The Daily Beast Podcast - The Right Way to Fight Georgia’s Voter-Suppression Law

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Goldie Taylor has been working in and around Georgia politics for decades. So she knows first-hand the kind of stunt Republicans are trying to pull with this new voter-suppression law.  “What [Gov.] Brian Kemp will tell you, what other state GOP office holders will tell you, is that they've done this to restore confidence in the ballot. Poppycock. They have done it to keep people who don't look like them, church like them, live like them, away from the voting booth,” Taylor tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. Taylor knows a lot of her out-of-state friends are outraged, too. But their calls to boycott Georgia over this law? They’re just wrong, she says.  “Sometimes being an ally means shutting up,” Taylor continues. “As soon as this began to happen, we heard people, especially people in Hollywood say, ‘Oh, we're going to boycott Georgia until they stop this.’ Right. And both me and Dr. Bernice King stood up and immediately said, ‘No, you want to put the very people that you aim to help out of work in the middle of a pandemic. You're going to make it so that they can't recover in an effort to pay back a governor who won't feel it.’”  “Sometimes you have to take on a whole state or a whole county or a whole country. I do believe in that,” she added. “In this case, that's not what the leverage lies. In this case, the leverage lies in the direct contributions, the financial pipeline that greases the pockets of state house Republicans. Dry it up.  “How do you dry it up? You target their donors, big corporations: Coca-Cola, UPS, Home Depot, AT&T—all these companies who have huge footprints here in Georgia, who are pouring money into our state house. You put pressure on them specifically. But what you don't do is tell Major League baseball to take a game out of the city, because who gets hurt? The people who are selling the popcorn, who parked the cars. People who scan your tickets. The people who can least likely afford it.”  Then! Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman discusses why even people on the left need to take Jim Jordan seriously. And Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall talks about why “Washington is a town that is really wired for Republican governance.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at the Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how we get our out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure everything doesn't go too far off the rails, while we have fun discussions about our world gone mad. And while I take

that duty seriously, ourselves, not so much. Today we have a great episode with Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo and host of the Josh Marshall podcast, as well as Goldie Taylor, the queen of Georgia political analysis and editor at large for The Daily Beast. But first, we have Jake Sherman, founder of Punchball News and author of The Hilda Diod, and he's going to talk to us about what's really going on in Congress. Welcome, Jake Sherman to the new abnormal. Thanks for having me. We're super psyched to have you. I think I was like one of the first subscribers to Punchball.

I think you deserve a plaque for that of some sort. Right. I want swag. Well, we have, we have swag. You know, every day I have this thought, which is we've gone from like terrifying, high stakes just this sort of very dramatic presidency to like real in the weeds wonkiness. We have and that's good for us because that's what we care about. Yeah, it's a, it's a market difference. You know, I came from Politico where I was for 11 years and I wrote Playbook,

which is an institution that was there before me and it is there after me. I never really, maybe by choice, or maybe it's a failing of mine. I don't know. I'll let everyone else design. I never got into the Trump kind of like mood beat. You know, I just, it wasn't something that interested me a ton. I care about legislating. I'm like, I'm not a policy nerd by any stretch of the imagination, but like I like covering bills going through Congress. I find that much more interesting. And to be fair, there were a few big bills that went through in Donald Trump's presidency, but now- I'm going to walk that back for a second because I'm curious, I actually wrote a He's about that this week for The Beast, and I was thinking about a lot because legislating

takes nuance. And it feels to me like Trump actually had a pretty hard time legislating. He had a terribly hard time legislating for many reasons. And one of them was his just lack of attention span. I remember after one of the horrible shootings during his presidency, someone said to me, like, or maybe I was on TV and someone said, how will Donald Trump get, like, how could he get gun control through? And I said to myself, like, it's not that difficult. He is the most powerful figure at his party.

If he just took a position and held it for more than one day, he would have a chance. Like when he, and I wrote a book on this with Anna Palmer, my co-founder of Punchball news, but like, it's not difficult to, he had a sustained interest in tax cuts. So he got a tax cut bill through. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't take a lot. It's not rocket science, in other words. Were there other, and again, you know, it's like with defense production, there are things that the government does that I may have missed. But were there other large pieces of legislation that Trump was able to pass besides the tax cuts?

Well, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement he got through. Right. Mostly because of Nancy Pelosi, who controlled the house. And remember, this flood of COVID spending. Right. He got the first. With him, yeah. And frankly, those, I think, having nothing to do with him, frankly, those were some of the most monumental pieces of legislation in our time. I mean, those will be seen as some of the most effective federal rescue packages ever. And he had very little to do with them. They were all negotiated by Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Stephen Mnuchin, and mostly by Schumer and Mnuchin and McConnell, depending on when it was. But yes, he had nothing to do with it. And frankly, that's why it was successful. Yeah, it's so interesting to me because...

Can I make a controversial point here? I actually, and I think I made this case during his presidency and before his presidency, and I remember saying to my wife, who's a Democrat and was not a supporter of the president because we're allowed to have spouses that have political views and some people of the internet don't remember. I said to her, the morning after he got elected, I said, this guy's going to be a really successful legislative president. And she said, why?

And I said, because he has no core, he doesn't care about anything particularly. And that is actually really good when you're president because you're able to do whatever the hell you want. And Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor got caught on a hot mic. He said, you'll be unstoppable. He was recalling a conversation he had with Trump, and this is a paraphrase. He said, you'll be unstoppable if you're able to move a little left and move a little right. No one will know how to judge you. Of course, he did none of those things. And but I mean, he had the makings to be a successful legislative president in that he actually doesn't care about anything. Right. He's soulless in the right way, but the problem is he's not organized enough to be president. He didn't have an interest in it. He didn't have an interest in the nuts and bolts of the job in a way that is difficult to do. As you said, you said it really well. It requires nuance. It requires sustained kind of interest in one topic. So it's difficult in that respect, yeah. So talk to me now about this situation we have here, because if we have this very, you know, Democrats have the majority, but just very slightly. Yes. I mean, they don't have a functional majority in any way, shape, or form. I mean, they have a 50-seat majority. They don't

have a majority in the Senate. They have a 51-seat majority with the vice president. In the House, they have, depending on how many vacancies they have, and they have a number because a number of people have gone into the administration, four or five seat majority there. So their ability to get anything done is significantly kind of hampered by those numbers and on any given issue. You know, if there was a big piece of legislation going through the House, any group of three or four Democrats would be able to stop it. Yeah. And Republicans have don't seem like they're very interested in doing anything with Joe Biden. So, you know, it's, it's become very, it's become very difficult to legislate. And now Joe Manchin is the most important senator in the Senate.

You're doing this focus on Congress, which I think is really good. But you start with Jim Jordan. Yeah, well, Jim Jordan, again, you might not like him. But Jim Jordan is the most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives and will be a- Really? Explain why. And more than- McCarthy, McCarthy. Yeah, I mean, listen, so Jim Jordan is seen as the ideological compass for the far right. And people, you know, people suggest that there is a divide among House Republicans. There is no divide. Every single one of them except for Adam Kinsinger and Liz Cheney are ardent supporters of Donald Trump. I mean, that's just, you know, that's just the reality of it. And no one is seen as close to Trump as Jim Jordan is. And Jim Jordan, by the way, has already

prevented Kevin McCarthy for being speaker once. And he's going to have. the ability of doing that again to do that again in 2022, if Republicans, as history would indicate, take back the House of Representatives. So I understand, listen, I am very used to the fact that we are going to get flack when we cover Republicans in a certain way. Our theory of the case is that we cover power where it is. And we try to, you know, that's just, that's our theory of the case. I mean, I just have to ask you about because I was like, oh, Jim Jordan. But I don't understand. So could he be speaker? No.

He seems right. He can't. Yeah, he cannot. So Jim, what Jim Jordan can. So in order to be speaker, he would need to be able to get 218 people to vote for him on the House floor. I don't think he would be able to do that, especially if he were running against McCarthy, which I don't think he would anyway. But his power is that he has power over McCarthy in that McCarthy also can't be speaker without him.

So that's a tremendous amount of power to have. He's the kingmaker, right? I mean, I think we've hit a really important point. which is he's powerful because of Trump, but he's also tainted because of Trump. Sure, but tainted in the eyes of who. I mean, his colleagues are all in the same position that he is. When we wrote this book a couple years ago, we would invariably get, it was a book about the Hill to Die on, which is about the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency from Capitol Hill.

And what we suggested, when we went to do events or book readings wherever on the East Coast and on the West Coast, people would, you know, ask us, when are Republicans going to ditch Donald Trump? And we give some version of the answer that like the majority of the House Republican Conference goes home to districts where Donald Trump has 80 or 90% approval. That's just the reality of the Republican Party and the Republican base today. So while it might not be popular to be for Trump anywhere else in the House Republican conference, it's an extraordinarily powerful thing for 90% of the members. Right, because of gerrymandering and the way the districts are set up.

Yep, absolutely. because the districts are just, yeah, I mean, there's very few competitive seats left in Congress. And that's a whole other issue, which Democrats are trying to solve but are going to be unable to solve, at least in the short term. You know, one of the things I am obsessed with, and I always say this to Democratic senators and they always disagree. And then sometimes they come back during the same interview and agree is I always feel like with Democrats, the problem is messaging. Well, yes, it is. I mean, one party wants to give you money and the other party wants to complain about Dr. Seuss. Like, how is this an even...

Little-Naz-X's-Nikis, Molly. Get up to date. Please, please. Yeah. I mean, I just feel like if you message that properly, Republicans would never win elections. Well, they would, because of the problem you talked about before is that people go home to these districts that are very, that are unwinnable by the other party. Right. And nine times out of ten.

And to be fair, and I'm not defending Republicans here or not defending them, but to be fair, Republicans are now in favor of giving people money. That line has been, I mean, when I started covering Congress at 2009, Republicans wouldn't add a dollar to the deficit without cutting money somewhere else. So this is a different Republican Party than it has been for a long time. But that all said, yeah, I think there's something, there's some truth to that. And I think the fact, here's the thing. I think that a lot of Democrats were promised a lot of things in the election in 2020. And Democrats have not been able to deliver on a lot of those things and will not be able to deliver on them. And by the way, that's not an unusual dynamic, right?

That's every party promises stuff they can't deliver on and then has to deal with the fallout. But listen, I think there's no question that there are segments of the country, suburbs and certainly cities, but suburbs that are just so repulsed by what the Republican Party has become. that Democrats have been able to make new inroads there. The question is, can they have not, I would say this, this is a long way of answering your question, but they have not been able to recapture some of the rural parts of the country where they were able to compete in 2006 and 2008. Those parts of the country are just completely gone now. Yeah, I mean, that world is over for Democrats.

And again, the thing that I've been hearing more and more in reading about, which I feel like is so compelling, is this idea that everybody's so stuck that you probably just have to register new voters, like what happened in Georgia. Yeah, and by the way, Democrats are way farther ahead than Republicans on that front. Right. But, you know, there is still this demographically, Democrats should take over America and there should be no more Republican Party, but that, what for, you know, I mean, if you were just to go on the straight demographics, but we've seen that Democrats are having so much trouble messaging to certain groups that they would otherwise, but whatever. What do you see this week happening?

because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. I would say a few things. I would say let's zoom a little bit beyond this week and talk about, I mean, and we wrote about this, I think, this morning, although it all blends together for me. Reconciliation. Yeah. So Chuck Schumer is trying to use the budget reconciliation process an additional time. So he wants to.

Are you only allowed to use that once? You're only allowed to use it once per budget resolution. Okay. Democrats want to use it. I find it unlikely. They're going to be able to use it again. These kinds of things don't always work out the way people envision them when they... But all of this reconciliation stuff is really just up to the whims of the parliamentarian. Right. That's right. And the parliamentarian used to work for Markey. Well, the parliamentarian is somebody who, but listen, they just ruled,

the parliamentarian just ruled against Democrats in a big way. I know with the minimum wage. with a minimum wage. So what Democrats are trying to do, I mean, is this is the most significant expansion of government, expansion of government services, expansion of, you know, just, and I'm not saying it's good or bad, but in our lifetime, right? I mean, this is a mass. They are trying to do massively, massively big things. And to do that, they need to do one of two things. They need to keep their entire party together and do it on reconciliation or they need to blow up the filibuster. I see this as all part of a larger precursor to blowing up to trying to blow up the filibuster. I really do. I think that Chuck Schumer has

very little choice but to blow up the filibuster at this point. Yeah, this is just building narrative at this point, we think. I just think they're not going to have the votes to blow a filibuster. Right. Well, that's my thinking too. Go on. And so I mean, that's that's the problem, right? You need to have, you need to have keep all Democrats together. And Joe Manchin has said he's not interested blowing up the filibuster. And cinema, too. Cinema and Joe Manchin, yeah. Yeah. So you have this problem, right? You don't have the votes for the filibuster. You don't have the votes for the 60, because think about 10 Republicans who want to play all with Democrats. No way. Zero chance. Zero chance. I can count three who might, right? Right. And I think

that reality, whether it be guns, whether it be additional COVID relief infrastructure, whatever, that's what drives everything. It's just that, that limitation that they have with just 50 votes. And Mitch McConnell says, listen, you know, we have 52, so we have 50 as well, not 52. Right. And we're going to hold fast to what, you know, against most of these plans. And the only way around that is to blow up the filibuster. Right. But again, you don't have the votes to blip the filibuster. Correct. Unless, I mean, listen, there is a scenario, I guess, in which things just come to such

an amazing halt that Joe Manchin could be for some sort of filibuster reform. And I don't think it hurts him. Joe Manchin is a pretty godlike figure in West Virginia. Right, he doesn't care. And you can't ever primary him. I mean, what are you just going to have a Republican? Correct. Yeah, that's what he said in the New York Times this weekend, which is like, send the liberals after me.

I'm going to be, that helps me. Right. Right. I mean, 2022 map is not good for Republicans, though, and there are all of these retirements. Yeah, they probably lose, I don't know, probably they could lose Pennsylvania. Yeah. Obviously, there's Georgia. I mean, there's just, yes, it's very difficult.

But then there are a bunch of seats that are, I mean, Wisconsin's going to be a tough race for if Ron Johnson runs again or if he doesn't run. What broke Ron Johnson's brain? You know, it's been interesting to see him kind of switch gears. I'll be a little bit charitable year. Because I remember in, you know, he was like a Paul Ryan type Republican in 2016. I remember I was with Paul Ryan in Wisconsin the day Trump was elected. and he was campaigning, Ryan was, for Ron Johnson. You know, and it was just a, it was a much different vibe, to say the least.

But I don't know, you know, it's the same thing, but there's been a lot of people who have changed in the Trump era, Lindsay Graham, Ron, John. A lot of people have had to. What do you think that is? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, Lindsay Graham still has his streak of thinking that he's the guy who Democrats could talk to and who, you know, could save the day.

but we've seen no evidence of that. But I mean, listen, Democrats have still have a good relationship with him, but he's not seen as an honest legislative broker. Dye-Fi hugged him. And I see, listen, he has good relationships with people on budget, on judiciary, and those kind of committees that he's been a long time insider on.

And listen, I think he's been bolstered and been, I don't know about his power, but he's been, he has confidence now that he beat back a very well-funded Democrat in Jamie Harrison. In that, I mean, he won by, I think, 16 or 18 points or something like that. It was a very big victory for him. So I think, you know, he's particularly heartened by that.

What do you think happened with Democrats in the Senate? Because it felt like something went horribly wrong with some of those Senate seats. I like Maine. Yeah, listen, I mean, I think there's a combination of things, right? I think that they were running against longtime figures in the state. Susan Collins, long time political figure. Lindsay Graham is represented, he's been in the House and the Senate since 1994. I mean, these are people.

And by the way, some of these states are just, I mean, I mean, South Carolina is a Republican state. You know, it's just, you know. Yeah, it's a hard one. Yeah, it's really hard. And Maine and North Carolina, and I mean, there were a bunch of states where it, I mean, I know what happened in North Carolina. And actually, there's new polling that says it, it actually relates to John Edwards, believe it or not. Mm-hmm.

Isn't that wild? Okay. But that he, that this candidate had an affair like John Edwards and they were sick of it. Yeah. Maybe that's right. I mean, listen, it's very difficult. she's just been a constant presence in people's lives. And she said, listen, and she was able to make the point that, like, you know, the moderate leanings of the state would be blown up that she weren't there. Whether that's true or not is arguable. But I mean, you know, that's a, that was a powerful argument for her. Who are the congresspeople to watch?

That's a very good question. So the thing that I'm most obsessed with right now, and I'll continue to be obsessed with, is Hakeem Jeffries and who comes next to the Democratic leadership. The Democratic leadership is old. Nancy Pelosi's probably leaving after this term. She has said she's leaving after this term without saying it directly. That battle for the next speaker of the House,

the Democratic leader, is going to be very interesting. Obviously, I believe you should be watching Jim Jordan, but you might disagree. I'll watch him all right. Yeah. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is obviously somebody that everyone's watching, but the will-she or won't-she about Chuck Schumer is super interesting. Yeah.

And, you know, the McCarthy-Skhalese relationship, if they get into the majority, it's a relationship that I've watched and was a big part of my book. They don't have a great relationship. It's very tense at times. Yeah. It's easy to be in a good place when you're in the minority, but when you're into the majority and you have to govern,

that'll be interesting. And listen, I really do think, you know, the Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer back and forth is obviously fascinating. Who's going to be the next Republican leader? Is it going to be John Cornyn, John Barrasso, John Thune, a lot of Johns? And who are you watching in the Senate? On the Republican side, those people, I am endlessly curious about Elizabeth Warren, because now her portfolio, we wrote about this a couple weeks ago, her portfolio has now expanded.

She has a host of huge committees. And the question I have about Elizabeth Warren is the question I have about so many politicians is, Does she want, like, I think being in the Senate or being in the House is a pretty damn good job. And a lot of people don't agree with me. And the question is, does she have the stomach to, or the interest in spending her career or the next several years in the Senate? Or will she try to run for president again? I think she could be a huge, huge figure in the Senate, but there are people who think she won't even run again. So that's very interesting to me.

Goldie Taylor's our go-to person to talk Georgia politics as a veteran of the system. there, and editor at large at The Daily Beast. And today she's going to give us the lay of the land on what's happening in this oh so important state for democratic politics. Welcome back to the new abnormal. I'm a bit of a better at a heart of me. You are. And there's a reason for that because you're fabulous.

And also, you know so much stuff that I want to know about. I have a bunch of things I want to ask you. But first, since you are in Georgia, what the hell is happening in Georgia? And, you know, we talked about this a little bit on the last call and just how fractured our state GOP happens to be. And it has turned in on itself. And, you know, after this last election cycle where, you know, we hit the national spotlight in terms of, you know, us trying to reclaim our elections from then-President Donald Trump and his shenanigans. In the aftermath, some politicians really got hurt. politicians like Governor Brian Kemp, who has a reputation among his fellow grassroots Republicans

to shore up, to revive Secretary of State Brad Rastonberger, who will likely lose his seat because he stood out on the truth that the election was free and fair, right? Right. In order to combat or, you know, to coalesce the party around themselves again, they have passed what I believe were fairly draconian voter registration laws and the president. And by the way, nothing passes our 40-day session, state house generally inside of one session. Usually take two sessions. This year, however, this came through in a single day. Yes. So, Goldie, these voting restrictions, a lot of people on the right are saying that actually they're not such a big deal and that Democrats are

overreacting and that there are a lot of states where you can't bring people stuff when they're online. Talk to me about how those people are full of shit. I mean, explain to me why they're wrong. Well, shit is generous here. Yes. What I will tell you is you could never sort of approach and politic, you know, electioneer within a 150 feet of a Georgia voting booth. And that That is true in all of these 50 states. There has been no prohibition, however, on water, food, snacks to people who are in line, as long as you are not electioneering. So simply the handing out of water, standing alone by itself, truly is protected speech, by the way.

And as long as you are not violating the sanctity of the voting booth, then being able to approach somebody in a line who, by the way, they are in these very long lines, because Republicans made it so. They did things like reducing the number of polling sites in certain counties, you know, predominantly black counties where they did that. You know, they did it by reducing the number of election machines in some counties, predominantly black counties. Some years ago, they attempted to purge the roles, the voting roles.

And we talked about this before of people who they suspected, you know, had moved or didn't answer their mail in time. 70% of that list turned out to be wrong, by the way, because they didn't use a post office certified list. Right. And so all of these things are happening. These long lines are happening because Republicans wanted those lines to be long. Why did they want them to be long? Because, generally speaking, these communities voted on election day. The early voter was usually not the black voter. So they opened up absentee voting, however. Right.

Well, something happened. A really piece of that. of magic happened during this last cycle. Donald Trump told everybody not to trust the mail. So black people said, you know what? We cannot trust the mail. We're watching them all through mailboxes out of our communities. You know, we are seeing that things are coming to us in the mail three and four weeks late, if making it at all. So we are going to go down there and get our absentee ballots and we're going to mail them so darn early as they are going to get there.

I'm not going to stand in a line that wraps around the building because I have a job that I have to get to, right? Yeah. So we all voted early. We flipped the system on itself. And they said, holy smoke, they're onto us. We need a tactic. And that's what this piece of legislation is. It went from three or four pages of a sort of a summary to a nearly 100-page document in a single day. And it outlines literally down to the letter how they can control the outcome of an election, one by asking for even more voter identification than they had in the last cycle, which was a, a double process. And this time, they are giving, and here's the peace de la sounds and how you say that shit. Yeah, I think you got it. I pronounce French things. But what I would say is they took the Secretary of State off of the State Elections Board where that person would have been shared and has been shared since the Secretary of State's office was created in this state, a state of wisdom,

justice and moderation. That is our model down here. So they took him off. Not only did they take him off, they also made it so that state elections board can take over any county election board in this state where they suspect or have reason to believe that the numbers were somehow corrupted. Right. So they're not leaving it up to that county to audit or re-audit their own numbers. the state can step in and decide that they will not certify a vote until the state county election board has its say. And so what Brian Kemp will tell you, what other state GOP office holders will tell you is that they've done this to restore confidence in the ballot. Poppycock. They have done it to keep people who don't look like them, church like them, live like them, away from the voting booth.

because the more of us who show up, the more often they lose. The tide has turned in Georgia. We're becoming quickly a minority and majority state in that we are browning almost more quickly than a place like Texas. I think Texas is the only place that outbrowns us in terms of trajectory. And so at some point, you're going to, and Georgia really was always sort of purple anyway, right? Right. But Stacey Abrams did the math.

and get to her in just a second. Stacey Abrams did the math some years ago, 10 years ago, and understood where this was all going. And if we just got them registered and got them to the poll, we could flip this state. Nobody believed her. Well, they do now. In fact, Georgia Republicans believe her so much right now that they're willing to turn the entire, you know, state election on its head to get their way. But here's the good news. Stacey Abrams, Mark Elias, who runs a law firm that specializes in these kinds of cases at the federal level. they are on the ground here, and they are challenging it in the courts, which is absolutely necessary. You've got Warnock and Osoff in D.C. to U.S. senators we never had, you know, before in this day.

Right. History-making gentlemen, both of them, who are now fighting for a federal voting rights act. This Lewis piece is going to be a significant part of that. And then you've got the grassroots folks who are going to do what they always do. Figure out how this new system is supposed to work and make certain that people understand it, that people get registered, and that people turn out. Republicans may have just made a fatal mistake. They've just told people, we don't want you to vote. And guess what happens in this day and age when you tell people that we don't want you to vote?

They do. From your mouth to God's ear, let me tell you. So you think Stacey Abrams can fight back against this? And all of the amazing women and men in Georgia who have on the ground have this covered? I mean, not that we shouldn't be worried because obviously we are worried, but. I think that, and I say this with all due intention and sincerity, sometimes being an ally means shutting up. Yeah. We here in Georgia have a history of organizing.

Yeah. And we've organized on the world's taste, Dr. King. Yeah. You know, Reverend James Orange, Fred Shuttlesworth, let's go down the list, you know, Ralph David Abernathy, of leaders that we have birthed out of the city. We know what we're doing. And so when we tell you that we are thankful for people like Mark Elias coming in to partner with us on the federal court issue and that we are thankful for U.S. senators like Osov and Warnock who are in D.C. doing the job every day and that we have several grassroots organizations here in Georgia who are handling the voter turnout issue here and that we have a bank of U.S. of state legislators who are doing the job under our gold dome, you must believe us. And so when we tell you what kind of help we need, we need you to listen. And so automatically, as soon as this began to happen, we heard people, especially people

out of Hollywood, say, oh, we're going to boycott George until they stop this. Right. And both me and Dr. Bernie King stood up immediately and said, no. You want to put the very people that you aim to help? You're going to put them out of work in the middle of a pandemic. I think that... You're going to make it so that they can't recover in an effort to pay back a governor who won't feel it. Yeah.

I think that's really important. important. People have actually, I was hearing people talk about that and I said, Dr. Bernice King says, don't do it. Don't do it. They said, well, it worked in North Carolina. It happened, you know, in South Africa. This is a different set of dynamics. It's a very different set of dynamics. And I believe in sometimes you have to take on a whole state or a whole county or a whole country. I do believe in that. In this case, that's not where the leverage lies. Yeah. And this leverage lies in the direct contributions, the financial, you know, pipeline that greases the pockets of State House Republicans.

Dry it up. How do you dry it up? You target their donors, big corporations, Coca-Cola, UPS, the Home Depot, all these people. AT&T, all these people who have huge footprints here in Georgia who are pouring money into our statehouse. You put pressure on them specifically. But what you don't do is tell the Major League Baseball to take a game out of this city. because who get hurt, the people who sell the popcorn, the people who park the cars, people who scan your tickets, the people who can lease likely to afford it. And people go, oh, well, you know, this is the Montgomery bus boycott, you know, all over again.

No, it really isn't. This is you sitting in your house in California or New York or Boston or Dallas or wherever you are. Right. Telling us here in Georgia where the political leverage lies and you sacrifice nothing. Can we talk about the Derek Chobin trial because I've been watching it all morning and it is just I, you know, am without speech. You know, I have actually refused to watch the trial. I have watched witness trials like this one my lifelong that, you know, I watched George Zimmerman. I watched that trial.

I watched the Jordan Dunn when he was murdered so viciously in Florida. I watched that trial. I watched a number of them that were televised or followed them because they weren't televised in other ways, right? And what I know is this, and I said this from the beginning, I think I said this as early as maybe 2013, 2014, is that the amount of justice that someone receives when they are, you know, a gunshot victim doesn't depend on their race. It depends on the race of the shooter. And so in this, and in all cases, when the shooter is blue as in a police officer, it is rare that you can even get a grand jury to indict. and when you can, getting a jury to get over the bar of being able to convict that man or woman, you know, for the death of whomever in the line of duty is next to impossible.

It almost never happens. We've seen a couple of cases just in recent years. I went to South Carolina, Charleston, and followed the steps of Walter Scott from the time that he got out of his car with the bloke, broken blinker and skidded around a corner and across a street and through a field, I walked his steps. The steps where Officer Schlegger followed him and shot him from a great distance in his back as he scampered along a field. Yeah, getting them convicted is almost never. I saw that video, though, and it's like one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life. And it goes on and on and on and on and you have to wonder how can you watch that?

Well, let's just say this. But for that video that you saw, that was bystander cell phone video, that young boy, young man who had that cell phone on his way to work and decided to whip it out and tape it. But for that video, Schlegger would have gotten away with it. Yeah. And so I tell you that these kinds of cases are difficult to watch. But, you know, we watch people get killed on tape.

We watched what happened to Eric Garner in New York. We watched choked out by Congress. on television and that cop walked away with no indictment. And so that's my fear here with this officer. And I walk with that each and every day. I don't have confidence in this justice system when it comes to adjudicating their own and cops belong to this justice system.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't always have confidence. And I'm thankful for attorneys like Crump and Chris Stewart, here in Atlanta who go to trial, who step on behalf of families. I'm thankful for every marcher who gets their feet out on the street,

right, and brings attention to these issues. I'm grateful for one and all. But I am prayerful. Yeah. 12 jurors can look at this and see for what it is. I hope so. Thank you so much, Goldie. You are just like one of my favorite guests and please come back

soon. Thank you for having me. Hey folks, if you haven't heard, single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening

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completely bomb that Biden press conference? These set piece press conferences that presidents do are a funny thing. Whenever whenever you say, why are you guys complaining so much? These press conferences are always pretty stupid.

There's a lot of tutting and like, you're being terrible and all this kind of stuff. And they have some role. It's kind of good to have the president up there in a context

where he can't, you know, he can't just like dash off or kind of get frustrated and run away and stuff like that. But they're not that big a deal and it's sort of this thing

that's been going on for decades. That's just something that the White House press corps kind of complains about. And, you know, kind of like that's their job and everything. But there's still most of the, most of the White House press corps, they're very reactive to Republican messaging, to put it frankly. Yeah, right. I wouldn't have expected that there wouldn't be a lot of kind of lame questions, but, you know, not having a question about COVID. It's a pretty big issue right now. So I, you know. But you know what's interesting about COVID is,

Because the Biden administration has done such an incredible job with the vaccine rollouts, which is, I think, in no small part due to who his chief of staff is, Ron Klein, who's had like a lot of experience with this. It's almost like it's going well so we don't have to talk about it. Yeah, I think it is sort of, there is some kind of complication to it in the sense that the turnover of the administrations happened at a pretty critical. critical point in the rollout process. And I think if you've been watching it closely, as you said, there's abundant reasons to think we'd be in a very different place if President Trump were still in place. But since Biden came in just after they had kind of gotten through people in nursing homes and some health care workers, it's kind of hard to know who's doing well and who's not. But again, Washington is a town that is really wired for Republican governance. And that remains the case. And that remains the

even though if you look back over the last 30 years, it's mostly democratic presidencies. But there are just some structural things in place that make it that way. And the most visible, the one that you can kind of just see in a quantifiable sense is something a lot of people talk about a lot, is that on the Sunday shows, you just got a lot of Republicans. You know, you get Republicans on to talk about Republican stuff,

Republicans on to talk about democratic stuff, Republicans on to do big think stuff. So there's something there. Yeah, but explain to me, Why? Because I don't disagree, but why Washington is such a Republican town and why it's set up for Republican governance. Well, you know, it used to be easier for me to understand that because let's go back kind of a good distance, like half a century, basically. If you look at during the Clinton administration, which is already, you know, almost 25 years ago now, Clinton came in after basically like a 30-year period or, you know, 25 years. period of straight Republican governance. You have Nixon, you have this brief interlude of Carter,

which, you know, doesn't go terribly well in partisan terms for the Democrats. And then you have Reagan, and then you have Bush. So there's lots of reasons there where kind of that just became kind of locked in a lot of Republican sensibilities, a lot of Republicans in the sort of, you know, para government that exists, you know, kind of who runs D.C. and all that kind of stuff. It's a little less clear why that is the case now? I can only say, I have some theories, but I can only say that it has really persisted much more than one might have thought, but some of that has to do with the specifics of the two presidencies, Clinton and Obama. They each had certain characteristics that allowed a lot of that to remain. Okay, here's my question for you, which I think we've been talking about

a lot, and is something I'm, I often think. about because I'm such a dork. How do you fix the Sunday shows? You know, I don't really know beyond kind of hassling them. There are a number of groups that kind of compile this. You know, they do like once a week or once a year. They say, okay, there were, you know, 10x Republican guests and 4x Democratic guests. They're private shows. I don't know, I don't know exactly. You get Chotner on there, chotner on there. Yeah, I mean, it gets very complicated because some of this is that you have sort of, you know, both sidesists' tendencies

kind of deeply embraced, even by people whose personal politics may not be Republican-leaning. I mean, it's broadly true that journalists tend to be more left-leaning in their personal politics than the country in general. There's not much disputing that,

you know, the kind of the line reporters, at least. But it's, you know, one of these things that I think we've all seen that, you know, Republicans, play a game of chicken with like, you know, debt default. And the question is, well, what a Democrat's going to do about it? People assume a lot of sort of analyst opinion assumes bad behavior as kind of a baseline. So you feel like it's the framing that it's that both sides and framing that is like largely

the reason why the media can't stop equating Democrats and Republicans? I think that's basically right. And that goes into lots of things with just, how the media is structured, the fact that we have big networks, we have big metropolitan dailies that have as their business model kind of appealing to everybody. It's a little hard to tell, you know, half the customer base that they're the problem. People who make like strawberries and like sandwiches don't have to do that. So it's, it's kind of hard. It's funny because it's like one of the shifts I've been seeing lately and I consume a lot of

news is that we've gone from too much news to too little news. And so you see again this weird phenomenon of media needing to make stories. And so, I mean, the boat is a great example. I mean, that story happens to, like, have really spoke to me. But it's also kind of like a feel-good story. I mean, not for the boat and not for the other boats. But for us, it's a feel-good story. And not the crew, right?

Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, I love that story, but I'm not sure who feels good in it. But I do feel good. Yeah. So I don't mean feel good. It's a bummer. But I mean, in the sense of in an American context, kind of everybody across the spectrum,

reporters, politicians kind of be like, oh, what the fuck the boat? You know, and I was, oh, yeah, the boat. The boat's like this. The boats like that. Check out my new meme. Like no one feels aggrieved about the boat. Right. Right.

In that sense, it's feel good. Though Tucker Carlson did say that the boat was because, that there was some connection to our military becoming two. woke. Oh. It had to do with the boat, which is like pretty amazing even for Tucker, but he did try to thread that needle. Oh, yeah.

I think of soldiers. I think of what woke people. Exactly. That's me too. Exactly. I just love it. Do you think that the Republican Party will ever be interested in legislating again? Not in the foreseeable future.

I think the best way to think of the Republican Party right now is like a car going down the hill and it's riding its brakes. It's trying to slow everything down. It basically likes things as they are and is resisting change on various fronts. That doesn't create a lot of legislation that you have much interest in. And that's one of the reasons why the filibuster

is such a problem for Democrats in the sense that aside from judges where it's already been totally done away with, there's not a lot of stuff that Republicans really want to do legislatively. So it's kind of no skin off their back. I mean, the one thing that Republicans generally want to do is to cut taxes. But tax cuts operate under the reconciliation system.

So kind of there's no filibuster for that. Right. So they don't need a filibuster. Yeah. So do you think that Democrats should get rid of the filibuster? I mean, again, we just had someone talking about this. And if you don't have the votes, it doesn't matter. But do you think that there's a world in which they could?

What's your optimistic view on this? You know, it's funny. I actually did a post on this this morning because it's a funny thing. It is so, it is the current situation in national politics, which all kind of turns on the filibuster, whether it's going to stay there or, you know, there's some kind of reform or loosening of it, is just so opaque.

In most legislative debates, we can say, okay, these guys want this, these guys want that. Are they going to compromise? Are they going to hold out? But in this case, you just have kind of stray quotes and you've got to infer things. The people who really have worked this issue for a long time have really since the beginning of the Biden administration

been more optimistic than I would have been if I weren't listening to them. And I think most of them still think that we are on a course where after the relief bill's done, we need to kind of work through, kind of put Republicans to their test, watch it fail, which obviously it will. And then you get to a point

where the mansion types are going to say, okay, enough, we've got to get some stuff done and then something is loosened. I'm relatively optimistic that there will be some significant change, which allows there to be, you know, a lot more legislation passed. But again, it's one of those things where this is taking the lead of people who I know, know this issue and are following it. I say to myself, well, I really have no idea, but I know this person really knows their stuff and they're thinking this, so I'm going to make that my opinion. Yeah, it just feels like the numbers aren't there. It's hard for me to imagine Mansion coming along.

but that it feels like cinema is more conservative than her constituents, whereas Mansion is not. It's funny. I kind of see it a little differently. I see her as basically a poser. She has this thing of, you know, she's in a red, purple state that is trending blue. And she just is very into kind of co-playing this kind of maverick. I love the filibuster, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, her politics have shifted so seismically over the last decade. I find it very difficult to take anything she says at face value as true. It's just kind of all some kind of weird positioning stuff. And to me, that means other people fall in line.

She'll fall online. It's all kind of positioning and posing for her. Mansion's a really different story. He's got a number of issues where he's just not lined up at all with most of the Democratic Party. and he is in a state that is, that is at least in the current configuration, you know, extremely Republican. Yeah. You don't replace Mansion with a Democrat. You replace Mansion with a Republican. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the key is, because I keep seeing these people say like, well, what does he want, give him what he wants, then he'll kind. I think the key is is that he really wants slash needs a politics where the lines between the party are a little bloat.

lorry and people make deals and they kind of, everything's kind of a little warm and fuzzy and a little overlap and stuff like that. That is the environment in which his continuance in office in West Virginia is plausible. To the extent that there is binary polarization and you're a Democrat or you're a Republican and they both want diametrically different things, his remaining a Democrat in West Virginia really doesn't add up. So I do think there's a logic to the, to the cage. But man, it's not fun to watch. And it's not fun to be in that universe with him, which we are. Do you see any Republican senators who might be, you know, move to the independent column, like what happened in Maine?

Basically, no. I mean, no. I mean, Murkowski could theoretically do whatever the hell she wants. I mean, she could definitely do whatever she wants. That's one of the reasons why this whole thing of running a primary against Trump. is really kind of a joke that back in, I believe it was 2010, she lost her primary. And then she won the election as a right in,

which is basically impossible. Well, no, so, I mean, that never happens, and it did happen with her. And what that tells you, and i.e., she basically won it with a lot of Democrats, so she can kind of do anything she wants. And, but she caucuses with Republicans. And, you know, you certainly don't imagine,

like, Susan Collins switching, obviously, right? And Romney's not going to. I mean, I think he's demonstrated that he's, that he is willing to buck his party on some pretty significant things. I mean, it shouldn't, shouldn't be a heavy lift, but obviously impeachment was a huge one. So, no, I don't see any chance of that, frankly. What are you seeing this week that you're, like, watching out for?

Well, this morning I was, I wanted to see, I wanted to see a video of the boat actually moving. But now that seems, seriously, seriously, because here's the thing, Because last night, like I woke up like 2 o'clock in the morning, which I usually do. I wake up once in the night and I kind of like, you know, look at my device. And I see the girl like, oh, they floated it. Great. I'm like, oh, man, awesome, man.

And I wake up in the morning like, oh, half floated. That was the thing. More seriously, everything comes down to is there going to be some shift on are we going to have majority rule in the Senate? I know that kind of comes back to what we were just talking about. but that really is in national politics the entire thing right now because that's the difference between a pretty, you know, big and arguably transformative legislative agenda for Biden on the one hand or that the Biden legislative agenda is already over. So kind of everything is that, but it's kind of hard because what are you going to say? Well, you know, kind of you glom on to some like random quote,

you know, random quote from mansion, all of which are totally kind of. contradictory. Right. He has said a lot of stuff. Yeah, we're sort of like in a news sensory deprivation chamber. Yeah. Right? Like cut off from all, we have no idea what's happening. But everything kind of comes down to that. It's so interesting. Do you think that Democrats are going to get shellacked in the midterms? I think there is a good chance of it. I wouldn't say shellacked. I would say this. I think there is a pretty decent chance that Democrats and Joe Biden will be fairly popular in late 2022, just because I think he will do a pretty good job of the things he's working on. I think that a range of factors, including but not limited to the relief bill, will have the economy really chugging ahead.

But I think it is quite possible that Republicans will re-gerrymander things sufficiently. that all of that won't matter. And they will have already basically won the House just in the process of gerrymandering. So you could have a thing where maybe they pick up, you know, 15 seats, which after an aggressive gerrymandering wouldn't be so bad for the Democrats, but they lose control. I think it is actually possible if that first premise is right that Democrats could add seats in the Senate. So I don't think it's at all impossible that you have a situation where Biden's, you know, relatively, you know, kind of popular as polarized times go. Democrats lose the House, but actually gain seats in the Senate.

So I don't think it's going to be some kind of like, you know, 2010 or 2014 like blowout, more like 2010. I don't foresee that because I don't think that's where the country and where the economy is going to be. But that doesn't necessarily matter. I also think the more that comes out about, I mean, I could be wrong. And God knows how much my own personality and my own biases are shaping this quote. But I can't help but feel like giving people money and not killing them should be popular. Yeah, I think it's a good premise. It's a good starting point.

I think you guys are really discounting little Naz-X's blood shoes are really going to move the needle of this election. I've seen these cycles before. Republicans are kind of, you know, kind of casting about for an issue. And there's a lot of casting now, right? And there's a lot of, like, Satan's shoe stuff. Yeah. Yeah. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate,

and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, the new podcast from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer, checking in on the movement of the radical right.

Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. My fuck that guy today is not a guy. She's actually the most accomplished member of the Trump children. which is not saying much. Lara Trump, now a Fox contributor from a Trump family member

to a Trump campaign member, campaign member, Trump campaign worker, to a member of the propaganda network. Yeah. And still, she said as much is probably going to run for the Senate in North Carolina. So my nightmare is to have this woman in the Senate. So please Democrats find someone reasonable

to run again. who isn't having an affair. They really need to approach that as no candidates with a sexting background. Yeah, I think. Because that really threw, that really threw things off. Yeah. I would also say if you're going to have it, at least have it be a little spicy, you know,

that was some pretty weak sexting, if I do say about some myself. No, stop it. Well, that was the thing that kind of, that's why it kind of seemed like he was going to sort of split by. The polling. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's very, very not spicy. But to John Edwards, North Carolina is theoretically, even though it's so gerrymandered, a winnable seat for Democrats, if they pick someone like, you know, a Reverend Warnock who is really a great speaker and a member of the community. So please, please, please, Democrats, this is on you. I'm relatively optimistic about that seat because I think she would have some pretty serious weaknesses. as a candidate? Really? Yeah, I do.

But she's married to Trump's dumbest kid. How could she have weaknesses as a candidate? I mean, look, she's Trump. She's an emissary from Trump. Yeah. And if you're sort of covered with Trump but are not Trump, that's not always a great thing. And I mean, look, I think that probably gets you

a lot of the negatives of Trump and probably not a lot of the positive Yeah. North Carolina is not like Alabama. Right, exactly. Democrats win there. They've had two, you know, very disappointing cycles there, but it's always close. It's a very divided state. So if you're in a situation where economy's doing well, Biden's fairly popular. I mean, again, in a polarized age, fairly popular just means like you're at 53 percent or something like that. But I would be relatively optimistic about that. So tell us who your fuck that guy is. Give us your. I was coming up with just totally lame stuff. I was thinking like, yeah, Mitch McConnell. I don't know. Part of me is that a mansion.

Like, fuck Mansion. What the hell? Yeah. What the hell, dude? You got it, man. That's a good one. You know, I kind of end up defending Mansion, though. You can be conflicted about it.

Well, the thing is with Mansion, you hear a lot of people saying, like, oh, he's a closet Republican, just kind of, you know, wolf and sheep's closing. The thing is, he could be a Republican any fucking day of the week. Right. If he wanted to be a Republican, believe it. He could become one right now. He would have that seed for the rest of his life. It's just this kind of odd thing where the margin is with someone who is, it's not like he's like Dick Durbin, but he happens to be from West Virginia. Right. He's out of a very specific kind of political milieu. West Virginia used to be a very democratic state until, basically until the Obama years, although that was trending. little. It's still a state that likes a lot of government spending, likes the safety net. Yeah, you mean the things Democrats do. Right, but also like loves guns, loves coal, love Trump. And those things have just become more salient in that politics. And I don't even know what,

I mean, no one even pays attention to what Trump's margins are in West Virginia because they, you know they're over like 50% margin between them. I mean, it's just like a joke. And as you said, there will never be another Democratic senator from West Virginia. I mean, you know, never's a long time. But in... It seems unlikely. Unlikely in the current, in the politics that we know today. That's just not going to happen.

So that's a tough one. But I mean, fuck him. As long as I'm coming up with something for this second. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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