The Dispatch Podcast - Pettifogging

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

The team looks at the larger implications of the impeachment trial, the U.S. nuclear modernization efforts, the history of executive privilege, and that gun rally in Virginia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, joined today, as always, by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. Today on the podcast, yes, we do have to talk about the impeachment trial yesterday, but not what happened at the impeachment trial. Talk about some of the larger issues, implications moving forward for our democracy, our country. And then I dive in a little with some of the reporting that the guys have done this week. our nuclear arsenal, executive privilege, and guns enrichment. That's all coming up on the podcast. And with that, let's jump in. So obviously, yesterday was the start of the impeachment, trial. And I'm just going to skip right to the end of yesterday, which was the Chief Justice reprimanding, I think is the appropriate verb to use both sides. Petty fogging was the word, was the example he came up with. Petty fogging, an old term for worrying too much about

details that are minor or unimportant. That is not what he was saying was going on. I will read you what he said. In 1905, the Swain trial, a senator objected when one of the managers, use the word pettifogging. And the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used. I don't think we need to aspire to that high of a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are. And with that, I guess I don't want to jump in to the details of the back and forth for the same reasons that John Roberts was alluding to there.

But I do want to talk about what it says about the system as a whole where we're headed. And, Jonah, I do want to start with you on this because you've certainly been the forefront on two impeachment trials now in pretty quick succession of our last four presidents, you know, 50% at this point have been in a Senate impeachment trial. So where are we headed then? Can we assume this will now head the way of judicial confirmations where both sides escalate this war in succeeding administrations? will Republicans seek to impeach the next Democratic president? First of all, thank you for noticing that time is a flat circle because it's a very strange thing that my launch as a career as a pundit began over 20 years ago at National Review where I was blogging about the last impeachment.

It's deja vu all over again. And now I'm starting this thing during an impeachment. But we don't use the word blogging that much anymore. I think it's Swedish with a soft jay. Anyway, so I think it's a legitimate concern. I think there are some reasons to be less worried about this being the new cycle going forward, only insofar as Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency almost by design trolling the opposition. testing how far he could go maybe not in terms of policy although sometimes but truly in terms of his rhetoric and it doesn't seem obvious to me that the next Democratic president will be able

to mimic that that style and there may be like even if the next Democratic president were Barack Obama in you know the exact same doppelganger Barack Obama that Republicans in the House if they controlled the House wouldn't try to impeach a Barack Obama next time they might I mean, I think it's a legitimate concern, but it depends on a lot of variables. One of them is the personality of the next president who comes in, whether it's Republican or Democrat. Part of it depends on how much of a price Republicans versus Democrats have to pay for the drama of the Trump era. And there was a price in 98. I'm sorry?

And there was a price in 98. There was a price in 98. and you could see the next Republican leader in the House, if there is one, saying, hey, look, we're going to pull back on the drama a little bit because we've got a brand problem. So I just don't know. It is certainly true. There's sort of a Chicago way dynamic here where one side pulls a knife, the other one pulls a gun. You know, Harry Reid was the guy who basically got rid of the filibuster that brought us the Republican appointments on the Supreme Court.

But Harry Reid points to the delays. of Obama appointees before that, and then Republicans point to Bork before that, and then they, I mean... And I actually think Bork really is the Fons et origio, to use some Latin on you, of a lot of this, the way they... Did you just call them the Fonz? Anyway, I think it's a legitimate concern, the tit-for-tat cycle of these things, but there's also another dynamic in American politics, which is that people get sick of the drama, and

it all depends. I also just think that I still think that Donald Trump is more of a one-off than a archetype for future presidents one way or the other. David, as our legal, maybe not legal historian, but you've been in the conservative legal fights in the past. Yes. Do you agree with Jonah's assessment that this is personality-based? I'll accept the title of oldest lawyer in the room. You're the oldest person in the room. Oh, my gosh.

Okay, yeah. You're like three months older than me. Thanks, Jonah. It makes you ancient. I really appreciate that. So I would say if you look at the last two impeachments, it's not like these things fell out of the sky. So you're hearing a lot of concern about, well, impeachment become. the new norm. Well, one of my questions is what kind of presidential behavior will become the new

norm. So, you know, we had Clinton impeached in 98 for not just for being Bill Clinton, but for perjury and obstruction of justice. And he was dead to rights on perjury. And then you have George W. Bush. We look back on the George W. Bush era and sometimes forget how incredibly partisan and contentious it was. You had Barack Obama, again, very partisan, very contentious. And aside from a few, you know, firebrands in the house, there was no serious drive to impeach either person. Then here comes Donald Trump. And then on the one hand, his supporters say, Donald Trump is a singular figure of disruption. He is like nobody else. He is this, you know, this incredibly historic destructive force. And then at the

same time, when his sort of bull in a china shop routine includes things like engineering American diplomacy for personal gain, then the defenders are like, wait a minute, this is out, you know, this impeachment is outside of the, is this the new norm for the presidency? And so I will press the panic button on too many impeachments. When I see an impeachment for something other than perjury and obstruction of justice in Clinton era, or trying to secretly re-engineer, American diplomacy in a strategically vital region of the world for blatant personal gain and to investigate a crazy conspiracy theory. Okay, but to push back on your point, which I take, and it is well made as your points often are, you know, during the Obama presidency, there were

certainly conversations about massive executive overreach to the point of, you know, remember Ted Cruz's list of lawless, of lawless, Obama actions, but it was before the Trump impeachment. In a post-Trump impeachment, you don't think that that similar action, a similar executive order, you know, ignoring immigration law or, you know, pick your Democratic poison there, could be used as a basis for saying this is a lawless president who's not abiding by the Constitution and therefore must be impeached. So, Sarah, you either read my French press yesterday and are teeing it up perfectly, or you didn't read it, and shame on you. I'm not even sure I want to tell you now. I just feel like the suspense is better.

So I dealt specifically with that argument in my newsletter yesterday, because you get this response an awful lot about Barack Obama, that yes, he used the pen and phone, particularly, in my mind, the most egregious example of that, where there was multiple, but the most egregious examples were in immigration and in education where he he substantially tried to change he tried to change the law substantively by writing memos rather than even going through a rulemaking process or much less going through Congress and those acts were lawless now the however there was immediate avail immediately available effective constitutional redress there and it was called going to court you could immediately go to court you could get it

an injunction. You could stop what it occurred. There were checks and balances built into the system that allowed you. Let me give you a different example then. I'm going to take away your comfy example of DACA. And instead, I'm going to give you the third party payments example where they were settling with, you know, threatening to sue large corporations. You know, we're going to sue you for $40 billion. Or you can settle with us for $10 billion, but some of that money is going to go La Raza. Oh, yeah, the Sue and Settle model. The Sue and Settle model, which had no redress in courts. There was no standing by, you know, members of Congress, for instance. And yet it was probably a violation of the Appropriations Clause. No, Sue and Settle was terrible. I wrote a whole

chapter about Sue and Settle in a book about administrative overreach. You're just plugging all your writings today. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this is just what happens when you're an old lawyer. You've kind of encountered all this stuff. No, really old. That's absolutely, it was absolutely an abuse of power. And if I recall correctly, is while you were at the DOJ, that Sessions put an end to some of that nonsense, unless I'm misremembering. You're correct. But to the point, why wouldn't Republicans impeach the next Democratic president for something similar? Well, that's, you know, it depends on the gravity. So there is a, there's, there are two questions. Is it an abuse that can be redressed in the

constitutional process. If so, I would say use the constitutional process. Go to court, get an injunction, stop the abuse. The other one is if it's an abuse that cannot be addressed through normal constitutional process, how severe is it? And that's the key question to me of the impeachment, that the Senate should be debating right now in the chamber is how bad is what Donald Trump did? Is it, so I, you know, my, my tendency, my thought on this is when you're talking, about conducting diplomacy in a strategically vital region of the world in the middle of an actual shooting war involving our chief geopolitical foe, and you're distorting that diplomacy for the sake of purely personal gain, that is nearing the red line or past the red line of severity. If, to take your Sue and Settle example, you're entering into a settlement agreement that the company doesn't have to enter into but feels bullied into entering into and then has to shunt some money off to a liberal activist group that is bad. That is something also that is you are capable of bringing to public attention and you're capable of dealing with

through congressional process. But diplomacy is where the president is near the peak of his powers and it's much less clear where there is a check outside of impeachment. Steve, what I'm hearing from David is that severity is in the eye of the behold. And in David's beholding, he thinks the severity weighs on this side, A, I've seen you furiously scribbling notes. So I know you have, you want to, you know, weigh in on what both Jonah and David have said. But in addition, who is the audience for this? I have to take notes because my brain oozes information that I'm so old that it just escapes right away if I don't write it down. This podcast is brought to you by old people.

And Sarah. I see the names of the starting lineup of the 96 Packers just literally like dribbling out of your ear. I can do that. I can do that, actually. So I think David makes a very compelling case about both the Clinton impeachment and the Trump impeachments. I am less convinced by his prospective case, going back to the first question you asked. I do think this is likely to happen a lot more. And I think the challenge I would make to David's argument is built, it's built upon a certain

assumption of good behavior and seriousness from our politicians, which I would argue is not an evidence. And that's what John Roberts was saying last night. Right. It's not as if you watched or listened to any of the 12 hours of what transpired yesterday or you look at what's happened over the past, well, three, five, ten years. it's not like our politicians are putting facts, truth, and evidence at the front of every decision they're making. The David French severity balancing test is not, yeah.

And I would also add to that what makes this different in what I think you're two out of the four, two out of the last four presidents being impeached question is so interesting, is that we've, that's come at a time when we've seen this proliferation of information. information. So there's information everywhere. And you remember back to the Clinton impeachment, one of the most important moments was when the Drudge Report published things that other people weren't willing to. And now we have a lot of outlets that are like the drug report and, you know, and go way way the Drudge Report. And to your point, by the way, the Drudge Report published when others were holding a Newsweek was holding it at that point. They had the information. Correct. There were multiple. Because we hadn't gone, and that's when Drudge runs it, which is really interesting to your point about just the media landscape.

That does not happen now. Right. I mean, well, or you could argue that it happens. I mean, the mainstream media outlets don't hold as much as they used to, which I think is your point. But you also have any of a number of other outlets that are willing to publish anything and everything and an entire new landscape of outlets who are devoted not really to seeking true information. but to just passing along misinformation in furtherance of one political agenda or another. And I guess that's the problem that I have with David's argument is I don't see where we go back to this point where people are primarily interested in just the facts and truth of the matter. And the partisan polarization that we're looking at now, it seems to me, I don't think it's necessarily permanent.

But I do think it's here for a while. So if you're a Democrat or a Republican and you want to exact revenge on Democrats for what's happened here, why wouldn't you? When you have majorities in Congress, why wouldn't you do this? What's stopping you? So in watching the trial yesterday, I can't imagine a world in which anyone watching does not come into it with an opinion. And I don't mean the senators, but rather viewers. of it. So Jonah, A, feel free to just tell Steve why he's wrong, per usual.

He doesn't usually need an invitation. I'm trying to be a good behavior here. He's sitting in his corner, hands to himself. I've been chastised. What is the purpose of this trial? If it's a made-for-television event, but everyone watching is already rooting for, you know, the Packers or the Niners. What are we doing here?

Yeah, so it's funny, not really in a ha-ha kind of way. First of all, I'm more on David's side of this. I think... Yeah, I think it's me and Steve versus you and David on us. The likelihood of future impeachments has obviously been increased, but you still need opportunity, right? It's like in, what are you, lawyer type people, means, motive, and opportunity, right? The motive is clearly there. The means is there, but you need the opportunity.

The president needs to do something that on its face doesn't make it seem totally unreasonable to impeach them. And I think that's where Steve and I think you're right. All of us are disagreeing on what that level of opportunity has to be. And you guys think it needs to be higher than Stephen. I think it needs to be. And that's right where the nut of it is. Yeah, that's right. And we'll find out.

I mean, if it's the old people against the young people. I'll just put it out. So true, Steve. So that said, I mean, I think that the one of the reasons why people have tuned this out, like, so Hugh Hewitt wrote this column. I'm going to talk to him about impeachment on his radio show tomorrow, which should be entertaining. Hugh, you know, says that because the majority of American people aren't paying attention, that somehow this all redounds against the Democrats. and he thinks that the, you know, the polling and somehow shows that this is a sort of a sham and all this kind of stuff, I think that's completely wrong. I think one of the reasons why, and this is something David and I have talked about a bunch, is that this is not exciting because everyone knows Trump did it. We can all disagree about whether it should be, whether it's impeachable or whether he should be impeached about it for it. Those are perfectly legitimate questions, and people of goodwill can come down on various sides of it. But I honestly believe that anybody who says to you with a straight face that Donald Trump's phone call was perfect or that there is no reason to believe that he isn't, that there's no reason to believe whatsoever that he is guilty of anything, you are either a paid or volunteer water carrier for the president or you are what some social scientists call really dumb.

and it's a part of the problem is everybody's like yeah he did it obviously trump did it the the release of the transcript of the phone call was like you know as david i've been saying for well it was like the release of the nixon tapes at the beginning of the story so there's no dramatic build right now and so people are tuning out because they know the thing is rigged and the republicans are not going to vote to remove them um i don't know that that is bad for Democrats the way, you know, my friends like Hugh Hewitt think it is. And the truth of it is, getting back to the sort of your initial point, Trump would not have been impeached at all if he had just apologized, right? His positioning in this made Democrats impeach him by insisting

that he everything was perfect. He did absolutely nothing wrong. And that basically trolled Democrats into doing it. I think your best evidence for that, by the way, funny enough, is the Mueller report. Not that he apologized for that, but rather they didn't impeach him for the Mueller report because they didn't have enough because Mueller had undermined their obstruction theory. And so on Steve and I side, to undermine our team for a second, when it goes to that opportunity, they didn't have enough opportunity so they hung back. And then the release of the transcript was then the opportunity.

I think those opportunities. Nancy Pelosi fought impeaching him for a year. Yeah. And then Trump behaved in such a way that it made it impossible to tell her own side not to do it. And the messaging you get from a lot of pro-Trump pundits on this is so convoluted. They make it sound like they simultaneously say the Democrats have wanted to impeach him from the beginning. It's true of some Democrats. But they then say that Nancy Pelosi made a huge blunder by going back on her position on impeaching. Which is it?

Did you always want to impeach him or not? They make it sound as if Trump has, Trump is not a relevant variable on this. When if Trump had just simply come out and said, hey, you know, I kind of screwed up. I don't think it was impeachable, but I can see how people would not like this. Nancy Pelosi wouldn't have impeached him. Trump is the guy who you tell him under, remember that scene in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 where the raccoon is telling Groot, do not press this button or you'll blow up like the galaxy? See, Trump is the guy, if you tell him, do not push the big red button, he'll say, okay, okay, okay.

And then by 10 minutes later, he says, you're not the boss of me, and he pushes the big red button. Don't look into the eclipse. Right, exactly. Under no circumstances, look straight into the eclipse. Well, I think, I think Jonah's right about some of that. What struck me, what strikes me in listening to what transpired yesterday, is that you have all of these Republicans who, I think, most of the Republican senators, would fit into Jonah's description of people who think the president did something wrong. Very few of them, at least in the conversations I've had with many of them, are defending

the president on the merits. He's everything, the call was perfect. And more to the point, I think, if you ask them, would you have done that call that way, their answer would you know, which I think goes more to the, yeah. But it's interesting because the White House defense, because they have. have to please the president is the maximalist defense on this, right? So sit baloney says the president has done absolutely nothing wrong. And if there's ever been a time that Republican senators were grateful for the inability to speak, this has to be it, right? I mean, because they don't have to go.

I mean, some of them will go out and probably try to find that middle ground. I'm not sure exactly where it is between embracing this maximalist argument that the White House wants the president to make. And we've known for a long time. that the president wants a robust defense offered on his behalf. And these Republican senators will, I think, at the same time, attempt to acknowledge, yeah, this probably does cross-line. Maybe it's not impeachable and, oh, the Democrats have been partisan and, oh, the process is terrible. And I think some of those arguments, by the way, have some validity. But ultimately, they don't, I think many of them don't want to be seen as embracing what the president does, you know, potentially as a precedent for what comes next.

Can I jump in with a pet peeve of mine just for a moment? This is a whole show about pet peeves. Sure, sure. So looking back at these last four presidents, we, you know, we speak a lot and rightfully so of the failure of our leaders and how our leaders have, you know, Bill Clinton was a scoundrel. Donald Trump is Donald Trump. We have seen problems with Barack Obama. I think the disputes with George W. Bush, with Bush and Obama, I think much more the disputes

were conventional political. I don't like their policies or the way they tried to execute their policies. But particularly with Clinton and Trump, can we just talk for a minute that we got a problem in this country when that is the kind of politician that the people of this country want? And it's sort of like the third rail of political commentary is we can't say, hey, primary voters, what is your problem? You know, Alabama primary voters in 2007, what is your problem? The rot in our political system is extending to the voters themselves. And that's something that we've got to confront and we've got to face up to. And you can't say it if you're a politician because that seems an awful lot like suicide, but political suicide. But it seems to me if we're talking about

negative polarization more broadly. We cannot just talk about our leaders. There's millions of people who look at Donald Trump and the person that he is in the Oval Office putting the strains on the system that he's putting on and say, yay, fantastic. And that worries me more than Donald Trump in many ways. Yes. But I think there's so there's the political reason why blaming voters is stupid for a politician. Set that aside, though. There's also the voters didn't suddenly show up one day and decide to vote for Donald Trump.

There has been resentment building. There has been populism building. This didn't come out of nowhere. You can argue the cycles of American politics. You can argue the media environment that Steve was talking about has contributed. And I think you can argue that the over-promising under-delivering in a new,

expanding world economy certainly is part of what drives the populism side from the sort of economic grievance immigration grievance side. So I take your point, but there's a reason that they picked Donald Trump. And it's not just that they were like F character today. Well, a lot of them were. A lot of them were because there's a big difference between saying, I'm really upset with the establishment. And I want a more populist figure somebody who's going to be very aggressive and saying, and also somebody who lies constantly, somebody who has a demonstrated record of infidelity, somebody who has bragged about assaulting women, somebody who is subject to more than a dozen corroborated accounts of sexual assault. So there's the difference. There's a difference

between saying, I'm fed up with the establishment, and I do think there was, and there are millions of people who are at that point of character doesn't matter. And in fact, Inflicting pain is the point. John Harris had a great headline that I don't know if you read Jonah. He's our OJ, quoting a Trump voter. And that's where I guess I disagree a little with David. It's not that they wanted it that. It's it. He's their OJ.

No, I think the He's Their OJ thing is actually a really good shorthand explanation of a lot of this. And I agree with almost everything you said. about the reasons why people were pissed off, while we have a populist moment, all of that kind of stuff. Where I differ a little bit is, where, again, I'm siding with David, the way we elder statesmen do,

is that there's a huge difference between an explanation and an excuse. And so the reasons why, take a very stark example. The reasons why African Americans in 1968 rioted are very understandable, right? Just given the political climate, given the history that's involved in all the rest, that is not an excuse to set fire to some innocent person's store or throw a garbage can through someone's window. You can understand where rage or frustration or anger comes from without excusing what you do with the anger and rage.

But the excuse is that there was no other outlet. We had to throw the trash can through that store window because we did not have another venue and vehicle to express our rage. And that's where, who was the other candidate that those people were supposed to vote for? First of all, I do like Donald Trump as the trash candidate. Like an Oscar the Grouch type thing. Not just trash. No, but look, I understand that. That's why riots happen is a lack of a vehicle for lack of outlet.

And we've seen this. I mean, I think, Sarah, you're right. we've seen this for a while. And it's cross-partisan and cross-ideological. It's why we've seen the kind of volatility that we've seen in our politics and in our elections over the past decade. And I would argue sort of even before that. But to me, the point that David is making and Jonah's endorsing is the reason for my pessimism about what comes next, right? It's not just that we have some politicians who want to gain advantage by, you know, raising impeachment. It's because that they're likely to find a pretty good following for these kinds of things among a populace that doesn't know necessarily what to believe is, again, on both sides, willing to believe the kinds of things that I think we've seen increasingly politicians accuse one another of sometimes with basis, sometimes without a good basis.

And it's into that information environment that we're, but, that we'll be having these political disputes with the next president, the next president, the next president. And that's what makes me, David, your sort of the basis for your argument is what makes me pessimistic. David said that the disputes with Obama and Bush, W, were namely policy. I mostly agree with that assessment, but the way that they were characterized was not a policy dispute. It was characterized as evil in the Bush years, and it was characterized as un-American and largely sometimes in racial terms during the Obama years. So it may be at its core a policy dispute, but if that's not how we're characterizing it, I think that

tips the hand further and further and further to pass Trump, past whatever this is. Well, I would say we're in, we're nearing a point where we're going to have to decide kind of who we are as a country. I can see a spiral in the way that Steve describes. I could see that happening where partisan media builds upon the, you know, the part of the increasing partisanship of Congress in particular, where we, where negative polarization has no check and where you would have a situation where a partisan Congress stoked by partisan media inflamed, constantly and relentlessly inflamed by the talking heads on television and radio and Twitter, et cetera, would impeach some future version of a Mitt Romney, for example, over

policy differences. I can imagine that. I think that negative polarization is becoming extraordinarily strong. I also take some solace. not that I'm in any way an optimist, but I do also take some solace in some of the social science out there, particularly the hidden tribe study from the more in common, that shows how small a slice of Americans are driving this, are really at the front of the partisan polarization bus, and that there are a lot of people who don't want to be on that bus. And in fact, I mean, to plug for the dispatch, Right. One of the core understandings that we have of the news media environment is that there is a hunger for people who want to know what is really going on shorn of partisanship. And I think that this is going to be one of the defining questions of the next five, 10, 15 years of American politics is do the people, the partisans driving the bus keep driving it? or does what the more in common studies call the exhausted majority take back the wheel? And that's going to be a real question going forward. And we will leave David as the oldest person with the last word.

And there's a book called Why Nations Fail that I think can be instructive on this point from 2012 that hopefully is not Cassandra at the gates here. Steve, totally switching topics. boom we're totally done with impeachment updating our nuclear arsenal you did some reporting on this this week that I found interesting informative outside of my normal media diet and what's interesting politically to me about it

was that it is pitting these very senators crews cotton you know Trump Republican senators against the White House tell us more about your reporting yeah this is an interesting to me, a really interesting story for exactly the reasons you suggest.

And also there's some intra-Trump administration conflict on this as well, which I think is very interesting. Basically, for 30 years, we've put off modernizing our nuclear arsenal. And this is something that's been agreed to and warned about by leaders of both political parties, national security leaders of both political parties for years. And in the piece that I wrote for the website, I cite this Bob Gates speech in the waning days of the Bush administration, where it's a stark warning. I think he saw this sort of as one of his last opportunities to really warn people about the problems with...

And is this technologically updating, safety updating? It's mostly technologically updating. It's also, you know, research. He made the point... It's like adding Bluetooth. They have no Bluetooth, I would say. Actually, it... Siri, Siri, launch missile, Siri.

I won't take this digression, but there's actually a way in which our security is better because we haven't updated. So you're still passing some of this nuclear technology. This is the Battlestar Galactica. Literally, yeah. I mean, it's sort of interesting, but that's a, that's another topic for another day. David is knowingly nodding at my Battlestar Galactica reference.

They only survive because they're not networked, guys. Yes. So this, the lack of urgency on this has led us to this point where I think you have people, you know, we would call defense hawks, but then people way beyond people we would consider defense hawks saying, we've got to do this and we've got to do it now. The Trump administration's been pretty good about this for the first three years, increasing the budgets of the National Nuclear Security Administration. And this year there was a budget request that went up from the NNSA asking for $20 billion, and it was paired back by the Trump administration, the White House Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, by some $2.5 billion for fiscal year 2021, and then $16.3 billion over the subsequent three years. it's a real problem. If you talk to people who know this world, they say there are many things we're not going to be able to do without that two and a half billion dollars, despite the fact that it's just a fraction of a fraction of the overall defense budget. Iran is building their program. North Korea is building their program. Russia has their program. China is rattling at the gates. And that's, I mean, that was one of the reasons I used this Bob Gates speech is Gates is speaking to us at a time when a lot of what we're seeing today.

was speculative and maybe even unlikely. You know, he was warning Iran maybe wants to get a nuke and North Korea is looking to get a nuke. We now know that North Korea is a nuclear state, China and Russia, while they're not our adversaries, they're in the nuclear game. I mean, a lot of these things that he worried about have now come to pass, and we still haven't taken this as seriously as we should. So this woman who runs the NNSA, Lisa Gordon Haggerty, sent a memo in December objecting in the strongest possible terms to these additional budget cuts.

Yeah, I mean, it was, she said basically, we will lose our deterrent capability, our nuclear deterrent capability, and we may not be a superpower anymore. I mean, you can't say it any stronger than that. And people who know her well, again, bipartisan say she's a pro. she's very smart. She's not prone to hysteria and hyperbole, but she really believes this stuff. And there has been this movement among Republicans, many Republicans in the House and the Senate, to get her back, to push back on OMB with this. And they've written a letter to the president and said, we want to sit down with you about this. This is awful. Well, Trump has spoken about this privately with some of those members of Congress and others and said, basically, I don't know why OMB is

doing this. I mean, this is really frustrating to me. They should just fund NNSA at the level that NSA says they should fund it. But is this telling people what they want to hear. Well, he does that a lot, right? There's a reason that OMB is doing what it's doing, and they would say we're still bound by these caps that are a legacy of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which while it's not really in place anymore, the spirit of it lives, and there are these softer caps, so we can't do it. And if we fund this at the level that they would like us to fund it, that something else

has to give. And Mulvaney as chief of staff is on team OMB here, which also makes me doubt that what the president is telling these senators is the whole, that he's just shocked, shocked to find gambling. Right. And the OMB staff would tell you, they didn't answer my requests for comment, but I'm told that the argument that they're using is, it's fully funded anyway. And These things that they say are really important aren't actually that important, and we can get by. And talking to a good number of experts who work in that field, I think that the OMB argument is just wrong.

It's not true. Can I ask a point of information, as they say, on the Senate floor? Is or is not Mick Mulvaney the head of the OMB? I want a clear answer from you. So we had this argument. We had this discussion before where we said, I thought he was. I was corrected, and then as I was doing research for this piece, the OMB website I found, has him listed still as director. My understanding is that in order to be acting, you must continue in your role.

They could have moved him to a different position, but you would have to continue in a different role in order to add the acting hat. As chief of staff? Well, he's acting chief of staff. They can make him chief of staff, but they have not done that. To be in acting, you have to continue in a different position. in a different position. And that would explain why Russ Vaugh is also acting. There's fun little things about this.

We could fact check this. We should fact check this. Okay. Well, that is fascinating, particularly because those are the sort of discussions that impeachment is overshadowing, both in the media, in cable and anything else. We're never going to pay attention to this while we have sort of cotton candy running around on news all day. And on a future episode of the remnant, we're going to get to the really important issue of whether or not we should nuke the moon. which I actually am a pretty strong believer in it. There's a huge deterrent effect. Huge deterrent. Well, Jonah, since you raised your hand.

Executive privilege, you had a great piece discussing what is executive privilege. But the parts that I found great as an attorney, but I think non-attorneys or just historians, was the George Washington reference. Yeah. That's what made me wanted to do the thing, is I discovered the George Washington thing. And I have to give credit to Gary Schmidt from AEI, who on a podcast with me, pointed out the George Washington stuff. What's the George Washington stuff? Tell everyone else.

Yeah, so the story of George Washington is when he was a little boy, he chopped out of cherry tree. No, okay, so the relevant part of George Washington. The rest of us are still young. During the Washington administration, I believe it was the second term, he concluded a treaty called the generally called the J Treaty, which is a trade deal with Great Britain. For anybody who's seen Hamilton, you can understand why this would make some people upset because the French, who are our allies, were still, or again at war with the Brits. Lafayette.

And we ended up concluding a trade deal with the guys that we went to war with in the Revolutionary War. Lots of harrumbs from the House. and the House demanded that they get all of the papers and documents and minutes from meetings and letters associated with the negotiation of the J treaty to look at. And Washington said, screw you. He said, you have no... To the House. To the House.

Right. I said the House. The House wanted them. And he said, you have no reason to ask for these things. We have to keep confidential certain conversations. as a matter of principle because you cannot negotiate these kinds of things in public in front of the public eye. And this is basically what created executive privilege, is this argument.

And he actually canvassed his whole cabinet, which is kind of relevant because they were all pretty much literally founding fathers, right? So when we talk about what the intent of the founding fathers was like Washington took a poll of the staff and they're all founding fathers. and but the the there are two important details here one was Washington said to the house hey look if you were conducting an impeachment hearing or inquiry of course you could have this stuff because that constitutional function trumps any my essentially executive privilege and and then the other interesting tidbit is he did give all that stuff to the Senate

because the Senate has the authority under the Constitution to approve treaties. And so this sort of lays out, this is the origin story of executive privilege, but it also bears in sort of the larger scheme of things because the Congress, the White House is absolutely correct when they say the president's power is strongest when dealing with foreign policy and national security. What they leave out is that the houses or the Congress's power is. strongest when conducting an impeachment inquiry. That's where Washington, by the way, as a, you know, former communications person, never answer the hypothetical. Right. He just waited right in to impeach.

He just threw it out there, yeah. As all of his predecessors are like, no. I mean, is it successors? No. So, having answered the question, I want to get my one peeve out of yesterday because this is one of these things that is causing me to have flashbacks to 1999, which was that little recognize Prince follow-up album called Flashbacks 1999. Anyway, the Cipollone and the other White House lawyers, they're doing the exact same thing that Bill Clinton's lawyers did, where they do

this stuff where they say, if they can do this to the president, they can do it to anybody. And they make it sound like this is some Orwellian police state thing when impeachment is not any of those things. And they can't impeach Sarah Isger, right? They can't impeach Steve Hayes as much as some of us here would like to see that happen. We can impeach Steve. Is that in the bylaws?

And actually, we'll talk. And when they, when Cipollone says, or Secholo or whichever staggering mediocrity it was, says that, you know, he's, the president is just standing up for. for his constitutional rights. They make it sound like he's invoking the Fifth Amendment or something. He's not doing that. The executive privilege is a true emanation

from a penumbra, basically, from the Constitution. Oh, my. And it's a privilege that the office of the president has. It is not an in an alienable right we're all born with. And they talk about it as if, like literally, Zeckelos said something along the lines of it is patriotic to stand up for your constitutional rights, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is such hot garbage. And they're trying to turn Trump, like they try to turn Clinton into a civil rights martyr for obfuscating and trying to hide the truth.

Self-righteous Jonah is my favorite Jonah. Can I just need to push back against Jonah? My own freelance Ukrainian diplomacy is severely chilled. by this entire I am I am minding my P's and Q's in Keeve now, so thank you

thank you for assuring us of that and for pronouncing Keeve correctly as we now all have learned to pronounce it but this brings us to you my culture warrior yes

there was a rally in Richmond this weekend and there's a lot behind this there's the gun sanctuary city ordinances that are being passed through at Richmond. There's Governor Northam's, guns around the capital, but there's also the cultural side. And these are your people speak up. Okay, so a couple things. I wrote, again, you just keep coming back to the French press. So I wrote about the

sanctuary, the gun sanctuary movement several weeks ago. And essentially, there's a little bit less there than meets the eye. A lot of these resolutions that are being passed in these and counties, are not terribly legally binding. They're more of a statement, sort of a formal public protest against potential gun control laws being pondered in Richmond. Some of them might have more teeth than others, but the intent of them is to echo the sanctuary city laws that you see, say, for example, or sanctuary state like you see in California. And essentially what they're saying is, okay, state government, you may not commend. local public officials to enforce your state edicts and it's much the same way that

California is saying, okay, federal government, you may not commandeer the use of state resources to enforce your immigration laws. And so there has been no real push come to shove on this yet. I'm skeptical that we will see a real push come to shove on it. But so that's this sort of the sanctuary county movement. The actual rally itself. So there's two things here. One is, in my experience, when the gun rights movement is dealing with gun rights, in other words, when the NRA is dealing with gun rights as opposed to backing Trump wholeheartedly, you're often seeing, and you're often seeing sort of the best face of this movement. You've got people who are very responsible gun owners who

understand, and this is going to sound kind of silly to say, but it's really, really important. They understand guns. They understand where gun violence comes from, and the mainstream media just doesn't. And so they often win these arguments through calm, reasoned, discourse, and superior knowledge. In other words, American democracy functioning the way it should. However, however, one of the things that disturbs me is that there's a reasoned, is a orbiting around the fringes of the gun rights movement are these people who show up in what looks to be like cartoon versions of seal team six yeah it's like cosplay yeah yeah like cosplay seal team six except with real ar-15s how did he know while i'm dressed that is so weird

gross jana and i sarah speaking for Every listener. And everyone, so everyone knows when those guys show up, they're going to be the face of this protest to the mainstream media. Like, oh my gosh, look at this, you know, amateur militia marching through the streets of Richmond. And I don't know what you can do about them, really. They're a pretty ornery set of folks, so that they seem pretty harmless, all things considered. Just to sit down and say, no, no. Like, I'm of the opinion that, look, the gun, the gun, right.

movement is at its best when it's presenting to the public what I think is the true core of the movement, which is a very responsible face, which is, you know, I could sit next to you in a restaurant. You would never know that I'm carrying, but because I'm carrying, you're safer than if I wasn't. When you have these cosplayers, it presents something totally different. And I think that that there's got to be, you know, can somebody sit down and talk to them, talk about how destructive they are? But I think there's sort of this instinctive rally around these guys that a lot of people have online that I think is just completely misguided. I think open carry, although lawful, is just flat out rude and it is extremely disconcerting to an awful lot of well-meaning people.

And it should be absolutely minimized. and the only thing I'll add to that is that we should be particularly grateful it was very peaceful and I think that is thanks in large part to local state and federal law enforcement that were all available on the ground and took it seriously there were counter protesters there were the the cosplay types as you've described them and all of that stayed peaceful and that is a good day in our country and thank you David for explaining all of that thank you Steve and Jonah for your input as always. We will wrap this dispatch episode for now. And thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you guys next week.