The Dispatch Podcast - Biden Pushes for Gas Tax Holiday

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Sarah, Steve, and Jonah dive into a delightful political potpourri, tackling everything from the Biden administration’s possible gas tax holiday to immigration and the Georgia congressional runoffs. They also discuss the House Select Committee’s January 6 hearing on Tuesday, which produced some interesting testimonies.   Show Notes: -TMD: “Biden’s Mixed Messages on Oil” -Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal: “Biden Got the Energy Market He Wanted” -Capitolism: “Fueling Uncertainty” -TMD: “How Trump and His Aides Pressured State Officials” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. We finally got rid of David French, guys. Congratulations to everyone. Just kidding. David's on a plane to D.C. for a special advisory opinions taping. So he'll be back next week. We got plenty to talk about the gas tax holiday proposed by the Biden administration with raging inflation, continuing the January 6th hearings, how they're going. politics, potpourri. Immigration, gun bill, latest elections? Let's dive right in. President Biden had been ruminating, if you will, on a gas tax, finally coming out and announcing that he wanted Congress to pass a gas. Gas tax holiday for the summer expiring in early September met with not a lot of enthusiasm from his own party, Nancy Pelosi saying she would see what the consensus was.

Joe Manchin in the Senate saying, no, he would not vote for it, making it basically dead on arrival in Congress. In the past, plenty of politicians have called gas tax holidays gimmicks, in part because of what the gas tax is and what it isn't. it. Gas tax is of course what it sounds like. It's about 18 cents on the gallon right now, as I understand it. But gas is a commodity based on supply and demand. And by getting rid of the tax, you in theory, well, you definitely don't change the supply issue, but you in theory just up demand, which plenty of economists and energy sector experts have said will actually just increase the cost of gas to about what it was without the gas tax.

or rather with the gas tax. And so this will have no particular effect on consumers trying to buy gas. It could increase profits, margins for energy producers, and it will have no effect on supply. Energy producers saying, this is useless,

like please don't do anything with the gas tax, and also the sort of schizophrenic reaction from the Biden White House that on the one hand, they want energy producers to massively increase short-term output but are not willing to do any of the things to help energy producers with long-term output, the things that energy producers would actually need to invest in, even for short-term output,

they say it doesn't make any sense. They want all the benefits of low gas prices now with all the benefits of fighting climate change now, or at least being able to say that they are. Steve, let's start with the basics. The idea that you would let then, if it did lower prices, let a gas tax holiday expire two months before a midterm election. This seems like politics all the way down, but not very good politics. Yes, seems problematic.

I mean, it's really hard to understand what the White House thinks it's doing here. You could see an argument at the most basic level that the White House political shop cooked up a case for a gas tax holiday just to allow themselves to say, the president's doing something. He feels your pain. He understands that this is the problem. If you look at polling, it's not just inflation, but specifically gas and what people are paying for gas that has people as concerned as they are about the economy. And theoretically, you know, Joe Biden and Democrats, if they were to embrace this, can say, look, the president is doing everything he can do. The problem with that, as you point out, and as we pointed out in the morning dispatch Thursday morning,

is that they're not doing anything at all to increase the long-term supply, in part, I think, for deeply held ideological reasons, because they believe that limiting fossil fuel production is a key part of fighting climate change and have been saying so for years. I mean, this is something Joe Biden campaigned on. It's near and dear to the parts of many on the Democratic in the Democratic base. And that's the case. I mean, remember, there are these clips that play about Joe of Joe Biden talking about wanting to bring an end to the fossil fuel industry, talking about new limits on supply.

And there are specific things that the Biden administration did to do that. So their policies are in part at fault for some of this. I mean, there are all sorts of other supply chain issues. There are big picture global issues. but certainly Ukraine and Russia, but you can't ignore the fact that the Biden administration said, we want to do this. We want to limit the supply in a pretty dramatic way because we think it's important for climate change. And now they are having to deal with the political consequences of their own policy decisions. What I find most curious, and I'm interested in both of your views on

this, immediately, even before President Biden made this announcement, you had Nancy Pelosi saying, in effect, she was against it. And as you point out, Sarah, you have Joe Manchin expressing skepticism. He says he's not going to support it. And other Democrats publicly saying, this is not the answer, including Democrats who have said this for a while, remember Barack Obama back a decade ago, which said, this is a gimmick, this isn't a real thing. What should we infer or what can we learn about the White House political operation if they

have members of it, their own party disparaging what they had teed up as a pretty serious policy rollout before it's even announced. To propose this without having Nancy Pelosi on board is baffling to me. Without having Nancy Pelosi have a statement that the White House has already seen, that she's going to cheer it, you know, they understand that she can't get all of her members lined up, but they need a strong statement from the Speaker of the House. Joe Manchin, I sort of put to aside, clearly the relationship between Joe Manchin

and the White House is strained. Fair enough. I still think it would be smart to take his temperature before doing anything, just again, if you want to get stuff done. But the Nancy Pelosi part, where it appeared that Nancy Pelosi hadn't coordinated at all with the White House.

Right. Or worse, that this was the coordinated idea from the White House? Crazy. I thought Carl Rove had an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Biden got the energy market he wanted. Like Steve, it just backs up everything you just said.

He runs through on his first day in office. Biden canceled Keystone XL pipeline, halted new leases in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His first week in office, he banned new oil and gas leases on federal lands and water. In June, he shut down exploration on existing leases in Anwar. In October, he increased regulatory burdens on building pipelines and other infrastructure. This February, he limited leasing in Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve.

A federal judge enjoined some of that. But nevertheless, it had a huge impact on, again, energy companies have to make long-term investments. It's a boom and bust industry. So he noted that daily U.S. oil production was at 12.29 million barrels in 2019, skipping the pandemic, obviously. right now it's 11.85, which is a significant drop. Also noted that the profits last year were 4.7% compared with Microsoft, 39%, Facebook, 33%, Google, 30%. That was fun. Jonah, the other part of this to me that's particularly baffling is that the gas tax pays for stuff. Like, we use that money. So if you do a gas tax holiday,

you still have to pay for the roads. So all you're doing is spending money you don't have, which we're already doing a lot of. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is in many respects, just in another gimmick, like releasing oil

from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It gives you something to talk about. That's about it. You know, I mean, I'm not, look, at least that was supply side. Yeah, but I mean, I mean, part of the problem with the supply side thing, and this is part of the problem

with the way Biden talks about all of this stuff is that it's that it, It's the price of oil is only part of the problem. It's the refining capacity that is the other part of the problem. And you can bring down the price of oil. You're still going to have those bottlenecks with the refineries. And on the political side, I just see this as an extension of something that we've talked about a few times around here, which is that this White House often seems like it is geared to the daily messaging cycle.

on cable news rather than a long-term sort of strategic vision. And I think Biden in particular just has specific problems. I mean, we haven't talked too much about how the fact that, like, he's just, he really does increasingly seem too old in that even the sort of sympathetic media is starting to sort of talk about how he's too old and that, you know, and it seems mean to talk about, but it's nonetheless, I think, a fact. and so when he when he talks about this stuff

it's like he stripped the gears of his credibility and he can put it in whatever gear he wants it just doesn't get much traction and um you know he did this video where he's showing horrible things in Ukraine and trying to say that anyone who's complaining about high gas prices would

is in favor of Putin killing people and it's just a dumb cable news driven Twitter driven messaging strategy um And on the actual policy stuff, I mean, I think Sarah, you know, hit on the key part is that oil companies need certainty. They need predictability because they're setting prices and setting investments not based on today's price of oil, but what the price of oil might be in 18 months or three years. And when you have to have a administration flatly saying they want to destroy your industry, it tends to cost.

cause a certain amount of conservatism in your investment strategy. And I just find that there's so much, on the policy side, there's so much dishonesty and dissembling from the administration on sort of every front. You know, I mean, like, first of all, oil companies don't own gas stations for the most part. Exxon doesn't own any of them. They got out of that business. You know, why? Because profit margins in gas stations are razor thin.

It's like 1 or 2%. The way to think about gas stations is like movie theaters. Movie theaters make almost no money off of ticket prices. They make money off of the popcorn you buy to watch the movie. Gas stations make almost no money off of gasoline. They make money off of the stuff you go off the beef jerky you buy. I do buy a lot of beef jerky. Well, I know.

You are like a major profit center for the oil industry. Well, when they, the Wisconsin gas stations have the special, you know, homemade beef turkey stands, so you can go in and get it. I mean, it wouldn't call it fresh, but it's awfully good. And they have just that entire case of cheese products. Cheese curds, for sure. Bob McNally, founder and president of Rappaden Energy, told Axios yesterday, I need more oil right now.

I need more refining capacity right now, says the White House, but also says the White House, we will not bless new long-term infrastructure. That's where the disconnect. This is the problem. Let me just read this quick paragraph from the morning dispatch. We had an item in the morning dispatch on this today, as I mentioned, and it's just so good. It captures the dissonance. Deck and Garvey put this together. He wrote, Biden, during different points in his administration and his campaign, Biden has both guaranteed his administration will, quote, end fossil fuel, unquote, and written letters to oil executives asking them to, quote, take immediate actions to increase the supply of gasoline, diesel, and other refinement. product, unquote. He has both signed executive orders attempting to pause new oil and gas leases on public lands and chastised oil and gas companies for not drilling more. Last week, Biden convened a meeting of international leaders to discuss efforts to limit global emissions and accelerate the transition

to clean energy. Next month, he'll visit Saudi Arabia in an effort to convince the kingdom to boost its oil production. I mean, that in, you know, three sentences captures what we've seen from the Biden administration. And no short-term three-month gas tax holiday is going to solve that problem for them politically. And it's certainly not going to solve the economic dissonance that's making it so hard for people to invest in increasing supply. Interesting info out of New York, because they did suspend their gas tax. On June 1, the retail price of gasoline was $4.93. Two weeks after the six, six, $0.16 per gallon tax holiday went to effect. The average price was $5.4. Of course, gas prices

can go up, you know, for other reasons. But the point is, getting rid of the gas tax did not change anything for New Yorkers. The price still went up. All right. So this seems dead on arrival politically. It seems like if anything, if Zanette lost to even announce it from the White House because everyone says it's a gimmick. not going to happen. So where does that leave Biden on energy prices as people head into the summer thinking maybe they shouldn't go drive to Grandma's house? Frankly, I think he gets the same benefit out of it, whether it passed or not, just because he gets to have the sound bite, which is to say very little benefit, but he gets to have the soundbite saying, I'm doing this.

People aren't going to remember whether it passed or not. It's the people are going to move on. I think it is the most interesting thing about it is that it's a I mean sort of the counterfactual poses it if Biden's poll numbers were 60 percent would Democrats be saying this is a dumb gimmick that we're not even going to vote on I mean I think it just shows you it would still be a dumb gimmick right but I mean the policy wise it wouldn't be any different but politically I think the fact that Democrats feel perfectly free to say eh whatever, dude, is a really bad sign for the Biden White House. Yeah, and they can say that, I think, look, I actually don't, I guess it's a gimmick.

Yes, it doesn't solve long-term problems. I don't have a problem with a brief suspension of the gas tax. I mean, I think if it were something that addressed a specific short-term problem, like there was a spike that we could identify that was likely to disappear in three months, and this would help people get through and it was a challenging time and prices are 50% higher than they were at the beginning of the year. Fair enough, do it. I think the problem is the lack of long-term solution. And I think Democrats are wary of investing in something politically from the Biden White House that isn't likely to have a, to solve the problem, to really address the problem.

Because I think that then it's very easy to see where this is a medium and long-term net negative. it makes Biden look totally powerless. So he does this thing. Gas prices come down for a little bit, but if they return to where they were when he did it, this is not going to look like he's solving the problem. And even if they don't, again, 18 cents a gallon, I'll take it every day of the week.

But even if gas prices don't return to where they are now, but remain high, Joe Biden's, it's almost impossible to see this as a win for Joe Biden. Like, how does this work? How does the proposal work in his favor? I don't see it. And I think Democrats don't see it either. All right. Next up, the January 6th hearings continue.

Steve, I thought it was interesting because when you ask someone about January 6th, I think most people conjure up images of a violent mob storming the Capitol. And the question turns on, did Donald Trump incite that violent mob to storm the Capitol? and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. I think that's a relevant question. I think that there's actually not great evidence in terms of criminal incitement, for instance, that that happened.

And that's sort of what the hearing started with. But what it has done since then, to me, has been far more important. And to me, what we should think of when we say the term January 6th is actually what happened in the run up to January 6th, where you have the president with legal advisors trying to come up with a way

to ignore an American election that had occurred so that they can stay in power for however much longer, regardless of the results of that election. And I say regardless, now they thought, I think that many of them truly believed that there were election shenanigans, but to have testimony that John Eastman,

understood that zero out of nine members of the Supreme Court would agree with his legal arguments, for instance, zero is pretty relevant to whether you think you have a legal argument for staying in office. And then what happened in Georgia? Those seem way more important to me when you talk about self-government and the perpetuation of it and the transfer of power, the mob is almost a little bit of a side show, frankly. I want those people to be, they have been, hundreds have been indicted, they're in trials. It's not that I'm saying that's not important.

It is, but that's like already happening. This part where Donald Trump believed he could continue to stay in office regardless of the election, that to me is a way more interesting part of these hearings. And I'm wondering why they didn't, I don't know, that hasn't seemed like the theme. The theme still seems to be on trying to meet the narrative where it already was, which on January 6th, violent mob, the prime time stuff that they did was all about that. That's what got 21 million people. I'm frustrated by that. Yes. So I strongly agree with your first point. And that's been something of a theme, of course, on this podcast. We've talked about this a lot. It's much more about the coordinated choreographed attempt to steal an election than it was about the spasm of violence on a particular day. particular time, whether or not Donald Trump inside it. I think he excited it. And forget stealing the election

for a second. To stay in power regardless. Correct. To stay in the White House, which is different. Stealing an election is that you wanted the election, you were going to have the election come out differently. They also tried to do that, but they didn't care. They wanted to stay in the White House whether they were able

to steal the election or not. Right. So I agree strongly with your point on that. I disagree strongly with your point that that's not been the focus of the committee. I think there was a brief preview at the end of that original prime time two-hour session where they played the video, the additional 10-minute video that they put together with new footage of the actual attack. And Liz Cheney mentioned it briefly in her prepared remarks. But really, the case that she made, I think, far more effectively than Benny Thompson, the chair of the January 6th committee was, this is about so much more than that day.

This is really about blocking the peaceful transfer of power. And in that sense, this is totally unprecedented, it's something we haven't seen. And that's why she believes Donald Trump is a threat to the republic. If you look at the hearings that we've had so far, they have almost entirely ignored what happened on January 6th. That's coming. There are going to be two additional hearings. There's a hearing taking place Thursday, today when we're recording, that will focus on a scheme at the Justice Department that we've talked about before. Then there are two additional hearings that have now.

and bumped back to July after Congress's recess, in part, they say, because they've accumulated more evidence to make this case. One of those two hearings will focus on the actual attack, and I think they will go to great lengths to show that the attack that happened on January 6th was not separate and spontaneous, but was in fact, you know, a culmination of what we have seen sort of it's part of the through line it's part of the broader narrative it was you know with all of the testimony that we heard about the threats to mike pence and the efforts to pressure mike pence to to uh in effect decide the election on his own which he understood he couldn't do the january sixth violence was a part of that was trying to get him to to back off and the fact

that they continued to make calls even after the violence trying to get uh senators to slow down the process, I think, makes that case. A couple very interesting big picture things about the committee. And we talked about this pretty early in the process. I think it was very smart of the committee to make Republicans the centerpiece of this. Virtually everything that we have heard, aside from the very compelling testimony of two election workers on Tuesday from Georgia, has been critiques of the Trump campaign. the Trump effort to block peaceful transfer of power with great detail, dispassionate,

mostly non-emotional, and almost all of it coming from Republicans, including Republicans who strongly wanted Donald Trump to be president over Joe Biden. That has, I think, really taken the air out of what was what House Republicans had telegraphed as their main critique of the committee, which is that it's a partisan committee. It is a partisan committee. It has more Democrats than Republicans. It has people like Adam Schiff, Schiff, who has proven himself a partisan, an exceptional partisan in a number of different ways. We saw Adam Schiff asking some questions the other day.

He has not been a focal point of these hearings, and instead you've heard primarily from Republicans. The other thing I think that has been, that's interesting and has made this much more significant, than I think many people anticipated going in, is that it is mostly a recitation, a just-the-fax recitation of what happened. And to your early point, Sarah, it puts details behind what I think people looked at, you know, this what was going on, why is Trump lying about this? Why, you know, we'd get a, you know, a clip of a phone call with Raffinsberger. We'd hear about something else, but it didn't really make much sense.

And what I think the committee has done pretty effectively is lay out that this was a plan, that they were acting on a strategy. Now, they were very competent for the most part in doing it, and some of the things they thought they were going to be able to accomplish were kind of laughable. But this was a real plan. And the extent to which people appreciate that, I do think it will have a longer term impact that many people didn't think. I mean, you have people who are very critical of the committee from the beginning, sort of changing their tune. and saying, wow, this is a pretty effective presentation. All right, so I want to take that and hijack this a little bit and ask a question to both of you guys, because I am truly, I can talk to the ground or I can talk at square

or even rhomboid. If you watch Fox's daytime coverage of the hearings, it's perfectly fine, you know, more or less. It's not Tucker Carlson-esque. They have serious people on. I would argue that they focus way too much. on the quote unquote unfairness of the partisan makeup of the thing and focus way too much on how either Nancy Pelosi or Kevin McCarthy or both, but mostly Nancy Pelosi screwed up because, you know, Jonathan Turley will say these are very compelling witnesses.

Nancy Pelosi made a mistake not allowing Republicans on here because Republicans wouldn't be able to rebut it, right? And you hear the reverse thing from Donald Trump himself, recently that Kevin McCarthy screwed up because we need Republicans on there to rebut it. I think Trump is wrong on that because the kind of rebuttals that Trump wants would hurt them. So the question is

did Kevin McCarthy in fact screw up? Did he make a mistake by not allowing so that you know, Pelosi kicked off just so people understand it. Pelosi said you can't have Jim Jordan and Jim Banks because they are trollish

House Freedom Caucus, Trump you know, Musk sniffers. And but you can have the other ones that you want and you can put two other Republicans on there if you want. And McCarthy said, no, if you're going to tell me how to pick my people, I'm going to pull all my people. So the only

so Cheney and Kinsinger are in effect Pelosi appointees on the committee. Now, there are a bunch of people who think Kevin McCarthy screwed up because there are, you could have good faith Republicans on there, pushing back at parts of the narrative, a point that Sarah made recently.

And there are good faith arguments that more adversarial committee would make it more compelling because you would have a better process for finding the truth. I agree with the adversarial point. Fine. But is this better or worse than what we would have gotten

if McCarthy had been able to appoint people? Because the idea of Republicans cross-examining the two black ladies who are the poll workers, the mind reels at how badly that could go for Republicans. The idea that Republicans could really swat down Brad Raffensberger and Gabriel Sterling and Rusty Bowers, I'm very skeptical of. And so is having the fig leaf of saying this is partisan and we didn't even get to push back on all this stuff better for Republicans? because the strategy was to make this a partisan crap festival and they get that talking point. I don't know how effective it is

because the witnesses are compelling and they're all Republicans. So is this the best case scenario McCarthy could have gotten or would have been better for McCarthy and the Republicans if there were more Trump-friendly Republicans on it? So I want to

remind slash qualify what you said about what I said about the adversarial process. It's not that I said it would be better for Republicans. I said it was better for me. I said there's a good faith argument for an adversarial thing.

That's what I meant by you. I just want to be clear that, in fact, I don't think it would be better for Republicans. I think that it is smart if you want something, if you want a hearing like this to get a lot of attention, to have an adversarial nature to it. So I actually think it probably would have been better for the Liz Cheney's and the Adam Kinsinger's and the other people on the committee. They want this to get the maximum amount of attention. having controversy and conflict would help with that.

It would, in addition, I think, help in a truth-finding process separate out some of the high-minded narrative they all agree with, which like, with something like, oh, actually, there is no really good pushback. Like, Brad has answers to that that I think would be really helpful for someone like me. Okay. Now, what is actually good for Republicans? As you said, Donald Trump thinks Kevin McCarthy made a mistake. He is, you know, whacking McCarthy over this on a near daily basis at this point. I don't think he's, I don't even know that Trump really believes that, but it sure sounds nice to say we would have really good pushback if only Kevin hadn't betrayed me in this way.

And the way we kind of know that there's not good pushback is that we haven't seen any pushback on cable news. Where are those people, the Republican congressmen, even the Jim Jordans. saying, here are the questions I would have asked. Here's what they don't have answers to. Here's what they misled you on. Here's the facts that aren't coming out. I haven't seen any of that. So I think this is probably the best case from a partisan interest for the Republicans. I think it is not been the best for the committee. I think it has not been the best for the American people because of that. But I think Donald Trump is certainly winning the day because he gets to have it both ways. He gets to imply that there's some amazing pushback that's not getting made

and not have to actually have anyone go try to make that case. So, yeah, once again, Donald Trump has found the way to win again. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I think the challenge for Republicans and for Trump in pushing people to defend him is that even people as servile and spineless as Kevin McCarthy they don't want to make Trump's defense on Trump's terms. Right. Right?

Like, if they were going to make any kind of a defense, it would be a distraction defense. It would be Nancy Pelosi didn't get the security that the Capitol needed that day. It would be Democrats are ignoring these three or four things that provide important context and therefore they're, I mean, it would be sort of a version of the, this is all partisan, but they would just be making it as part of the committee. Trump wants them to defend him on the merits. He wants them to say the election was stolen. And they're not going to say that. I mean, if anything has become clear, I mean, I think it was clear based on 18 months of investigation.

We have to imagine that the 2020 election has been investigated as much as just about anything other than the Kennedy assassination in the past 50 years. There have been dozens and dozens and dozens of investigations. there have been investigations that have looked at this, at the national level, there have been investigations that have looked at these claims at the state level. It's totally and completely preposterous for anyone to suggest at this point that the election was actually stolen. Donald Trump is making that argument. I don't think Republicans want to make that argument. If you think back to the ostensible reason that Kevin McCarthy backed the ouster of Liz Cheney

as the number three Republican in the House of Representatives, he claimed it was because she was too backward-looking. It was a silly argument at the time. I don't think even Kevin McCarthy, who's a very bad liar, believed it when he made the argument. But I do think that there's some truth. You have a core group of Republicans who's willing, they're willing to sort of fight for Trump in a generic sense, but I really don't think they want to be making specific arguments about specific claims that Donald Trump is.

making or wants them to make. Think back to his first response to the committee. It was this 12-page statement pushing back on some of the claims that had been rebutted by the committee and just recycling these things that have been long discredited. I don't think Republicans really want to be in that business. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why

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Let's do some political potpourri. We had elections on Tuesday. Immigration numbers are coming out of the southern border. Just all time high, breaking all time high, breaking all time high of folks both attempting to cross the border and successfully crossing the border as well. And we have the gun bill in the Senate. Jonah, pick your popery. Ambrosia with daffodils.

Oh, that sounds lovely. Oh, that's different popery. sorry. I think the gun thing is interesting. I think it remains to be seen whether it will actually pass, but I think it's, so far it's a good sign. You have 14 Republicans, at least voting to move forward. John Cornyn getting massively booed at the Texas Republican convention. Then again, those folks also voted to at least look into seceding from the union called President Biden, the acting president. But, you know, not unimportant that John Cornyn,

this senior senator from Texas, gets booed repeatedly at his own convention called a traitor. Yeah, I think that's significant. They also, you know, called the election illegitimate, and they said that, and they took out the bold position against homosexuality that kind of went away, I thought, 35, 40 years ago. But anyway, they're an interesting bunch.

And so it's interesting that he was booed, It's also interesting that he doesn't care, and he has moved forward, which I think, again, is a good sign. I've said it on here before. I think Senator Murphy has the right idea where he says, I want to send a signal that Republicans can vote on reasonable gun measures without ending their careers. and to sort of shatter the myth of inviability of any gun safety

which is like this term that people are falling back on because no one wants to call a gun control legislation and I think it's going to, I think that part's going to work. The real question for me is whether or not Democrats in the House so muck up the bill

when it gets to the House that it makes it unpassable in the Senate which I think is a real possibility. And at the very least, you mean, you only need like 10, what, 10 Democrats, 10 AOC types to say,

this doesn't go nearly far enough, we're not going to vote for it. And you could see it failing in the House, which would be an interesting sort of political problem for the Biden administration, for Democrats generally, that it's the Democrats who are holding up any progress on gun stuff.

And, And, you know, do I agree with every, do I think every provision in the thing is great? No, but, you know, I'm persuaded on the red flag laws, even though we can't call them red flag laws. I think the boyfriend loophole thing is a little overwrought, but whatever. And I think generally that this would be progress. And it would be political progress as well. And it's just, to me, it is interesting to see how there are certain. interests on the left and the right who have a vested interest in thwarting, you know, sort of modest progress on this kind of issue. Steve, why don't you talk about what you found so interesting on Tuesday's primaries? Yeah, I mean, there were some interesting results. None of them are the sort of big headline results that we've seen in primaries in Ohio and the original results in Georgia and elsewhere.

But there were some interesting takeaways. Donald Trump backed two candidates in Georgia for house races who not only lost in their GOP primaries, but were totally destroyed in their GOP primaries. Vernon, who was running in the 10th congressional district, Jake Evans running in the 6th congressional district, they were defeated soundly. uh, Mike Collins defeated Vernon Jones, uh, Collins is a former Democrat, um, or sorry, Jones is a, is a trucking company executive. And Trump backed Jones. Collins beat Jones 75 to 25 in that ballpark. Um, Brian Kemp continues to, uh, sort of flex his political muscles in Georgia, having, uh, endorsed Collins ahead of this, this runoff. So you saw, I think, further evidence that Donald Trump is just not as powerful or influential, at least in Georgia, as we might have expected him to be.

There are all sorts of reasons, I think, that we can imagine for that. I do think the sort of long memory and the January 5th, 2021 special elections in Georgia, where Donald Trump went on January 4th and talked about Donald Trump rather than really campaigning for the two Republicans, which cost Republicans the majority in the Senate. I think that Georgians have a long, a long memory there. And then there was also a race in Virginia, where Donald Trump did not, his favorite candidate, did not win. And then in Alabama, Katie Britt, the former chief of staff to Richard Shelby, Senator from

Alabama, won the race as expected. She was endorsed late by Donald Trump, who had originally endorsed Mo Brooks, who spoke at the Stop the Steel rally, was a Republican member of the Freedom Caucus, and was originally one of Trump's sort of favorites, later was not one of Donald Trump's favorites. None of that means, of course, that Donald Trump is not tremendously influential in the Republican Party. He is. He remains. So I think you can see by the eagerness that a lot of these candidates. have had to get his endorsement, that he remains a huge factor. But it isn't the case that once you win his endorsement, particularly in a Republican primary, that seals your

victory. And I think that was sort of the assumption conventional wisdom even just a few months ago. And we're seeing that his grasp is a little more tenuous than we might have imagined. There's also additional polling out this week. There was a New Hampshire poll that included Ron DeSantis, where Ron DeSantis was ahead of Donald Trump in a head-to-head primary matchup. There are other indications that his power, while it's pretty significant for the base, that it might not be as strong as people assumed it would be a few months ago. And lastly, immigration.

So last month, the Customs and Border Patrol reported 239,000 encounters. in the month of May, only 1,600 of those were placed in the Remain in Mexico program where they have to wait on the other side of the border to file their asylum claims. So the vast, vast majority, you know, being either detained in this country, let go with a hearing date in this country, not detained at all in this country. I think this is a huge political issue for both parties heading into November and one that's not getting a lot of coverage because it's not the number one issue. The number one issue, absolutely, it's going to be inflation and gas, those two sort of being connected to one another. This is a distant second in a lot of ways. But I think

it is number two. And I think we're seeing that even in the results in that Texas special election, to some extent, not necessarily because the Republican won. And I've talked about why, like, I think both sides are over-reading that part of the special election. But the Texas 34 district voted 23 points for Barack Obama in 2012. 23 points for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Four points for Joe Biden in 2020. And then Republicans were able to win by seven, eight points in that special election with all the caveats about the money spent, that it's only six months,

the Democrats didn't play, all of that. that. I think that the lack of coverage on immigration will not affect how important it is to voters out there in November. I think it absolutely still will be more to come on that. All right, we're going to wrap with a little twist on not worth your time because there's two things that I just think aren't worth Stephen Jonas' time, but I found them very worth my time. First up, big news in college sports. The Ohio State University was finally able to trademark the word the after being initially rejected.

So it is now officially part of their name, the Ohio State University, and it appears that you do have to emphasize it when you say it on ESPN. That will be part of the trademark. Most importantly, though, we have breaking news about the skin mites that eat from your pores and mate while you sleep. So almost 90% of humans have these mites living on them.

They're passed down at birth. They are harmless. They live in your pores. They, you don't notice them. They're a fraction of a millimeter, micrometer, whatever. At night, however, they come out of your pores and mate on your skin. Up until now, it was thought that they accumulated their feces for their whole lives before releasing it upon their death, which could cause skin inflammation. However, that is not the case, says new research conducted by the University of Reading, the University of Valencia, the University of Vienna, and the National University of San Juan, all coming together for this breaking news in the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution.

the mites do, in fact, have an anus. They have been unfairly blamed for all these skin conditions. In fact, they propose that rather than being a parasitic mite, they in fact might be symbiotic. Now, sadly, it turns out that because of their mating habits and their sexual anatomy, unfortunately, it looks like they are also going extinct. the lack of new exposure to potential mates that could add new genes, it's not turning out well for the mites. So enjoy your mites while you have them.

And just know, there is a lot going on when you go to bed at night, Jonah. So questions. First of all, why do we have to have questions? Why don't we want to talk about this anymore? That was disgusting. I'll start with the Ohio State University thing. What is the grammatical rule that says, You have to say the, rather than the.

Yes, I was having the same thought. It loses its punch if it's the Ohio State University. But all the football players, when they announce themselves this way, say the Ohio State University. Interesting. So we'll get our answers in the comments. And then on the might thing, I don't understand why they're going extinct just because there are no new frontier, facial frontier. tears for them to conquer or because they're evolutions and stasis. Lots of, I mean, have you ever seen a horseshoe crab? Those things have looked like that for like 40 million,

50 million, 100 million years. They were like stepped on by Tyrannosaurus rexes. And so like lots of things have halted their evolution. It doesn't mean they're going extinct. It doesn't mean that there are new, more innovative competing mites going on to their, onto people's faces. And I, I, I honestly thought that this was a wasted opportunity for a great headline about how mites mate right. But that's just me. But did I mention that this is literally a quote from the research paper, the quote, all-night mating sessions on your face? Yeah, and frankly, if they do go extinct because they're not as robust in the facial bedroom, Um, that's fine for me because I'm sort of a lesser of two weevils kind of guy.

Oh, my God. Jonah's on fire. On fire. So we were blaming these mites for skin problems, poor buildup. It turns out they might actually be cleaning our pores, uh, but, you know, I guess we'll know when they go extinct. We'll see. Uh, that's all the time we have.

I know it's, it's, it's, you can't believe we're not going to spend more time on the club mites. But Steve is making a face like he is really considering whether to continue my contract. I mean, did Jonah really just say weevils? The lesser of two weas. That was in poor taste. I don't like. You don't get it?

Poor taste. Come on, man. The dad jokes. We'll have David back next week. He'll keep all this in line. We know David doesn't like to discuss all night mating sessions. So until then, you're stuck with this podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Hop into the comments section if you're a member of the dispatch. Don't forget, we have Dispatch Lives for Members on Tuesday nights where we do deep dives into, well, whatever we feel like. And otherwise, leave us a review or rating wherever you're getting this podcast. Thank you. Caleb, play us out with some Lionel Richie all night long. Oh, that's all night. I'm going to be a lot of the The January 6th hearings actually end?

No. No, they're not done. Good. Okay. We are actually recording on the same day as the DOJ episode, which should have aired last year. I kind of had like a thing. And then there are two more that are, that they've bumped, that they are now having in July. And then there will be the trials by combat. Which I'm looking forward to. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

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