The Dispatch Podcast - Biden Makes a Move on Student Loan Debt

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

President Joe Biden announced a plan to provide tens of millions of Americans with student loan debt relief. The fallout was swift. Our hosts are here with their reactions. Plus:  Jonah, David, and Declan discuss the results of this week’s primary elections.   Show Notes: -TMD: Biden’s Base Gets a Student Loan Gift -The Dispatch: The GOP Is Shrink-Wrapping Itself Around Trump -The Dispatch: Tim Ryan Keeping the Pressure on J.D. Vance in Ohio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the podcast. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant podcast. Some might call the the flagship podcast of the Dispatch Empire. And today we have no Steve Hayes and no Sarah Isger. And subbing in for both of them is our own Declan Garvey. Welcome, Declan. Thank you. And as per usual, the co-host of our very well traffic for a niche podcast. podcast. David French, host of the co-host of the advisory opinions. David, welcome on board. Niche. You've mispronounce flagship. When I say niche, I mean selective, like in spinal tap. Oh, okay. So I think I've already screwed up the format for it. So for all I know, I'll be re-recording that intro. But today we're going to talk primarily. We're just going to, as we're in

the dog days of summer. This is the last week of August. And so we're basically just going to wallow in politics and public policy as it pertains to college debt relief. So we were talking in the green room. David was warning me that Declan's gone pretty radical on this. So since David's the lawyer and he knows how to keep his passions in check, why don't we start with David, you know, what do you think's going on and what's your take on it with the student debt relief? Yeah.

I just got to say I don't like this on every which way. I've been trying to steal man it, you know? I've been trying to sort of think, okay, what is the argument here? but economically, you know, it's inflationary right when we are in a inflation cycle, battling inflation. By some measures, it may eat up entirely the alleged benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act. We just endured, this is a form of government largesse aimed not at America's struggling and marginalized classes,

but aimed at the class of Americans who do better than virtually anybody else educated, people with college degrees. I mean, this is a group of people who do not struggle as a class in the United States of America. So you've got a group of people who are set up to do well

if they have college degrees. You have something that's extraordinarily inflationary. And then you just kind of also have this unfairness aspect to it that I think really appropriately sticks in a lot of people because there's an awful lot of people in this country who sacrificed a lot to either pay off their college debt or to not take on debt entirely. And sacrificing by doing things like working through college, sacrificing by foregoing a lot of things that they liked so that they could pay off their debts quickly. Sacrificing by saying no to a dream school so that they could go

maybe to a state school or saying no to one state school so that they could go to a much cheaper state school, lots of sacrifices. And then being told, well, now you have to kind of help pay for other people's student loans as well. Now, again, Americans are compassionate folks and there's a lot of consensus that we should have safety nets and we should give people breaks when they fall on hard times. But that's, again, not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a giant government benefit to a population of people who do really well as a group in the United States. And then the last thing, which is not trivial, is where's the authority for this? Where's the legal authority for this? Yeah, there's, you know, the memoranda have been put out.

We're going to talk about this on advisory opinions. The legal read for this is pretty darn thin and rooted in COVID emergency powers. Now, the ability to challenge the legality of it could get kind of interesting because the question's going to be who has standing. Because as a general view, there's no such thing as taxpayer standing in the U.S. In other words, I don't have standing as a taxpayer to file a lawsuit simply because I'm aggrieved at how my money is being misspent. So the standing question is going to be very interesting. But aside from all of that. Great policy. No, it's just hard for me to see it as anything other than sort of a giveaway to a key constituency right before an election. Declan, tell me I'm wrong.

I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I mean, I like to think of myself as generally a pretty even-keeled person. I don't generally get worked up about policy stuff as much as maybe I should. I was legitimately losing my mind yesterday watching Joe Biden give a speech at the White House announcing this policy. He goes into a five-minute monologue about his dad and jalopies and a random banker from Delaware in the 1950s who rejected his family for a loan. He named the baker. Like that banker has descendants that now got put on blast by the president of the United States.

And it's just, you know, to have the gall to go up there and say, this is going to fix a broken system when all it is is a one-time get-out-of-jail-free card for people who took out their loans before June 30th, 2022. If you took it out on July 1st, you have the same exact problem that everybody had coming into this. And, you know, there have been studies that show that the debt is going to re-accumulate to the same amount. within four or five years, something like that. This is just what we're going to be in the same place, five years from now as we are today. It will arguably be even worse because now schools saw this. They saw what happens.

Joe and I talked to your colleague, Beth Acres, at American Enterprise Institute yesterday for doing some reporting on this. College administrations took a victory lap yesterday. They're sitting there being like, okay, great, we can raise tuition another $10,000 because Americans have $10,000 more in their in their pocket. So, you know, this is not going to do anything to address the reasons why student debt has exploded. And I totally grant the, you know, all the comments Biden made about student debt being crippling for so many people and, you know, affecting their lives and their

lifestyles and decisions that they have to make. That's all true. Tuition has increased about 180% over the last 20 years on an inflationary scale. That's far outpacing anything else really in the economy. And so, you know, costs are outrageous. Like, there is something that we need to do about this because it is, I would argue, a crisis that, you know, people are having to fork over $60,000, a year for college. I don't think that you're getting that return on investment. But this is just going to delay the problem. It's not going to be an answer to it. And it really is just a, you know, college-educated Americans voted for Joe Biden at about a 60% clip in 2020, people with graduate degrees who hold about half of the outstanding student debt voted for

Biden at a 70% clip in 2020. This is benefiting them, rewarding them ahead of the midterms, getting them to turn out in November at the expense of people who don't support Joe Biden, honestly. I mean, he has plenty of people who voted for him that will not get these benefits. as well. But disproportionately, people without college degrees are in their Republican camp right now, and it just seems like a very craven, very political, cynical

play. This is a sure sign that I am not the normal moderator of this podcast, that I just assume that David was going to do a little explaining about what the actual policy was. And because I wasn't prepared to do it, but... Everybody knows, Joe.

But so, well, look, we are sort of like the anti-commentary podcast insofar as, like, John Hodoritz will stop cold the conversation to have some to explain to the audience that Kevin McCarthy is the House majority, the House Republican leader, or that you might find bacon on a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich. So we don't necessarily, we assume a higher level of policy fluency and political fluency among our listeners, but we should say, and Declan, since you've been actually doing reporting on this, you can correct him if I'm wrong.

it's $10,000 of loan forgiveness up to an income of $125,000 a year. And then if you have a Pell Grant, it's like up to $20,000 of loan forgiveness. Do I have that right? Yes. And if you're filing jointly rather than as an individual household income just has to be below $250,000 to be eligible for the relief. And then there's one other kind of less discussed, but I think equally important. And this is something that people, conservatives concerned about this policy are less up in arms about is a change to kind of the income-based repayment plans that, you know, if you are borrowing federal student loans, there's a plan you can enroll in to pay X percentage of your income over a set number of years.

And at the end of those years, whatever the remaining balance is will be forgiven. Biden made a move yesterday to reduce that percentage from 10% to 5 and cap the length of that term from 20 years to 10. And so that's, you know, the biggest cost to the American taxpayer is going to be in kind of the blanket forgiveness. But those changes to the income-based plans will definitely rack up as well. Yeah. So, like, I hated for all the reasons that you guys are bringing up and I don't have that. much to add on the reasons why it's wrong. I mean, if you were interested in pure socioeconomic justice,

I don't want to use the phrase social justice, but even social justice, you could come up pretty quickly. I mean, I'm sure the three of us and none of us are economists, could come up with a formula for forgiving car loan payments that would do more for people truly in need. than this, right? I mean, if you have a small business, if you file as a small business owner,

or if you have three kids, you just come up with all sorts of things that would make more sense in terms of fighting income inequality and the like than this thing. Because there are plenty of dual income, we used to call them dinks, remember that in the 80s?

We have dual income, no-kid families who've recently gone out of college or grad school with a lot of student debt who are going to be members of not the 1% and certainly the 2% within the next 15 years and the idea of who aren't making $125,000 yet. I mean, I'll just be honest, AI is crawling with them.

You know, the research assistants and interns, you can't open, it's like you open the fridge and they're just all in the yogurt. I mean, they're all over the place and they're all going to do fine in life. and none of them deserve to have $10,000 in loans forgiven. I shouldn't say none of them as a generalization, right? They don't.

But it seems to me that it kind of reminds me of that Harry Truman line that H.L. Manchin came up with, which he said, if Truman, I'm going to butcher it a little bit, but this is the gist of it. If Truman were to discover that there were a high proportion of cannibals in the United States who were voting, he would promise them a well-fed missionary in every pot. And it is just pure, old-style sort of Roman, these are my people, let me give them money, free stuff, kind of politics. And to that end, I've seen this from a few different people, and I'll throw this to David, couldn't part of the point be that they're hoping someone figures out the standing issue and that the courts throw it out?

out, and then they get to say, sort of like they did with the loan, forget, not the loan, the eviction moratorium, and just be like, hey, we tried. And this creates this sort of like, let's vote Democrats so we can get the kind of judges in here who will let this kind of thing happen. So he gets credit for trying without actually having to do the thing that he is done here. Is that too clever by half? And what is the likelihood of that? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a little skeptical of the idea that this is something that's passed or enacted with the expectation that it will be blocked. I think it's certainly enacted with the knowledge that it could potentially be blocked.

But this is something that's different from some of the other emergency declarations and some of the other sort of performative pieces of legislation we've seen in the last few years where you're just sort of tossing something completely unconstitutional out into the public. square, and everybody knows this thing's going to be blocked. And then, of course, what this does is it impairs sort of trust in the judiciary because folks who don't know the law think, oh, look, look at the court blocking my favorite policy. The reason why I'm a little bit skeptical of that as an explanation is I'm not sure this will be blocked. And the reason I'm not so sure relates to the standing issue. You know, the legal justification, the legal justification for the for the order is rooted in what's called the Heroes Act, the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003,

which quote, according to the general memorandum opinion for the General Counsel for the Department of Education, best the Secretary of Education with expansive authority to alleviate the hardship that federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies. Just to interrupt you real quickly, David, there. When that bill was passed in 2003, here is what the text outlining the rationale for its passage was. There is no more important cause for this Congress than to support the members

of the United States military and provide assistance with their transition into and out of active duty and active service. This was passed as the United States was going into Afghanistan and Iraq for service members to address their student loan issues. Continue. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a big, there's a huge legal stretch here, huge legal stretch, especially when you're talking about, you know, locating the reason for the financial distress in COVID when we have a superheated employment atmosphere. This is not PPP where the government was saying, you have to shut your business for a month. Like that, this is not that. You know, so, was Congress. And PPP was Congress. Right. Exactly. PPP was Congress. Right. Exactly. PPP was

the Biden administration is actively arguing that the pandemic is over, and that's why we need to stop using more restrictive immigration measures. And so they're trying to have it both ways here. Yeah, right. So there's a po-pery here to take on legally. The question is, who can sue? And I haven't, I haven't dived enough into that question right off the top of my head. It's more difficult to sort of think about who might have standing. I am certain. that you will see State Attorneys General, Red State Attorney General, trying to take this on, and they're going to try to argue, I'm sure, that there's some sort of cost-borne to the states as a result of this policy. It'd be interesting to see if they can make that case. But that's the one reason why I'm a little bit uncertain about this,

is this performative legislation, like, say, some of the social media moderation legislation, like we saw out of Texas and Florida, where the full expectation, not only did people clearly have standing, but that law defied existing case law. The standing issue makes me wonder if this thing might actually happen, to be honest. I have this longstanding theory. I don't want to sound too,

I don't want to get too hairbrained or too remnantty on this, but a lot of the way we talk, a lot of the way politicians, particularly Democratic politicians, talk about billionaires or the 1% are not morally, per se, but sort of structurally, psychologically, anatomically, very similar to classical anti-Semitic sort of arguments, right?

Here are this shadowy group, and I'm not ascribing anti-Semitism to anybody here. I'm just saying that, like, it's this, if you were going to diagram it in a logic or a rhetoric class, it's a very similar form of argument where you ascribe to the injustice of certain tiny minority of allegedly affluent and powerful people who have outsized control and get the benefit of all sorts of breaks, give you sort of the outrage that you invoke when you mention these people is supposed to justify anything else that you want to do. And so like yesterday, Joe Biden gets asked at this event, is this fair to the people who've already paid their student loans? And he twisted into, is it fair to the billionaires who

get their tax breaks? And I mean, something along those lines. And it was such a staggering non-sequitur, right? Because, and it shows you how institutionalized this sort of Elizabeth Warren, billionaires, one percenter, Bernie Sanders' trope is, is sort of instantiated within the Democratic party that they can't even see how that response cannot anticipate the Republican ads that are going to come out because they're not going to be putting out, you know, billionaires saying, oh, this student loan forgiveness thing was terrible. They're going to have hardworking, like plumbers and mechanics or people who went to community college saying, why am I paying for somebody to pay off their medical school loans when the average doctor in this country

he makes X amount of money or the average lawyer makes X amount of money. And so I guess I'll throw this because I'm going to stay on this for just one last round. Like long term, Declan, do you think this kind of politics is this sustainable that or, I mean, or is this the kind of thing that he'll get the sugar high for the 20, or do you think he'll get a sugar high for this for the 22 midterms? is part of it is clearly like that's the one group that they need to turn out who normally doesn't turn out very much because midterm electorates tend to be much older if you could get those 20 to 35 year olds with student debt to turn out

he gets the sugar high response that he wants but long term doesn't work for the Democratic Party or actually answer the question you wanted me to ask I don't even know that he gets the short-term sugar high I think more people in that cohort will turn out in the midterms of November, but I think this is going to motivate a bigger reaction on the opposite side. And the reason I say that is looking at the candidates who are actually up this cycle, we've seen already in, you know, less than 24 hours past this announcement being made, Representative Tim Ryan, who's running for Senate in Ohio as a Democrat, came out in opposition to the plan. Senator Catherine Cortez Mastow is already out in opposition to the plan.

Senator Michael Bennett is already out in opposition to the plan. The people who are actually having to run and defend this policy to voters don't like it. And even on the Democratic side, to your point about Biden's response yesterday to this fairness critique, he preempted, he knew that was coming because that wasn't the first time he said it yesterday. He worked it into his speech was like a, and I don't want to hear anything about unfairness from the Republicans who passed the $2 trillion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They know that that exists as an argument. It's very strange that that was the best rebuttal that they could come up with because it's not

a very strong one. And I don't think that voters will see it as one as well. You know, let's just put, can we put some numbers on some of this? Because one of the things that I want to really emphasize about this is, again, this is this is kind of like the Democrats' version of a tax cut for the rich, right? If you look, so there's Social Security Administration statistics. This is from a study at the end of 2015, men with bachelor's degrees earn approximately $900,000 more in median lifetime earnings in high school graduates. Women with bachelor's, $630,000 more. Men with graduate degrees, $1.5 million more in median

lifetime earnings in high school grads. Women with graduate degrees, 1.1 million more. So, you know, if that $900,000 is $30,000 a year for 30 years. I mean, that's a lot of money, right? So if you're talking about, and, you know, and some of these numbers are, you know, there's a 3.5 times lower poverty rate for bachelor's degree holders versus those with only a high school degree. On 2021, median income for recent college graduates is 52,000 a year for high school graduates in the same cohort. It was 30,000 a year. So again, you're talking about, and I think this is super important. I understand that there's a lot of people who are very pressed by their student loans. We're talking about the cohort of Americans who was set up to do very well in this country, very, very well.

And I think perhaps one of the best and inadvertently perhaps revealing tweets was when Lawrence Tribe tweeted out, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe tweeted out, congratulations to as many students who are going to benefit from this student loan debt cancellation. That's when I really lost it yesterday. I was just about, I was punching a hole through the wall, being like, why does nobody understand? Yeah. And trust me, I graduated from that same institution with a pile of debt. I mean a pile.

And it did cramp my lifestyle some, especially in my mid-20s and early 30s, but no one on this earth should weep for me. No one should weep for me at all. So again, if you're talking about something where you're wanting to help struggling people, As Jonah said, car loan relief would be far more effective. Here's another, you know, I was just talking to someone in the mortgage business, and he was saying that we're going to have an spiraling number of foreclosures coming here soon. And also, there's a lot of concern in the lending industry in general over used car loans.

A lot of used cars were purchased at very informed. prices over the last two to three years and financed above their actual realistic value, that's going to hit a lot of struggling families a heck of a lot harder than the investment in a college education. And that's really the way to look at a college education. It's a big investment that pays off handsomely over the life of that education. And so this was very targeted relief for people who don't need a lot of relief in the United States of America. Even if you're going to do student loan relief, which again, or student debt relief, which I'm for all the reasons we talked about, opposed to, why not carve out for people,

why not say, okay, except for the lawyers and the doctors, right? Or the MBAs. I mean, like, I don't want to be in a position. I don't think it's necessarily great politics for the Democrats to be subsidizing, you know, people who got their masters in puppetry or antebellum non-gender conforming poetry. But at the same time, like, those people probably are going to suffer trying to figure out how to pay their student loans in ways that, you know, someone who's going to be a, you know, a lawyer or cardiac surgeon or whatever isn't. But that's not the point.

The point is, is that it is basically pandering to a class, the sort of new class, management class, you know, a bureaucratic class that is the prime constituency of Democrats these days. So there was some reporting on this yesterday. I think it was the Wall Street Journal that Biden's initial inclination was to do just that, was to carve out graduate degrees from this forgiveness. But AIDS were able to convince him that he shouldn't by arguing that that would cut. nurses and teachers from the relief. And so that's kind of where we are with that. I do want to, you know, before we move to the next topic, talk a little bit about like solutions here where if we're not in favor of mass student debt forgiveness cancellation, what are things that can be done to address some of these like admittedly outrageous costs that we're seeing. And I, and I,

again, talking to Beth at AEI yesterday, she had some really, great points, just about, you know, the way that we think about college and higher education in this country that, you know, pushing it as something that every American needs or should aspire to when we're seeing that, you know, the return on investment is getting less and less profound, the higher cost get is really damaging in ways, not only do people that go and attend college and either don't graduate or graduate with a degree that's not going to allow them to pay back their student loans or what have you. But it really hurts everybody because, you know, if demand for these spots, these limited number of spots at these schools is so high that

schools can continue to charge whatever it is they want to charge and with the backstop, knowing that the government's going to be there to bail them out at the end, then there's no incentive for schools to bring costs down or even just hold them steady. And so, So, you know, there's different experimentation going on, whether it be let's charge people who graduate with an art history degree less than we would charge somebody in chemical engineering. It's cheaper for us to teach that over the course of four years, and you're not expected to recoup as much of the benefit of that degree over the course of your career. That's something that could work.

Or, you know, making schools a little bit more accountable to, you know, if X percentage of your graduates default on their student loans within certain number of years after graduation, students aren't going to be allowed to use federal student loans at your institution anymore. You need to be more invested in the outcomes here that your students are able to pay off their debts. They're able to get jobs. They're able to build a career off of the education they receive at your institution. There's a lot that we can be doing to kind of ensure schools have more skin in the game where it's not just an entire industry based on monopoly money, which is, you know, we can raise whatever price we want to raise to put in a rock climbing wall in our dorm basement

because that will get more, that will stand out to more high-income prospective students. Think about, you know, ways to rein this in a little bit. And so I think the most frustrating thing about this to me is that this one-time cancellation basically forecloses that debate. It's a, all right, we fixed it. now it's time to move on. We'll fix it again in five years. But this is something that's been festering for decades now and really needs somebody to look at it critically. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how

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Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. We have done justice to the student loan issue, I think. And the great thing is, is that We're going to be talking about it again in six weeks, if not six months, because this is one of these things that just never goes away. But we should turn to, you know, if this is the remnant, we would call the rank punditry portion of this podcast, but we are so high-minded here that we will not do such a thing. But yesterday, we're recording us, no, not yesterday, Tuesday, we saw really sort of, I think it was pretty much the, end of the primary season. Are there any primaries left? I think that was sort of it.

And we've got, next weekend is Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall campaign. So why don't we start with what we saw this week, and then maybe we'll broaden it out to sort of politics, Po-Pourri. I'll go to you first this time, Declan. What did you make of what we saw this week? Was there anything that really stuck out to you? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest race from this week, which, we saw primaries in Florida, Oklahoma, New York, was a special election in, believe it was

New York's 23rd district, maybe it was 19, something like that, which was to fill the seat vacated by Antonio Delgado, who was selected to become lieutenant governor in New York. And this was a, you know, widely seen as a bellwether contest for the November general election. It was a Democrat named Pat Ryan running against the former Republican gubernatorial nominee in the state, Molinaro is his last name. I'm forgetting his first name, but Mark. And the Democrat prevailed kind of against conventional wisdom. Democrats themselves didn't see it as a potential holding opportunity,

they barely invested in the race. And this is kind of the, I think it's the fourth or fifth in a string of special elections that have taken place after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade at the end of June, where Democrats have significantly outperformed the expected partisan lien of these districts. So that's, you know, whatever the district voted in the 2020 election for Biden or Trump, Democrats are outperforming that going forward into the 2022 midterms. and that's not what you expect based on, you know, the historical trends of midterm elections and the party in power. And so, you know, that is something that's woken up a lot of Republicans kind of given anxiety to a lot of Republicans here here in D.C. that, you know, oh, we've been promising this massive red wave for a year and a half. We sure hope that it doesn't dissipate and we didn't peak too early, but there's been,

I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about Senate stuff in a little bit, but there's kind of been a growing sense of, hey, wait a minute, it's a little too early to write Democrats' political fortunes off yet, and we got some more evidence of that this week. Yeah, so just so if the district is the 19th in New York, and I believe it went for Biden by two points in 2020, and Ryan won it by two points.

I believe this week. But the point is that, as I understand it, both Ryan and Marano are normals, right? I mean, Marano was not running as a Trumpy guy, used a solid candidate that he put a lot of hopes on. And if you were going, if you're going by the historical precedents, if it were true that we're going into a wave, everyone, all the sevologists say that this is the kind of race that should tip towards the side with the wave. Instead, it looks like it's the same margins from 2020, which was on net a good year for Democrats, but not a great year.

And but given that we were talking about a red tsunami, remember, there was a while there a red wave was like Cuck Rhino thinking. It was a red tsunami. And now it's looking, I think the Cook Political Report now says it may be just a red ripple. But David, what is your takeaway from this week? because then I have a question about the Dobbs stuff that I want to ask both of you. Yeah, you know, that's, I think the,

I think one of the key takeaways is we've got to stop presuming the red wave. I mean, how much more evidence do we need right now after weeks of the generic ballot closing? And then as somebody indicated, I think it was Nate, it was one of the Nate, Silver or Cohn, said that the generic ballot number is interesting, but could be misleading when the actual voting is done because there are more districts

with no Democrats challenging a Republican. So you're going to have more Republican votes, perhaps, even if there isn't a red wave, simply because there are in multiple districts with no Democratic challenger. But I do think the generic ballot is indicative of something that Democrats have done pretty darn well on it. They did well in New York 19,

that a number of Republicans pickups potential pickups in the Senate are in looking like they're in danger. Some Republican holds in the Senate are looking like they're in danger. So I think it's pretty safe to say that we should walk into Labor Day weekend and really the onset of the heaviest campaigning season with our minds really wide open as to what could happen. The other thing is, can I just say, what do we have to do to not have Charlie Christ a part of our political lives anymore.

I mean, I'm old enough to remember in 08, and I don't know if you guys remember this, but in 08, the Republican governor Charlie Christ endorsement before the Florida primary was much coveted and fought over, and he delivered it to McCain at the last instant, sort of chopping, cutting off Mitt Romney at the needs in 08, and it's hard to believe what's happened in the 14 years since. Now it's Democratic gubernatorial. nominee, Charlie Christ. After a pit stop at independent gubernatorial nominee, Charlie Chris.

Yes, yeah. A pit stop at independent. You know, it's easy to laugh about it in one sense, but in another sense, it's sort of a symbol of the exhaustion of our political process. How is it that we're still having 14 years later this same guy around,

just switching party hats? And it's indicative of, it's indicative of a challenge that we have in our politics. It's this, there's a very small, narrow group of Americans who are deeply, deeply engaged in politics, increasingly radicalized. There's a very large group of Americans who are not all that engaged. And to be frank, I think in many ways, just kind of coast on things like name recognition. Do I know this guy, who that this guy is? Do I not? And, you know, in many ways when it comes to sort of this, how is it that we have this in this geriatric um political elite well it's because of us it's because

of us and you know the charlie chris primary is exhibit you know 973 of that okay let me get to the question i want to ask in a second but first um let me push back of that on a little bit i mean look on the one hand i agree with you in the post apocalyptic world where we are we are we are you know drinking from, on our hands and knees, drinking from puddles in, in, in bold and rubble-strewn inner cities. And we consider, you know, Thanksgiving dinner to be a particularly plump rat. There's still going to be Charlie Chris coming along saying, hi, I'm Charlie Chris, and I'm running for office, because he is just sort of impossible to get rid of. But on the flip side, I think it is worth noting that Florida, home of Florida man, right?

You know, home of homo floridus actually has among the least crazy politics, at least among Republicans, that we have seen, or even in general, of any major state. I mean, look at what's going on in Texas and compare it to Florida. And it's kind of amazing. And the Charlie Chris point that we're referring to is that he won the primary for governor as a Democrat to run against Ron DeSantis against what's her name, the agricultural? Nicky Freed. Who is much more of a pure resistance, hardcore, you know, the sergeant of the Supreme Court is going to arrest Donald Trump any day now. kind of candidate, right? And the Democrats in Florida rejected her in favor of a guy who,

you know, I think Rhino makes him sound more conservative than he actually is, but he is just a squish establishment creature, right, who considers the letter after his name to be, like, you know, whatever name tag you give me for this convention, I'll put it on, but like he doesn't care. And, um, and, um, and meanwhile, Well, Laura Lumer, who we all know is problematic. Whoa. We all know her, but listeners might not. Yeah, so Laura Lomer, I mean, if you want to do the greatest sense on Laura Lumer to explain her, that's fine with me.

I can't even remember. She's been around for so long. Sort of Michelle Malkin adjacent, Islamophobe, paranoid conspiracy theorist. She lost by like four, six points yesterday or on Tuesday, and she said it was because the Republican primary was rigged by Big Ten. She's banned from every major social media platform, has been for years. I mean, I think banned from Uber, even, if I remember correctly. There are two great Laura Loomis stories. The first is that she tried to break into a congressional hearing to talk about her being banned

from Twitter, and Billy Long, the representative from Missouri, who was a former auctioneer, went into full auctioneer mode, just rattling off numbers and things that. for sale just to drown her out until the police came and escorted her out of the building. And two, to protest being banned from Twitter, she handcuffed herself to Twitter's headquarters, except she only did it to one door so that people could still walk in and out freely and they did all day while she was just sitting there stuck until somebody unlocked her. I don't really know why I had never really understood why it's incumbent upon Twitter or anybody else to unlock her, right? If she wants to, you know, I mean, like, she got herself into

that problem and, like, let her get herself out. But anyway, my only point is, is that, you know, one can criticize Ron DeSantis, and maybe we should talk about Ron DeSantis, but the Florida GOP is not the Wild Wild West that a lot of the rest of the GOP is. And I think that's just sort of an interesting thing that you would not necessarily expect, given the way Florida is covered in the mainstream media, and given the way the sort of MAG or Wright invest so much in Ron DeSantis, that it's sort of a standout of sobriety compared to a lot of other places. And we saw that with Lumer's race, but also State Representative Anthony Sabatini, I think is his name, also lost his primary to a very normal Republican in Florida. And then in New York on Tuesday,

which I guess you could say is like Florida Republican politics, but just give him five years to move to Florida. Carl Palladino lost his primary in New York. And then one of the representatives, Republican representatives, Andrew Garberino, held off a MAGA primary challenger. So you kind of had a string of victories for closet normals on Tuesday. Yeah, the New York when, I had not followed the craziness of this Palladino guy. And so I just thought, everyone says he's crazy. Is this the kind of thing where it's Twitter saying he's crazy, which can be everything from he's a normal Republican that have said some things that made the hard left mad to actually crazy? And it reminded me of that drill tweet.

What was it? You do not under any circumstances have to hand it to ISIS. Well, Palladino has, under some circumstances, handed it to Hitler. But speaking of Florida politics, a lot of our, you know, I agree with you, Jonah, there are a lot of ways where Florida politics for some years has been sort of an island of sanity.

It's diminishing in that respect. I mean, think about this congressional race. Matt Gates versus Rebecca Jones. And Matt Gates, as listeners know, is Matt Gates. Rebecca Jones, as listeners may not remember, is a person who was a coronavirus data manager who I would recommend there's this really phenomenal blistering Charlie Cook take on her from some time ago in National Review. But this is a person who sort of blew the whistle on alleged data shuff, data mishandling or deception during the during the, during the

pandemic and turned out to be upon closer examination just way she was not what she appeared to be and she was basically the michael avonauty of website managers right i mean just kind of yeah that's a good way of stuff pandered to the msnbc crowd pandered to npr and turned out to have been like making stuff up borderline paranoid um tried to turn herself into a victim of you know, deep state kind of left-wing theories about DeSantis. So, I mean, it's very much an Iran-Iraq war kind of race is what you're saying. Yeah, and we've had some pretty wild legislation in Florida here in the last couple of years. I mean, the Stop Woke Act alone, one of the most sweepingly unconstitutional bills I've seen pass out of the legislature in

some time, already part of it's been blocked. Another part of it is being challenged right now in federal court. Yeah, yeah, this is some of that performative legislation that we were talking about earlier. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex presale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. So this is the question I want to ask you. guys. I've been thinking about this a bit. So the general rule is, going back to FDR, first term of a presidency, first term presidencies, midterms are bad for his party, and there are only three exceptions. FDR and 34, there's George W. I'm missing one. George W. Bush in, no, I'm not. There's Bill Clinton

in 98, because Republican overreach on the Lewinsky stuff, and then there's George W. Bush after 9-11 in 2002. And this is sort of built into the formula for every election handicapper, is that you need some huge exogenous or sui generis or some other highfalutin precedent-breaking event to change the sort of back, the background assumption that midterms are going to be bad for the president. And there were people who, for obvious reasons, thought the Dobbs decision might be that. Now, I think that might, might, might, might be right, but not for the reasons that sort of pro-abortion rights people argue.

It's that when one of the main reasons why midterms are good for, for, for, the out party is the out party gets to say, we're not in charge. Here are all these things that you're complaining about. Everything's going wrong. When we get in, we'll be the normals who come in and do the stuff that you actually want government to be doing now that you don't think is being done. And because of the abortion stuff and the way it is, and some other things, but primarily the abortion stuff. The way it is dominating the conversation, and you're all hearing all of this reporting from places like Tulsa and wherever about Republicans going too far with abortion restrictions and whatnot, and DeSantis doing things in Florida, which gets a lot of

coverage, and Abbott sending people to, you know, Washington, D.C. by bus. I mean, so there are other things other than to the abortion. It just doesn't quite feel like Republicans are completely out of power. And the stuff that's getting attention for Republicans is stuff that doesn't seem like it's necessarily aimed at the stuff that we think the Democrats are doing badly. Instead, it seems like the swing for the offenses kind of thing. And you couple that with the people who are legitimately motivated by pro-choice positions and whatnot. And it just sort of takes the edge off of the normal galvanic sort of logic of, oh, the out party's going to come in and be normal and instead says, oh, I have to choose between two abnormals. That makes me less excited.

What do you guys think of that? The kind of an addendum to that, I think, and this is something talking to Republican strategists earlier this week for a story came up a lot, is that, this guy, Donald Trump, is back in the news. Right, that's the other thing, right. This month. And I think that's actually having a much bigger effect than is being publicly acknowledged at this point that, you know, for as much as we talk about how popular Trump still is within the Republican Party, how much Republican base voters still adore him, he hasn't

gotten more popular among the general electorate at large. He's still incredibly, you know, his approval rating never really. got above 45%, it tanked in the post-election January 6th stuff. You know, that's where most Americans are still are on him. And for him to kind of be back as the heir apparent waiting in the wings, it reminds a lot of voters, particularly independent voters, oh yeah, that's what the past four years were like. I kind of had forgotten. I was focused on inflation.

I was focused on, you know, these very baby formula shortage and all these other legitimate criticisms of the Biden administration. And then you remember, this is what 2015 to 2020 was like. The day to day, every day there's a new Washington Post story about various, you know, FBI raids and banana republics and unfair and, you know, espionage and all. and all these things. And it's just voters are like, wait a second, I'm rethinking a little bit about this. So it's a lot easier. And this is why, you know, if Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy had their way, they would put zip ties on every single Republican in Congress and just have,

you know, one designated delegate to come up there and be like gas prices, inflation, gas prices, inflation. Because if that's the message, then they win in a cakewalk. But there's all these other complicating factors that are popping up and complicating their path back to the majority. Well, but I mean, so, David, is it, would it be a cakewalk? I mean, I kind of, I agree as a generic proposition, but this special election in the New York 19, the Republican, part of the reason why Democrats are popping champagne is that the Republican was inflation and, you know, guy and inflation and crime, inflation and crime, inflation and crime. And, And Pat Ryan was abortion, abortion, abortion, and at least in terms of their advertising.

And it may be that, I mean, I think Declan is directionally right, that like prior to Mara Lago and prior to, and but for Dobbs, right, and a couple other things, the smart move, if Republicans had stayed on message with inflation and crime, inflation in crime for the last two months, and didn't go off on these other stuff, maybe Pat Ryan would have lost. I mean, I think that's entirely possible, but now elections are getting nationalized in ways that are not on the terms

that Republicans wanted, and sticking to the smart plan of a month ago or two months ago, maybe isn't the smart plan anymore because the situation on the ground has changed. What do you make of all that? Well, you know, one thing we know from 2020 is that a lot of Democrats

who never said the words, the police and their lives were absolutely saddled with defund the police. And I think especially in these house races where these contested house races, not the bright red or the deep blue, there's your ability to differentiate yourself in the way that Senate candidates do, where the Senate candidates' quality really, really, really matters, I think is maybe more cramped. maybe you have a little bit less ability to truly differentiate yourself. But I do think that, you know, when you're talking about a national narrative that's dominated by Dobbs and re-dominated by Donald Trump, I'm not sure that's great for Republicans.

And the Dobbs point, I think, is worth dwelling on for just a minute because one of the things that I was thinking when I was going into this election cycle was. we have a pretty long history of abortion being a major topic of national debate, but it really being pretty low priority to people. And for those for whom it was a priority, it was disproportionately pro-life. So perfect example for that was the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, where McColliffe ran a race where he spent millions saying abortion, abortion, and the exit polls indicated that only 8% of Virginians put abortion top of mind, and of that 8%, almost 60% were pro-life. So it actually worked to the benefit of Republicans.

And the big question was, will Dobbs change that dynamic? And I have been skeptical about that. I have been skeptical. I'm getting less skeptical because of the Kansas election results. And also because the way in the way, which a number of states immediately began responding to the Dobbs decision, there was in some quarters, you know, you immediately saw the pro-life movement break out into its own sort of internal fight, where of course the media as a general rule was going to really amplify the more

extreme voices. And so you had a dynamic, which was Dobbs is actually reverses Roe, reshuffles people's priorities, perhaps, and then a right-wing environment where a lot of extremism immediately bubbled to the surface. And that's a recipe, it seems like, again, before Labor Day, that, you know, is going to maybe turn the red tide into a red ripple. Yeah, I think it's an important point, though, that it's not necessarily dobs that causes backlash. It is the decision tree or event cascade post-Dobs, right? When Republicans are out there defending, and I shouldn't say Republicans in a collective sense, but when there are Republicans defending bans on abortion for raped 10-year-old girls, that is not a great

rhetorical issue environment for pro-lifers or for anti-row people or any of that kind of thing. And the problem is, is that the people with nuanced, smart arguments about why Roe needed to go and why they're pro-life are largely staying silent because they don't want to talk about this. They want to do inflation and grind, inflation and crime. And so it leaves the only people really happy to talk about this stuff is the people who want to defend, you know, bans on abortion for 10-year-old rape victims and victims of incest and that kind of thing. And so, and the media is dying to make that the official position of Republicans generally. So it's, it's even more sort of problematic.

Yeah, there's a dynamic on the right that is basically saying, hey, if you're going to, if your position is for a ban on abortion, except in circumstances of life of the mother and threat, physical health of the mother threat, and rape and incest, which is a minority position in the U.S., right? That's a minority position. But there's a version of the right that says, you're a sellout. You're not really pro-life if you take that position.

And so you have a lot of people who are pro-life people who are taking a position that about, depending on the polling, 60 to 70 percent of Americans disagree with, which is the ban on abortion except for the case of life, health, rape, and incest, and then constantly being fending off attacks from your right, that you're selling out unborn children. And that is a dynamic that's occurring on the right, and it's occurring all the time. And it's not like this is happening in secret.

People can see this. You know, I remember one time I was on, I was on Ezra Klein's podcast, we were talking about this fight over this New York Times editorial pay new hire this i forget her name but she had done a whole bunch yeah sarah jong now yeah sarah jong a whole bunch of super toxic tweets about white people and and one of the positions in her defense was no this is an intramural leftist argument about sort of how to talk about race and class and all of this and she didn't really mean those words the way they come across literally and my point was was, but everybody could read them.

And if you're, if you, there's no such thing as an entry, a purely intramural debate over law and policy when you're having it in public on Twitter. And so that's one of the dynamics that's playing out. And it's really in a lot of ways paralyzing the ability of the pro-life movement to sort of pivot back towards the majority of America. Let's again make it clear the majority of America and making a compelling, coherent case for a distinct set of policies. The biggest canary in the coal mine here for me has been watching what Ron DeSantis is doing

on this in Florida, which is 15 weeks not budging from that despite, you know, and he's not talking about it at all. Like a reporter asked him earlier this week, I think I saw why he's not going further, why he's not trying to push the legislature will do literally anything he asks them to. Why is Dee asking them to move it up to eight weeks, to six weeks, to, you know, eliminate some of these? And he walked away without saying anything. He refused to even acknowledge the question was asked. He knows that this, you know, there's not a more political animal in the Republican Party right now.

He knows this is not a winning issue for him if he wants to mount a general election campaign. And, you know, Sarah's not here. So we get to talk about issue polling. Ha, ha, Sarah. the Pew came out with a study this week showing that, you know, in in March of this year, 43% of voters listed abortion as, quote, very important to their 2022 vote. You know, it's high, it's not very high. I think the economy is somewhere in the 70s.

But in just the two months or three months since then, since Dobbs, that number has shot up to almost 60% and it's driven almost entirely by Democratic voters. It's not Republicans saying that that's the most important. And so it's an animating issue. It's in a midterm election where Democrats have every reason in the world to feel depressed, unmotivated to go to the polls to, you know, lament that Biden either is unpopular and incompetent or not progressive enough for their ideals. This is a reason for them to get up and go vote, and we might be seeing that play out

in the special election. Okay, so we are almost exactly on time for the vital question of what is not worth our time. And I should be clear. Like, I found out I was hosting this podcast literally seconds before we hit record. So I did not have prepared a brilliant sort of, you know, Zen Cone question about what is not worth our time. And I can't remember now, what did we agree that we were going to agree that was not worth our time or talk about whether it was worth our time?

Didn't we have a conversation right as we started? Did we agree that we were going to say it was not worth our time to talk, to discuss whether or not Anthony Fauci was an elf who should be chucked across the Potomac? Well, maybe that was it. So for listeners who don't know the context here, Anthony Fauci announced he's retiring. Ron DeSantis said that he was a little elf who should be thrown across or into the Potomac. I can't remember which. Across the Potomac. So it was, yeah, it was not technically like a threat to drown him. It was, you know, trying to just throw him like out of Washington.

Also, you mean, you would know this better in I as a Tolkienologist, but I'm, I don't, I don't think you can actually drown elves. But, um, uh, I don't think they have gills, Jonah. Maybe that's not worth our time. Don't they emerge from water like Lady of the Lake in various stories, you know, holding swords or whatnot? I don't know. But so I, the reason I'm a little reluctant on this is that, you know, first of all, I'm hearing from people who are very mad at you about this.

And, uh, oh, my goodness. We should finish the context. And you criticize Ronda Santis for his vitriol. Yeah. And, and, and it's one of these things where, I think I think you're right. This conversation is not worth our time, but anything that comes after a butt. That's right.

I think that Fouchy does invite and let himself become a target of scorn and anger in ways that I think we're unfortunate for him, for science, for our politics, etc. but that's not a that's not a criticism of your position it's just a criticism of fouchy and i think he doesn't he's invited some of the you know i mean i think it was marjor taylor green i don't want i wouldn't want to disparage marjor taylor green or insinuate that she is sometimes irresponsible in her rhetoric but someone was talking about how when republicans get back in power that fouchy needs to have be put on trial for something or other and that's sort of crazy talk too but Anyway, Declan, you know, is the elven status of Anthony Fauci worth our time? I mean, in terms of the general degradation of our discourse and, like, increasing

bullification of the way we do our politics, like, no, I don't think that's necessarily something Ron DeSantis should have said, although, you know, he will be rewarded vitally for saying it. I do think that I tend to agree with you, Joan. And I think that there are very legitimate criticisms of Fauci that, you know, will be, have been explored, will be explored further when Republicans take back control of the House, or not to negate our entire conversation, if Republicans take back control of the House and have the majority, you know, some of his stuff, evasiveness on gain of function research in Wuhan over the course of the past two years. I think some of the noble lies in defense of inviting more vaccine uptake or, you know, talking about when to be masking, when not to. I think he really, and he's had a 40-year career in public service, and I think the vast, vast majority of it has been incredibly positive and a boon for American society. I do think that the way he handled the politics of some of what he was trying to get across

did some significant damage to kind of harden positions on the right with respect to COVID. To give an interview, I think it was like two or three weeks ago. I think it might have been to somebody at reason saying my biggest regret from early in the pandemic is that we did not lock down harder, longer, and implement more restrictions. To be saying that in the summer of 2022, I think, just reflects a marked lack of self-awareness that is kind of indicative of what I see as his biggest problem of the past two years. So a couple of thoughts on this. One, I think the Elf and Chuck across the Potomac, most people, what people were really mad at me

about was, once again, how dare I criticize Ron DeSantis? so how dare and number two is how dare i criticize him for you know for his work you know for his tone or it was called tone policing you know whatever um because of course everyone knows that the way to win now is to be as cool as possible all the time and it's your pearl clutching if you don't like that so that was the main thing the other thing was there's this i fouchy has become this boogey man on the right, all out of proportion to the actual power and authority that he had. America actually turned out, over the course of the pandemic, to be a less, a place of fewer and shorter lockdowns than almost every other advanced to democracy in the world.

So to this day, I mean, if I go to, I'm going to Canada next month just at two, because we're going on the first family vacation in like seven years, okay? And we're, we're going. We're going to catch a Disney cruise to Alaska. It's going to be a great fun. We're leaving from Vancouver. Do you realize the COVID restrictions that are still in place in Canada compared to here? And so, you know, if you look at the actual American response,

because of federalism, because Fauci had no actual command authority, what actually ended up happening on the ground in the United States was wildly variable, depending on who your governor was. who your mayor was. And this sort of idea that Fauci is the boogeyman here. Some stuff he, some guidance he gave was bad. Some guidance he gave was good. But this elevation of Fauci into the Uber boogeyman, I think it's just completely misguided, but it's a trope like on the right now. Like on the right, it is a trope. And what you then see on the left is things like, you know, what was a Chiron on MSNBC recently? In Fauci, we trust.

There is a bar near my apartment in Washington, D.C. that sells things called Fauci Pouches, which are basically Capri Sons with his face on them, and an alcoholic beverage. So there is, you know, every action invites an equal and opposite reaction. Yeah. Hero worship, vilification. Yeah, but the problem with all of this is that you are making this sound like it's worth our time. And the whole point was to get out of this as quickly as possible. So that's what I'm going to do, invoking moderator's privilege. I'm going to throw you both across the Potomac, where you can retreat to the trees that you live in,

where you make chews or cookies or whatever, you elf lovers. And with that, thank you guys for doing this. Thank you, Declan, for subbing in for two of our guests. I look very much forward to Sarah coming back as the moderator of this. this this perfectly meaty part of the bell curve podcast and the dispatch uh menu and um and that's all i got so thank you guys Welcome to the podcast. This is Jonah Goldberg of the flagship podcast.

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