open. And look, like, I'm not saying Joe Manchin is where we want him to be on a whole host of policies across the board. But I think we just need to be like really specific about where where what he's actually been saying, because sometimes Joe Manchin being anti something kind of slows everything down. Like, well, why bother? We don't have Manchin, but like, he's gettable. We should think of him always as being gettable. Which shows back to our question about, you know, the future of bipartisanship.

Even though there were no Republican votes this time, Joe Biden is going to continue the dance of I want to try to get Republicans to work with me, if not for the American people or because he believes it to be true for Joe Manchin, for the audience of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Like, no cost. As he should, as he should. And, you know, today, Psaki was asked about Biden's position on the filibuster. And she said, again, you know, he would prefer the rules not to be changed. I wish, you know, his position now was Joe Manchin's idea of the talking filibuster is interesting, but like maybe Joe Biden doesn't want to get out in front of the parade. Maybe he wants to have Manchin and the Senate go through this themselves. That's fine.

I think there's going to be I do think there's going to be a moment where Joe Biden is going to have to show leadership on this and push particularly on H.R. One. Maybe that's not maybe the moment is not here yet, but he's going to have to get there at some point. But there's also like one thing that has been very useful about Joe Biden's moderate aesthetic, which is a lot of times what it really boils down to. We were incredibly frustrated by him in the primary saying that Republicans are going to have an epiphany and

all that. One of the advantages of that is when he does come to a progressive position, it looks more moderate. It becomes the kind of consensus position, and that's really valuable. So ultimately, when he does come out for some kind of filibuster reform, you know that it will be a consensus position that some other Democrats that are reluctant can can hopefully, hopefully get behind. I do think this next reconciliation bill, if it ends up being a reconciliation bill, is going to be pretty wild. It's going to be an infrastructure climate bill, maybe up to they floated four trillion dollars. And now Joe Manchin saying he want it paid for by raising taxes. He wants some pay for pay for us to which I'm like, OK, you're going to pass a four trillion dollar bill raising taxes and you're going to do

it by getting 10 Republican senators on board. It's like, well, I don't know what Joe Manchin smoking. That's why he's annoying. Right. Because he wants a two to four trillion dollar bill, but he won't vote for it if Republicans aren't included. But he says it has to be fully paid for. But he wants to increase the corporate tax rate and then repeal the Trump tax cuts. Like, you know that that that scenario does not exist. So to float it like that in an interview, to create a dynamic that is impossible to achieve is it's baffling to me. I mean, again, yeah, it'll be like, look, he like maybe he just likes to make a scene so that he can prove to folks back home that he's, you know, not loved by either party, but get things done. And as his own man, it's like, I'm sure that plays well, but it's very fucking frustrating for those of us who are trying to parse his statements

and create something that is logically coherent because it does not exist there. How dare you, Tommy? How fucking dare you talk about Joe Manchin, who we love? He's our prime minister. Look, I think the most generous interpretation of that is that Joe Manchin was speaking to Republican senators directly. And this is basically saying this is our opening offer. Four trillion dollars, bunch of shit. We want to raise taxes to pay for it. We want to work with you guys. What do you got? Right. And then we'll see. And then, you know, they won't come back and say absolutely not. Some of them will. Most of them will. But like his buddies who are Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and and Mitt Romney will come back and say, OK, I could do some pay

for some taxes. I could cut it down to three trillion or two trillion. You know, like so maybe this is just sort of the opening negotiation here. But I do think for our purposes, like Democrats and activists and organizers need to start pushing our priorities for this next reconciliation bill, for the Build Back Better bill, whatever it's going to be called. And it can be anything from I think it's going to be climate's going to be huge in this bill. This is where we're going to get climate done. To the extent we're going to get done, there's a lot more, there's making the child care allowance permanent could happen in this bill as well. Some of these measures, most of the measures in the COVID relief, the American Rescue Plan only last a year. So making them permanent in the next bill is going to be really important too. So there's a lot we should fight to get done there. I do think on H.R. 1, the key now is going to be really put pressure on

your representatives, whether they're Democrat or Republican in the House and the Senate, especially in the Senate, since it's going to go there now, to pass this bill to make sure we have a big fight over this. You can go to votesaveamerica.com slash for the people to learn more about H.R.1 and to help make sure it gets passed. This is going to be hopefully the next big fight and the real test of Joe Manchin's flirtation with filibuster reform. It's an open flirtation. It's getting pretty flirtatious. I think they may take this in. What were you going to say?

I don't know. I'm not funny anymore. Maybe I never was. Got to get out of this pandemic. I'm good on it. One year. Happy year anniversary, boys. Oh, my God.

Yeah. One year. Well, when we come back, you'll get to hear Love It Be Funny with Virginia state delegate Danica Roe. Joining us on the pod, she's a Virginia state delegate and former journalist first elected in 2017. She was the first openly transgender person to serve in a U.S. state legislature. Please welcome Danica Rome. Good to see you. Thank you so much for the invitation. It's great to join, John. So since President Biden was inaugurated in January, he's made federal protections for trans Americans a priority.

He's lifted the ban on trans service members, for example. At the same time, we're also seeing a record number of anti-trans bills at the state level. Where do you see the fight for trans rights right now? What are some of these aggressive local efforts to discriminate? What do they mean to trans people and what should people do right now in response? Sure. So I'll take the second half of that first, and then we'll come back to the first half. So the first thing about what should people do in response is elect people who will actually take care of their constituents, who won't single out and stigmatize the very people

they're elected to serve. Look what happened here in Virginia now that we've done that, now that we have our Democratic majorities that we worked so hard to elect, first, you know, coming within a hair in 2017, and then actually winning the majorities in 2019, we have passed so many pro-LGBTQ bills in the Virginia General Assembly in the last two years, it's been an all-you-can-gay buffet in Richmond. It's just, we have done things like the Virginia Values Act act which actually put some real teeth into our enforcement mechanisms hb 1049 from delhi levine which added sexual orientation gender identity to more than 70 different sections of non-discrimination code we passed my bills to prohibit discrimination against trans people and health insurance which actually happened to me in

2014 we passed my bills to ban the gay and trans panic defense this year, HB 2132. We passed my bill last year to allow for localities to include sexual orientation, gender identity, and their non-discrimination ordinances at the local level. We passed my resolution, HJ 85, to recognize the Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20th of every year in Virginia. We have non-binary driver's licenses now as well. We passed one bill from Delegate Jennifer Carol Foy, who's now running for governor, that says that if you're going to have a dress code at your public school, that it has to be gender neutral. So you're not just picking on gay and trans kids. And we have passed just, there's so many more. If you want me to just kind of tick them off

no i'm happy to dive in but i'm enjoying it oh yeah yeah so you're like like what i'm really trying to get at here is like we've even done hiv modernization this year for example an lgbtq advisory uh task force that actually um responds directly to the governor for example we've had bills to deal with you you know, people who were discharged with anything other than honorable under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, so that, you know, at least in Virginia, we're respecting their service. And the list goes on. And so, you know, it's like, oh, oh, oh, and I should also mention, we also passed a bill for model trans policies for how to humanely train trans kids in schools, which is something that's

obviously the heart of a lot of, you know, the fights going on right now. And also, here's another thing. One of the fights right now is about, you know, like, you know, sports and stuff like that. In Virginia, we took care of this six years ago. If you actually look at the model policy of the Virginia High School League uses here in Virginia, it's a non-issue. You know, there's an entire process that trans athletes go through. So, you know, it's basically verifying that they're not going to have a, you know, inherently competitive advantage over other people. At the same time, you look at the policy that we've done, you look at, you know, there's a few trans kids, but not a lot, but just a few who actually play sports in first place here, because most kids feel

too stigmatized to even do it. And you look at where we are and it's just like, what's the point of attacking children, their kids, they want to play sports. Oh, well, this might mean that, you know, as the, you know, the opponents might say like, oh, well then this is going to prevent, you know, is this some cisgender girl from getting a varsity scholarship or whatever. First off, cisgender girls who are competing at varsity levels are incredible athletes to begin with. I covered them as a newspaper reporter covering high school sports for 10 and a half years. Like I am telling you, we are looking at a lot of kids who are extremely just like really competitive. Another thing is that when you have trans kids who are on puberty blockers, who are on HRT to begin with. And within nine months, their testosterone level is either

that at that level, or even below that of cis girls, their estrogen level is the same, you know, the same range, they don't have that competitive advantage. And in fact, with puberty blockers, plus HRT, you're even, you know, basically allowing their growth to be consistent with that of cis girls in the first place. Ask me how I know as a trans person, I'll be happy to tell you. with that of cis girls in the first place. Ask me how I know as a trans person, I'll be happy to tell you. Yeah, so you're right, right? They're focusing on trans youth and specifically around sports. 65 of the 73 anti-trans bills introduced at the state level this year have specifically targeted trans youth, many around sports. It seems like gay people were stigmatized for a long time. If we let gay people marriage, society is going to fall. They lost that issue.

They lost that issue on policy. They lost that issue on the politics. They don't seem to talk about the fact that gay people getting married was going to destroy society. Society continues. And yet they've sort of abandoned that. Now it seems like they want to stigmatize trans people. They want to turn trans people into what gay people were in the early 2000s.

John, have you been reading my emails or hacking into my phone as I've been talking to other people or other reporters? Because I've literally said this verbatim, we are just relitigating the fights from 17 years ago, only now with a new victim, only so instead of attacking gay, you know, gay people for wanting to get married. Now they're attacking trans kids because they're a softer target to attack. It's really so it's it's obviously like like if you look at the fight over gay rights, what you see is over time they will not win. They will not succeed. But what was terrible at the time, right, is 2004. A bunch of discriminatory anti-gay amendments make it onto the books.

And even as the public moves further and further away, we have to go back and chip away at those laws. This is even more pernicious because this is attacking children. a scapegoat that we don't end up with a bunch of these horrible laws on the book that will punish, stigmatize, harm kids at this pivotal moment when they're just, when they're, when they're at the beginning of their life, when, when they're, when they're at their most vulnerable. So there's a few things. The first part of this is that one of the most important parts of winning federal elections is having judges, right? And being able to appoint and confirm judges. And that's going to be one of the horrible legacies from the last four years is having a lot of people with anti-LGBTQ records being put on the bench. And at the same time, we know that, you know, if President Biden has Supreme Court nominees or he's going to pick,

if we know that, you know, there's going to be other federal, you know, circuit court judges and appellate court judges who he's going to be able to pick. What we're looking at here is basically understanding that when you look at Title IX, when you look at federal non-discrimination laws in general, as it is, that federal judges who are actually understanding what the law means and that the idea that discrimination on account of sex is inherently discriminatory, or, you know, like, when you're discriminating on account of sexual orientation or gender identity, it is inherently to discriminate on account of sex, as we even saw in the Bostick ruling last year, right? And by the way, not to mention that I have the Equal Rights

Amendment tattooed on my arm, but that's a whole different story for another day. If you get into that level of public policy here, what you're going to find is that the federal government has to be our backstop against a lot of these really regressive and repressive bills that are being introduced and passed. Because if you look at what happened in Idaho, when they started taking shots at trans kids, it took federal courts to actually have to block them in the first place. And so that's the first component of it. The second component of it is you have to win elections everywhere at the municipal level, at the county level, at your state level, you have to compete, you have to win. And the reason for that is what we are seeing, where are these trans bill or these anti-trans bills most likely to

succeed in Republican trifecta states where you have a Republican governor, Republican led chamber or basically Republican majorities in both chambers of their state legislature? Unless you're Nebraska, give us a unicameral quick little trivia fact. There's one unicameral state legislature in the United States. in the United States. But what I would just kind of posit here is that in order to win those state elections, that means that you have to be, especially as LGBTQ people, vulnerable enough to be visible in the first place, to put yourself out there, knowing fully well that there are repercussions that come with putting yourself out there as an LGBTQ person. I did it in 2017, and I'm not going to be that person who's going to tell you that my experience is going to be what you were going to experience, neither better nor worse. It just is, it just exists. And, you know, when I won, I took on a 26 year incumbent who had

been elected 13 times, who had been in office since I was seven years old, and had accumulated the most anti LGBTQLGBTQ voting record and not just voting record, but actually the bills he was introducing in the entire South, if not the entire country among state legislators, including he was the author of the state's 2006 anti-marriage equality amendment, the Marshall Newman amendment, which, by the way, we just took the first step to repealing and replacing with an actual affirmative right to marry this year. So we have to pass that one more time next year in Virginia in the General Assembly, and then I'll go to the voters in a referendum on the following fall.

But, you know, to say, to emphasize that in order to win state elections, you have to win the local elections, too, because that's how not only you build your farm team, that's how you learn how to organize. you build your farm team, that's how you learn how to organize. That's how you actually put people out there in the first place who are able to collect data, to put it into NGP and put in van to really understand how to run a campaign. You have to have that organization. You have to have that infrastructure they're willing to help. And that's what we need. And there are groups like Emerge America that trains democratic women to run for office. I went through Emerge Virginia's bootcamp. There's the LGBTQ Victory Institute. They train LGBTQ candidates to run for office. I went through the Victory Institute's 2016 training that November. And then sometimes you'll have your local organizations that train as well. Like for

me, the Democratic House Caucus did a training, the 2015 and 2013 Democratic nominees of this seat did a one-day training, which was super cool. But there's other organizations too. EMILY's List, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Run for Something. All of these are groups that, and the National Democratic Candidate Training group as well. All of these groups here exist in order to help candidates get on the ballot who actually share our values in the first place. And if your values are based on inclusivity, on building up our infrastructure and start tearing down each other, then these are people who can help you, number one, qualify for the ballot and two, learn how to win elections. And again, maybe I'll say this a few times this election, ask me how I know.

Yeah, how do you know? I know because I went through it and I won. And then I won again. And I just literally, noon today, just an hour and 45 minutes ago, turned in my petition to qualify for the ballot this year. So I'll be on the ballot November 2nd. So I'll be on the ballot November 2nd. So as we're making this, as we're sort of fighting these fights at the state level, I think one, you do see that as the public is shifting, the anti-trans movement is kind of narrowing their focus and trying to, and it's getting tighter and tighter.

And now it's saying basically like, we're just being pro-girl sports. That really, we're not anti-trans, we're pro-girl. And we're trying to- Can we hit the timeout button on that for a second to address this load of BS? Let's do it. Okay. So the same people who underfund girls' sports,

the same people who will promote the football program and then cut the girls' volleyball program or cut arts or cut anything else that actually girls will, in general, participate in in the first place, they're the ones who are trying to tell us that they're going to be the savior of girls sports. They're just, they're so full of it. It's just, you know, their rhetoric absolutely does not

match up. And by the way, the same people who were opposing to the equal rights amendment now trying to make themselves out to be the, uh, you know, the savior of girls sports. Oh, please. No, no, that's, that's just not true. But can you talk a little bit about how some of these anti-trans measures would actually hurt girls sports and make it, make it harder for girls to participate in sports? Oh my God. Let's just look at, let's just look at the Tuberville amendment, right? That came up to the substitute version of the version of the COVID relief bill. It just passed, right? That just passed the Senate. If, when you actually read the amendment, and I did, because I'm a legislator,

it's what I do, even at a state level, I'll read federal legislation when I absolutely have to. So I did. And in reading this, they said that basically it was based on like your genetic component about your reproductive system. There was nothing about birth certificates or anything.

They, what in essence, what Senator Tuberville was doing was he was going to have to subject every cisgender and transgender girl alike to invasive anatomical searches of their reproductive systems, presumably by adults, to see if they were female enough. I don't care where you fall on this issue. If you look at this and you go, I don't want some adult prodding my child. That's terrible. That is objectively mortifying. There's, and here's the thing. Some people say, oh, they could do a cheek swab for DNA and stuff. Here's where it gets interesting. What happens when you're starting dealing with inter gets interesting. What happens when you're

starting dealing with intersex girls? What happens if you start dealing with girls who are just built a little bit differently, right? Even if they're cisgender. And when you actually look at how short-sighted, mean-spirited, and ill-thought-out this amendment was, the consequences of what they were doing is horrific beyond what they even knew they were doing to start with. And the second part on this is they were asking themselves and they were asking the states to violate other existing federal law. And so how are they supposed to, you know, they're going to restrict money from, you know, from states and schools that are doing it right. More than a dozen states right now

already have trans inclusive policies. So let our us who are doing this right, let us continue doing what's working. And other states should be emulating what we're doing instead of regressing into discrimination. Yeah, we like you've made sort of I want to come back to these sort of two points that you made one is around this. And it does seem like what they're really saying is let's target any girls, any adults subjectively decide doesn't look my definition of feminine, right? That seems to be like one piece of this. And you also said that basically trying to protect trans kids by making sure that there were these non-gendered school uniforms. And it seems to me that like we're in this fight right now, which is for trans people, but also at the beginning of

a larger fight around gender itself and the salience of gender in our culture. And that seems to scare conservatives. They seem to be genuinely scared about it. We spent. No, they're not. No, no, they're not. No. Like in the same way that they weren't really scared about marriage equality. Right. No, it's not that. Well, they want people to be scared about it, I should say. They want like the politicians who were talking about who are doing this. They're looking for money and they're looking for votes. Do you think they would give a damn about this if they're if they didn't think that it was going to be good for their fundraising or it was going to be a good Twitter moment for them or get them on Fox News or whatever right-wing media

publication of your choice? Hell no, of course not. They're trying to be as inflammatory as possible because they think it's in their own self-interest. This is how they work. And they don't really care if it means that they have to target their own constituents and hurt children and exploit children for a political gain. They'll do it if it thinks that it's going to help their careers. That's where we're looking at.

This is the same playbook that they used that Karl Rove used during the Bush administration when they were engineering all the anti-emerge equality amendments that were up on the ballots in 2004 and five and six, right? So when you look at the history of this, we've seen this playbook before. The issue is that chances are a lot more people know gay people or bisexual people in their lives more so than they know trans people in their lives because we make a

significantly smaller percentage of population where we're 0.6 to 1.2 percent of the population depending on you know your numbers and so very often for me i'm the first out trans person someone knows they have met yeah i know they've met others they just don't know that but you know when i'm at the doors though you know what's you know the funny thing is I've knocked thousands of doors over my campaigns. I've heard more than 30 local town halls. You know, I'm very present in what I do. Do you know, I can count on one hand how many times people have mentioned trans stuff at the doors in a discriminatory, like, negative way. I really can.

When people, even the few occasions when people do talk to me about trans stuff, it's usually, oh, my kid's trans or this person I know is trans, or I have a colleague who's trans, you know, they are, they themselves are, they want to tell me a story, right? And that's fine. But what do people, when I'm knocking on doors, you know, I don't ever see someone go, you know, Danica, if only Virginia was more regressive towards trans people, would we finally be able to fix Route 28? That's not how it goes. They want politicians to take care of their commutes. And by the way, my plan for Fix Route 28 is in front of the Commonwealth Transportation Board. Hopefully we can get money for that later this year.

Look, I remember that your campaign was on fixing roads. But what I was trying to get at, though, is I know that as a gay person, you spend so much time fighting political fights about why you're not bad, that so little time is spent on why being gay is not just worth tolerating, but is wonderful and contributes and brings wonderful things to our culture and our society. And so as we think about this trans fight and the fight for trans people and trans lives, like when you think about a trans kid right now watching these fights unfold, how do you communicate to them not just that we're fighting to prove that there's no threat, there's nothing wrong with being trans, but that trans people

are wonderful and good and contribute something important to our world worth protecting. John, the day I won my first campaign in November 7th, 2017, I got to the Prince William County Democratic Committee's victory party pretty late that night. I had been held at a different victory party. And as soon as I got out of the car, there was a 10 year old trans girl named Clara who was in the parking lot. And I had known her throughout the whole campaign going back to that January. And it was now November 7th.

The first thing that I did was I picked up Clara. I looked her dead in the eye and I told her, honey, you can be whatever you want to be. You can be president because we just won this campaign and you just help make it happen. She has just as much right to chase her dreams and to be who she is and to be that well, where it's sacred to sales as any other person. And, you know, I have a sticker that I keep outside my, or actually a pin I keep outside of my door in Richmond where it says, my trans is beautiful. And this is one of those things where as Democrats, we tend to say, no matter what you look like, where you come from, how you worship, if you do, who you love, or in this case, who you were born to be, that you should be able to succeed because of who you are, not despite it, not for what discriminatory politicians tell you you're supposed to be. You be you better than anyone else ever could because you're the only person who can be you.

And if you're in one of these states where you're having these fights and you have to stand up and fight for your rights in this, we had to do that in Virginia. I drove down to the Virginia General Assembly four times in 2016 to fight nine anti-LGBTQ bills. And I spent 16 months leading, spearheading an effort, along with our now former school board chairman, Ryan Sawyers, to get the Prince William County School Board to include sexual orientation and gender identity in their non-discrimination policy. 16-month bruising fight that we won a five to three vote. And you know what happened? The three people who voted against it ended up losing their next election, even though at the time, you know, like so many hundreds of people were saying the worst things you could imagine on camera into a microphone saying that gay and trans kids were abominations who were damnable and damned by God. And then one of the actually elected Republican officials, one of the county supervisors, was applauding them for doing it.

I know because I sat right behind her and watched her do it. And that same person who then, by the way, deadnamed me in front of my stepdaughter. So it was like, yeah, that was a real class act. But, you know, we had to win a lot of policy fights and we had to really win a lot of elections here in order to secure that safety and protection. And so for people in other states, look at the model that we set in Virginia in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. You can follow that model. And here's the thing. I can't just tell someone to get up and leave their state and come to Virginia because they might not have the money they might not have the means they might not have the ability to come here

and if they leave then who's left to fight right and at the same time if it does get to be too much if you've put your heart in it if it's too dangerous if your family's being threatened whatever it is please know that the people of the city of Manassas Park and the Prince William County portions of Haymarket, Gainesville, and Manassas that I represent, we will welcome you here because of who you are. And here in Virginia, especially here in Northern Virginia, you know, we celebrate you.

So please, by all means, anyone who likes to come to Virginia, regardless or because of your identifiers. Welcome. We're glad you're here. And I just want to know how I can serve you. Danica Rome. Thank you so much. Thank you. I know I was supposed to plug my socials and stuff. So if you want to do that. Yeah, I can do I can just do Yeah, tell me I get whatever you need. Everyone. Yeah, sure. So I'm at Twitter at P WC Dan-I-C-A. Facebook, it's Danica Rome, Virginia Delegate. And you can find me on ActBlue.

If you type in Danica Rome, it's always a great, great place to stop by. And my website is DelegateDanicaRome.com. Thank you so much. Cheers, John. Thanks to Danica Rome for joining us today. And we'll talk to you guys later. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmal Konian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.