Tangle - INTERVIEW: Politics + Media 101's Justin Higgins

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

On today’s podcast, we are sitting down with Justin Higgins. Justin is the host of Politics + Media 101, he led the legislative and media efforts to address Hurricane Marie as an appointed official for the Democratic Government of Puerto Rico, he has worked as a legislative assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives, as a senior research analyst for the RNC where he compiled opposition research, and — as I’m sure will be of much interest to our listeners — has actually switched political parties over the last few years.In today's episode, we discuss the current state of Congress, whether members really read bills, how much time is spent fundraising, why he switched parties, what the future holds for Puerto Rico, and much more. You can find Justin's podcast Politics + Media 101 here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. And on today's episode, we're going to be sitting down with Justin Higgins. Justin is the host of Politics and Media 101. He also led the legislative and media efforts to address Hurricane Maria as an appointed official for the Democratic government of Puerto Rico. He has worked as a legislative assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives, also as a senior research analyst for the RNC, where he managed some opposition research, which we're going to talk about. I'm super excited. And as I'm sure will be of much interest to our listeners, is somebody who has switched political parties in the last few years. Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Isaac, thanks for having me on. I read the newsletter, listen to the podcast and really enjoy what you're doing. I appreciate it, man.

So first up, I guess the best place to start is tell me a little bit about Justin Higgins. Who are you? How'd you get into politics? What's the story, man? Yeah. So aside from loving baseball and playing baseball all the way into college, kind of like Tangle, kind of like politics plus media 101. I grew up in New Hampshire, and that's a purple state. So you get Republicans and Democrats. Growing up, my mom and dad always preached community service, whether that be going to the soup kitchen or toy drives once a month. But in addition to that, for no reason at all, Isaac, every four years, we get every single serious presidential candidate from the GOP, the Democrats, some independents and libertarians thrown in there as well. And they come to New Hampshire,

a small, small rural state of a million people, and they give speeches. It's not only like the speeches that you see from President Trump, where they're in 20,000, 30,000 seat stadiums, right? But what you see is real retail politics. So they go around and they shake hands in diners. And my parents would always take me around to meet Democrats, meet Republicans, listen to George W. Bush, John Edwards, John Kerry. And that's where the politics and my upbringing kind of intertwined was I was fortunate enough to be born in New Hampshire from parents who wanted to go watch these political rallies. You grow up in this place, you have the seeds planted of political interest as a young Justin,

and then you ended up landing in Congress as a legislative assistant. How did that happen? What was the application process like? How did you get a job in Congress? Yeah. So I don't come from one of these blue blood families, right? From a wealthy family where everything's kind of just handed to you through your connections or you have the money to do it. I was an intern in Congress my junior year of college, and my dad took out a loan to pay for it. It's very expensive. And that's basically where the application begins. You either need to know somebody or you already need to have prior experience. So I was an intern that helped me get a job as a lobbyist for a Fortune 400 company right out of college.

job as a lobbyist for a Fortune 400 company right out of college. And then from there, I went and one of the members of Congress that I lobbied, because the company that I worked for was headquartered in Kansas, was a Kansas congressman. So naturally from having conversations like you and I are having now, but about legislation, about employing workers in his district, about exporting great Kansas pork and beef and wheat around the world. We ultimately hit it off. He offered me a job in his office. And then I began working in Capitol Hill because it always seemed more interesting to me, Isaac, to work on the inside for the people rather than working on the outside for a large corporation trying to influence and manipulate policy. You know, I think a lot of Americans would hear you say that and think there's no difference. The lobbyists are Congress. Congress is the lobbyists.

Tell me a little bit about that relationship. How does it work? Well, what actually happens behind the scenes, you know, that I think a lot of people wonder about these days. I mean, it's becoming more and more of an issue, this sort of the quote unquote revolving door between Congress and the lobbying industry. So that's a big question. And I think you're hitting on a big issue that's very multifaceted and arguably one of the most important, the staffing revolving door between Congress and K Street is, as you know, the acronym. So for starters, I don't think it's necessarily as nefarious as people believe. So my former boss, Tim Hulskamp, I practically disagree with everything

he believes and stands for now, but I think he's a good guy. He would tell the company when I was a lobbyist, when we would come in and ask for him to vote in favor of, for example, a big farm bill, no, we're not going to vote in favor of that. I'm a Tea Party member. I don't believe in government spending. So he'd basically tell our company, not in so many words, to go screw. And that was a big lobbyist, big company that we were working for. So that's one example. On the other hand, where lobbyists have a lot of influence, it's not necessarily all the money that is given, which your listeners can look up open secrets, go to see a member of Congress and go see what industries donate to them. The power where lobbyists have is based on the employment

numbers of the district or state for the company that they're working for and the member of Congress that they're talking to. Because not only is that important for the state's health, the economy, the exports of the state, the tax dollars, but also Isaac, it's voters. That's really what matters to these members of Congress. So if you have a powerful company that employs a lot of people in somebody's district, what you're likely to see is the influence is not necessarily, will they vote for something? Will they not vote for something? It gets really nefarious and troublesome when the influence is you have this major piece of legislation

and you have the lobbyists working with a member of Congress who's very powerful and the lobbyist wants to insert a line in a bill. The bill's maybe $100 billion. They want to insert a line for $20 or $30 million. And they can do that because of the people that they employ in the members district. And they can get away with it sometimes because the bill is $100 billion. It's not being read by everybody. And it's being passed during the night after being out and available in the public for a day. So that's where it gets a little bit messy where you can't really see the influence. It's not necessarily on these massive bills with controlling votes of Manchin and Sinema, for

example. It's interesting. I mean, I think there are kind of two ways to parse that. On the one hand, it's like, here's this company that's lobbying and it employs all these people who live in a district. And presumably some of the company's interests might be aligned with some of the workers' interests. Oftentimes they're not. Sometimes they're in opposition with each other too. I'm wondering, do you view that relationship as being a healthy part of democracy? Do you think that that sort of give and take is good for the country? Is it bad for the country? Is that something that we shouldn't allow? Where do you land on that? So the way you just described it, I think it's vital. I think it's a first amendment right. I think that, let me take you inside Congress. So if you're a member, if you're

working for a member of Congress, your job is, and you're a policy advisor, it's to analyze policy. You probably have, if you're working on energy, you's to analyze policy. You probably have, if you're working on energy, you don't just have one issue. You have energy, you have immigration, you have international trade, you have national defense, you have veteran affairs, and that's all in your portfolio. So there are many different staffers. I'm talking about a personal office staffer. So on one level, lobbying is important because it allows the private sector to come in and talk to these overworked young staffers and explain the issues from the private sector's point of view. So it's a conduit of information in its most simple sense. And the same thing goes

for committee staff, which literally write these bills. If they're focused on energy, they have a wide variety of energy issues that they need to focus on. It's really difficult to become specialized and an expert in everything that they're writing legislation on. So again, the private sector can be a conduit of information that is extremely vital and healthy. And also, like you said, it's working to protect the interests of the company. And in some times, the interests of the company will align with the interests of the workers. Where it gets out of hand, in my opinion, to keep it short, is Citizens United. It's when we aren't able to have transparency in the spending of the money.

And then these companies are allowed to spend, literally, Isaac, unlimited amounts of money on super PACs. And they're not legally allowed to coordinate, but they find ways to coordinate the spending of the money with the buying of the ads, with the polling, to have a very outsized impact on campaigns. You said something a minute ago in your answer that is literally one of the, you know, 15 or 20 questions I have written down in front of me that I was interested in touching on. And that is about the truth or myth of whether bills actually get passed without members of Congress reading them. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that process. Does it really happen? Is that

just something that gets hyped up by idiot journalists like me? Or is that kind of stuff going on in Congress? And what does it look like? How is that possible? So it happens all the time. And I'm going to... So when we say members of Congress not reading bills, I think we need to include their staffers not having time to read the bills either because members of Congress have a lot of work to do. There are many bills, so we can't expect them all to read every single bill. But what happens is when you have large pieces of legislation like a budget or you have other bills that are not going through the normal committee process, so the normal committee process is you have a piece of legislation, you have a committee hearing on it in the House and Senate,

you have amendments, and it's a very transparent process. When you have a bill that's difficult to pass, sometimes they don't go through that process. And what will happen is the bill will be dropped literally 24 hours before the vote comes. So ultimately, the reason very few members of Congress read these large pieces of legislation, what will happen is on the Democrat and Republican side, you have a few different staffers on specific committees that are responsible for writing those bills. They will then give summaries to the lead negotiators who negotiated those bills. And then those negotiators, whether it be, for example, in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, you had Mitt Romney on the right. You had Moore Capito, Shelley Moore Capito

from West Virginia on the right. You had a few others on the right. You had Bernie Sanders on the left. You had Mark Warner on the left. When these pieces of legislation are dropped and not everybody can read them, the negotiators then go and summarize these pieces of legislation for different factions of the House. So the progressives with Bernie Sanders and the Senate, the moderates with Mark Warner and Joe Manchin. And then the last thing that happens is leadership tells members to vote a certain way. And because they're getting summaries that they feel confident in and they trust, and leadership is telling them to vote a certain way, they will have enough information that they believe is enough to vote on the bill.

And the interesting thing here is if they want to gain power in Congress, if they are a young member of Congress and leadership tells them you must vote a certain way on a certain bill, that's 90% of the time enough for these people to vote because it'll influence the trajectory of their career in the House or Senate. It'll influence the amount of power that they have and the amount of good that they're able to do for their district. So yes, a lot of time, most members don't read major pieces of legislation. It's interesting. I mean, I think one of the really big criticisms, and this is something I've written a little bit about in my newsletter, is just how much legislating is driven by leadership now. It feels to me like as somebody who's not behind closed doors, I wish maybe I need to

take your out and just go become a legislative assistant and undercover report the entire thing. But as a reporter, somebody who's trying to scratch at what's happening in these backdoor meetings and overnight and between leadership, it really seems like there are three to six people who are basically deciding what a final bill looks like with some input, like you said, from staff members and maybe negotiators. I mean, is that basically your read on how it's happening in today's version of Congress? So I actually learned the most because my member was like a quote unquote backbencher.

He was a rabble rouser. He's a Tea Party member. He wasn't writing legislation. I learned the most when I was working for the governor of Puerto Rico and we were trying to get these billions of dollars through the appropriations process when I was meeting with the senators, the members of Congress, all behind closed doors and offices. So yes, there are, generally speaking, a few people that influence the process. It is very top-down in that normally it's the committee chairperson, man or woman, that influences it. It's the leadership. So Speaker Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, they can even determine what bills come to the floor. And then you have votes that you need to win because for the majority of the time, the majority of the

party is going to be in favor of a piece of legislation. And then the people who are kind of holdouts will then influence the legislation. So typically speaking, what you have happen is ultimately pieces of legislation are largely written in the direction that the party is comfortable with. And that's why you have the majority of the people vote in favor of this bill, maybe with not reading all the ins and outs of it. But I will say this, with the power of social media, especially since 2010 with the Tea Party movement, it has become a little bit more decentralized in that you can have a member of Congress or a faction of Congress

that is not in leadership, that is not a swing vote, ultimately tank a piece of legislation. And I'm going to use a quick example, the 2014 Gang of Eight immigration bill that President Obama was trying to pass. You had the Tea Party ultimately just message through social media and on cable news all the time against this piece of legislation that establishment Democrats, the progressive Democrats, the establishment Republicans, and conservative Republicans largely supported in a way that made the legislation toxic. So you had these people that have no influence in legislation sink it because of social media and the power that that can afford. So yes, but there is nuance.

One of the other major criticisms I think that the kind of state and process of Congress gets these days is that members just spend most of their time fundraising rather than actually legislating. I've heard various estimates pegged on this. I think AOC once said, you know, every member spends four or six hours a day on the phone with fundraisers. There's been sort of like a wide array of depending on the day, what these members are up to. What's your read on that? Do you think that's a fair critique of where things are at right now that we're just stuck in this churn of election cycles? Yes. So I think what the public should know and what people tend to conflate is members having to do this and members liking doing it. Members absolutely detest. They have a burning passion. They hate most of them and the good, hate fundraising. Even if they're

good at it, they hate going. Because you got to think, right, Isaac? You're the CEO and founder of your company. I am of mine. CEOs don't want to be going and calling people for two to four hours a day or whatever the number is, begging people for money. That's not what you set up your company to do. And it feels gross. And it's the same thing for members of Congress. They do not want to be doing that. However, because of Citizens United and because of the Supreme Court decision and dark money and all the money that is in politics right now, they are largely either forced to play the game or not play at all.

So not only do you have to fundraise to win an election, but most of the public probably doesn't know this. Let's take environment. If you're very passionate about environment, you want to sit on the Energy and Commerce Committee. The only way to get on the Energy and Commerce Committee is to make leadership of your party happy. The only way to make leadership of your party happy is to vote like they want. But not only that, it's to give them a certain amount of money to meet your benchmark for fundraising. So you literally have to do it. If you want to accomplish what you've promised your voters you would accomplish, you need to do this fundraising. So it's an unfortunate cycle that I blame a lot of on campaign finance laws. Well, let me ask you this. I mean,

cycle that I blame a lot of on campaign finance laws. Well, let me ask you this. I mean, Congress could change campaign finance laws. I mean, if they really detest it and hate it so much, why don't they just change how it works? I mean, if that's a shared value, members don't want to do it. They're members of Congress. I mean, they're literally the only people who can change that. That's a fair criticism. However, the Citizens United decision, as we know, was I believe it was 5-4. I have to look that up. And it was the Republican justices that were in favor of this. And I can bash the Democrats for other things. Corruption is awful on the Supreme Court, not the justices being corrupt, but the way they vote. So the only way to change this would be through a constitutional amendment or the Supreme

Court to overturn it. First off, we probably couldn't get anything. Even if you were to get something through, let's say this democratic controlled Congress, you couldn't get a constitutional amendment through because you need two thirds of the Senate. And you definitely wouldn't be able to get something through the state hurdles. So to change this, it would take a constitutional amendment, and it's just not feasible with the way that Republicans view this issue and the partisan and polarized nature of our politics right now. You know, related to elections, and I think this is a good segue, we're coming up in the 2015-2016 era of your career in politics. And I think one of the things that sticks out about your experience to me is that you have some background in

opposition research. And I get a ton of questions about this from readers of my newsletter. And I know about it just because reporters get presented with oppo research all the time. But I'd love to hear it from you. I mean, first of all, how do you define opposition research? And what's that space look like in an election season? Yeah, that's a good question. I define typically and generally held the term opposition research to be research that is publicly verifiable usually, that is about your opponent, that puts that opponent in a light that they would view as negative. So if you are a Democrat and you are running on pro-climate change legislation and an agenda that that's going to get you elected, one form

of opposition research, one of the more simple forms, would be for a researcher to go through your legislative history and find out all the money that you've taken from oil companies, all the legislation you've proposed or voted on in favor of oil companies, and then to package that up in a narrative to look up Isaac Saul, to look up the New York Times and send that narrative, usually in bullet points, over to a reporter to say, hey, this Democrat who's bashing these oil companies and who's claiming to be this climate crusader, their history actually shows that they are pro-big oil based on the millions of dollars that they fundraised and the legislation that they have received. So some people,

Republicans wouldn't find that negative, but because it's opposition research is something that would be viewed negative from the view of that candidate that it is targeting, their voters would find that negative. So in a broad sense, that's what I would describe as opposition research. Yeah. I think one of the big general misconceptions that I see out in the political world is a lot of people sort of conflating opposition research with unsourced anonymous allegations that come through intelligence officials or something like that. Obviously, you were working in this space in the 2016 election, which I think had both some of the most notorious opposition research and also some of the most notorious sort

of smear campaign questionable leaks, all that stuff that happened in the election related to Trump and the P-tape and the Steele dossier and everything else. What was that time like for you? I mean, that seems like a pretty wild era to be in the space. I'd be interested, you know, what you were working on and how it went. Well, before we do that, I think you said something that is very, very important and needs to be highlighted. The P-tape, the Steele, a lot of the stuff in the Steele dossier, that's not opposition research. That's bullshit rumors. I don't know if I can swear on this, so edit it out. That's stuff that you can't verify. So that's not true opposition research. in Ohio in their little district. And because we hear a rumor that maybe they have a DWI,

we go through that court, we look for their name, we find the record. And then we go to Isaac because we have the proof that this is a DWI. So it's a lot of research. And again, it has to be publicly verifiable. So I just want to commend you. It's not this conspiracy theory world, So I just want to commend you. It's not this conspiracy theory world, which many people think it is, even though it's called like the dark arts. The campaign, on the other hand, that's a longer story.'s works is the bulk of the apparatus of that campaign is headquartered in the president's headquarters. So for Hillary, it was Brooklyn. For Mitt Romney, I believe it was Boston and their own campaign does the most of the work. The Trump campaign didn't have an apparatus. It didn't have an infrastructure. So yes, Trump would be working on his own speeches and ad-libbing and tweeting on his own. But the RNC was responsible for creating a lot of the narratives, creating a lot of the talking points, creating all of the opposition research, and then

giving that to different surrogates. So unlike any other campaign really that's been running modern times, a lot of this work fell on the RNC. You walk into the RNC, Isaac, it's kids that are 22 to 28 years old. It's not a lot of old people. It's young people getting paid crap money, working 80 to 100 hours a week. And you have, it's an open floor seating plan. And then you have about 30 or 40 flat screen TVs above your head, and it's always on the news. So you're sitting there at your computer researching for 10 to 12 hours a day, and you're at the RNC. So all the news stations are CNN, MSNBC, mainstream media that is attacking you because your job, your goal is not to influence Fox News.

You know, you can just send them talking points and they're probably going to read them near verbatim. It's to influence the other outlets that are ultimately against you. So you're listening to all this negative stuff. You're then working to research everything. And the way that the Trump campaign was run, it was very difficult to just sit there and listen to his racist comments about Mexicans. My father was a Vietnam veteran. It was very difficult to listen to his comments about the Gold Star family at the DNC, the Khan family, attacking them even though their son had died in the line of duty. And then lastly, I'll never forget this. I mentioned the 30 or 40 TVs.

When the Hollywood Access tape came out where Trump was bragging about sexual assault, something the Clinton campaign did that ultimately was like psychological warfare, if you're in the RNC listening to this stuff for 12 hours a day, was her campaign played literally Trump verbatim saying, grab them by the beep. And that ad would run every five or 10 minutes. I'm not lying constantly. So you're sitting there trying to do your work. You're working for a candidate that you find despicable. And then you have this tape of him admitting to and bragging about sexual assault playing every 10 minutes. that is not easy.

The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Well, you've sort of put your cards on the table now and it's a good, I guess it's a good time to get to it. You switched political parties

in 2016. I think you just gave our listeners a little bit of taste of why. I'd love to hear from you about that process for you. I mean, we, you know, Tangle specializes in elevating arguments from the right and the left on big issues every day. I think we have a lot of political moderates, people who change their mind about certain topics and move between parties. I know we also have a ton of people who are very partisan and have their heels dug in on one side or the other. So what happened? Why did you make the jump and what has that been like? So my comments about Trump, I thought I knew what he was going into this because he came down the escalator making those comments about Mexicans and rapists and everything like that. As the campaign went on and as he ultimately won the campaign, what became concerning to me, and we see this to this day in the Republican Party, is a collective action

problem. So at one point, you had Paul Ryan saying he wasn't going to support Trump in the election after the Hollywood access tape. Some time passes, he starts supporting him again. Trump wins the election. And I'm like, okay, this guy is going to bring in adults, he's going to become presidential. And if he's not presidential, the people he brings in around him will be adults. And the Republican Party will stand up to him. He wins. And then the RNC starts vetting candidates for positions. We start vetting Secretary of State. Rudy Giuliani was a person that we vetted. Rex Tillerson was a person that we vetted. We start national security vetting. We vet Michael Flynn. It's starting to get a little bit more weird. We vet Katie McFarland and she is batshit crazy.

So I'm looking at these people that we're vetting and it becomes very, very clear. Not only are they not putting in the adults in the room to moderate this man, not only are they filling their cabinet or the positions under the cabinet largely with pro-Trump people just because they were on the campaign, but Republicans in Congress, Republicans in the House and Senate were beginning to suck up to this guy and do and say whatever that they thought Trump wanted to hear to get something out of it, to get a staffer in a position, to get their own position. So it became very clear that not only were the adults not going to come into the room, not only was Trump not going to moderate himself, but that the Republican Party in general was not going to stand up to him, even if he did become this authoritarian crank.

Obviously, my values also changed. But from looking at the Republican Party, to give you the best argument of why I think the Republican Party is currently rotten, it's because it is a party that is very susceptible to authoritarianism as we speak. different states. And Trump candidates for electors and board of electors are running at the state level on the premise that they will overturn an election that the GOP does not win if they get elected. That is the quickest way to a constitutional crisis in our country. And that is the quickest way to authoritarianism. And I don't see anyone in the GOP that's going to stand up to this. You're not the first person I've heard who sort of switched their political parties. And I think one of the things that I find striking or I'm really curious about, I mean, I always say about my own views that I feel very politically

incongruent. You know, it's like it's issue dependent and I don't feel like I fit neatly into a box anywhere. And these days, I just say I'm politically independent, though. I think a lot of the issues I've been talking about recently in the newsletter, I feel like I've been more aligned with the left than the right. And some of my readers are like, you're starting to get biased. And I'm like, I don't know. I just feel like there's some better arguments on this side the last couple of weeks or whatever. But I'm curious, you worked at the RNC, you worked for Republican congressional candidate, Republican member of Congress. You obviously must have had some conservative values. I mean, I think about individual liberty

type stuff, pro-gun rights, anti-abortion, the textbook stuff, limited government, free market capitalism. I mean, these things that I think sort of define the Republican Party today. Do you still feel those values? Do you still feel connected to them and out of place in the Democratic Party? Or is that sort of shifted for you as well? That's a good question. I think that the values that I had, I was always a moderate Republican, even though I worked for one of the furthest right members of the House. The values that I had and that I truly believe the Republican Party stood up for, you left out a couple, man. They were hammering Obama over the head with the Constitution

because they were saying that he wasn't acting constitutionally. They were the party of law and order. That comes back to the constitution. They were the party that believed in a strong America on the global world stage, whether that be pro-trade, whether that be pro-diplomacy, but also back to Reagan, the last comprehensive immigration bill was done under Republicans because they believed that that was a strong path forward. So I just truly believe that the Republican Party was in a way both the party of maintaining American dominance on the global stage, which is very important for our quality of life here because it means cheaper goods. It means better relations with other countries. It means a stronger dollar. So everything costs less inherently, means more exports to other countries, means more influence, but also that here they would stand up for the rule of law and the constitution. That in and of itself is limited government.

That means that a president isn't going to be ruling by executive order. I grew up in a Republican party that was criticizing President Obama for all of these things. Too many executive orders. He wasn't following the Constitution. Eric Holder was disobeying congressional subpoenas. And the Republican Party just does not stand for that at all anymore. So while I don't agree with AOC on most things or Rep. Omar on most things, I think that ultimately it's easy to say you're a Democrat because I believe in civil liberties. I don't believe the police should be shooting people dead nilly willy in the streets. But I also believe in democracy. And from my view, there's only one party right now that is inherently pro-democracy. And that's the

Democratic Party. If things switched, I'd have to reevaluate because democracy to me is my one priority. I cannot throw my lot in with authoritarians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gozar, and you have a whole host of them. 147 voted not to certify the election, man. Given this transformation that you've had, your experience in Congress, some of the things you just said about the members of Congress who have voted to not certify the election, who are like some honest brokers? Who are some people that you look up to that are serving the country right now that you feel like are, you know, people you trust, people you're glad are there at the helm? I'm going to start from the right and then I'll work from the left. So I don't have to agree with everybody, but you said honest brokers. You said putting the country first. You said that I trust.

So we're going to start with Ken Buck. He's one of the most conservative members of Congress. I don't agree with him on social issues, but I know that he is there. He's a member representative from Colorado Tea Party, but he is there. He's anti big tech. He's trying to pass new antitrust legislation. He's willing to work across the aisle on things that he believes in. And I think that he's a straight shooter. He sees it like it is and he believes it. And then he calls it. I think another one's Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney. I don't like Adam Kinzinger. I think that he is out there just to try and get more press and media. And I think it's gross. I think he's trying to make money off of this when he's out of Congress because he's been redistricted out. I just spoke to a Republican on our show, Tony Gonzalez. He's in his first

term. He's a representative from Texas. I think that largely speaking, a lot of the negotiators during the bipartisan infrastructure bill, left and right, are honest brokers. So that's from the right. And I could keep naming more and more. From the left, former Democratic governor of Virginia, Senator Mark Warner. I think he's great. I think Debbie Dingell, another congresswoman. And there are plenty more.

I like Joe Manchin. I think that he may switch his position. He may get a lot of hate because people may think he's in the pocket of lobbies. I don't think he's in the pocket of lobbies. I think that he genuinely believes in his principles, even if it is bucking the party, telling them to F off sometimes. But I think he's an honest broker too. How are you feeling about the Biden presidency so far as a newly minted Democrat who used to love the Tea Party smashing Obama over the head with the Constitution? Well, I loved it because I thought they believed in it and they don't.

So you live and you learn. Maybe I regret that. So look at the Biden presidency. I think Democrats are going to get crushed in the 2022 midterms. I would assume you think the same. Yeah, definitely. I think it's going to be an absolute bloodbath. It's going to be tough for them to figure it out four years from now. 2024 is a long time, three years from now. But it's even going to be tough then. So with that in mind, with the negative press, with their inability to message largely. I am thrilled with what's been done. I hate the ability to message it. So I think that the bipartisan infrastructure bill was very good. It was a solid bill. I think that the efforts, and hopefully something will pass on the China

Competition Act, is something that is appropriate. It's basically trying to reposition our domestic research abilities, our government funding to pivot towards China and technologies that will help us compete. I think that the way we've repositioned our military, pulling out of Afghanistan was good, even though it was a debacle in the way it was done. It could have been done better. But pulling out of Afghanistan, first president to end the endless war is a good thing. And I think the way that President Biden has been handling Ukraine has been masterful. He's been, from the beginning, with the way that he used intelligence to warn Ukraine, but also Russia and us. Yo, guys, Russia's about to invade Ukraine. We have intelligence. yo, guys, Russia's about to invade Ukraine. We have intelligence. A week later, they're about to invade. A couple of days later, yo, they are going to invade in the next few days.

Sure enough, Putin invades. We send Ukraine a ton of weapons. We're continuing to send them weapons. We work with the West, the European Union, members of NATO's different countries in Europe to create a coalition that has created very robust and strong sanctions. We've done it in a way that the coalition has stayed together. And now we're sending more and more lethal weapons and humanitarian aid and food and medicine to Ukraine. And there's no signs of our coalition breaking. So generally speaking, I think he's done a damn good job. He's passed a major bill, ended a major war, and is doing pretty well in a current, the most major European war since World War II. I'm looking at the time here and I know we've got a few minutes left.

There's another interesting tidbit of your resume that I'm interested to poke at a little bit and ask you a couple of questions about. couple of questions about one of the first things I think you did after your sort of party switch political transformation was work on some of the funding and securing the funding for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, which I think people probably should remember was a pretty big deal. I mean, it was a front page news story for many weeks, not just the image of, you know, President Trump throwing a paper towel into a crowd, but it was a huge story and it had huge consequences. It raised all sorts of questions about our relationship with Puerto Rico, what it should be, what we should do for them. What did you do? What was that role like? And then we'll get into a little bit of

where things are now. Yeah. So just to set the stage, it was the largest natural disaster in the US in over a hundred years at the time. I don't think there's been anything that supplants it. The estimates are three, four, 5,000 people died. It was a hurricane. Hurricane Katrina was awful. You had the levees break and you had flooding. The government in New Orleans still worked. Puerto Rico, when Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria, the island was without power and telecommunications for two or three weeks. So we had no functioning government. I was in DC and we kind of worked as that center of the government. When the governor was on sat phones, dealing with his cabinet, directing Blackhawks where to pick people up, we were talking with senators. We were figuring out a legislative

strategy. We were coordinating media. So our goal, because Puerto Ricans are US citizens, they're not a state though, as you know, Isaac, our goal was one, to explain what Puerto Rico is to people and why this human suffering mattered to Americans, which is pathetic, but we needed to do it. Two, create a legislative strategy. Three, go to Congress, get that legislative strategy passed. So it was really three or four of us working on behalf of 3.4 million US citizens. And it was heartbreaking to just see how many members of Congress didn't care, how much of the general public didn't know they were citizens. And the human suffering that was going on, it was tough. It was very difficult to see.

Puerto Rico is, I think, one of the most interesting stories in modern day U.S. politics. I think it's something that's, you know, I think Hurricane Maria, like you said, and eyewitnesses, a reporter, I mean, it brought it to the forefront of the country's conscious for a little bit. But it is certainly slipped away now, I think, three or four years later. I don't think many Americans in the mainland, aside from Puerto Rican Americans, think much about it. But I sort of view it as a looming battle. I mean, I think bringing Puerto Rico in as a 51st state is something that we're going to see Democrats probably attempt to do in earnest in the next 10 to 20 years.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about that, where that is, what the future of Puerto Rico might be, how it might land in Congress. What's your read on the state of play? So this is very interesting. I'll give you an analysis you may not normally get. So some establishment Republicans who are open-minded would make Puerto Rico a state if they had their ability. They've co-sponsored bills. Puerto Ricans in general are very religious. Some of them tend to be socially conservative. And the way that the politics breaks down in

the island is not Republican Democrat, even though they have Republican Democrat, it's statehood versus non-statehood. So that's how the political parties are aligned. It is the belief of Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and Republicans that if you admit Puerto Rico as a state, you'd have two blue senators, three blue house people. That's not true, that it would not necessarily break down that way. It would be probably closer to 50-50, 55-45. So that is something just taken into consideration, that the Republican Party is completely against it for political purposes. You would think, on the other hand, the Democrats would be all for it. That's not the case.

You have establishment Democrats that either don't care or are in favor of it. have establishment Democrats that either don't care or are in favor of it. And then you have far left progressives like Nydia Velasquez and AOC, who, while maintaining that they are in favor of statehood, are actually creating legislation that prevents statehood from happening in a way that would be quick and accessible to the people of Puerto Rico. be quick and accessible to the people of Puerto Rico. And that is the most interesting thing, because you actually have progressives working in earnest to prevent the easy and quick admittance of Puerto Rico as a state to the United States. So it doesn't break down necessarily clean, blue and red. You have red, establishment blue, and then these progressives who are kind of in the middle, just trying to slow things down. Why do then these progressives who are kind of in the middle,

just trying to slow things down. Why do you think progressives are doing that? Well, because of the way that things break down on the island. The more socialist candidates, the former mayor of San Juan, the far further left, Mr. Gutierrez, who was a member of Congress, who then moved to Puerto Rico, was thinking about running for governor. These people who are more progressive tend to be in the anti-statehood party. So even though these progressives are messaging that statehood is necessary and equal treatment is necessary, their politics naturally align with the more socialist members on the island of Puerto Rico that are anti-statehood. And that's why they're ultimately working against statehood. If there was a vote in Puerto Rico,

in Puerto Rico, about whether to become a state in the United States or not, how do you think it would go? The last four plebiscites have all gone for statehood. Interesting. So there's been, I can't remember the last, I haven't been focusing on too much. I think it was in 2020 and I think it went 52 to 47. But it goes for statehood and it's slowly becoming more statehood. And the reason why it matters, man, is these people are giving back to the United States, but they're not treated equally through the way that they receive funding. And because of a lot of different inequalities through statehood, what you have happening is the majority of the human talent are leaving the island. And it's almost creating this knowledge and immigration death spiral that hurts the economy in a way that really won't be stopped until there is statehood. Yeah. It's a little

bit of like the brain drain on the island that we see in even like rural places in America. Okay. So before I let you go, one last question about Puerto Rico, and this is a little bit of an open-ended answer, but I'm going to ask you to put your tangle cap on here for a minute. What do you think in your mind are a few of the best reasons to take Puerto Rico in as a state and the few of the best reasons not to that you know about there? The best reasons are you have 3 million Americans right off the coast of Florida. So if you don't accept them in a state and you just leave them in and you say, no, you can't be a territory anymore. What do you do with these Americans? What do you do with the kids that are born to these Americans? So you have this citizenship issue, which could turn into a national security issue. Puerto Ricans live and

work in the US military. They fight and die for this country at numbers that are way outsized to the general population and other demographics in America. So if they're willing to fight and die, the least we could be willing to do is to ultimately support them and bring them in equal treatment. They're not asking for preferential treatment. It's equal treatment. The third reason is, like you mentioned, if it's this brain drain, it's this immigration, people fleeing the island, it's this economic issue that makes it very difficult for Puerto Rico to pull itself up by its bootstraps. So the status quo cannot work. You either got to admit it or you got to let it

go. And then again, the fourth reason is if you admit it, you can build something that's even more beautiful than it is. You can strengthen our coast. And then you have this port and this hub down to Central America, down to Latin America, and it makes trade and it makes drug enforcement and it makes national security all that much more easy. The more negative arguments, which I don't think hold weight because ultimately you're going to either end up with a failed state or a continuing deteriorating territory, which ultimately ends up in a national security issue. But the positive arguments are you have a political system in Puerto Rico and specifically an energy system, which has been beguiled by decades of nepotism and corruption, PREPA, and you can go Google this, that that's a major problem. It'll take

years to reform the existing bureaucratic status on the island. And then an argument that I do not agree with, because I think that Americans can speak whatever language they want, is people argue that because it's not 100% an English speaking country, I mean, sorry, territory or state that they shouldn't be allowed in. And that's my opinion, not a very good argument. allowed in. And that's my opinion, not a very good argument. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, all great, I think, mainstay considerations that people should think about. For me, I think the equal treatment and just the advantages of welcoming them are enough to end of really having that territory be totally brought into the United States umbrella is just, there's just so much upside. Um, and then I guess just on like a, a kind of silly level, it's like, I've been to Puerto Rico a few times.

It's gorgeous. The people are incredible. The food is awesome. They love the United States. They're so welcoming to tourists. It's like a beautiful culture. The island is absolutely stunning. I would like love if it were easier to travel there and hang out there. It's like way better than Florida, in my opinion, no offense to Floridians out there. But yeah, I'm just like on a very materialistic level. It would be awesome if it was a place that was just ours, you know, like part of our country. I think that'd be really cool. Justin, this has been awesome. Super interesting conversation. Before I let you go, I want to give you a chance to just tell folks what you're up to these days, where they can find your work, all that good stuff. we are doing a political podcast. We are primarily a podcast. We are unique in the caliber of guests that we get on in the way that they are Republican members of Congress, Democrat members of Congress, Fox News hosts and anchors, MSNBC News hosts and anchors. And then we also bring in leading think tank and academic experts to take really deep dives into policy.

So while I'm now with the Democratic Party, we really do take things from a centrist angle, and we let people explain their points of view without really attacking them, hitting them on the head with no hysteria. I listen to your open, and that's what we are doing here. You can find us, type politics plus media 101 into any podcast um in uh of platform and you'll be able to find us uh in our most recent episode is on ukraine with the uh former head of urban warfare at west point talking about the battle for the cities of ukraine i love it justin higgins thanks so much for the time i'm on the books to come on your podcast in the next couple of weeks. So if anybody needs some extra motivation to go subscribe and check you guys out, there it is. I'm looking forward to coming to your turf and chatting. I appreciate it. Appreciate your time,

man. Thank you very much, Isaac. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. The flu remains a serious disease. Thank you. or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.