The Bulwark Podcast - Josh Barro: Dear Fed, Please Lower Interest Rates

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

One of the biggest reasons voters are not happier about the economy is because interest rates are much higher than they were few years ago. Plus, publicity-hound RFK Jr's self-own, more from the mailbag, and should Sotomayor retire this year? Barro joins Tim today. show notes Josh arguing for Sotomayor's retirement ABC News story Tim mentioned

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Today, I'm here with my friend, Josh Barrow, writer of the very serious newsletter on Substack, co-host of the legal podcast, Serious Trouble, with Popat, aka Ken White. He is a mayo-loving centrist, and I have those a lot of different, you know, wears a lot of different hats, politics, economy. We're going to get him in on some life advice in a mailbag at the very end. Awesome. Excited to have him. Thanks for coming, Josh. Absolutely. Great to be here. Let me just start here. For folks who aren't familiar, used to be the center on left, right, and center. That's correct. And so, like, help us get our bearings on your politics. How do you define your politics these days? And, you know, maybe related to that, how do you assess the performance of the

Biden administration vis-a-vis your political preferences? Well, I mean, I'm a Democrat. Back in the day, I used to be a Republican, but I've been toward the political center through most of that journey. And, you know, I sort of, a lot of people in my political wheelhouse who drifted toward the Democratic Party over the last decade. It's sort of for the same set of reasons, largely, but not entirely to do with Donald Trump and the realignment of Democrats as the more serious party, essentially. I was a champion of Biden's in the 2020 campaign. I thought that it was a mistake for the Democratic

Party to try to run a two left wing candidate. And I think, you know, when the election turned out to be closer than we expected, I think, you know, part of the upshot of that was that if Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders had been the nominee, they would have lost. And so I think it was important for Democrats to be the normal party for normal people. And I think they achieved that largely in the 2020 election. I think that there have been some significant missteps by the Biden administration, although I sort of give them a B. You know, the American Rescue Plan was too large by a trillion dollars, and that was somewhat inflationary. And the student loan policy has been inflationary. They've done a number of things that goosed inflation, which is just their number one political problem. But most of the inflation arose

from things outside their control, the COVID and the hangover of COVID and to some extent, the war in Europe. And so, you know, you look around the world, world leaders are unpopular everywhere. Justin Trudeau's down like 15, 20 points, same with Rishi Sunak in the UK. And so, you know, Biden being down, you know, maybe by a point and a half or two actually looks relatively good on a global perspective. And that's partly because Donald Trump is such a weak candidate. It's partly because the U.S. really does have the best large economy in the world. We've been growing faster than our peers, in part because the Biden administration also made a number of good economic decisions, along with some of the missteps that they made. And then immigration, I think it was a misstep in the first, well,

really in the first month of the administration to so rapidly undo the Trump administration policies on immigration without a really clear idea of exactly what that was going to do, the extent to which that was going to fuel a migrant surge. And so that's another issue where I think the administration has largely come around to a correct approach now, which is being stymied by the Congress. But it's, they're sort of three years late on that. So that's, those are the two main areas where I would ding them. And I think that they may be the difference between Biden being reelected and us getting another Trump presidency. But even so, his performance, I think, has been better than his global peers through this period. And so I think he deserves a significant amount of credit for that. Yeah, I mean, a B is pretty good. Do you have any, do you have any

presidents of your lifetime that you grade higher than a B, besides George H.W. Bush, of course? I was going to say George H.W. Bush. Who also lost re-elect. Yes. The Clinton administration, I think, actually was largely a policy success. A lot of his personal behavior was not great. And he had an element of Trump to him in that he created all sorts of unnecessary political distractions for himself and for the party and for the country. And that was not wonderful. But I think, you know, largely, you know, we saw good economic performance in the Clinton administration in part because they were

making good decisions. He had good luck in the way that Biden has had bad luck. The 1990s were a good time to be running a Western country. You know, if we're totally setting aside all of the, you know, any sex scandals or corruption all of the, you know, any sex scandals or corruption kind of stuff, I think Bill Clinton probably is the most successful president of my lifetime. So you've sort of answered this, but I want to dig a little deeper. There's a concerning poll to me out of Pennsylvania this morning. And I don't, you know, this podcast, we're not going to just obsess over every little poll flare up because I think there are going to be outliers and various things. I care a little bit less about the top line of this, but there's one element of this Pennsylvania poll that is

kind of alarming to me. They did this in such a way that they asked people about their ballot. Initially, it was Trump 47, Biden 43. And then they asked, then they pushed people who were, you know, kind of leaning one way or the other to just give an answer, a two-way answer. That lands at Trump 52, Biden 48. Meanwhile, Bob Casey, who is the embodiment of generic Democrat, is a senator in Pennsylvania, is at 52. And Dave McCormick, the Davos hedge fund billionaire that's pretending to be MAGA, is at 48. Who lives in Connecticut. Yeah, he lives in Connecticut. So McCormick's a weak candidate, so maybe there's something to that. But that's a little concerning to me, that in this poll with leaners, 8% of respondents said that they're for Bob Casey and Donald Trump. How concerned are you about that? How do you assess what the Biden problem is? Is that age? Is that immigration? Like, why would he be doing so much worse than Bob Casey, do you think? Jesse Singel actually has an interesting piece just out today about the failure of partisans to understand swing voters. And I think often people who are highly engaged in politics actually understand the partisans on the other side better than they understand

persuadable voters, because it's easier to think about if you're a conservative, what it would be like to be a liberal. You can probably describe what they believe and what they want. A lot of these persuadable voters in this election, and particularly the voters with whom Biden has seen a real deterioration in his performance in the polling, are more marginally attached voters. Biden has held up quite well with the sorts of people who show up to vote in midterm primary elections, who show up to vote in special elections. And that's part of why, you know, Democrats keep looking around and saying, hey, our performance in these special elections is quite good. That doesn't seem to agree with the polling. And that probably means that Biden's in better shape than the polls make it look like. And that's possible. Although I think

the explanation that better fits the data is that basically Democrats are holding up especially well with the sort of people who are super voters. Democrats are so into voting, they're even going and voting in the Republican presidential primary. And so if I think about that Trump-Casey voter in Pennsylvania, my guess is this is probably someone who didn't vote in the midterm election. The last time they voted was in 2020. And we don't know whether they're going to turn out this time, but if they turned out four years ago, that means that they may well turn out again. And I think to think about these people, the hard part is to imagine what it's like to not have spent the last nine years obsessing over politics and Donald Trump.

You sort of look at it and it's like, how can you not have an incredibly strong view formed about this man and the prospect of him leading this country? But I think a lot of these people, they really don't. And they look at it and they basically say, you know, I voted for Biden because I wanted things to be normal and they didn't go back to normal. And I think that is mostly an inflation story. They say it's gotten harder for me to afford things. My standard of living doesn't feel as good to me as it did four years ago. And they have a sort of nostalgia for the Trump economy because the economy was good under Donald Trump until the pandemic hit. And I think that people sort of, they may blame Donald Trump for specific aspects of the COVID response, but it wasn't literally Donald Trump's fault that COVID happened at all. And so I think people,

basically, they look at that and they say, you know, things seem to work better then than they did now. And that causes them to lean toward electing Trump again. So it's basically draining out all of the like, high emotional salience political stuff. And just looking at, you know, their everyday lives and saying, you know, their everyday lives and saying, you know, gee, things seemed to work better back then. I think that's the whole thing. And that doesn't imply that you then vote for Dave McCormick in the Senate race. I think that, you know, to some extent, these are people who have, in a Rust Belt state like Pennsylvania, they may have ancestral Democratic voting patterns if they're more working class.

There is also candidate quality issues on both sides in that race. Dave McCormick, some voter was complaining to him about gas prices in a diner or something. He goes, oh yeah, my wife's on the board of Exxon, which is literally true. He's like the opposite of relatable. And he lives in Westport, Connecticut. He also pretended to be a farmer. Pennsylvania is a swing state. They elect lots of Republicans to things. This is two Senate elections in a row where they're picking someone who's literally not from the state. I realize David McCormick grew up in Pennsylvania, but he's made his career and his life in Connecticut and is still commuting back

and forth to his mansion in Westport, Connecticut, even farther away than the northern New Jersey affluent suburb where Dr. Oz lived. You would think that there is some Republican who has like held office in the state of Pennsylvania who they could nominate for these things. And then on the other side, you know, Bob Casey, I don't think he's quite generic Democrat. You know, his brother and his father were politicians in Pennsylvania. His father was the governor of the state. There's, you know, to the extent that people care about that stuff anymore, the Casey family is really like a very, very Pennsylvania family. Yeah, the supply and demand issue for Republican candidates is definitely a problem where they've got Confederate cosplayer Doug Mastriano, Dr. Oz, and Connecticut hedge fund guys,

the candidates that they came with. How do you assess then, I mean, you're self-identified as somebody that is attracted to the Democrats because they're more normal and responsible party right now, which I think is objectively true and same, by the way. So then how do you assess then your analysis there, which is that there's a lot of voters who are looking at Donald Trump and Biden and saying in this time and being like, eh, there isn't really a clear answer on this question of who is more abnormal. Are you open to the hope that over the course of the campaign, these people are going to be reminded how abnormal Trump is? Is there something that Democrats can do to drive home how abnormal he is? Is this impossible because of the river of shit that Donald Trump throws? And like, and that there's a boy who cried wolf element to this for people, which is crazy to me given January 6. But I don't know,

how do you assess the normalcy, the competition for the normie vote here? I think the sorts of voters who are not that focused on politics and who do not reliably turn out in non-presidential elections, when they think about normal and not normal, I think they're thinking more about their own lives and their own economic situations than they are thinking about what someone who's really engaged might think about. They're not thinking about democracy as an abstract concept. They're not thinking about specific financial or other scandals or, you know, what's the influence of the Saudis in an administration, that sort of thing. So you're specifically talking about general election voters or

presidential voters here, because I do want to push back. It did seem like in Arizona and in some of these states, there were a handful of voters that did actually care about democracy and came out and voted for terrible, like Democrats that did not run very good campaigns just because they were so concerned about the abstract stuff. I agree, but Biden already has those voters. Yeah. When you look at, you know, the change in support for Biden and Trump compared to 2020 voters who voted last time who are changing voters who voted in the, in the midterm election, Biden is holding quite well his support with that group of voters. If they voted for him in 2020, they're voting for him again. So I think, you know, the sorts of people who came out and, you know, made the difference and elected Katie Hobbs as governor of Arizona, even though they

may have voted down ballot for Republicans. I mean, the state treasurer in Arizona is a Republican who won by 12 or 13 points because she's a normal person. Those sorts of voters, I suspect Biden already has. The problem is it's related to how his numbers in so many of these polls look remarkably weak with non-white voter groups. That's largely non-college educated non-whites. To the extent that Hispanic voters and black voters are falling away from Biden, again, it's the sort of voters who did not show up for the midterm and who are less politically engaged. So I think those messages about Trump and democracy, I think they're important for a certain set of voters. And I don't have a problem with getting those messages out there. I just, I don't think that's

where Biden needs to make up the difference in order to actually win these states again. This was supposed to be the mailbag at the end, but it's just so relevant. I'm going to mention it now. Brian asked, you know, what can we do to convince normal people that the economy isn't all bad? And I guess maybe more to the point, what can Biden, what should Biden be doing, both messaging and policy on this question? If your assessment is basically that the voters that are out there that have left Biden are basically upset about inflation and costs going up over the last few years, what's the message to them? Are there any policy levers that can be pulled? Well, so first of all, there's been significant improvement in the polling on consumer sentiment

over the last few months. As mortgage rates started to come down again, as inflation has moderated, public sentiment about the economy has improved. It hasn't translated into better poll performance for the president, which I've been a little bit surprised by. Larry Summers, the economist who was Treasury Secretary under Clinton. And Harvard president during the social network. Yes, exactly.

Which was an important career moment for him, and he had to deal with the Winklevii. Exactly. So he and some other economists have an interesting working paper out now about, because when the government measures inflation, it's the price of all the things you buy, it does not include financing or interest costs. So if the price of a car is unchanged, but the interest rate on a car loan is 9% instead of 5%, the car as a practical matter has gotten more expensive for the consumer. And this paper basically says if we adjust inflation measures to account for, you know, interest burdens that consumers are bearing, then that explains almost all of the so-called sentiment gap where people are saying, you know, well, the numbers on the economy look pretty good. Why aren't voters happier? Almost all of that can be explained by the fact

that interest rates are much higher than they were a few years ago. That doesn't matter when you're buying eggs at the supermarket, but it matters if you're buying a car, it matters if you're buying a house. I don't think voters are really wrong to have mixed to slightly negative views on the economy right now. I think that, you know, the employment situation is good, but a lot of things really have gotten quite a bit more expensive. And through much of this administration, wage growth was not keeping up with that price growth. That has improved in the last few months. But I don't think it's crazy for voters to look at their financial situation and say that they feel like they were better off, we have to go with five years ago rather than four years ago, because

the COVID pandemic was hitting almost exactly four years ago. I think it is a real problem with the economic fundamentals. I think the number one thing the president needs is interest rate cuts between now and the election. Jerome Powell needs to save us. Powell, I think, you know, correctly is somewhat formalistic about this. And basically, you know, his job is to react to the economic data. He's not supposed to try to get someone elected. The other thing is the inflation problem is not fixed yet. It is much improved. But the one problem if the Fed cuts rates too soon,

too fast, is that inflation could spike again. So I think it's a somewhat difficult technical question of exactly how much the Fed ought to cut. But certainly the president's political situation would be improved by the Fed cutting. Donald Trump, obviously, you know, he personally harangued the Fed to cut interest rates in sort of 2018, 2019. And the Fed did end up cutting interest rates. Now, it wasn't really clear the extent to which that was actually a response to Donald Trump's comments. There was this stock market pickup right around Christmas in 2018, caused some problems in the banking sector that gave the Fed a good fundamental reason to stop its rate hikes and then ultimately start cutting rates. So I don't know whether it worked. But you

know, one version of this we saw with Donald Trump is the president can explicitly try to get interest rate cuts. We don't like that, though. That's anti norm. The funny thing with this is that it actually goes back to 1992 election, where George H.W. Bush bitterly wanted interest rate cuts and actually got a bunch of interest rate cuts in 1992, not to the extent that he wanted. And he complained about it publicly. And then when Clinton came in in 1993, the White House started saying, we don't comment on monetary policy. And that wasn't really purely some ideological thing about Fed independence. It was a strategic decision that you actually made the Fed's life more difficult if you called for rate cuts. It made the Fed look indisciplined if it went ahead and cut rates. And they decided the Fed was more likely to actually bring rates

down if they said nothing. That was probably right in the situation. You know, I don't have a strong view on how this works strategically, but it wasn't just some like high-minded ideological thing about we shouldn't talk about monetary policy. It was actually a strategy to get the monetary policy they wanted. The Biden administration clearly feels that it's not in their interest to lobby the Fed. Although, I mean, the president did say in the State of the Union that interest rates will be coming down, which he caught even a little bit of flack for that. People saying that he, you know, he shouldn't be pushing the Fed like that. Now, that's just kind of descriptive. You can look at the financial markets. Market participants expect interest rate

cuts. The Fed, you know, they publish their economic projections and Fed board members expect to cut rates. So the president was really more making a prediction than lobbying there. But I mean, one option is that they could push harder. I don't have a strong view on whether that would be productive or counterproductive if they did it. The other thing is that he should do everything he can to avoid creating inflationary pressures. The problem is it's really too late for that. And I, you know, I was writing about this a year ago that, you know, they needed to the student loan interest pause. That was effectively a $60 billion stimulus every year as it was ongoing. We're at record levels of oil and gas production, but they could have been more friendly to the industry than they were, and maybe have gotten an even higher level than we have now.

So there are things they could have done that would have pushed in the right direction on inflation that would have created room for the Fed to cut rates, which would be improving the president's situation right now. Unfortunately, this close to the election, I'm not sure that there's that much he can do. But I really think that's the number one driver of are people going to be happy about the economy? I don't think haranguing people that they ought to feel better is likely to be effective. I think they're having a reaction to the very real inflation interest rate situation. And the most effective thing you can do is improve it. Jerome Powell, if you're listening, we do not want to live in an urbanist autocracy,

please, please lower interest rates a couple quarter quarter points. It's fine, please. Yeah, your point is really kind of something that I've been saying that is, there's this aspirational element that's very unique and wonderful about America. And, and I do think if you're living in a moment where people, this is only one subset, because, you know, many people aren't home buyers, homeowners, but among home buyers and homeowners, if you feel stuck, right, if you feel like I really can't move, like I can't move into a bigger house, even it's like, oh, my family's growing, I want to move out into the suburbs or the exurbs and get a bigger house with more space. You can't do that right now, because it's not going to be affordable

because of the mortgage side of things. If you want to take a job in another state, I recently moved from the Bay Area to New Orleans, and it was good. We got more value than we did in the Bay Area for our dollar, but not nearly as much as it would have been four years ago or three or five years ago. And I do think that has an impact on people's mindset. If they feel stuck and stagnant, then that, you know, gives them a

view of the economy that is maybe not as tangible as what what egg prices are, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And that's a that's a very real problem. I mean, personally, I'm in contract on an apartment right now. The real estate market is very weird. There are not a lot of sellers or buyers in New York. So there's not that much stuff to look at. very weird there are not a lot of sellers or buyers in new york so there's not that much stuff to look at but there also aren't a lot of people bidding against you for exactly this reason people who already own a home they have a mortgage interest rate that is so much lower than whatever they can get right now and so they they need to keep their mortgage they need to keep their current home even if it's too small or too large or in the wrong place and

that's a real problem it's a it's a reason to want to create the economic situation where inflation is tame enough that interest rates can start coming down. That will really do a lot to help fix that problem. We have one other element that is potentially a monkey wrench in the Biden re-election, and that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his third party campaign. We have some news. he announced that later this month he'll be announcing his vice presidential candidate in oakland my former uh place of residence uh there is some buzz that maybe that vice presidential candidate could would be nfl quarterback aaron rogers who went to school at berkeley down the road from oakland yeah as a result of that this was a huge gift to pamela brown at cnn who got an excuse to write a story about how at the Kentucky Derby, Aaron Rodgers told her at a Kentucky Derby party that he thought that Sandy Hook was a false flag and that the children that were killed there were actors.

And so that news is out today on CNN. How do you assess the veep stakes for RFK and just RFK in general? Well, so first of all, I like Philip Klein's theory on this, the editor of National Review Online, which is that it's not going to be Aaron Rodgers and he's not considering Aaron Rodgers, but that RFK Jr. realizes correctly that he will get more media attention for whatever VP pick he does announce if you have these news cycles ahead of it

about how it might be Aaron Rodgers. And Aaron Rodgers likes RFK and loves attention and so is happy to play along with that. So I don't think it's going to be Aaron Rodgers. That's fair. It says a little bit of something about the state of our politics that you feel like it's a boost for you to float Sandy Hook and vaccine conspiracists who are famous in order to get attention. You think that that's a net plus? I don't know if RFK Jr. knew that Aaron Rodgers specifically was a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. Maybe not specifically Sandy Hook,

but there have been some signs out there that he has some weird views. Right, and RFK Jr. is not opposed to a good conspiracy theory, obviously. That's true. The Sandy Hook one doesn't strike me as quite RFK Jr.'s specific style. If you've been going around buttonholing reporters to tell them that

Sandy Hook was a false flag, I guess you should be concerned that sooner or later one of them is going to publish that, especially if you appear to be entering the political arena. But I don't think the Sandy Hook thing was part of the PR calculation there. Are you worried about RFK for Biden? I'm kind of worried. There was a period of time where it was my conventional wisdom that he would hurt Trump more, and I'm less certain about that now. I think that maybe particularly black voters, younger voters, that he could eat into Biden. I really don't know how to think about it. I can see it going either way. I mean, especially when, you know, when we talk about the fall off for Biden among non-white voters who are disproportionately younger, non-college

educated, didn't vote in the midterms. That also seems like the crowd that RFK might be appealing to. And so if those voters, if they might have peeled off to Trump and then they instead peel off to a third party candidate, that's only half as bad for Biden. So I can see RFK Jr.'s appeal being really scrambled in terms of where people normally are on the electorate. I mean, that's how you have the situation where RFK Jr., who has been considered a left-wing political figure for most of my life, and he has a lot of big government, more regulation positions, how he's flirting with the Libertarian Party with the idea that they might nominate him. It's a weird moment in our politics that creates weird alliances. I also don't know exactly how the

two major campaigns will interface with RFK Jr. voters, because you can imagine, I mean, for example, one thing that you might do if you were Democrats, presumably an outside spending committee, is you could run ads targeted at anti-vaxxers about how Donald Trump created the vaccine and all of the things he did to, you know, to make people take the vaccine. And you could do this sort of rat fucking thing where you're saying, you know, Donald Trump is so pro-vaccine, isn't that great trying to push them to RFK Jr. I assume there would be a lot of blowback if you did that, because in some sense you were fueling anti-vax positioning, which has negative public health effects. So I don't know about who's going to be willing to do that, whether anyone will and, you know, who will take credit for it. But it's not just a matter of what RFK Jr.'s raw appeal is to different groups. It's, you know, the things that the other two campaigns do to try to make him appealing to voters who might go for the other side. Speaking of things that have scrambled our politics, the TikTok bill this week, we've been

writing a lot about. I'm curious in your thoughts. I mean, to me, it seemed like very clearly before once again, Trump inserted himself into this, that there was kind of this view among Republicans and Democrats on the Hill that the Chinese ownership of TikTok is a problem and that they should all hold hands and jump together on this. And there may be a few kind of weird outliers in both parties, but it would be overwhelming. And so that there's no backlash among the TikTok kids, and that they can just sort of move this through. And Yass, donor Jeffrey Yass, and Kellyanne Conway and the Swamp getting their tentacles into Donald Trump and having him flip flop on this has really scrambled it. So I'm curious about your assessment of sort of the legislative prospects at this point,

as well as the politics of it. I've been pretty unimpressed with the pro-TikTok lobbying campaign aimed at conservatives. I mean, there was that story that Kellyanne Conway had been taking meetings on the Hill for months, pushing a pro-TikTok position. She got zero votes initially. Before the Energy and Commerce Committee voted it out 50 to zero in favor of the bill. Clearly, you know, not a very effective advocate there on the Hill for that position. There were only 15 Republicans who ultimately voted against the bill on the House floor, a lot of them the usual suspects like Marjorie Taylor

Greene. So it doesn't look to me like the former president's opposition to the bill is yet translating to significant conservative dissension about the bill, except from people you would have expected it from anyway, like Rand Paul and Thomas Massey. The question is, who exactly is Donald Trump playing the con on here? You have this billionaire Jeff Yass, who owns some substantial minority stake in ByteDance. I forget what the exact percentage is, but it's a large share of the company. He's also a huge donor to the Club for Growth. You know, he really wants the GOP to take a pro-TikTok position. And so Donald Trump, you know, after having gotten some financial support for him, goes out there and says, I don't think they should pass this bill.

Is that actually an effort to kill the bill or is it an effort to get Jeff Yass to keep writing checks? The news reports saying that Trump is not making calls on the Hill trying to kill the bill. I mean, we've seen from the immigration bill what it looks like when Donald Trump actually wants Congress to kill something. It's a different kind of pressure campaign than the sort of half-assed one that we've seen on TikTok. I think the bigger threats to this bill come from more establishment forces. Maria Cantwell, the Democratic chairwoman of the relevant committee in the Senate, has been very skeptical about the House approach in this legislation. She wants to take what she describes as a more targeted approach that I don't think addresses the real problem. People are always talking about data protection and that sort of thing. The real issue

here isn't data. The real issue here is communist Chinese control over a media entity and deciding what things get shown to Americans. I don't think you can fix that without changing the ownership. The pressure on this in the Senate, I think mostly does not come from the extremes in either party. It comes from sort of more entrenched industry interests. I'm an L on this, but it's always worth contemplating. Is it possible that Trump is doing 4D chess on this or is at least his lizard instinct uh and that the existing biden issues with young voters you know this might be a lever to exacerbate them maybe that's certainly the pitch that kellyanne conway has been making explicitly now again i don't know whether she's saying

that because she believes it or she's saying it because she's trying to protect tiktok's corporate interests generally a good bet that she's not saying things because she believes them when it comes to kellyanne Conway. Sometimes, you know, the best argument to make is the true one. So, you know, she's a pollster. I assume if she has a good political argument to make, she'll probably lead with it. I don't know.

I mean, for one thing, I don't think TikTok is likely to actually be removed from app stores before the election, even if legislation like this passes. I mean, the legislation already gives TikTok six months. I don't think it's likely that this will be enacted more than six months ahead of the election. That's early May, and the Senate still needs to write its own version. I don't think the Senate's just going to pick up the House bill and pass it. I think there's going to be more negotiation. Though if TikTok plays hardball, it does give out the Chinese opportunities. There have been some stories that the Chinese don't know who to root for in this election,

which I think is kind of sensible from their perspective. It does give the opportunity to be like, okay, we're calling your bluff. And in December at Thanksgiving, this goes away. You know, I get,

you could see a sort of Damocles element to it. Oh, you, you mean that they would announce that? I mean, well, they've been, they've been saying that they're not going to divest.

I don't know whether that's, I mean, if TikTok is worth $50 billion, that's, that's a lot of money money even to a major sovereign government. So to sort of just let the company fold rather than take the money. Well, certainly if they do that, that tells us a lot about what TikTok was for and what they really value about it. I'm really skeptical of this as a vote moving issue, especially if the ban is not actually in effect at the time of the election, because first of all, a lot of these people who are calling Congress are literal children. Yeah. I've heard these recordings of the messages that are being left on representatives

offices, voicemails, when TikTok puts out the push notification says, call your congressman, protect TikTok. It's like 12 year olds. So they're not voting. Their parents are probably happy. Yeah. Some of the parents are happy. Obviously, a lot of adults use TikTok. But the sorts of people who are really passionate about that just do not strike me as sort of super high regularity voters. I sort of wonder what's in their psychology. Because, you know, I've never been on TikTok because of the communist China thing. Really? Yeah.

Oh, come on. What are you worried about? I've been on TikTok. And I get, you know, some of these assholes on tiktok and i get you know some of the some of these assholes on the internet or be like you're a hypocrite tim and i'm like what are the chinese gonna find out about me that i like to watch videos about gay relationship drama and basketball and andy rock like what are you like what are they gonna find out about so mask i know yeah i know my two wolves inside of me it's not a hypocrisy thing. I don't judge you for using TikTok.

I just like, I don't know. I've always had a kind of a gross feeling about it. And I don't really need another app to waste many hours of my time. Fair enough. But I also, if one of these apps goes away, another thing just comes in its place. Like it's not like short form video content

is going to disappear if TikTok goes away. It'll go over to Instagram Reels and whatever else. So I do not actually think that it would be, I mean, if you're a TikTok creator and you've invested a lot in that platform and there's some difficulty porting your audience and your following over to another platform, maybe you care deeply about the specific platform. But if you're primarily a reader, I think you at least ought to be fairly agnostic about that and assume that if it's not TikTok, you'll just get this stuff somewhere else. You created some drama. You're kind of a messy bitch who loves her drama sometimes. Yeah, with regards to Sonia Sotomayor, you're a weird,

you're kind of a weird person to spur on the Sonia Sotomayor must resign to protect the Supreme Court argument, which many people have jumped on i think you were the one that really spurred it and in a way that you're i think you're unusual because you're not like an anti roberts court radical right you've you've had kind of a nuance some of the left got mad sometimes that some of your takes that have been defensive of some of the choices of the roberts court i guess you can speak that. But so why are you so adamant that Sonia Sotomayor, age 69, should resign from the Supreme Court? Well, I liked the Roberts court better when Roberts was actually at the ideological center

of the court. You know, I think there's much to recommend about his vision for the court. I don't agree with all of it, but I certainly agree with more of it than most Democrats do. But he's not in control anymore. Fair. And so now, you know, because it's a six to three majority, you need Roberts and Barrett or Robert, I mean, it depends on the issue. It's Roberts and Barrett or Roberts and Kavanaugh or Roberts and Gorsuch, depending what you're talking about. But very often you can't get any of them. The court has moved farther away from me ideologically than where it used to be. I would like it to move back closer to me or at least not get any farther away. If Sonia Sotomayor does not step down before the election, there is a substantial probability that Democrats will lose either the

White House or the Senate or both. And so they will not be able to confirm a liberal replacement to succeed her. Which is because you agree with the insight that a Republican Senate will never confirm a Democratic appointee or at least the desired Democratic appointee. No. And I don't think a Democratic Senate will confirm a Republican appointee either. I disagree with that. Why would they? There are too many normie Democratic senators that people can bring along. No, but the majority leader just wouldn't bring it to the floor. Yeah, maybe.

As McConnell did. And if he did, you know, they would like riot in the streets and kill him. Democrats are actually responsive to the complaints of institutionalists, though, still in a way that Republicans are not. So I guess that would be my argument for this counterfactual. They were responsive, often excessively responsive to the complaints of progressive activists. And normally that bothers me. But this is an issue where the progressive activists would be right that Democrats should not confirm a nominee for Republican president. The level of base outrage that they would face, they wouldn the Senate map. But if Trump were reelected, I don't think it's implausible that we'd have a Democratic Senate after 26. In any case, the situation we're talking about here, where you have a Republican Senate and Democratic president, they won't confirm a replacement. And so Sotomayor will have to continue to serve on the court until the next convenient opportunity for her to retire. She will be 70 years old at the time of the election, which is how old Antonin Scalia was on the night of the 2006 election, which foreclosed his opportunity to resign into a little more than 10 years to get to 2017, the next time that a Republican president could appoint a nominee to be confirmed by a Republican Senate. And he didn't make it. He died at the age of 79 unexpectedly.

And nobody thought he was on death's door in 2006 because he wasn't on death's door. He lived almost another decade. That just wasn't quite enough time. And so basically, if S don't know what it is, a 15% chance, a 20% chance that they fail to control that seat in the event that they do have to wait that long. And I just think that's an unacceptable risk, especially because you can replace any of these judges with an essentially equivalent younger judge. There's this weird cult of personality that forms around these people. The Sonia Sotomayor candle. You don't have a votive candle to Sonia Sotomayor? Well, I mean, it's not as bad as the Ruth Bader Ginsburg situation,

but I mean, you say it's weird for me to be raising this. It's because the progressives who would raise it, who were shouting retire, bitch, at Steve Breyer, they can't bring themselves to call for a Hispanic woman to retire. I mean, there was a quote in Politico about, you know, that creates awkward optics. I don't have direct insight into this, but I suspect some of this comes down from the funders for these sorts of, I mean, you had these outside pressure groups like the Man Justice.

Ultimately, these groups, you know, reflect the interests of progressive activists, but also of the people who finance the groups. And it doesn't appear to me that there's some, you know, rich progressive out there who's decided to make it a project to try to get Sotomayor off the court. And so that's part of why you don't have these voices. It's not all organic and nobody is paying for the non-organic stuff. This is a wonderful transition into our first mailbag question. Okay. Are you ready?

Yes. All right. We're moving to the mailbag segment. We don't have music for you. Okay. Jonathan. This comes from Jonathan. And he writes, i've seen your friends

on the bulwark and i think josh barrow despite you're not a friend on the bulwark i think that you're gonna also be lumped into this category okay sometimes dismiss the left as quote all about the pronouns slash identity police why is it the left is blamed for defending their rights when the right is coming after them we wouldn't talk about trans rights as much if the GOP wasn't trying to demand what bathroom you use or calling any teacher who uses appropriate pronouns a groomer. Are we just not supposed to care about erasure? Talk about how you think about that problem. I feel like as two gay men, we're well suited to answering this question about how you balance some concerns about some of the lefty identity stuff with the very legitimate concerns

about the assault from the right? So the first thing I would say is that I actually don't buy trans issues as a major driver of electoral outcomes in the United States in either direction. I mean, obviously, it's something that gets talked about. And there are, you know, policies that get passed that have consequences for real people. I guess with the exception of the 2016 governor's race in North Carolina, where you had this very specific economic backlash over the bathroom bill law there, which turned it into an economic issue and got voters to really be focused on it. Aside from that, it's hard for me to think about elections that have really swung on this in either direction. And I think to some extent, as Republicans have really tried to make this a front and center issue, I think most voters, they just, they don't wake up in the

morning thinking about trans people in either direction. They don't view them as a threat in their daily lives. I don't think that they're, you know, afraid to walk into bathrooms or any nonsense like that. They may not also be motivated about trans rights as a civil rights issue, but I just, I don't buy it as the high salience issue that a lot of people make it out to be. And so, you know, when I complain about the left, I mean, you know, there are rhetorical things that I don't like about, you know, the sort of the identity politics part of the left and, you know, constantly trying to come up with new words for things and such. But I think that's much more annoying than it is actually really truly consequential.

I think it has helped Biden to talk like a real person. And I think that there can be a weird sort of HR speak that comes out from certain Democratic candidates that makes them, it's not even necessarily so much about the ideological content as that you just sound bizarre when you talk in the way that people talk inside a left-wing nonprofit. So I think that stuff is a mistake. But I really think that to the extent that the Democratic Party is losing votes by being too far to the left, I think it's much more about substantive stuff, like that the party has in fact moved very far to the left on immigration at a time when migration patterns have made the public swing

somewhat back in the more conservative direction of immigration. But I think that's mostly about policy. I don't think it's mostly about rhetoric. I do think it's a little bit about rhetoric. It's on the answer to the question. But before I get to my concerns about the rhetoric, I do want to say, and we do, and I think we might have had a disagreement about this if I remember correctly, I was deeply concerned about the Don't Say Gay bill in Florida. Now, I think the judge has come down on that and ruled in a way that, frankly, undermined a lot of the most concerning elements of the Florida bill. This was a settlement, right? Yeah.

Yeah. But even still, I think that particularly what is happening in schools, in the classroom, the backlash in schools is something that really concerns me. I have a six-year-old. I'm lucky that she's able to go to private school. I think I'd have deep concerns about having her in public school in a red state because of the assault. We saw the situation with Lex, I'm forgetting their last name, in Oklahoma, the non-binary student. Nex Benedict, I believe was the name. Nex Benedict, thank you, the non-binary student. Nex Benedict, I believe was the name.

Nex Benedict, thank you. The non-binary student that died in Oklahoma. But just even the notion of where teachers don't feel comfortable, where one random parent can sue teachers and the definition of what is instruction about LGBT issues is very vague. I think it creates a silencing effect in a lot of schools. I think that as a practical matter, people that do not have six-year-olds or have not recently had six-year-olds might not remember the fact that it's very noticeable when me and my husband walk into a kindergarten class with our daughter. The other six-year-olds ask about it to the teacher,

putting teachers in an uncomfortable situation where they cannot answer that question or talk about it candidly is silly. Like, I understand that, like, oh, we don't want kindergartners to learn about, you know, whatever, different types of sexual acts. Like, sure, of course. But the fact that they can't talk about gender identity

and sex, so I think that there is a backlash that is happening that is particularly targeting trans folks, but also gay folks that is concerning. And I think that Democrats and every well-intended person should fight against that and argue for it. But as a shorthand, when I say something on this podcast, like, you know, sometimes the left and, you know, they're signaling wrong by obsessing over pronouns. I think about things like I was reading about Nex Benedict in ABC News. And I guess Nex's mother is a Choctaw. And so ABC News assesses them as a 2SLGBTQ plus person, and that is in the second paragraph of the article,

that is a nonsensical string of letters. And I don't care about it. I'm not mad about it. It hasn't radicalized me. It doesn't want to make me vote for Republicans. But I think that to your point about the HR speak, that if you are, like I am, concerned about the rights attack on gay and trans rights, if you're concerned about the fact that Donald Trump is going to be bringing in an autocracy, that makes it more important that democratic politicians act in sound normal and try to speak to the broadest possible coalition. And they shouldn't unnecessarily do things that turn people off or scare them or freak them out. And there's like a strategic

element to all this. I mean, a big part of like this, this is not a new thing, right? Like the fight for gay marriage at times included making arguments that were politically palatable, right? And trying to make the case in ways that were more politically palatable rather than, you know, just completely letting your freak flag fly in every sort of situation. And if people want to identify as non-binary, or I think people should be respected, but I think that also it's preposterous, you know, when Elizabeth Warren puts she, her, and her bio, like everybody knows that she's she, her, right? And so like, why are we doing, like, what is the point of this besides to potentially alienate gettable people? And so

that is my answer to the question of why sometimes we flag that as an issue. I mean, the other thing, though, about meeting people where they are is that, you know, these issues that it's coming up with trans issues in schools now, and also very often about the way that, you know, the history of race in America is taught in schools, political fights over, you know, what the content of public education is going to be is one of the oldest political issues. And it's going to be with us forever. Public schools are shared institutions. They are ultimately going to reflect the values of the communities that control them. And so that entails a certain amount of political realism. And I think that the way that progressives have often talked about this and, you know,

talking about so-called book banning and that about this and, you know, the, you know, talking about so-called book banning and that sort of thing, you know, ultimately school libraries are not comprehensive and curricula necessarily entail editorial choices about what you're going to cover and what you're not going to cover and what you're going to teach. And those choices are necessarily value laden. So I think that there's been this sort of this unwillingness to give any ground and you end up in positions where you're defending specifically the book Genderqueer, for example. It must be in the school library. When in fact, on a fundamental level, it is really unimportant whether that book is in

the library or not. If it's in the library, it's unlikely that your kid is going to look at it anyway. On both sides of this, it's fundamentally unimportant, right? Right. And people have put tremendous stakes on this on either side. And, you know, it should be, you know, possible to say, you know, okay, the book that has the cartoon of someone sucking on a dildo, like, if that's not in the library, I think will be okay. They can still Google it. People can still Google for it. You know, it's gettable. Amazon.com,

other libraries exist exist yeah right people sort of have this idea that if you give an inch they'll take a mile and you can never admit that you know anything is is inappropriate for for a school setting but in fact then what that just ends up meaning if you defend everything your opponents attack is that they get to pick what your positions are and they can put you in this position of defending things that are not very defensible and so i think that the sometimes the left has not been as strategic on this as it ought to be. Concur. Strategy and defending human rights and defending gay rights can live together in harmony. Okay. Final question, then I'll let you go. Life advice segment. Anonymous. I'm in a newish relationship, about three years, and we've

agreed to never talk politics. My is super mega and i'm center left politics wasn't in my top five before 2016 but now it's fueling my doubt about my ability to sustain this great relationship i don't hate the other side or brand them as evil but steer clear of engaging in their nonsense i think this relationship is worth nurturing but it's going to have to come from my tolerance and goodwill am i going along to get along isn't that part of all relationships josh barrow i'm sorry i can't get over describing a three-year relationship as newish. As newish, I also noticed that. My husband and I were married three years after we started dating. Gay marriage was not legal three years after me and my husband started dating,

so that was not possible for me. Certainly, it's possible to have relationships where people have disagreements of political values. I think they need to have relationships where people have disagreements of political values. I think they need to have some underlying shared moral framework, because you have to believe that your partner is a moral person and that they're making good and moral decisions. And I think that's possible even if you disagree politically, but sometimes it won't be the case. Because your political commitments tend to arise out of your moral commitments. And very often when you look at someone with very different political commitments than you, you will reasonably conclude that they have very different moral commitments and they might not be moral commitments that you can respect. So I think that's the first question is, do you think that your partner is fundamentally a moral person and is making decisions for good moral reasons, even if he or she ends up disagreeing with you. So I think that's the first question to ask. I'm also a little bit put off by

the exact way in which the writer is describing this, because it sounds like they're trying to convince themselves that they're okay with this. I'm sorry, do we know is the writer a man or a woman? We don't. Okay. So he or she is sort of saying you know it has to be my forbearance what was the language my yeah it's my tolerance and goodwill right what about the other partner's tolerance and goodwill i mean you know this this has to be a two-way street and again it can be but basically if you know if you're sitting there you know gritting your teeth and just you know feeling like well i'm just going to let all of this pass but it's ultimately eating you up inside and driving you crazy then the relationship is not going to work. So I think you need to ask

yourself, is that what you're doing? Are the two of you actually engaged in this in a way that is mutual, where there's a project that both of you are working on and where you both have fundamental underlying respect for each other? And if the answer to that is yes, then the relationship may well be healthy. But if the answer is is no and really it's a lot of work for you to bottle this up and tolerate it then i think you're going to have to go and find somebody else three years also like you know even even without this issue you ought to be thinking about engagement at this point and if you're not ready to think about that you should probably be moving on some really great advice i would just add i think that in a different situation where

you're already married like the idea of having tolerance and goodwill for your partner makes a lot of sense to me. There's, we have a reader that once messaged me and said that them and their husband only communicate about politics via text message because it allows them to not to bubble up their anger at one another. And it's like, okay, all right, now they're managing a relationship that already was built on something, right? Like they're married and they're figuring out how can we make sure to not let politics get in the way of this marriage. I totally respected that. I thought that was interesting. That is not really the case here, right?

Like you're trying to decide, it seems to me, whether that should be a permanent relationship. So you shouldn't need to have the tolerance and goodwill on the front end about something that obviously you seem passionate about. But again, this is not the front end. They've been together for three years. This is a very established relationship. Three years. That's a good point. Right. The front end of what should be a big decision though, to your point, which is they should be starting to think about engagement at this point. Okay. My last thing is the word super mega. I would be worried about getting to a marriage about anybody that was super anything that i was against right super big nascar fan i don't know like very religious right somebody that is so into something that you would describe them as super into it that you're hostile to to me that's like it would be

very different if somebody emailed me and said hey boy i don't know it's i'm a little worried that this person i'm dating might vote for Donald Trump. They, whatever, liked the apprentice or they care about protectionist trade policy so deeply or, you know, whatever. I'd be like, okay, that'd be one thing and manageable. I don't know. Super mega was a very concerning phrase for me in that message. Okay, hopefully that was helpful, Anonymous.

Josh Barrow, thank you for your wisdom, your moral guidance, and hopefully we can do this again soon. Absolutely. This is great. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, Josh Barrow. We will be back tomorrow with our old friend Amanda Carpenter talking democracy. We'll see you all then. Drop, drop and playin' our favorite CDs Pullin' up to the parties

Tryna get a little bit tipsy Don't stop, make it pop DJ blow my speakers up Tonight I'ma fight till we see the sunlight Tick tock on the clock But the party don't stop No, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Don't stop, make it pop DJ, go, my speaker's up

Tonight, I'ma fight Till we see the sunlight Tick-tock on the clock But the party don't stop, no The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brath.