The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Biden Should Send ‘Abortion Trucks’ to Texas

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

Elie Mystal, Editor-at-Large at The Nation, has a wild, but potentially effective idea to help women impacted by the new Texas abortion law—if President Biden can make it happen. And Congressman Ruben Gallego defends Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan (and the idea that Madison Cawthorne is too dumb to lead a GOP revolution.) And then Elizabeth Shackleford talks her own experience pulling out of a war-torn country. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com 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 up day down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

Today we have a super fun episode. Congressman Ruben Gallego, who represents Arizona's 7th District, will join us to talk about the fuckery in Congress and codifying Roe versus Wade. Then we'll talk to Elizabeth Shackleford, who's a foreign policy wonk at the Chicago Council. She's going to talk to us about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and America's place in the world. But first, we have returning favorite,

Justice Correspondent at the nation, Ellie Mistal. Welcome back to the new abnormal, Ali Mistal. Oh, my God. You are in a rage the way I am in a rage. Let's talk. Yeah, I mean, Republicans have gone full Republican, and half the country is acting surprised that Republicans have done exactly what they've always promised to do. What the fuck?

I mean, do you want to start with the ridiculousness of the law or the ridiculousness of the response to the law? I want both. let's start with the law. The reason why this slightly caught people off guard was that everybody expected the Fifth Circuit to strike down this Texas law that they passed in May because that shit crazy. The law says that the bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected that usually is around six weeks. Now, as many people know, most women do not know they're even pregnant at six weeks, especially women who aren't trying to be pregnant. They don't know that they're pregnant after six weeks.

But the quirk of the law isn't just the ban, which, I'm sorry, that ban strictly, clearly, flatly, violates Roe v. Wade and Planned Banhood v. Casey, which both say that the government cannot restrict abortions, cannot ban abortions before fetal viability, which is usually at 24 weeks. So 24 weeks is the Constitution, six weeks is Texas. That's your delta. Right. But the quirk of the law was that the state does not enforce the law. So it's not like the Texas police officers or, you know, any state official that goes in and punishes abortion providers for violating the six weeks bans. They outsourced, deputized private citizens to enforce the law by issuing or starting a cash bounty system on abortion providers or anybody who, AIDS or bets, whatever the hell that means, people seeking an abortion.

So to enforce the law, it's a private citizen, which, by the way, a citizen who does not have to live in Texas. So if you happen to live in Atlanta, if you happen to live in Utah, if you happen to live crawled up the Heritage Foundation's ass. That's my personal address. You can enforce the law by suing somebody you suspect in Texas of providing abortions. services, counseling, or aid, right? And if you win, that person has to pay you $10,000 and attorney fees. If you lose, if you're wrong, if you just made it up, guess what? No penalty. There's no penalty in this law for being wrong about the neighbors and friends and coworkers and colleagues that you're accusing. So that's the baseline of law, and it's so beyond what is plausibly

constitutional. The law has this thing called standing, which is usually, quite a boring concept, but it means that basically before you sue somebody civilly, you have to have a reason, right? Like, you have to have some skin in the game. Like, if there's a law saying you can't play your music after 9 p.m. in my neighborhood, and you, Molly, who don't live in my neighborhood, be like,

it's after 9 p.m., I wonder who I can sue for playing music. Like, you can't do that, right? You don't have any standing, you have any skin in the game. So, you know, a person in Atlanta doesn't have any standing to sue a person in Texas for an abortion. They ain't even getting. Right. So we all thought the law, we all thought, many people thought the law would be held on constitutional.

A district court and Obama judge in Austin held it unconstitutional. A lot of people thought the Fifth Circuit would follow seat. Now, I was not one of those people because I know what the Fifth Circuit is capable of law. Fifth Circuit is one of the most conservative courts in the country. It is stacked with hardcore right-wing judges, many of whom are crazy, some of whom have, you know, It's stuck with judges who were part of the torture memo gang. Right. Explain to our listeners what the torture memo game is.

Just quickly. In the before times, long, long ago, the Department of Justice used to think the torture was legal when we were at war in Iraq. And they had various lawyers write memos legalizing or explaining why torture was legal. And one of the guys who helped is now on the Fifth Circuit, Judge James Held. Merry Christmas. Right. So, anyway, so people thought the Fifth Circuit was going to strike down. the law. I wasn't sure they would. In fact, they did not. And that's how it became a Supreme

Court case. They allowed the Texas law to go forward. The providers, you know, healthcare providers sued, you know, appealed for an emergency injunction. And the Supreme Court, in the same way the Fifth Circuit did, refused to act because it said that Texas's little cleverness, it's a little too clever by half, two-step of having a bounty system meant that there wasn't necessarily anybody that you could sue for this flatly unconstitutional law. To put this in terms of, you know, because private citizens are enforcing it, you can't sue the state of Texas or Governor Greg Abbott. You have to at least wait for a private citizen to do the dirty before you can even think about challenging this law, which is ridiculous. And the way that I've tried to explain

that to people, if I am, you know, the mayor of Gotham City. Right. And I say, you know what? I understand citizens of Gotham have certain due process rights that I must respect. But if anybody would like to put some jokers in jail, by whatever means necessary, I would happily pay Batman and Robin $10,000 if somebody ended up in my jail system. That's what Texas is doing. It is encouraging vigilantism and encouraging constitutional violations on its behalf and paying a cash bounty to make those things happen and then claiming it has no, it has no ability to be stopped. Right now, abortion clinics in Texas can no longer do abortions. There are women sitting in waiting rooms who are not going to be able to get abortions.

what can we do? Well, you know, there are a couple of options, and all of them require extreme tactics, right? Right. Because this is extreme law. Texas law is extreme. The court has refused to act. And the Republicans, as we said, have been planning to do this for a generation. So we shouldn't be, we shouldn't have been caught so flat-footed.

So, you know, I've come on the show before, and I've talked about court packing. I've talked about court expansion. I've talked about how that needs to happen to stop Republicans. from doing exactly what they just did. Yeah. Those options remain on the table. Another option would be legislatively. You pass a national law protecting the right to an abortion and a woman's right to choose.

Yeah. Democratic candidates running for president promised they'd do this if they'd won. Amy Klobuchar promised this. Kamala Harris promised that they would codify. And all the women, Kamala, Klobuchar, and Warren all said that, if they won, they codified Roe v. Wade, and all the men were like, hmm, yeah, there's a capital idea, capital idea, woman. So we could do that, right?

And would that work if the Congress codified Roe v. Wade, would that help? I mean, would that solve our problem? It would solve it in the immediate term. I think eventually the Supreme Court would just overturn that, but, because they're conservatives who don't like abortion. Right. But, like, it would, if you pass the law today, tomorrow women in Texas could access their constitutional rights, at least until the Supreme Court nullified that law at some point in the future.

Right. The most immediate solution that I have been advocating is, you know, abortion trucks. The federal, look, the... Wait, abortion trucks. Yeah, I'm not even, I am not even joking. Tell us. Here's the thing. So the Texas law, as I said, cleverly, they think, avoids constitutional review because it sets up

private citizens as the people who can enforce the law through civil actions. Well, you know who cannot be sued civilly by private citizens, federal employees over the commission of their duties, right? It's called qualified immunity. Many people, like me, have complained about qualified immunity, but let's flip it around on them. If Joe Biden, via executive order, establish, let's call it a federal privacy commission. Right. Oh. And hired a bunch of doctors. and empower them to rove throughout the country in a truck or van, enforcing privacy rights, and making sure that people had access to their constitutional rights. Guess what they'd be?

They'd be federal officials performing their duties, and thus through qualified immunity, immune from private civil actions, like the ones now legal in Texas. Boom, I've solved the problem, folks. You send those officials to Texas. The van or vehicle they are in is federal property. The Texans can't screw with it. Or you send them to national parks in Texas.

You send them to court. Because those are federal lands. Because those are federal lands. Texas, the state of Texas can't do anything about them. You have them provide abortion and family planning counseling to people. And then you start to run up against the Hyde Amendment. So the Hyde Amendment is fucking bullshit. But will you explain it to our people?

Molly, you have the right answer. But it says it's an old school kind of misogynist amendment that prevents federal taxpayer money from being used to procure abortion services. It's meant to prevent people who are on Medicaid from getting abortions. Medicaid, Medicare, usually by the time you're on Medicare, you don't need to have an abortion. That part of your life is gone. Right. So it's to prevent the people who financially probably desperately are direly need an abortion to get them. from accessing federal funds to, right? And it's a very controversial amendment. There has been talk, actually, recently, of the Democrats refusing to include the Hyde Amendment and the next budget reconciliation.

This was an issue during the primary because President Biden has been on record as a supporter of the Hyde Amendment in the past during his long, I mean, you know, President Biden has been a senator, you know, for as long as the day is gray. Like, he used to support almost damn everything, right? So that was an issue in the primary. Again, people, when legal issues come up during, presidential primaries. Pay attention. Yeah. You know, there's a reason why Biden, why I was skeptical about Biden, because he was against the Hyde Amendment and one of the most against court-packing candidates that we had in that

field. So, you know, pay attention when these legal issues come up. Anyway. Yeah. But there's talk about getting rid of the High Amendment. Right now it's still law. But you can get around the Hyde Amendment in my plan if you don't, first of all, you make abortions free. Right. Bortions tend to be quite expensive. People also don't really understand. this, but because of things like the Hyde Amendment, if you are a poor woman and you don't have good health insurance or you do have Medicaid, then your abortion is a very expensive

procedure, which is a huge issue, right? Sometimes you need more than six weeks to get the money together. Yeah. No, I know. It feels like the people I know who are lawyers were on this way before anyone else. Women were on it way before everyone else, right? Women with law degrees were on this way before anyone else. Women, you know, activists are on a, you know, we're on this in May when Texas passed the law. Right. Women are constantly, you know, Planned Parenthood, narrow. And basically, any lady you know with a law degree on Twitter or TikTok is like, look at what Republicans do. There is a portion of this country that is constantly aware of the attacks, both obvious and petty, both dangerous and slight that are constantly brought against women's rights, abortion rights, privacy rights, birth control rights.

Because they happen constantly. Either at the national level or state by state by state, these things are constantly happening. You know, one of the reasons why I wasn't completely caught off guard by this is because I follow those women. Right. Right. I follow Neh Rao. I follow the Center for Reproductive Rights. rights. I pay attention to what's going on in this space because there's always something

going on because Republicans are always trying to take it away. The thought that Roe and the right to abortion is well settled and there was never, you know, what Republicans were trying to say while they were nominating Amy Coney Barrett specifically to take away abortion rights was that come on, Roby way so well settled. Who would overturn it? Stop being hysterical lady. It's precedent. Right? You're the, you're the, parts are acting up and you're being hysterical. Like, that's what Republicans were saying with a straight face, knowing what they were doing the entire time.

So, yeah, the, so yeah, I think women were first. I think people in our communities probably were second because lawyers who have more access to lower income clients, kind of know the unique stresses and pressures that lower income clients are under. Right. Again, to go back to my solution, the way you get around the high amendment is that you make abortions free. And that should actually solve the problem.

But if you want to say, and there's an argument that will even paying a doctor to do an abortion would be a violation of the Hyde Amendment, which, I mean, I would say go screw yourself. But what you're paying the doctor for, where the taxpayers are paying the federal privacy protectors for is the counseling about people's constitutional rights, which cannot be stopped. and if those privacy protectors then later decide that in addition to canceling about constitutional rights, they want to provide constitutionally protected medical services, well, then I'm sure that we can privately fund that. Right. I'm sure that we could probably get together some kind of group of people. No, listen. I mean, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. You know where I learned that trick, Molly? Yeah. From the Republicans. Republicans love to use private funding to get around state regulations. I give you example A, private prisons. What the hell is that, except for public, private funding so that the prison system can avoid some of our constitutional regulations because it's a privately funded entity as opposed

to a public institution. Republicans are where I learn how to get around things like the Hyde Amendment. Thank you very much. Yeah. So that's, and that would work. Biden could sign that executive order, create the privacy protectors, send them out in mobile federal pieces of property like. trucks or vans or send them to national parks and courthouses and say with one clear voice,

not some three-paragraph platitude, oh, we will protect Roeview Wade. No, we will protect constitutional medical services now. Right. Right. Today in Texas and any other state that tries to pull this bull crap, because guess what, other states will. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think this is the beginning, the harbinger of,

what's to come. Look, the Supreme Court was already set to overturn abortion this term. Let's be clear. Yeah. They already had a case. It's called Dobbs v. Jackson and Women's Health. Yeah. Coming out of Mississippi, Mississippi has a 15-week abortion ban. Again, no exception for rape or instants. Let's not forget Texas also, no exception for rape or incest. So they were already set to hear that case where Mississippi has explicitly asked them to overturn Roe v. Way. The Mississippi case was, law was struck down by the district court, struck down by the circuit court of appeals. The fact that the Supreme Court even decided to review it was an indication that the only reason why you review a case that's unconstitutional, that has been ruled unconstitutional, is to say that it's not real.

I mean, that's the only real reason why you do it. In the dissenting opinion, which Roberts was part of, there's a lot of talk about the shadow docket. Can we talk about the shadow docket? Because this happened on the shadow docket, which is this very sleazy part of the Supreme Court. Can you explain to our listeners what it is? So the way that the law is supposed to work is you bring a case. I love you. By the way.

And then you argue a case in public. It's a public hearing. Even if you've never been to the Supreme Court, you have the option to because it's public because tyranny thrives in darkness. So you argue a case. You send you briefs. Those briefs are public. You argue in front of the judges that hearing is public. People can either physically go and see it or later listen to it on audio.

The court deliberates because that's a thing. They think about what they think. about what they should do. They write opinions, they write their opinions down. They tell you not just what their ruling is, but the logic for their ruling. In a common law system, the logic for the ruling is almost as important as the ruling itself, because it's the logic for the ruling that really becomes the precedent of what we should do in similar cases in the future. Right, right. That's the normal process. The shadow docket is the emergency process. process. It's when things are happening too fast, too quick, breaking news to be dealt with

through the normal process. It's supposed to be used exceedingly, sparingly, and rarely. So one example of a good use of the shadowed docket or appropriate use of the shadow docket were the election law cases, right? The coup cases, where Trump was trying to overthrow the federal government. In real time, the court was probably right to like, emergency, no. Right. Emergency, this is fucking crazy. Emergency, get your ass out of my courtroom, you idiot. Like, those decisions were appropriately handled in an emergency situation because it was truly breaking news about, you know, the future of our country. But what conservatives have done increasingly is to use the shadow docket to hide and smuggle their most partisan and controversial decisions without even having to give a reason as to why. All of the Supreme Court COVID cases so far have been on the shadow docket, right?

I always said all the election cases were on the shadow docket. I thought that was a good use of the shadow docket. And now this abortion case is on the shadow shadow docket. What that does is that it doesn't let people see an actual argument. It takes away people's proverbial day in court. You literally do not get a day in court. It absolves the conservatives from actually having to explain themselves. You were talking about the dissent because the dissent is all we got because we don't actually have a majority pain because they didn't have to bother tell us.

Right. So we have a dissent here of four members. who are actually criticizing the way that these five members are using the Supreme Court. Has that ever happened before? Is there precedent for that? I mean, the Supreme Court has been pretty contentious back in the day. I'm not a full historical scholar. I know things got pretty hairy around the Civil War. Right, I would think. That makes a lot of sense.

But the Supreme Court usually does kind of pride itself on its collegiality and civility. And I do think that the dissents were particularly strong, especially Sonia Sonomaeors. Yeah. Which, you know, a friend of mine said, in terms of efficiency for lines versus hits, she batted a thousand in that dissent. Every line was like, you know, it's all like that old Eddie Murphy skit from coming to America. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, who's next? Like, that was her whole dissent. It was kind of brilliant.

I wish it wasn't in dissent, right? I wish Sotomayor was part of the majority. That was ever allowed to be part of the majority. Yeah, it's amazing. So, yeah, the dissents were very pointed and strong because, again, what the court is doing is crazy. The core of the court's argument, short though it was, was basically that it doesn't know what the law is. Right. The Supreme Court said that it had to let the Texas law, the Texas too clever by half, Texas two-step bounty system go,

because it doesn't know if it's legal or not, which, A, that's literally your job, you old people. B, like, if you don't know what the law is, the thing to do is to enjoy the crazy new law and keep the 50-year-old constitutional precedent of Roe v. Wade and 30-year-old constitutional precedent of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. So for the Supreme Court to both say it doesn't know the law, but then say, so the answer is the thoroughway precedent. Yeah. Every Republican, and I am specifically talking about Susan Collins.

But every Republican who told you for two seconds that an Amy Coney Barrett or an alleged attempt at rapist Brett Kavanaugh or a Neil Gorsuch would follow precedent, they were either willfully lying to you, Susan, or a complete idiot. Those were your only two options because these people, especially the Trump judges, the most recent judges, just. threw away 50, 60 years of precedent on its head on the theory that it doesn't actually know what the lies. In the middle of the night on Wednesday. Thank you so much for joining us. Please, please, please come back. Thank you so much.

Hey, folks, if you haven't heard every 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 Soledadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun to 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 in the news You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member Where you'll support the beast fearless journalism as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles

To become a member head to new abnormal. That's new abnormal.thedailybeast.com Congressman Ruben Gallego represents Arizona's 7th District He sits on the committee on armed services as well as the committee on natural resources. Welcome to the new abnormal. Back to the new abnormal, Ruben Gallego. Thank you for having me. Very excited to have you here today.

I have a lot of things I want to talk to you about. First, we've got to talk about Madison Cawthorne. Why? Because he wants to do another armed insurrection. He said two days ago that he was like, we're working on that. That feels like not good. He would not exactly be the pipe piper of the revolution. I don't think he's smart enough to do it. So I'm not too worth of them. But, I mean, what is it like there? I mean, you have these insane members of Congress and the minority leader is protecting them. I mean, you've got McCarthy saying that he doesn't want these phone companies to participate with the congressional subpoenas.

Well, I mean, it's part of a way to cover up a crime. I mean, it basically tells you that they're members. were somehow involved or knew what was going to happen. We're encouraging it's going to happen. So, you know, Kevin only cares about one thing. That's him becoming the speaker. So if he can cover up the insurrection, if you cover up the future insurrections, if you cover up criminality, he'll do it because at the end of the day for him, all that matters is power. And then you can see what happens to Republicans to power. We just saw what happened in Texas with, you know, the basic banning of safe and legal abortions. And, you know, look, Kevin sold his soul a long time ago. and it doesn't matter who he has to buy off,

who he has to hide in order for him to get the votes for him to become speaker. That's what's happening here. And so do you think it'll work? It can. I mean, look, they have a very good advantage when it comes to redistricting. They're trying to sow a lot of hatred among the voters to distract them, you know, from how things are going, at least with when it comes to the economy, which I think most people care about.

You know, they throw out BS arguments about, you know, critical race theory, trying to scare people with people at border. I mean, everything you can imagine. they're going to do. You know, I hope that the American public and us as Democrats can remind people that we don't want the chaos of the Republican Party being in charge of anything because, you know, no good has come from it every time they've been in charge of anything. You were in Iraq. You are a combat veteran. You've seen the horrors of war. Talk to me about Afghanistan. I feel like in the end, Biden got us out of there and that's what matters. Look, it does. Look, the president did the right thing.

We needed to get out of there. I think there was a lot of things that went wrong prior to that in terms of, you know, evacuating some of our, you know, some of our interpreters, you know, that being said, once it really hit the fan, the fact that it will airlift 125,000 people in the span, I think, of 14 days is still a big deal that we should be proud of. It doesn't mean our job is done. You know, we still have people that are wanting to get to the United States that deserve to be United States, and we need to work to do that.

Now, what's happening right now is that there are people that are trying to, you know, use the chaos of the evacuation to somehow diminish the idea that we should not have left Afghanistan, right? They're trying to use it as an excuse that we needed to prolong our presence there to come up with another justification for us to prolong a 20-year war into something else. And that's just is not the right way to think about it. And it's what essentially kept us in Afghanistan is this idea that, you know, we need to find a way to exit Afghanistan in a manner that that would be, I think, I don't know what these generals were thinking, but it was never going to happen. And I think President Biden made a very hard decision. And, you know, I think in regards to that in the future, people are going to agree with him.

I think right now everything's very raw about what's happening, but he did make the right call. We needed to get out of Afghanistan. Had we found another justification for being there, we would have stayed there longer. The Taliban would have to start attacking. And then we would have to stay longer because you can't leave while they're attacking you. You see how this gets into a very perpetual war situation. And that's how we got here after 20 years. Right. I also think, I mean, and you can speak to this because you were in Iraq. It strikes me that there are journalists who have covered this war who have gotten very involved with the people of Afghanistan.

And they hate to see the Taliban take over because they know it's going to be terrible for them because it is terrible. But that doesn't mean that we should stay there. Absolutely. Like the Taliban is a horrible entity, right? And they are going to really, you know, dictate. some very strict fundamentalist views, and it's going to cost the civilians there dearly. But what we have to look at is,

what are we able to do the next 20 years and we couldn't do the last 20 years, that we're willing to sacrifice men and women to that may not change in the end. And while it really sucks that we have to make these types of calculations, the American public didn't want us to be there anymore. And at the end of the day, we're still a democracy.

The generals, the Pentagon, the thing tankers, the Warhawks, they don't get to call the shots. And the American public said that is smart. They understand what's going to happen to the Taliban, to what the Taliban is going to do to the, to the sensory of Afghanistan. So they know what's going to happen, unfortunately, to women of Afghanistan. But the American public has spoken. They said that we do not want to be there.

We do not want to sacrifice more men and women, our time, our treasure. It's time for us to move on. And at the end of the day, you know, again, we're democracy. The Department of Defense doesn't get to make the shots. Generals don't make the shots. Warhawks are doing shots. Think takers don't make shots. So everyday citizen has made that call.

They made the call under Trump and they made the call under Biden. And we're going to follow through on that. Yeah, it just strike me that I think there was a lot of emotionality in the way that this withdrawal was covered. I want to talk to you about the right has been very, has sort of picked up different disinfo narratives from the withdrawal that strike me as they're working overtime to try to discredit Biden. There's the disinfo that we left our military dogs behind. That's not true. That we gave lists of people to the Taliban for them to bring to the base. That's not true.

That he disrespected the ghost star families by not showing up. That's not true. There's going to be a lot of disinformation. What about the video of the guy with the helicopter and Don Jr. Said they were hanging? He was putting on a flag. The fact that now that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, has like the fourth largest air force or something like that. That's also not true. We disabled

most of the airplanes and for some of the Afghan pilots, fluid to other countries. But the point is the reason why they're trying to bring this disinformation, though, let's focus back on why they're doing it is because the withdrawal is popular. The fact that we left Afghanistan's popular. Now, there's going to be discussions about could we have done it in a safer, more control manner? And I think that's a legitimate conversation we should have. But the fact is overall is that the American public supports President Biden, leaving Afghanistan. And the only way for the Republicans quote-unquote to score points is to do these kind of side arguments of disinformation of things that did not actually attract.

Right. Exactly. No, it's really striking to me. And I think it's important. But it is, it is also striking that public sentiment has shifted so much on this war. Like, it was a very popular war in 2001. I mean, I was there. Right. And that's the point is that the, okay, I get what you're saying. It shifted a while ago. It's just that, again, and I talked about this the whole time, there was this unholy alliance between the Warhawks, the Pentagon, the think tankers, and just kind of your general, like, Washington elite that they continued this war where, you know, 20 to 40 men were dying per year, men who weren't dying per year, probably hundreds and maybe thousands injured here and there.

Thousands of, you know, Afghans killed in collateral damage. But because it was scaled, it was kept to such a little scale, you know, they, they were was never ever a real pool to get out because, number one, the politicians were afraid to go publicly against, you know, the military, just kind of military society in general. But eventually, the public caught up. I mean, I think the public was for getting out of Afghanistan starting around 2010, 2012. And it just took forever, really for us to get to this point. And it got to the point between basically Trump and Biden. And, you know, if you hear some of the things that the Trump people are saying, well, we never really intended to get out.

We were just negotiating. Well, the American public thought you were. That's bullshit. Yeah. I mean, he ran on the idea that he was Donald the Dove. But either way, the public spoke. That's what they wanted. This president followed up with it. And, you know, I think it's just a more of a shot, I think, to the D.C. kind of, you know, military crowd than it is to the American public. I think the American public actually understands is better more so than people here in our little sheltered world. So let's talk about Texas, that state right next to you guys. It's like the lunatics are running the asylum over there.

The laws they've passed, I mean, the abortion law is like beyond. I mean, it creates a whole new culture of vigilanteism that a la handmade's tale. Yeah, okay, to be clear also, we have New Mexico between us and Texas. I'm sorry, that's right, New Mexico. You're east coast elites. You don't know the southwest, do you? Hey, man, I know New Mexico. I'll confess, I was called up the map to make sure.

I was like, I have to tell you, I was like, Texas is next to Arizona, right? It is a big state, though. Yeah. This is a full continuation of the Republican War on Women, right? This has been happening for years. And now there was this theory that I think a lot of politicalists thought that, you know, Republicans would never go that far. They would only, they'd only like urge it, you know, maybe pass some laws because they didn't really want to pass this because there'd be a full blowback.

Well, now we know they really do want to control women's bodies, right? And, I mean, it's scarier that, like, I don't know if they don't understand that most women don't know they may be pregnant up until they missed their first period, but usually, you know, every four weeks. And there's, I have a feeling a lot of these Texas politicians don't understand, you know, periods and mental cycles. Yeah. To begin with, what makes you think that. It's even scared that they're actually deciding what to do with women's bodies and take away people's body soot. But, you know, there needs to be a reaction. We need to pass legislation at the federal.

level to enshrine Roe v. Wade, which we're going to do. Are you going to pass the codification? Because Congress can pass a codification of Roe v. Wade. Do you see that coming down the pike? We're going to pass it. We're going to pass it of the House. But we need is for the Senate to break the filibuster and pass it. If there's no better reason to do this, and I think the voiding rights is another issue to break the filibuster, when you have essentially a Supreme Court that takes a dodge and

making this decision. And by just silence, essentially codifies the destruction of Roe v. Wade, you know, this is when the Senate needs to act, right? When one branch of our government is essentially, you know, abdicating its role in making decisions about people's privacy, essentially, then we need to make decision. And we should not be using some adequate law, rule, not even law, rule of the Senate, to even stop legislation. And I think it's going to be even, incumbent upon Democrats in the Senate to realize what is going on. What is happening in the Senate? Do they just not?

I mean, it seems to me like we can get a lot of legislation through the House, which, you know, Democrats have a pretty small majority. And then they just can't, they just die in the Senate, even though Democrats do control the Senate. Speculate with me. Yeah. It's hard to understand the motivations over there. And every, every senator is different.

Every state's different. But we know that having right to say. and legal abortion is popular nationally. Right. We know that the majority of Americans are pro-choice. We know that this law in Texas is ridiculous. They have no exception, by the way. Rape and incest.

Rape and cess. Essentially, if someone is raped, they're going to be, someone's going to be able to hunt them down legally, mind you, while they're already going through the trauma of, you know, dealing with rape, you know, or incest. I mean, this is absolutely bonkers that we're doing. this. And we're essentially creating these little, you know, fundamentalist groups that are going to be tracking down women to make sure that they're not having an abortion. What's next? Are we going to have,

you know, pregnancy tests at the airports to make sure that women aren't leaving pregnant and coming back not pregnant? I mean, this is what, this is the society we're dealing with. And again, it is not popular, nor is it, more importantly, even if it's not popular, which it is, this is a women's right to choose. This is their body, right? We, we especially men, have zero right to be getting involved in this very intimate, intimate decision that's going to affect their lives and their health for the rest of their lives. So can you primary Kristen cinema? I'm focused here on the house. I'm going to do everything I can to protect, you know, the women's right to choose. So yes. No, don't. We're not going down that road. My own,

I feel like that's a good headline for the episode, right? Yeah, because you want you wanted to clickbait. I'm here to continue being a good member of Congress. And you know what? Kirsten's an old friend. I have faith in her that she will see the way. Oh, interesting. So can you call her up and be like, look, man, as Joe Biden says, come on, man?

Kierston does not have to be called for anything. She knows what's going on. She is one of the brightest people I know. And you know what? I've known her forever. I've known her when push comes up. She does the right thing, and I'm going to continue to be hoping that. What's the best character on Sex and the City?

Come on. Now you're just causing problems. You know it's Samantha. Oh, yeah. I did not see that coming. Yes. He's got very controversial sex in the city opinions. So what are you going to do with the movie?

Well, if Samantha's not on there, I'm not going to watch it. I'm boycotting. She made sex in the city. Wow. She did. I'm on Team Rubin here. Yeah. This is the hot take.

Without Samantha, sex and the city is boring. Whoa. Yeah. Think about it. I'm with them. I'm with her character was integral to actually make things like exciting. I'm not touching something so controversial. Well, and by the way, here's, here's more commercial.

After Samantha, I'm team Charlotte. Like, Carrie is like maybe three or four. Yeah. No. This is like an, that like Dungeons and Dragons equation of like what character you are. This is like unclassifiable. I think, I think if. If I had described it, I'm a combination of Charlotte and Samantha.

Wow. Jesus Christ. We're done here. Now there's your headline. Thank you so much, Rubin. Please come back soon. Okay, have a good one, y'all. Elizabeth Shekelford is a foreign policy wonk at the Chicago Council.

So, Lizzie, I wanted to have you on because you wrote a really excellent thread about what it's like to work on an evacuation of a war-torn country. Can you talk a little bit about how you found herself in South Sudan? Sure, happy to. I was a foreign service officer. It was 2013, so it was my second tour as a U.S. diplomat. I just have to ask an annoying question for those of us keeping track at home. How do you get that job? Well, it's a pretty long bureaucratic annoying process because they try to make it really merit-based. So you start by taking the Foreign Service Officer exam, which... Right. And you have to go to Foreign Service School, right? Like, there's a special school for it. There's, I mean, you do a number of weeks at any different time.

Like, we have our A-100 is what they call the kind of orientation. And when I joined, it was about six weeks. Then you go into a couple of different programs. It's in Northern Virginia. It's like baby diplomat school. And then you get the glamorous appointment of South Sudan. I get the glamorous appointment of South Sudan, which I was very excited about because it was the world's newest country. And I have an interest in Africa and wanted to go somewhere where we could, you know, where the kind of U.S. interest was high, but it was kind of a small enough problem set. It seemed to me that we could really make a difference. So it was my first choice. And I was really excited.

I arrived and I was supposed to be a junior political officer. But when I got there, I was told that I was both the political and consular officer. So I was the head of our tiny consular section. So you're basically the ambassador at that point. No, we actually had a very skilled ambassador there. And I did have the political chief who was my boss. So we had a small number of us in a very small embassy that was basically a USAID office that had been turned into the embassy when the country became independent in 2011.

So it was a lot of very, and kind of rough going. You know, we just managed with the space we had. And my predecessor had set up the consular section, which was basically a closet in the cafeteria. And it was from there that we did a small number of visas for people that South Sudanese to travel to the U.S., mostly South Sudanese government officials and military coming to do training. And then American citizen services. So we did emergency services for American citizens. That was most of what we did in the consular section.

And talk to me about how your evacuation started and all of that. So it happened a few months into my tour there, and the political situation was really quite rough. That's a whole other long conversation to get into. But needless to say, it was both a surprise and not a surprise when in December of 2013, violence erupted between the government forces and actually other government forces. It was kind of internal between two sides of the political sphere. Violence started on a Sunday night because in a place like Juba, you hear a lot of gun fire anyway. It took us a little...

Yeah, oh, that must be good. It took us a little while to realize that this wasn't, you know, the standard. So, and then nobody was really moving around town because there was a lot of, a lot of violence, mostly by government forces in the streets. So it took a couple of days to both be in a secure enough position and then realize that we were in a real war. So it was going to be necessary to do some evacuations to help people get to safety, including a lot of embassy staff. Wow. And so one of the things we've interviewed a lot of people about Afghanistan, and one of the things they've said is that you can't evacuate before the absolute last moment because if you do, your evacuation actually can cause the chaos. Yeah. And there is a lot of truth to that. I mean, there are a couple of different levels of evacuation. And, you know, we mentioned the orientation class for the foreign service. And I remember as they kind of went through the session to talk about,

evacuations. And I remember them saying very clearly, you'll almost never have a military evacuation. Usually, usually, 99% of the time, something happens. And what you do is you help Americans get to, you know, to commercial aircraft and get out. And you advise them to leave, you know, to buy a ticket and go. And that's what happens most of the time. But of course, we're living in a different era than even even a decade ago. And yeah, we certainly had to do that. Because so, So in countries like Afghanistan and South Sudan, I mean, we're telling people all the time not to live there. I mean, these places are dangerous on an everyday basis. And so the State Department warnings are, it's dangerous here, and there's not a lot we can do to help you. So please, please leave.

And for American citizens, you know, they have that option. But you don't live somewhere like that casually. So people are there for a reason. And that's why, I mean, both you don't want to precipitate you know, kind of an urgent chaotic withdrawal, like an emergency withdrawal before it's absolutely necessary because, as you've said, you don't want to precipitate that sense of chaos because it can feed on itself. And lack of faith in the government. But you also can't convince people until it's pretty chaotic that they really need to leave. That goes for Americans. I mean, obviously, a lot of South Sudanese and a lot of Afghans who would like to live in a place like the U.S., they need the ability to come. So that's a different.

it's a different issue. Right. It strikes me that a lot of these Americans that are there didn't want to leave, and that is one of the problems that America's had now with Afghanistan. Can you explain that a little bit to our listeners? Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to get into the, you know, blaming the victim issue, because it's, it's 100% understandable why every American who chooses to stay to the last minute is there. And also a lot of them are there for service, right? I mean, a lot of them are there for service, but, you know, I mean, we, we do tend to get. We got the Americans out who worked directly, U.S. government employees. But there is, especially in a place like Afghanistan, there are thousands of people who are working on things that are in the interest of what the United States is doing there.

And we saw this in South Sudan, too. You know, you've got all the contractors working on USAID projects. You have all the contractors working on military issues. Lots of people doing, you know, whether it's logistics or training or, you know, infrastructure. work. Many of those are going to be American citizens who are there for those projects. So that's one big category of people. And then the other big category is American citizens who have family in Afghanistan. And for obvious reasons, they can't bring everyone they're related to with them, even if they have citizenship in the United States. So many of them are very hesitant to leave before the very last minute in

hopes that things won't go terribly wrong or in hopes that they can find a way to bring more people with them. Right. Exactly. I mean, does the job end up being you convincing people? There's only so much scope to do that. And that's why I think it's important for people to know. It sounds so awful to have wrapped up our military evacuations with more Americans on the ground. But I think it's really important that people understand that these are folks who could have gotten out for a long time and who we explicitly, the U.S. government explicitly, you know, asked to go. Americans are free to do what they want in these situations. We can't make them leave a country.

And so there's not much we can do beyond making the case. And in time after time, there are people who are going to, you know, color bluff on that. Right. I feel like we have so little exposure to foreign policy in a certain way. And our news is so America-centric that a lot of people could only compare this evacuation to Saigon. Right. I mean, that's something that, you know, does loom large and, you kind of American culture and history. But we have had these types of situations, you know, a handful of other times. And they are always dramatic. And one of the things I really like to highlight to people is that,

you know, you can be really critical of decisions happening in Washington. And I am of quite a few, you know, in terms of what's happened the last few weeks, I think that it could have been changed on the margins. But there was much that the U.S. government could have done years before to change the situation. But when you got to the past few weeks and the active evacuations in Kabul when the Taliban has taken over, the people on the ground who are implementing those decisions and those policies are all, you know, they're normal people. There are service members. There are diplomats. And they're individuals who one by one have to make these decisions. Who out of these scores of people in front of me? Not am I going to let in because

there are, you know, there's documentation you check and things like that. But, but in those numbers, it's who do you even, who do you even start to consider? Because it's just, I mean, this, the scale was so huge. And we faced that. It quieted down over days and we were able to kind of manage the numbers better. But at the outset in Juba, we had far more people, you know, on the first day than we had seats on planes. And people were very urgent. And you did have to decide. I personally had to decide, you know, who to choose to put on planes. How do you make that choice? Well, you have guidance from Washington, and I mean, beat my head against a wall quite a bit that it wasn't more clear.

But I understand it's hard to pinpoint it from Washington. There's a lot that you need to consider on the ground. But, you know, we had guidance like American citizens and their family members or their immediate family members, which is a very different definition in the United States than it is in a place like South Sudan or Afghanistan or elsewhere. And we didn't have guidance that said specifically only children. or children and stepchildren, or you could bring grandparents if they were with children, if they were the primary caregiver. And we didn't have that kind of nuance. So you did have to make decisions.

But what I did on the first day when I realized how hard those calls were going to be. And we had a few of us who were vetting potential passengers is, you know, I looked at the situation and I came up with some more specific rules to apply. And I felt that that was the best way that I could be the best way. most fair, but every time you turn around, somebody wants to make another exception. So you just, you create your parameters and you try to apply them as evenly and fairly as you can. But it isn't easy. Oh, I'm sure. It's an anxiety dream in real life, right? I mean, were you able to get everyone out? I mean, that's a hard question. No, is the short answer because there were people who showed up

every day. And some people I had to say, you know, we don't have space today, but come back tomorrow. and some of those people didn't come back. And I don't know if that's because they found an alternative way or because, as they had said, they were in great danger. That haunts me all the time. I can't imagine it doesn't. I'd say we got, you know, we got all the Americans out who had wanted to get out who were in Juba. There were certainly Americans who were outside of Juba who we lost track of, you know,

people who were trying to walk from cities that were, you know, 80 miles away from Juba, that type of thing because there was no alternative. And we just don't know. You know, people didn't necessarily follow up with us to let us know. And those are the things where you think, you know, maybe they were okay. Maybe they weren't. And you're never going to know, but you do the best you can with what you have. And it's cold comfort to say, we told them not to live here or not to stay here. But, you know, you try to cling to that sometimes. It does seem to me it's just such an impossible situation that hindsight really changes the perspective of it. It does. I mean, I feel pretty confident in South. Sudan that there wasn't much we could have done to do what we did better or to get more people out. And one thing I'll say that I was amazed by, even as a U.S. government employee, even as a

foreign service officer, was the links to which we went to help people out from different parts of the country and, you know, from different parts of the city. I was amazed at the resources that we threw into there. I mean, by the end of the period, we were, you know, we were getting approval for planes to fly out a handful of people who had managed to finally make it to Jugar to the airport. And I mean, that was a pretty huge cost to do. But we were willing to do it. What we weren't able to do was at times when things were really dangerous was, you know, to kind of go into an active battle area and extract people. That's what you'd like to do. But instead, you know, you throw more planes and hope people can make it there. Now that the military has stopped the evacuation, will Americans and also

Afghan interpreters, will they be able to get out? I do think so. I mean, a lot is going to depend at this stage moving forward on, you know, working, frankly, with the Taliban. The Taliban controls the situation there. We have some leverage. I wouldn't say we have an extensive amount of leverage, but we have leverage to do some things on the margins, like get permission to, you know, ensure safe passage for Americans and our Afghan allies to the airport to get out on commercial flights. I mean, at this stage, and I'm not sure what the current situation is with how active the airport is. I know that that's a big question, but frankly, it might be safer for a lot of people now that, you know, the U.S. government isn't,

you know, the U.S. military isn't controlling it. I mean, it's possible that, you know, some civilian air flight start to happen again and that it's much calmer to get to and into the airport. Now, that's not going to be much of a comfort to the people who feel like they are being hunted down. But probably for a lot of people, it's going to be a much, you know, safer option now than it was when you were, you know, in massive crowds at a place that's being highly targeted by, you know, suicide bombs. Thank you. Tell us your books. Tell us the titles of your books before you go. Your most reason book. Sure. So I published last year, it's called The Dissent Channel, American Diplomacy and a Dishonest Age, for anybody who is really interested in kind of the play-by-play of. of how those evacuations went. You know, there are a couple chapters that really walk through it.

I mean, every day and every moment of our efforts to get people onto planes and out of the country. But it also puts the context of some of our foreign policy decisions, you know, kind of into the on the ground detail, how our bigger foreign policy decisions really affect what we can do in a country. So I think it's interesting for anybody who's interested in the Foreign Service or just kind of really what embassy life is like and work is like on, you know, in these more challenging parts of the world. So, you know, if you want to read about evacuations, that'll give you a play-by-play.

Thank you. Thank you. 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, new podcasts 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. Hi, Jesse Cannon.

Hi, Molly Jung Fast. So, Labor Day. There's still his work to be done, though. This was a week of fucking fuckery, as they say. Gee, but what could have happened that got your ire? I haven't noticed you on cable news and other places yelling at disgusting people like Lio Rose. We knew they were going to overturn Roe, but the response to it has been so fucking annoying that I can't even, I thought I was irritated. I'm 10 times more irritated than I was before.

I'm very mad about Roe, and so for that, my fuck that guys are going to be. be all first they're like this is going to be a um tiered fuck that guy today so the first person who deserves well women have had the right to choose for 50 years and on wednesday texas took it away because why the fuck wouldn't they and the goddamn supreme court didn't do shit so my fuck that guy is tiered my first fuck that guy the sort of the in the tiered fuck that guy is one Greg Abbott, who may remember him as a person who is letting COVID rip through the schools right now. Greg Abbott has really, you know, been anti-masking, anti-tracing, anti-testing, anti-testing, a very kind of willy-nilly on the vaccine, though he's had three. And so for that, he took away the right to choose, made it harder to vote, made it easier to get a gun.

And for that I say, go fuck yourself, Greg Abbott. But I would also like to say that Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton are also horrendous. You'll remember Ken Paxton as the AG. This is a triumphant of the really the shittiest Republicans. And then I would also like to say a hearty fuck you to Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Kegstan Kavanaugh. But Gorsuch, the three of them, decided that the law is not a big deal and that they, that Texas has the right to set out bounties on the, you know, on the Uber driver who drives you to get your abortion. And so for that, I say, fuck all of you motherfuckers.

And wait, I want to add a third fuck that guy to fucking Byron York who I was on a radio show yesterday after and he told the host that Roe hasn't been overturned because of a procedural. go fuck yourself. Tell that to the girl in Texas who wants to get an abortion and can't. And he did not quite say she was being hysterical, but the implication was there. When confronted with this fact, he told me that I was lying. And so for that, Byron York, go fuck yourself. The thing I think so many people forget, right,

is that a lot of what Roe was about was making it so that abortion was readily available enough that we didn't have women dying in back alleys. Right. And if you say that this doesn't do that, You have to obscure a lot of facts to say that's not overturning row, and I think people keep forgetting that. But also, it's like easier for them to say women are being hysterical. It's like saying Trump is going to mature into the presidency. Wah, want, wah.

Jesse, who is your fuck that guy? Mine are the 11 House Republicans who sent a letter to 13 telecompanies vowing to pursue all legal remedies if they comply with the January 6th committee's records requests. So included in these signies were Jim Banks, Marjorie Taylor Green, Warren Goldberg, Madison Clothard, Paul Gosar. Louis Gobert, the dumbest man in the United States Senate. But I just have to say is like, you know, these are the exact type of people who, when they haven't done anything wrong or the type of people would be like, I have nothing to hide. I'll show this. In fact, I'll expose my password that's written on the bottom of my computer screen and they'll show off everything. but when they have something to hide,

they sure will try to cover it up. Smart money is on somebody's going to come out looking real bad here. Yeah, it seems like, I mean, I have to say, the guilty flee where no man pursueth, as they say, sure seems like that.

I think that's right. And anybody who wants to bet me on these communications damning them if they do come out, I'm happy to put some money on it because I'm into investing. That's good. I'm not sure that's what investing is.

You might be right, but I'm kind of bad at it. 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. We'll 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. Want more great listens?

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