The Dispatch Podcast - Mr. Meijer Goes to Washington

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

“I was proud that after the assault on the Capitol, we were back in the chambers a few hours later,” freshman GOP Rep. Peter Meijer from Michigan’s 3rd District tells Sarah and Steve on today’s episode. “There was someone’s blood drying, right? And we’re going back to work to send the message that our constitutional process—it got erupted—but you’re not gonna scare us away.” Rep. Meijer—who holds Justin Amash’s old seat—joined today’s show to discuss what it was like certifying the Electoral College vote, evacuating the House chamber on January 6 amid the Capitol siege, and undergoing impeachment proceedings just days after being sworn into office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of the Friday Dispatch podcast. I am Sarah Isgird, joined by Steve Hayes. And this week, we are talking to Congressman Peter Meyer of Michigan. Congressman Meyer was elected into Justin Amash's old seat. He just was sworn into Congress on January 3rd. And he is one of the 10 members of the Republican caucus on the House to vote in favor of the article's impeachment against President. Trump. This is a fascinating conversation that we're about to have. And we're so grateful to Congressman Meyer for giving us so much of his time. Let's dive right in. Congressman Meyer. Thank you so much for joining us. There's a lot to talk about, a lot of newsworthy stuff to talk about. A lot of newsworthy stuff to talk about. about, but before we get to any of that, you are a freshman congressman. You hold Justin Amash's old seat who left the Republican Party shortly before he retired. But maybe more interestingly, you also hold Gerald Ford's old congressional seat. How, I mean, not to quote office space

here, well, paraphrase, how would you say you got here, Bob? Well, thank you, Sarah and Steve for having me on. I still don't know how I got here, and apart from winning a primary and a general, but it's very bizarre to kind of have this legacy of, frankly, impeachment and, and resignations and pardons and maybe just kind of presidential misconduct more broadly. You know, where we are right now is, I mean, I know how we got to from January 6th to January 6th to January 13. but you know that what was going through my mind in that legacy of uh of gerald r ford of of the what the nation had gone through you know around watergate and and maybe i'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit here but it's just you know that question of of kind of grace and

forgiveness acceptance and responsibility and whether it's time for you know to unite and to heal you know or time for accountability and folks to own you know what they created. And I'm happy to dive into some of that. You won your race by six points. It wasn't particularly close in Michigan. You were sworn in on January 3rd, I believe. Yes. Was this, you know, you mentioned like the legacy that you feel that you've inherited in this scene, the responsibility and duty of being a U.S. congressman. Did you think that responsibility would come in the first week as this something you'd ever considered before January 6th?

You know, I mean, I watched that show, a designated survivor, right? Or like the freshman congressman who's the military veteran all of a sudden gets like elevated to the vice presidency, but he's also like part of the conspiracy, not to spoil anybody who hasn't seen that show that's like a couple years old at this point. So I'm not saying it wasn't in the wildest imaginations, but I certainly didn't expect to have to, you know, undergo a siege of the Capitol on day. three and then impeach a president seven days later, especially a president of my own party. Big picture. Why did you come to Congress? What did you hope to accomplish? What do you hope to

accomplish? Yeah, I love that question. Really, you know, my tagline in the race was strong, stable, and effective representation, right? It's bringing back that legacy of Gerald Ford, who was in this seat for 25 years and a few of his successors like Paul Henry and Vern Ehlers, There's just very, you know, solid, responsible, bipartisan leaders, but also those who could kind of hold the line. There are a number of long-term trends that I'm deeply concerned about, and I wanted to try to fix the, what I call the maturity mismatch in our political system between short-term electoral incentives and long-term governing incentives. You know, the eyes glaze over when I refer to it like that, but just how do we make sure that our government is functioning better in two years than it is. today and that we're not going to continue in the direction we're heading, which is straight off a cliff, you know, depending on the issue and anywhere from five to 50 years. So I'm on the

younger side, I'm 33, and I just wanted to make sure that there are folks in Congress who are not only concerned about their electoral prospects, but trying to figure out how do you make the hard choice for the country in the long term. And boy, I've really stepped on that one in the first 10 days in office. Given what the Republican Party has gone through and the transformation it's gone through in the last four or five years, why did you decide to run as a Republican? How do you see yourself fitting into the current and future Republican Party? If I say, why am I a Republican? It's three, I would say, core principles, limited government, economic freedom, individual liberty. I'm a huge proponent and believer in subsidiarity.

You know, pushing decisions down to the lowest competent level of an organization. I mean, that's how any entity is going to function as best as possible. And to that point, you believe that policies of subsidization, of nationalization, federalization, centralization, that just leads to bad outcomes. That doesn't lead to effective policy. That doesn't lead to, you know, improving any status quo. And the Republican Party is where what I think is that intrinsically conservative and small C belief, I mean, that's where that lives. Now, it butts up against a sense of populism that is completely antithetical. But, you know, obviously being a Republican and a conservative in the Trump era, I'm sure you both have had a thousand conversations on this and have your own kind of history.

and backgrounds. My view was that, you know, with the Trump administration, there was, it was a mixed bag, but there were a number of things that if we could, if we could make sure that some of the policies around, you know, the deregulation, the economic vitality, just the sense of having America have an asserted place in the world, but also one that was a little But even if it was braggadocious and talk was humble in scope, that there were a lot of ways that that could wind up being a better path for the country long term, you know, freeing us from some of the failed policies of, you know, the pre-Trump, GOP, the Bush-Shaney consensus, the lack of energy and vitality, you know, but, you know, it's like anything else. I mean, you have any fuel harness correctly, you know, it can propel you, you know, great lengths. And if you don't harness correctly, you have. blow up on the launch pad. And I think that's what happened on January 6th, that combustible mixture finally lit. Steve, I feel like that's about as interesting and complete a summary of the last

several years of the conservative movement that I've heard. And what's fascinating is it's coming from a freshman house member who's newly elected into the party. There are about 740 ways. I'd like to take this conversation. We probably won't get them all in. I would love to explore subsidiarity with you and Michael Novak and some of the work that he's done on that. We can link to that in the show notes. A come from the land of Acton. Yeah, there you go. Right, exactly.

The Acton Institute, Lord, acting the whole thing. Let me talk a little bit about that. I'm very interested in your views on the three reasons you are a Republican and how relevant they are today. but before I get there, if I'm not mistaken, you decided to run for Congress, at least announced to run for Congress after Justin Amash became an independent, after he left the party. So you were prepared to challenge him if he ran for re-election as an incumbent. Do I have that, right? Am I remembering that? Correct. Correct. Okay. And then so on the one hand, you have an incumbent who leaves the party

in large part due to Donald Trump and what's happened to the Republican Party. I mean, it was very clear. about his frustrations with the party and said in the fact, I can't be part of this anymore because it's not what I thought it was. And then on the other hand, in the general election, particularly toward the end of the general election, your opponent, who was an Obama administration attorney, if I remember correctly, challenged you and said, you know, this guy's way too close to Donald Trump. I mean, he is, in effect, Donald Trump. He's Donald Trump from Michigan with a beard. How, who was closer to write on that?

And how did you, as you ran your race and you thought about the prospect of serving in Washington, possibly with, during a second Trump administration, how did you think about Donald Trump? How did you think about your service in, potentially in the middle of a Trump era? And, well, I guess I'll leave it there. Those two questions are enough. Well, I'll say in our primary, um, I was never endorsed by Donald Trump. Our primary was on August 4th.

It was a five-way primary. I had two opponents who were running kind of hard in the Magalame. And up until August 3rd, I was the anti-Trump, never Trump, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I win the primary. August 5th, my now Democratic opponent starts blasting me for being the most pro-Trump, right-wing extremist. I mean, it did the hardest 180 you could imagine. I'm like, can we get everybody on the same page here? We had a primary debate where one of the questions was, you know, will you unequivocally support, you know, Donald Trump? And I think I was the only person who said,

I'm not going to be a rubber stamp. You know, we're going to agree on things. You know, I agree with them on X, Y, and Z, but at the end of the day, I'm going to put West Michigan first. And You know, there was a corner to which, you know, anything but unchecked loyalty was absolute treason. But then, you know, that's sort of like the boisterous public personality. I talked to a person, you know, huge Trump fan with a MAGA hat on. And maybe like, you support Donald Trump. And I'm like, well, here's where we stand.

But, you know, we're going to differ. And first me, like, yeah, fair enough. All right, you got my support. Right. So it's this weird version of like the self-reinforcing perception that folks in that camp, you know, only accept blind loyalty. There's certainly some, but it's not representative,

but you can't necessarily project nuanced views where it's like, well, yes with an F, no with a butt, right? You can't get that across in politics. But I would say that the majority, you know, the campaign, especially when it comes to, you know, kind of the shadow of Justin Amash. I mean, he was in the race, but he never really was actively campaigning.

he had been flirting with running for president for a while. You know, I don't think that was more of a question of when than if. But a lot of that shadow was just less about Amash v. Trump and more about just the way that Justin Amash had been relative to, you know, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. So I guess it was more of a teamwork. frustration in some circles, than it was just solely, you know, you know, shoehorned into a Trump narrative.

Right. Jumping to January 6th, you wake up on that day, and there's some sort of anticipation. We don't know exactly what's going to happen, but what did you have in mind? What did you think the day was going to hold? I thought that we would see a large, protest. I thought we might see some violence around the edges of the protest or, you know,

counter protesters and skirmishes as we had seen in D.C. before. You know, I woke up. I had most of my staff working remotely, you know, went got groceries the night before, you know, so that my wife, we have an apartment here so that, you know, she didn't have to go out and case something happened, you know, we could be hunkered down for a few days. I brought, in a pillow and a blanket and some whiskey into my office and some, you know, snacks from Trader Joe's, you know, just expecting that. How did you prioritize the pillow, the blanket, and the whiskey? Which one was most important as you, as you planned? Whiskey. Wait, what brand? We have to know. I had, oh boy, I had Eastern Kill Distillery, which is from Grand Rapids.

I had some of their bourbon. I believe I had bullet. And then I had a very old bottle of Edwardar Scotch. So it was a little bit of a grab back. You came prepared. Yeah. I came prepared. Yeah.

And some nice glassware, et cetera. Because the expectation was that, you know, going into the electoral college certification, there were nine of us freshmen who ended up voting to certify both states. And we thought that this would be the end of our careers. Remember, Eric Trump Jr. is like, if you don't stop the steel and overturn and accept these fraudulent results, you know, we're going to be in your backyard in six months. You'll get a primary, blah, blah, blah. Like, that was our expectation is this is the right thing for us to do. But, you know, we might be signing our political death warrant.

And that's what Chip Roy said on the House floor. along with a few others, I signed on to a letter with him saying why we would accept the electoral college results and why it was not appropriate to be challenging them. But we expected it to be, you know, the six states that Holly and Cruz and whomever had all said they were going to object to and each takes two hours and gets drawn out and then you got to vote. So, you know, we were thoroughly expecting that this could go, you know, all night or into the coming day. And that was the expectation coming in. Hence why you need the three bottles. Who, since you mentioned a few other members, do you have a member who you sort of look at as, you know,

that person is either a mentor of sorts in terms of just how to run a congressional office or philosophically? Yeah, I would say that, I don't know that I have a singular member on all issues. I think, you know, plenty of my colleagues in the Michigan delegation, we kind of bounce ideas off each other and kind of help each other out. And then, you know, I've known a number of the folks

in Congress who were in the military, especially those who were backed by a super PAC called With Honor. I was involved in the formation of that early on because I was pretty active in the veterans community. So, you know, there were some folks that I had preexisting relationships with, but also over the course of both the electoral colleagues. certification and the questions of impeachment, you know, folks who were grappling and didn't want to just take the politically expedient route or maybe didn't know viscerally what they were going to do, but we're trying to better understand and look through all angles. I mean, a lot of us kind of gathered together to pressure test ideas, you know, compare notes about

where our heads were at, and just make sure that we had thought through every aspect of a decision. I don't want to skip ahead past January 6. And Steve, I hope you'll go back to it. But were you disappointed that only 10 members of the Republican caucus voted the way that you did? I think it would have been a very interesting exercise if the impeachment was a secret ballot. Of course. And I think it may have been Tim Alberta, who estimated, you know, be 50 or 60, and I think that's probably right. Now, I think from a public perception, it's a very, it's so binary, right?

You either voted to impeach or and betrayed Donald Trump or you voted no and stop this, you know, and he did nothing wrong. I would say about two thirds of members of Congress, either either in their, in their hearts or in the statements they've put out, believe that the president's conduct, you know, leading up to on January 6th and then the immediate aftermath was either, you know, impeachable or likely impeachable. You know, the question becomes, and this is where a lot, and I think these are very reasonable concerns to have, and I had these same concerns, questions of timing, questions

of due process, and I'm happy to say why those were not operative in my decision-making, ultimately. You know, questions of will that just lead to more divisiveness? I'm sympathetic with those who held those concerns, though at the end of the day, I think, you know, the article of impeachment before us was factually accurate. Due process is, obviously, it's a legal consideration. This is a political process, but also we were holding this trial at the scene of the crime, and many of us were firsthand witnesses and or, you know, victims in the general sense as having had to flee the house chambers as I did. Many of my colleagues did. So, you know, it was a, it was not a question of establishing, you know, the facts. It was, no, we were all, we were here. There's no dispute. 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

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and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s-com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Let's pause for a second and return to January 6th, and then I've got a bunch of questions to follow up on that. What did happen? You told us what you anticipated happening that day and how you prepared for that day. What happened to you? What was your experience like?

I had gone to the chambers because we were currently, we were debating the Arizona Electoral College certification. And I had planned on speaking, you know, for one of them and just saying, you know, why I was voting to certify. We knew that the protests were growing, you know, the Capitol Police, I'd step out to take a call or just have a kind of a break from the chambers. And the Capitol Police would say, okay, just stay away from the windows, you know, we're monitoring the situation. You could hear the crowd.

You could hear the chance. You could see, you know, just a large swarm of people out there. And, you know, as we're, as we're watching folks to liberate, then, you know, like make an announcement, you know, please, you know, we're going to ask everyone to kind of stay in this room, you know, we're, the crowd's getting large, you know, but everything's still safe. And then they recess the chamber, a couple of minutes, Nancy Pelosi recesses a couple minutes later. We're still in Capitol Police say, just, you know, stay here. We're still trying to assess what's going on. So if we could just have everyone stay in their seats, And then they made the announcement that there were people in the building, that the, they were, there were individuals in the capital. They weren't sure of how many, but they kind of went to lock down the chambers. So all of these kind of outer doors kind of start to slam shut. You know, the police get visibly more tense. They say that there's, my colleague and I were in the, in the balcony, in the gallery that surrounds the house chamber, but it's all part of kind of the same room, right?

just on the third floor, not the second floor of the Capitol. And they slammed the door shut, say, you know, there's been tear gas in the rotunda, which, I mean, if you go from, there may be one or two individuals in the building to tear gas has been deployed in the rotunda. Right, that escalates quickly, yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's not the scenario that is just like one or two people slip past. You know, we're told to grab the inhalation hoods that are underneath the seats,

It's kind of a billowy gas mask that you put on in case there's, there's fire and smoke. We were told to get down because we started hearing pounding and realized that pounding was not from, you know, the Capitol Police securing the doors. That was from people outside trying to get in. And we were on, as I said, in kind of the balcony, the gallery. The Capitol Police were still holding the line downstairs. stairs. And that's when, you know, we're told to immediately kind of get underneath the seats in case there was gunfire, you know, it kind of stay low. And then they made the call for everybody to evacuate. And, you know, we, it was chaotic, but we, you know, folks tried to stay calm.

You know, a couple of colleagues, you know, kind of visually saying, okay, do I have so and so, and so, so okay, let's kind of stay as a group. You know, the Capitol police said, okay, go take that elevator, press the button to the sub-basement, and all of a sudden, just we go downstairs, try to crack some jokes, have no idea what's safe. We know that the Cannon House Office building has been evacuated, presumably because the permitor is no longer secure, and we're going into the tunnel complex that connects all these buildings. So eventually we're wandering through these tunnels. You know, no police officers with us. Occasionally, one would run by. We'd say, where do we go? And one would ignore us. The next one would say, just go that way.

You know, 30 or 40 unarmed lawmakers roaming these tunnels, not knowing if we're going to turn a corner and find ourselves face to face with who knows what. Eventually we get to one room where a police officer or Capitol Police says just stay here. We're there for 20 minutes and then they consolidate us in another room. And that's where we were for probably four or five hours until they were able to secure the complex. So it was chaos. It was, it was, you know, we tried to maintain order and some degree of calm. But, you know, I think the more we look at the videos from that day,

it was clear how much, how much worse it could have become. I mean, it was a tragic day as it is, but how close we came to, you know, a far more significant loss of life. You served in Iraq. You worked in Afghanistan. Some people who have covered some journalists who have worked over there have compared that scene and that day to things that they saw when they covered the wars and the aftermath of the wars there. Is that an apt comparison or is that an overstatement? I felt it's that sense of I don't know what's going to happen next that so I think it's the first time I've said this publicly when I you know when they were saying stay away from the windows and I'm up in the house gallery you know watching the the proceedings I kind of had that that that little like spidey sense tingling

I also kind of had to go to the bathroom, like not a lot, but just like a little bit. And so I went out of the gallery, tried to find a restroom because this is something you learn when you're overseas. The last thing you want to have to do in a moment like that is go to the bathroom, right? I mean, you want to be clear-eyed and focused and not anything else. So I went down to the sub-basement. I tried to go to the capital, the press kind of gallery because there's a bathroom in there and that was fully locked, which should have told me something

that the folks in the media were more freaked out than the police officers and then just found an elevator, went down to the sub-basement, made a right, and somehow there's miraculously a men's room. But when I was coming out,

there was a capital police officer in like a parallel corridor sprinting by and yelling, clear. And that was the moment that I knew I'm getting back to the chamber. I have no idea

what's going on but you know this is where something new is going to happen um and got back to the chamber off the elevator and that's right when they they sealed the doors but i would say you know it's just and i would say my experiences in afghanistan were far more so relevant in iraq you would have moments where um you know just like all of a sudden you hear the signal and the the rocket's coming in, right? And, you know something bad is going to happen. In Afghanistan, it was more just that feeling of, that feeling of tension. And when things start to get chaotic, you know, once the perimeter collapses,

you have no idea what happens next. You know, like this, it was apt, those analogies, ultimately. There was a colleague I worked with in Afghanistan. I didn't realize, but he texts me. He's like, wait, you're in the capital right now, right? Yeah, he's like, I'm on the FBI SWAT team. We just evacuated someone there. I mean, like this weird, there were several other journalists and war correspondents that, you know,

I'd run into overseas and we kind of realized, like, we were all in the capital that day. Like the sort of culmination of this forever war aftermath. But I'm, you know, it's just a. a moment where you don't know what's going to happen next, but you just can't rely on anything. You said something a few minutes ago that I found really interesting that I don't think I've heard anyone else articulate quite this way, that because you were there and your colleagues were there,

there was no need for fact-finding afterward to figure out exactly what happened that day. I mean, we do need to figure out a whole bunch about what happened that day, but in terms of the vote for impeachment, your presence there informed a lot of what you are thinking about that, then as you go into the vote from this week. Walk through how that next week goes as, you know, pretty immediately it was clear that an impeachment vote was going to come back up. The articles were drafted almost, you know, immediately within the next day.

As you're contemplating what has just happened, but also know that this vote is coming up, I'd imagine pretty immediately you start thinking about how you're going to vote. Yeah. I would say that there was still a few, at least we had two or three days to just process and figure out what the heck happened. You know, I mean, I was proud that on, after the assaults on the Capitol, we were back in the chambers a few hours later.

I mean, there were folks clean. cleaning up broken glass, cleaning up trash. Parts of the area were near the house floor were roped off because it was a crime scene. They were doing the investigation in terms of what happened with the woman who was shot. So, I mean, there's someone's blood drying, right? And we're going back to work to send the message that, you know, our constitutional process, it got erupted, but you're not going to scare us away. And I thought that was just a really compelling, really compelling message.

So it didn't stop some of the objections from still occurring, which is a whole different matter. But I think after a couple of days, it did become clear. I mean, okay, there's going to be impeachment now. Okay, can we push this? Can we get a censure right away, bipartisan, strong censure? You know, it doesn't have much effect. But, I mean, it sends a strong signal. and then we have our investigations

and then wait for impeachment afterwards. But, I mean, Nancy Pelosi, I mean, their team, I think it was actually Jamie Raskin who drafted it, but they drafted an article of impeachment that was quite narrow. I'm not sure, you know, it was quite narrow and it was factually accurate. I read through it and said,

this is what I saw, this is what I experienced. this is what happened and I couldn't I couldn't get myself to to not vote for it I couldn't convince myself that any move other than voting for impeachment was the right one I watched the president's speech on the ellipse I watched you know all the rhetoric that have been leading up to it I waited I waited for him to come out and condemn what had happened or show some point of leadership, you know, that day. I waited for him to show some degree of accountability or take responsibility for what had happened or just acknowledged that you may have played a role.

And there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. You are a member of the House of Representatives. Your constitutional role is to vote on basically the charges for the president. This is a political process, not a legal process. as I, like, hammered into everyone last time we did this not so long ago. But to use the analogy, your job is to vote on the charges. In the Senate, they then can vote to convict.

It looks like that trial will not happen until while Donald Trump is in office. With Donald Trump as a former president when he has tried in the Senate, and therefore the only judgment that the Constitution provides that's available to the Senate at that point, is to disqualify Donald Trump from holding office again. If you were in the Senate, or if you were advising one of your Senate colleagues, how would you balance the need for accountability, as you said,

versus the need for sort of moving on, forward-looking. It should be up to the voters to reject Donald Trump. We should let the democratic process do this. It will, in the end, be better for the country that way. And this is where I think you holding Gerald Ford's seat has to be kind of interesting. Well, I'm absolutely.

I mean, I think back to obviously his pardoning of Nixon. But that was after Nixon resigned. It was after he accepted accountability for those actions and after those actions have been kind of fully erred out in court. In order to show that grace, you first

must have an admission right of guilt um i mean ironically that's what that's what a pardon requires it requires an admission of guilt you can't be pardoned if you're if you haven't admitted that that guilt i mean sentences can commuted but um in this case i mean to your point i mean the house's job is to to look at the charges and and these charges were accurate and in my experience and to the best of my beliefs and knowledge at the time. You know, I think there were, I've colleagues and I respect this difference of opinion who said, well, I'm concerned about the snap impeachment and then what this means as a precedent.

Okay, that's fair. I can get over that concern because I think the assault on the Capitol was pretty unprecedented and it was, and the president's role to me was left him rankly unfit for office. Others who have concerns about due process. Again, fair, but, Sarah, to your point, you know, this is. is a political process. You're not violating someone's constitutional rights, you know, in the impeachment. Gerald Ford when asked when he was in the House of Representatives, you know, what an impeachable offense was, and he says it's whatever a majority of, you know, the House of

Representatives decides at any one point in time. But at the end of the day, I mean, I think there are folks who are trying to equate the political process of impeachment to a criminal process, saying, well, I'm not sure that, you know, this charge of incitement of insurrection wouldn't hold up in a court of law. Like, well, it actually might, and those criminal charges may very well happen. And the fact that we are strongly considering, you know, the expectation or the likelihood that the president will at least be charged with incitement of insurrection makes it pretty hard to not vote for impeachment here.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think a president should be held to a slightly, higher standard than some guy, you know, who gets up on a soapbox on a street corner and starts, you know, raving like a lunatic. What, what, looking ahead to the, to a possible Senate trial, you're starting to see what feels like a bait and switch from some Republicans, some Senate Republicans, and then broadly Republicans who, some of whom argued in the lead up to, you, in the lead up the impeachment vote, this is a rush process. I can't support a rush process. I can't be part of a rush process. The president needs due process, et cetera, et cetera. And now that the impeachment

vote has taken place and the president has been impeached, they're making sort of the opposite argument, or at least a different argument, which is, boy, you can't impeach a president who's already done with office. You know, we can't. And the through line there, what they both have in common is that it, that they have the effect of absolving those Republicans of responsibility for actually having to carry out any kind of punishment, which, which is awfully discouraging. I wonder if you, if you think the pattern here, I mean, I think for me, as somebody who's

been pretty skeptical of President Trump for several years, I've grown accustomed to seeing this pattern where he does something outrageous. In some cases, it earns a rebuke from fellow Republicans. In some cases, it doesn't. But, you know, they'll show disappointment and then kind of move on quickly and hope that this can all just be put behind us. And that is part of the argument you're hearing now is, boy, this would be divisive. Can't we just get this behind us? Joe Biden's going to be president. You need to focus on, you know, getting relief to people, to the vaccines, all those things, which are, I think, hugely important, obviously. But it feels like we're headed toward kind of like President Trump is going to go out the way that he came in with

Republicans either downplaying or excusing or lightly rebuking his actions. but not actually really following through. Have I just gotten way too cynical now? I think what is dependent here. What's dependent here is the question of what is actually uncovered in the process of the investigation. I mean, we're in a really interesting spot where prior impeachment hearings, I think there was a bit of an inflation of what the consequence was.

At the beginning of the Mueller report, It was, you know, or at the beginning of that process, all of these little kind of breadcrumbs and there was smoke and assumed to be a big blaze. And, you know, there were things there, but it definitely didn't fit the really, you know, fantastical narratives that I think some had hoped. In this case, you know, what we saw plainly and evidently on January 6th is damning. And it's not like exculpatory evidence is going to come out. You know, it's not like, oh, actually Trump filmed a 10-minute video, and there was a technical error, and it only put out two minutes of it where he said, we love you, you know, you're special and then gently prodded. You know, the people would just, you know, put a capital police officer in the hospital and several of them, but one, you know, on life support, you know, who ultimately died. there's no way that it ends up getting framed in a more charitable light, right?

There's no evidence that's going to come out that all of a sudden, you know, will, we'll prove exculpatory. So, I mean, there may be some folks trying to take that middle path right now. You know, when it comes to the concerns about divisiveness, and this is the argument I hate the most, I understand why some make it, but to me it just, it really sends a chill down. my spine is when somebody says well I'm worried this could lead to more violence like you are not saying what the right thing to do is but you're giving you know those insurrectionists you're giving an assassin you're giving that sort of domestic terrorist veto um if this leads the possibility of more violence that is a law enforcement problem right you should be making the the decision

based upon your oath of office and allegiance to the constitution um We should have consideration for what may happen, but that's in the messaging and that's in the response factor. That's not in what is ultimately the right thing to do. Let me ask one more question before throwing back to Sarah real quick. The divisiveness, I think, is a key point. And it goes to sort of what's at the heart of these objections. And I would argue that, you know, the real problem is it for two months, the president made the claim that the election was stolen when the election wasn't stolen. I mean, actually, You know, it goes beyond that, right?

He starts by saying in advance of the election that the election was going to be rigged. He starts saying that evening that the election is being stolen, and then for two months he makes the argument that the election was stolen. And I guess what surprised me and maybe shouldn't have is how many Republicans were willing to amplify those claims, despite the fact that he suffered one after another loss in the courts on the merits and the recounts showed what the recounts showed. And so, as a consequence, we have this gap now where you have 70 plus percent of Republicans who've indicated to pollsters that they believe the election was, in fact, stolen.

And, you know, in my conversations with your colleagues over the past a couple of weeks, I asked all of them basically the same question. This was House members and senators, but I'll limit the House members for the purpose of asking you about it. you know, how many of your colleagues was the way I phrased this, how many of your colleagues truly believe the election was stolen? And the answer I got was, from everybody, was in the single digits. And one person said 10% to which I said, wow, really? You think that many? And he said, no, actually, not really. Probably not. So you have this gap. between what rank and file Republicans across the country believe

in pretty overwhelming numbers and what members of Congress believe and then voted to sustain. And I wonder, how do you bridge that gap? How do you get the 75% of the people who believe something that's wrong and I would say demonstrably, provably false to come around on that?

You know, this has been something that I've been grappling with. Because I would hear, you know, people calling in and saying, you know, why won't you stop the steel, you know, these other folks are going to object and they're going to stop this steel. And I would say, but the people who are objecting are making arguments that there were questions of constitutionality based on Article 2, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution regarding that can be in terms of constitution. interpreted to say that any non-legislative modification to an electoral process at the state level is unconstitutional. And that's why we're hanging our hat on this issue with an executive order by a governor in the state on absentee ballot acceptance days. I mean, it wasn't, they weren't trying to argue with a straight face that there was a massive landslide victory for Donald Trump

that, you know, Dominion voting machines and Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong-un or maybe. even the ghost of Kim Jong-Hill had all, you know, collaborated and conspired towards. But when they said, no, I have questions of election integrity and want to make sure that people can trust the process. Like there were sort of dog whistles that, you know, I have concerns about electoral integrity, you know, but I also try to say, but let's be very clear, you know, Joe Biden won this election. And there's a very, very big difference between wanting to make sure there's trust in the process and saying that even though you couldn't establish anything at a court of law, even though no, you know, law enforcement or judicial or any authority found

any evidence of widespread, you know, systemic fraud or anything that would have shifted results in any state. You know, what was being, you kind of had this, this iceberg effect where, you know, the people who wanted to seem serious and respectable were making sort of the above the water argument, but then the way it filtered down into sort of the fever swamps on social media was something completely, completely miles away and yet connected. And I've talked to a number of folks and some would say, you know, well, no, I don't actually believe the election was, I'm not saying like my colleagues, I mean, people who didn't want the electoral college result certified, and they would stop and say, well, no, I don't actually think the election was stolen,

but, you know, I think it's important that we reverse some of the, you know, loosened processes because of COVID and the expansion of absentee balance and how do we go towards some of the Baker-Carter commission reforms that were proposed in 2005. I'm like, okay, great, yes, that is excellent. Those are the conversations we need to be having, but we're not having those conversations you know, when Sidney Powell and Lynn Wood are the ones that are driving the dialogue and not when you have folks coming to the Capitol sincerely believing that either Mike Pence can change this election result completely, which just, I mean, think about that for a second and tell me how any of that makes sense, you know, or that, you know, really the election date

is January 6th, and if we have people who are passionate enough, you know, we can reverse everything that went up to the November 3rd election and just, you know, have Donald Trump be the rightful king. I mean, to answer your question of how many my colleagues actually believe the election was stolen, I would probably put it in the teens, not just the single digits, but, you know, how many of my colleagues have voters and supporters that trust them and they will tell them, maybe not a lie. I mean, some are definitely telling them lies, but they might not be telling them a lie, but they are having that sort of illusion and speaking in such a way that what they're saying and what people are hearing are two different things.

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Final two questions. First, what is the substantive legislation that you think can get bipartisan support that you hope Joe Biden prioritizes in his first few days or weeks in office? Oh, bipartisan legislation. I think, I mean, setting aside a lot of the COVID issues, which I mean, I've concerns about, you know, state and local bailouts and if that's not applied on a per capita basis, but just used to absolve municipalities that ran themselves into the ground pre-COVID and are now in dire straits, that that's a non-starter, but by and large, I think there's a lot of room on kind of COVID relief and negotiations. I think there's a lot of room on what we can do to make sure that there's a strong emphasis on domestic manufacturing without getting into, waiting into a tit-for-tat kind of tariff battle. I'm personally a big fan of repealing the post-9-11 AUMF and figuring out what should

our force posture be overseas and having some more accountability there. But on a lot of things, I mean, I don't know what the next steps are going to be. I mean, there are divisions on my side of the aisle, as you're seeing on the leadership kind of battles. And then Jim Jordan pushing to have Liz Cheney, who has been, who has exhibited tremendous leadership in these past two weeks to have her, you know, removed from her leadership position, you know, as soon as there's an opportunity, I'm sure there'll be a civil war in the political sense on the Democratic side as well. So, I mean, we've been going through very weighty constitutional issues here, and I hope that we can get to a point of talking about policy. But, you know, my view on on the unity and how do we move on is that until there's

accountability, you know, until you kind of air out the wound and clean. it, you know, it's never going to heal. It's just going to fester. So I'll be honest, I don't know when we get back to talking about policy. We need to. We need to make sure that the vaccine rollout is going as quickly as possible. We need to make sure that, you know, state and local governments have the funding they need in order to get those, you know, doses in arms. Because if they don't, then, you know, we're stuck in this pandemic and then everything else just takes longer. It gets worse. it was more challenging. Steve, I hope I can get your agreement right now

that we have to have Congressman Meyer back for a full discussion just on the potential repeal of the 2001 authorized use of military force that is still in effect. I mean, I have so many questions for both of you and hopefully you have some disagreements even about it. But last question, I can see you on Zoom. Our listeners can't, obviously.

And you have something on your head that might generously be called a hat, but it's unclear because it looks so well loved. It has some of the qualities of a hat. In some other ways, it's missing some qualities of a hat. What is on your head right now? A very frayed and ragged Detroit Tigers baseball cap that was originally navy blue.

Oh, my God. I know. It looks khaki. It actually looks khaki. Yeah, it's basically. like a light gray at this point. And yeah, I've had this for probably 12 years. It's been to over 50 countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, eastern Ukraine, South Sudan, Tunisia, Georgia. It's been around. Were you wearing that in the capital on January 6th?

I was not. I was, I was wearing a suit and looking very professional. Actually, a suit my wife got me for my birthday. And, you know, I was, I'm not sure that a baseball cap is really appropriate in the house chamber. It might be now. I think. Or a helmet. A helmet would have been nice. A helmet would have been very nice. It maybe, it wouldn't have gone with my pinstripes. But at what point, do you retire the hat? Or perhaps I should ask, at what point is your wife, Is that hat going to disappear and we'll just know why it disappeared when someone else in your household disappears the hat? I think my wife understands the emotional connection, and I don't think she would commit such an act of betrayal. But she does take issue, it's a little too fragile to kind of clean. And it might be time for a shadow box.

We could frame it. Yeah, you could use some for briefs. put that way. All right, Congressman Meyer, thank you so much for your time today for all of your insights and for telling us how we got to where we are today. I hope that the next few weeks of your congressional tenure are less exciting than your first few days were and certainly a lot more safe. We hope to talk to you again real soon. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Steve. This episode is brought to you by This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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