The Dispatch Podcast - Supreme Court Hears Mississippi Abortion Case

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

With all eyes on the Supreme Court today, the gang starts with an explainer of what is happening in the oral arguments of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. What’s at stake? Is it as monumental as some are making it out to be? When might we know how the court rules? Plus, a new COVID variant emerges, Russia builds up its military presence near Ukraine, and blue states fail to live up to their own ideals.   Show Notes: -SCOTUSblog on Dobbs v. Jackson -TMD on Omicron -U.S., Allies Warn Russia Over Military Buildup Around Ukraine | WSJ -David Ignatius’ latest column on Ukraine -Blue States, You’re the Problem | NYT -Everyone’s Moving to Texas. Here’s Why. | NYT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. The gang is back together after Thanksgiving. And plenty to talk about today. The Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in the Mississippi 15-week abortion ban case. We've got a new COVID variant, Ukraine issues, and why is it that blue states don't actually do blue-state-y things? Let's dive right in. Steve, surprise here. Steve is doing our abortion case. Well, I decided to do the abortion case, mostly because I wanted to ask you a bunch of questions. This is certainly a. case that we're going to be hearing about and talking about a lot in the immediate future and

I think in the medium and long term future. And I thought it would be wise to start with something of an explainer's segment. So let me start by asking you questions. Oh, I thought you were explaining it. What? I am not explaining it. I am asking you questions. I am teeing it up and you are going to answer the questions. So fast to take this topic. He was the first one with a topic. This is true. So the case. is Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. And it has been variously described in pretty much every article that I've read about it as the most important abortion case in a generation. It's how Ed Wayland put it in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday morning. So let me ask you,

Sarah, what's at issue in Dobbs and what should we expect in oral arguments, which are actually taking place as we record. First of all, Mississippi passed a law stating that it was illegal to seek an abortion after 15 weeks, or actually more accurately, it was illegal to perform an abortion on a woman after 15 weeks. It criminalizes the procedure, not the mother. And this is unusual because it is really the first straight down the plate challenge. to Roe v. Wade and Casey versus Planned Parenthood to back up. Roe v. Wade, of course,

establishes a constitutional right to an abortion. But everything else about Roe was overturned by Casey in 1992 in a jointly authored opinion, which is unusual, but not never happens, where they held that the standard for whether a constitutional right to an abortion had been infringed was whether it imposed an undue burden on the mother. It's worth diving into Casey a little

because there were three Pennsylvania laws at issue in Casey, and actually the court upheld two of them and only struck down one under that undue burden standard. So minor parental notification was upheld, and a 24-hour waiting period was upheld. The court struck down spousal notification as being an undue burden on the row right of a constitutional right to an abortion.

And so whereas we've had, had restrictions out of Texas and Louisiana in 2015 in a case called Hellerstadt. Texas had restrictions about basically that a doctor had to have access to a hospital nearby, that the facility that an abortion was performed and had to meet an ambulatory center standard, things like that. That was struck down by the court in 2015. In 2019, in a case called June medical, even though there were new people on the court, Louisiana had identical, nearly identical regulations to Texas, that was struck down as well because Chief Justice Roberts flipped his vote. He had voted to uphold the Texas restrictions, and then he voted to strike down

the Louisiana restrictions because he said that keeping precedent in the court was actually of an institutional interest, regardless of whether he disagreed with striking down Louisiana's restrictions. But in those cases, it was sort of these atmospherics around abortion, abortion regulations, if you will. What makes the Mississippi case unusual is that it is actually simply a new line, this 15-week line. And unlike SBA, the Texas abortion case, which David and I have been screaming to high heaven, is not really about abortion. That's about whether you can make a sort of civil bounty hunting law about any constitutional right. Dobbs, this is actually the full and complete challenge to Roe and Casey and the first time that

this court with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for instance, is going to hear an abortion case. That is a great summary. Let me ask you about a timetable. How is this likely to happen? When should we expect a decision? How will this unfold? We will almost certainly not see a decision until June. Now, that's not because the court just likes saving all the hard cases to the end to pop them all on us at once. But rather, they release the cases when they're done writing them. But what happens internally in the court is that after the argument today, they will have a conference.

No clerks are in that room. only the nine justices. And in fact, the junior most justice has responsibilities like opening the door if someone knocks. Justice Breyer famously was the junior justice for 11 years and had all the junior justice responsibilities in conference. So they will discuss that in conference to kind of a preliminary headcount of where people are. If the chief justice is in the majority, after that, he will assign the majority opinion. He can assign it to himself. He can assign it to anyone else who's in the majority. If he's not the senior most justice and the majority does that. However, then the person who's assigned that opinion, the justice, will go and write it. But once

they've written it, they still need to get four other people to vote with their opinion, to sign on to their opinion. So for instance, if this comes out, you know, after a conference as maybe six three with the chief justice joining, he assigns the opinion to himself. But he writes just a way to narrow opinion. There actually are five votes to overturn Rowan Casey, but he's not one of them. He might circulate his opinion and find that, in fact, there aren't five votes for it, and that, you know, Justice Gorsuch's concurrence is the one that actually has five votes. That will become the majority opinion. That is the process that takes a really long time. There's dissents. There's concurrences. Everyone's getting to respond to each other.

It's why you'll see these footnotes back and forth that are basically an ongoing conversation. that tends to take until June. And votes can change up until the very end. We saw, at least based on reporting from Jan Crawford Greenberg of CBS, that, for instance, in the 2012 Obamacare case, that there were vote switches frequently. David, there's been lots of talk about Dobbs potentially ending Roe versus Wade. Is that likely in your view? It is very possible.

Okay, I'm not going to say it's likely, but it's very, very possible. And the reason why is really pretty simple to explain. One is, so you have a 6.3 court at Republican nominees, and they took the case. They took the case. So it takes four votes to take a case. So under no circumstances is that case taken without at least a Republican nominee. deciding to take the case. If they wanted to leave the law entirely alone, the easiest way to leave the law alone was just not take the case, was to leave in place the lower court ruling

that rejected the Mississippi law. And that status quo, it's a non-controversial way of ensuring the status quo. Just don't take the case. So they took the case. So that tells you something here is going on. And so they have broadly three things they can do. One is they can strike down the Mississippi law, which would be in many ways the most surprising thing. In other words, affirming the lower court striking down the Mississippi law, that'd be the most surprising thing. Why did they take the case just to essentially reaffirm existing law? That would be surprising. Another thing they could do is kind of do a chip away approach. In other words, they're going to say, okay, the Mississippi law is okay, because what we're going to do is we're going to shift the undue burden standard

in Casey and maybe a particular direction, say, fetal pain once there's enough state interest once there's a possibility of fetal pain. And besides, the vast majority of abortions occur before 15 weeks, which is true. So the combination of an increased state interest with fetal pain and the fact that the vast majority of abortions occur before 15 weeks means that under this kind of middle ground rule we establish that the Mississippi law is going to be okay, but Roe and Casey, the underlying right to abortion will be touched. Then the third broader, the third thing, which, you know, pro-life folks like me are hoping for is they took this case to say, nope, to Roe Casey. It is time to reverse Roe Casey. Now, what that means practically, a lot of people don't really understand this, what that means practically is it returns abortion to the democratic process, to the state, to the state

governments, potentially to Congress. It doesn't ban abortion in the United States. What it does is it returns the issue to the states, to the democratic process. So why would people believe that maybe reversing Roe and Casey entirely is super possible here? Well, the answer lies in that if you're in the, if you're talking about a middle ground here, a middle ground decision, a middle ground decision, the more I think about this, the more I think of a middle ground decision in here is just kind of another made up standard constitutionally as a matter of constitutional law. So one of the big critiques of row as a matter

of constitutional law is it's just made up. I mean, you're not finding the right to an abortion in the Constitution itself. Roe is just made-up law. It was heavily criticized even by pro-choice. It's got many, not all, but many pro-choice scholars at the time. It's just kind of made up. Well, then what happens is Casey comes along

and it replaces most of the Roe framework with another made-up standard. Where did undue burden come from? It just came from the noggins of the justices. It didn't come from the text of the Constitution. So is this court going to replace the second made-up standard with a third completely made-up standard? Maybe. Maybe they're going to do that. Are they probably going to do that? I used to think it's two, three months ago, that they probably would do that. I am, maybe I've been drinking my own Kool-Aid too much, Steve, but it's a tasty Kool-Aid.

And the Kool-Aid that I'm drinking says, I don't think the court's going to make. make up a third standard, this court, is it really going to make up a third standard? And so I'm increasingly optimistic. I'm going to pour some bitters into David's Kool-Aid, though, real quick, which is, there's a way to do your middle bucket without creating a new standard, which is simply redefining the undue burden standard so that, you know, Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh, Roberts, maybe even Barrett, sign on to this, you know, upholding Mississippi's 15-week ban saying that they're returning to the undue burden standard

as it was originally intended in Casey, therefore they're not overturning Roe v. Wade. They're upholding the Mississippi 15-week ban. But viability, as the marker right now under Roe and Casey, basically any of the restrictions pre-viability have to meet that undue burden standard. That's why the 15-week ban is so interesting. It's clearly pre-viability, just barely so.

And they will say that viability, is what we're getting rid of, not the undue burden standard, not row, therefore we're not the, there's not a third standard. There is simply, we're upholding precedent because stare decisis is important. Casey is 30 years old at this point, row nearly 50. And so, yeah, viability's gone and it will go into that undue burden test. Was 15 weeks enough time for a woman to be able to exercise her constitutional right to an abortion? And that is why David will. be sad. That's your prediction.

That's my prediction. All right. Interesting. One of the things that's happening is I'm keeping one eye on legal Twitter as this is unfolding. And already Roberts has started to toss a few bitters in my Kool-Aid as well. Well, but you don't, you won't have Roberts to overturn Roe v. Wade. That's going to be a five-four decision without Roberts. joining the liberals saying that he would have upheld it under stare decisis, similar looking to what

June medical, that Louisiana restriction case that I mentioned. So if you want Row and Casey gone, you don't need Roberts. If you think there's this grand middle way, it's more like a six three decision, but it's narrower. Yeah, my concern is, I'm sorry, we just launched into an episode of advisory opinions. My concern is that if you don't have Roberts, our Kavanaugh, and Barrett willing to overturn Roe 5-4, just as a practical matter. And see, I think that it all depends on Roberts. If Roberts goes into conference and says,

I'd be willing to redefine undue burden, then you're right. It'll be 6-3 under the narrower viability test gone, my prediction. But there is some chance that Roberts goes into conference and says, no, I'm not touching Roe, I'm not touching Casey, I'm with the four. Y'all do you.

and it's just going to be 5-4 regardless, in which case I think you can then pull potentially Barrett and Kavanaugh over into the overturning row. I just think that's unlikely because Roberts would prefer to have the 6-3 narrower opinion than a 5-4 blockbuster that he's not part of. Jota, where do you think Roberts is on the undue burden? No, I'm just kidding.

I'm not really asking you. My question goes back to something Sarah said a long time ago before this was a years the dispatch podcast was hijacked by advisory opinions um the she mentioned that that we like we wouldn't see a decision until june and if you do the math uh not great at math but i can do this much that puts it less than six months out from the 2020 midterbs let's say for the sake of discussion that david is happy at the outcome here and it comes closer to something resembling a return of abortion to elected officials, to our politics more than our courts. What does that mean? Does it, does it matter for the

2022 midterms? Does it matter to our politics more broadly? How do you, how do you expect that that would play out. So first of all, I'll confess that I was unprepared for this because I thought we were going to talk about Lou Dobbs, and this just completely took me by surprise. No, I think you can actually be humble about what it will mean, and that still will mean it means a big deal. And what I'm getting at is that nobody in living memory, basically, no active politician under the age of like 70, has any real experience campaigning in an environment where

legislatures have real power over the issue of abortion policy? Of course, I should just jump in. Sorry to interrupt, but there are lots and lots of active politicians who are not under the age of 70. No, that's true. But even they, they haven't had to talk about abortion like a real thing. They've had their talking points baked in for a really, really long time. And I think a serviceable analogy is to when Biden initially announced the

vaccine mandate on big businesses. And a lot of us were saying that, you know, this actually was welcomed by a lot of CEOs who just didn't want responsibility for the decision of telling their staff to get vaccinated. And now they could say, look, don't blame me. the federal government is making us do this and they sort of let a lot of CEOs off the hook. And the Supreme Court has left one and a half, two generations of politicians, essentially off the hook for having a considered, nuanced, and sincere abortion position. And so I personally think it would be good for American politics in the long run for reasons

that both David and I have written about a few times. to get rid of Roe and send this stuff back to the states and let people work it out. But in the short term, I think it is very possible that the Democrats benefit from it in terms of galvanizing a lot of voters who always sort of just sort of felt like, oh, I don't have to vote on the abortion issue

because it's really not on the ballot this year. And if it's on the ballot, I think it just, it disrupts a lot of preconceived understandings of where suburbanites are and all that kind of thing. But it's also just wildly unpredictable in ways that, I think, are hard for everybody to game out. And so it's for a lot of political consultants, it's more disruptive because it's a bunch of unknown unknowns in terms of where the voters, how the voters will respond for 2022.

In the long run, I think it's different. I think it's, it's, it's, it's probably. a net benefit for Democrats and a net loss for Republicans just because of the way culture issues work in fundraising and whatnot and voter mobilization? Sarah, you've written a lot about the politics of abortion. Is it a net benefit for Democrats? Really hard to say at this point. There's certainly data that would support that Republicans were more motivated by openings on the Supreme Court, messaging around the Supreme Court, even in 2018.

But, of course, that was before it was a 6-3, I mean, I still think it's a 3-3-3 court, but it's at least a 6-3 court on that one axis, on the conservative-to-liberal access. There are six Republican appointees. Is it still motivating? Now, I think that it could be less motivating for Republicans and still not very motivating for Democrats. Democrats have not been able to really mobilize, court voters on their side. I also think that Congress's sort of inability to do much

undermines the argument of being a court voter on the left because the answer at this point would either be to pack the Supreme Court, but the Biden Supreme Court Commission has already poured very cold water, like icy cold water on that idea, or have Congress pass a federal law banning abortion after a certain number of weeks, sorry, the opposite, mandating the that abortion is legal before a certain number of weeks. I'm just not sure that that will be a high enough issue when, in fact, inflation we know is a much bigger issue, healthcare is a much bigger issue, housing, gas prices.

You know, you look at where actually abortion falls, and David has been the champion of this thesis, that abortion has just nearly fallen off the culture of war platform as being really motivating to people. And so you'd need something else to really turn, I think, Democrats into court voters. I don't think I've seen it yet.

Yeah, Steve, following up on that, there's a few interesting little snippets that are worth talking about. One is Texas and the dog that didn't bark, which is the Texas law has passed. It's a heartbeat bill, which is much like many other heartbeat bills around the country, but it also has this really unique bounty hunting provision.

The response to that law, both in the public, in progressive corporations, was far more muted than the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act law. It was far more muted than the response to Dave Chappelle's Netflix special. I mean, literally Dave Chappelle's Netflix special was a bigger sort of cultural topic. Then we had this little laboratory experiment in Virginia, because in Virginia, Terry McCall have spent a giant ton of money making the case that, hey, the next governor of Virginia may well have a lot of power over abortion rights in the state of Virginia, which is true.

It's true. If Roe Casey is reversed, then the state government in Virginia will have more power over abortion rights in Virginia than it's had in almost 50 years. and the percentage of people who listed abortion in exit polls, sorry, cover your ear, Sarah, as number one issue, 8%. 8%. Now, that's almost half of the next lowest percentage, which was 15% who said taxes. And of the 8%, a majority of those, 58% were pro-life. So it looks like a small percentage of people, but more pro-life. And then I had this really interesting conversation with an individual recently who is privy to a lot of website numbers in the social conservative world. And he said, you know, when we write about abortion and our site writes about abortion, the number, there's just not the interest.

Now, I will say that's not the case with us. I would say that's not the case on some of the stuff that I've written or what Sarah and I have talked about in advisory opinions, but there's a lot of data points that say that this is not the motivating factor it once was. Here's another one. Ryan Burge, statistician from Eastern Illinois University, said the real motivator, more than abortion for evangelical Trump support was immigration, more than abortion. So the question I have is, one of the questions I have,

if this is in fact a case that this issue is diminishing in salience to the American public, does that make it more likely that the court would be willing to go ahead and take the plunge and overrule Roe Casey? See, Sarah, that Kool-Lade is tasting good again. Well, I hope everyone's enjoyed this episode of advisory opinions. Thank you, Steve and Jonah. Jonah's just leaning back. He is.

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Omicron, Omicron. How are we saying this? I'm choosing not to. But, no, I think Omicron is fine. Omicron, right? I'm saying, oh, my gosh. Not omogosh? Yeah.

My problem is that by a time I found out about Omicron because of my travels, I'm in the Pacific Northwest right now. And all of like the Transformers jokes were already taken and old news. And it just really bummed me out. And so, yes, we have a new variant of the coronavirus. virus. It sort of burst on the scene or public consciousness pretty much last Thursday or Friday. New York Times had a headline on it that caused the stock market to swoon and not in a sort of romantic bodice ripper kind of swoon, but like in a kind of like fall off a cliff kind of swoon. And there was an

enormous amount of agita and and and sturm and drong on the sunday shows about it and um and i would say a good deal of what what you might call elite panic about it um and now everything is sort of falling back into place that it's something to be i think Biden said the right thing even though he didn't come across as particularly masterful or reassuring but he is said it's something to be concerned about but not something to panic about um so maybe since we uh went longer than the wedding scene um in the deer hunter on the dobbs decision uh will do this sort of a little more lightning roundish and i'll just ask around uh how concerned are you guys about omicron omicron and uh and why and then i'll have my added thoughts starting with

Steve, our resident worrier about things like pandemics and whatnot. Yeah, so I think, I would say at this point, I'm not terribly concerned. We had an explainer in Monday's Morning Dispatch, which we will post in the show notes and open up to non-members. Very, very good explainer. Declan Garvey wrote it. Basically walking through what we know and what we don't know at this early stage. And the conclusion that he reached after talking to a number of people whose career it is to study these things, we don't know that much. And what we do know suggests that any panic at this point would be premature.

Now, that's not what we're seeing. We are seeing panic. I mean, the hysterical headlines over the weekend from many in the mainstream. media, I thought we're way over the top, very premature and probably not, we will look back on them as not warranted at all by what follows. There is a very interesting article penned by the woman who's the head of the South Africa Medical Association and the woman who, the doctor, who first talked about this. Angelique, Dr. Angelique

Couttsy. And it's a very harsh critique of the overreaction that she's seeing in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. She said the people that she's seen who have this

have had either very mild symptoms, no symptoms at all. And she is shocked at the reaction that that we've seen. I think this plays into the critique that we've seen from many conservatives of the media and democratic politicians of sort of leaning into hysteria about this, about wanting to control the lives of people. Some of that criticism has surely been overwrought, but some of

it's been pretty much on target. And I think it's likely that when we look back on this, in two months or six months, we will likely use this as maybe the case study of that, if early indications about what we think we know about this end up being true. Sarah, how worried about this are you and why? I got my booster 10 days ago or whatever it's been now, so I'm feeling like I should go and, you know, enjoy life. I think that the right up in the morning dispatch was the best that I've seen, and I'm not just saying that.

Well, I'm kind of just saying it, but also I mean it. In which it also explained the history, that part of the reason the Spanish flu worked itself out in a lot of respects was because we believe there was a variant that was more virulent, but less deadly. And there is evidence that that is maybe the case. here. As I think Steve mentioned, and certainly mentioned in this morning dispatch write-up, doctors have noted that it's very unlikely for a mutation to both increase the virulence and the deadliness, that it's usually a trade-off in terms of how mutations work on these viruses.

And so if we are seeing more virulence, it is likely that it, in fact, is less deadly. If that's the case, it's very, very good news for everyone except people who have really been enjoying their tribal pandemic. Right. We should just have a quick explainer that by virulence, you mean essentially contagiousness, right? Yes. More contagious, less harmful, right? Yes.

David, where do you come down? I came down basically where Sarah comes down. I got my booster. I'm, you know, I'm not saying that I'm running around, rolling around in COVID crockpots, but I'm living my life with reasonable, you know, reasonable caution. and I don't see any reason to change that. You know, the stories sort of, the horror stories sort of come and go. And I've started to look at, and I, again, I'm going to agree with everyone on endorsing the dispatch.

Look at the Omicron variant. I'm going to call it Amicron because this is the dispatch. And, yeah, I'm going to call it Amicron. I'm with Sarah, I think the most likely outcome, and again, take everything that I say with a giant grain of salt, but I'm getting it from people who've been, you know, maybe more right than most on the pandemic, is that this sort of increase in contagiousness and decrease in deadliness is one of the ways this pandemic ends. And if we see that emerging, that is net, net, a good thing.

Yeah, so I agree with all that. I think if you were going to design this as a, like if you're going to do it in a lab where you wanted to come up with the best way to reach herd immunity and you didn't care about people's psychology, you would create a really contagious but not very harmful version of the coronavirus and let it run rampant around the world. And it would give everybody the antibodies without sending anybody to the hospital. And the only reason I bring that up is that I think, you know, to Steve's point all the stuff about how there are people out there who want to control everyone's life

and all that. I think that's true. But I think it's worth pointing out that there's also just this this is a great example of bad news bias where people like to panic. People like to worry and they get comfortable in a state. They like some people at some very fundamental level like this new normal. And there's nothing in the science that says you shouldn't be greeting this new variant as good news instead of bad news. But everyone wants it to be bad news. And I'm not saying it is good news, but it's just as likely, given the history of this stuff and the signs of this stuff, that this is a good development, not a bad one. And it took days for people to sort of come to grips with the fact that not every bit of new coronavirus news is bad news. And I think

that's something that should be a gut check for a lot of people. Yeah. And I think if you go back to the beginning, it's, I mean, you introduce this Jonah by saying that it, you know, it's, you know, My job is to worry about these things. I mean, I was very, very cautious at the beginning of this. I thought it was worth being extraordinarily cautious with my own personal behavior, with my family, with the way that we did the dispatch, you know, our in-person meetings, our in-person contacts. But then as you learn more and you actually pay attention to the science, you adjust your

behavior accordingly. And I think we've learned a lot about this. And in some respects, I think that early caution was warranted and wise. In other respects, I think it was overdone at the beginning. And certainly now, I think there's little justification for the downright hysteria that we saw. I mean, go back and look at some of the headlines over the weekend from big mainstream media outlets. They were hysterical. It's totally unwarranted at this point.

Maybe we'll be wrong. Maybe we'll learn a lot more about this in the next three weeks, five weeks, and we'll revise these early preliminary assessments. But until we get more information about it, I think it's wise to sort of take a pass. Can I just tell you my biggest pet peeve, like looking back on the pandemic, is the requirement to walk into a restaurant with a mask, check in with the hostess, go sit down, and take off your mom. mask because now there's water on the table. I don't think that's how viruses work. Still

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slash y annex. All right, David, tell us about Ukraine. Yeah, so here we are again. Vladimir Putin is building troops up on the Ukrainian border. Close to 100,000 are there now. But there's some twists. We talked about this months ago when he very openly, and in fact on Russian television was broadcasting that a giant pile

of soldiers were heading towards southeast Ukraine. It was highly publicized exactly who was there. You could see the equipment. But this is another buildup, but it's not being publicized. Very quiet. It is not being talked about as much. But it's very hard to hide 100,000 people moving with heavy equipment. And they're moving to where some heavy equipment was left after the last buildup.

And look, I mean, the odds are this is more bluffing. The odds are, maybe this is more bluffing, designed to get concessions, designed to play games, designed to wear us out. But maybe not. So, Steve, you do a lot of reporting in the foreign policy arena. You talk to an awful lot of people who are involved in America's national security establishment. what are your thoughts? I don't think you can treat it as bluffing. We've seen this movie to a certain extent before.

We saw it in the early spring of 2014 when we had similar kinds of behavior from the Russians, from Vladimir Putin. And it turns out it wasn't a bluff at all. I think this is very worrisome. There are other, there's a lot of reporting about what the CIA has found, about what Western intelligence services have found about both. the massing of troops and the intent behind the massing of troops. And I think people who follow this closely are as alarmed, maybe in some cases more alarmed than they were in 2014. There is a

column out today in the Washington Post by David Ignatius, who is extraordinarily well-sourced in the U.S. intelligence community and very well-sourced in the national security foreign policy apparatus of the Biden administration. And he has a line in this piece that he wrote today. He's a columnist, but he writes heavily reported columns. And he wrote reports of the Russian buildup couldn't have come at a worse time. President Biden was seeking improved relations with Moscow after his June summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. The Russians seemed to be reciprocating with dialogue on cybersecurity and strategic stability. And then there was this line. And the administration had signaled support for an eventual diplomatic

deal on Ukraine that would give Putin much of what he wanted. Well, I would like to know a lot more about those signals about what that kind of arrangement would be. But if we take it as true, and I do, I think David Ignatius, as I said, he's well sourced and I think he's a good reporter. If we take what he says as true, this is calamitous. If President, if Vladimir Putin is reacting, responding in a sense to perceived, um, softening of the American position on Ukraine and its territorial integrity and, and, uh, what's been happening there over the past seven years, uh, that those signals, sending those signals will have been, uh, horribly irresponsible and bad. policy. There's an irony built in here. Joe Biden as Barack Obama's vice president went to

Obama and said, I want the Ukraine file. I want this. I have good diplomatic connections in Europe. I know the issues well. I want to handle this. He wrote that, wrote about that in his memoir in 2017. But looking back on the outcome of those diplomatic efforts, I think it's fair to say that they failed and failed miserably. And part of what Putin may be doing now is looking back at his interactions with the U.S. government, with the Obama administration with Joe Biden, and the threats that we made then at Russia's aggressive behavior with respect to the Crimean Peninsula and Ukraine and our failure to follow through.

There were some sanctions that had some modest effects on the Russian economy. But Barack Obama and Joe Biden and others repeatedly threatened that Russia would be isolated from the international community that this kind of aggressive behavior, you know, territorial incursions into Ukraine would not stand, would be met with a fierce international response that would result in Russia being totally isolated by the international community. 18 months later, Barack Obama goes to a United Nations meeting and meets with Vladimir Putin. And if you look back on what the administration was saying at the time was the purpose of those meetings, it was to better understand what Putin was doing with respect to Ukraine.

How is that isolating Russia? So Vladimir Putin looks back at that and says, basically, I didn't really pay for what I did back then. Why would he not think that he's in a position now to repeat it and to go further, particularly when there's internal tension and turmoil at NATO? I think this has the potential to be, I'm reluctant to say anything could be as catastrophic in terms of U.S. diplomacy as Afghanistan was, but I think this has the potential to be really, really bad news. so Jonah if you look at reason history but it seems to me that what Vladimir Putin does is he thinks

how far can I go and he goes that far if you're looking at the Biden administration especially after Afghanistan I'm worried that Putin thinks that he can go pretty far here in fact maybe even cross the border far

is there anything that you're seeing in the Biden administration that might lead you to disagree with me if I'm getting in Putin's head and thinking that he could be going further than is going so far as to be that dangerous? No, but I think the place that causes me more concern isn't the Biden administration, but it's the Xi administration. insofar as you know there is this weird relationship partnership you know between russia and china russia thinks that they are you know kind of co-equals but no one else does it's sort of like the great cornell harvard rivalry that everyone at cornell knows about and no one at harvard does

but um the the logic of russia testing the limits on ukraine makes even more sense if you think about it in the context of China and Taiwan. And if, because in Putin's mind, Ukraine is every biz as much a part of Russia as China, as Taiwan is a part of China. And this is a way to test this sort of principle of protecting territorial integrity and all of these kinds of things. And I thought it was, you know, it's sort of like in a movie where on movies they make much bigger deal about social media than reality. But I did think it was interesting that a Russia state media account this week celebrated Russia's invasion of Finland or the USSR's invasion of Finland in, was it 38, 39, on the pretext that they were saying Russia recognized that Finland might be an ally of Nazi Germany and therefore. needed to invade, leaving out the fact that at the time the Soviet Union was actually an ally of Nazi Germany, and this was just simply a grotesque attempt to take back Finland, which also

used to be part of the Russian Empire. And so I kind of can see how the Chinese might be really encouraging Putin to do this as a way to do a test run to see what the international reaction is on Ukraine that would create an even better diplomatic permission structure for Taiwan. And I just get no sense that the Biden administration is up to figuring out how to deal with it. Okay. So Sarah. We're going to do our last topic. Nope.

I'm using my time on this topic and putting it into the next topic. Nice. Jonah said everything. Jonah's always right. As I've said so many times on this podcast. Okay. So the New York Times had this interesting video that was making the rounds. It was by Johnny Harris and Binya Applebaum. And the headline was, blue states, you're the problem. Why do states with Democratic majorities fail to live up to their values? And they went through something like affordable housing in California, where housing is not affordable. Disparities in education funding, noting that in Chicago, for instance, instead of taking all of Cook County, the county with Chicago in it, taking all of the property taxes and then dividing

them equally among all the schools. Instead, they've split up into, I forget the number, but 140 different municipalities where, you know, just your block basically can put together its property taxes and pay for your high school, basically turning it into your own little private public high school. So increasing disparities in education funding. And then economic inequality. and then going to the Democratic platform, noting that these are top priorities in the Democratic platform, noting that the states, California, Illinois, Washington state

are all run top to bottom by Democrats. Republicans have little to no say and how the state is run. So why is it that Democrats continue to blame Republicans for standing in the way of some of the policies they want when in the states that they are wholly in control with no Republican pushback, they're not actually doing the things

that they say they stand for? There's a ton to dig into here, but I think the one that I'm most curious about, because for me, it's the one that sort of the most data-e is Washington State's tax structure. So Democrats say in their platform that they're highly against income inequality, that they're for a progressive tax system. This means that the percentage of your income that you pay should be equal or close. to equal across different incomes versus rich people paying very little percentage-wise of their income versus poor people paying a very high percentage. But Washington state has the most regressive tax system in the country. It is number one. So a totally blue state, most regressive tax system. If you were in the bottom of income earners in the state, you pay 17% in taxes. If you're

at the top, you pay less than three. So my question to you, Joan, is why actually are Democrats not able to do something that seems really easy to me in Washington State, which is redo their tax system so that it's actually a progressive tax system? As I am in Washington State right now, and that has absolutely no bearing on my knowledge set about Washington State's tax structure. But I thought I would, I can now put the dateline on it. Yeah, look, I thought the video. was really good. I had missed it and David's piece on it last week

between driving cross-country and that Fox stuff, I was somewhat distracted. And I think you know, there are a bunch of different reasons for these things.

One of them is how to put it, sort of the, what happens with the tribal mindset or the popular front mentality, when you no longer have the external enemy to define what you believe, it creates a lot more space to have disagreements where you're not assuming someone who disagrees with you is evil. And I think that explains some of it. It's like it's very easy for people to say we have to pose the Republicans because they are an existential threat to all that is good. But the second, it's like other Democrats in a place where there really aren't any real Republicans,

it just opens things up for good faith disagreement about things where you assume the other side's motives are not evil and that is a recipe for much slower pace of reform on things. That's one part of it. I think another part of it, and there's something I've been interested in in a very long time, is that in essentially one party states, special interests have a real propensity to capture the power structure.

And the place I've looked out of there's some really interesting polyside papers on this is in New York State where, you know, the standard talking point about from Democrats is Republicans all think, really are in favor of voter suppression. They've been saying this about Republicans for 20 years. They don't like high voter turnout. They don't want everyone to vote. But in New York State, the single biggest actors in trying to keep voter turnout down, particularly in primaries, which decide elections, are teachers' unions. because if only 10% of the electorate shows up, the teachers' unions are a decisive segment of the electorate. If 100% of the electorate shows up,

teachers' unions are a rounding error. And so they don't like the idea of moving the primary day to a weekend. They don't like the idea of making it easier to vote. They don't like the idea of making easier to be a candidate because they have control over the structures of things. In Washington State, I have to assume there's some similar dynamic. about that when it comes to the sort of the hot, you know, who are the rich people in Washington

State gaming the, not gaming the system, but keeping, maintaining the status quo. And my hunches is there's a lot of high net worth sort of Microsoft, Amazon, new tech kind of rich people who in their hearts know they are the decent and the good guys. And so they couch all of their arguments for keeping the tax code the way it is as a way to keep Washington State innovative and not having a brain drain to other places. And that's very effective in terms of marketing and lobbying. But I'm open to correction. Steve, I just find it really fascinating that, you know, with affordable housing,

there's the NIMBY problem with educational opportunities and inequality. There's like, yeah, but like our high school here has this amazing theater program and we don't want to lose that. But the tax structure, you can't even get the tax structure. your number one thing. It's why you call yourselves progressives. Yeah, I mean, I think that the Times piece was fascinating. David linked to it in his newsletter. We'll put it in the show notes. And I think it highlights this hypocrisy that you're pointing out, that you have focused on,

Sarah. It's very interesting. And a lot, I think that, you know, sort of an overly simplistic explanation is it's easier to do when it doesn't affect you and your pocketbook and your life, your day-to-day existence. But it's interesting. I started that David's newsletter and started the Times video thinking that they were going to go in a very different direction and wishing that they would have. But it also, I think, opens up possibilities for us here at the dispatch. The Times examined the failure of blue states to implement policies that Democrats broadly say they support, as you outlined in the beginning, Sarah. I think an equally compelling, maybe more compelling examination would be looking at blue states that have actually implemented the policies that they said that they have wanted and the failure of those policies to produce the sort of progressive utopia that progressives have long promised. And Walter Russell Mead, before he went to the Wall Street Journal, did a series of detailed examinations of this that he called the blue model of governance and looked at the various cities and states that have been dominated by Democrats and the failure of those states and the increased government that they have to produce the kind of results that have long been promised.

There's a great irony. I think this is why it would make a good sort of long-term project for the dispatch. There's a great irony there, of course, because precisely the time that I think you're seeing and you can point to an abundance of data to show the failure of this massive government intervention in local economies and state economies, you're having an increasing number of Republicans make big government arguments for a bigger, bigger. role for the state in both state governments, local governments, but also at the federal level. So I would love to see that kind of a deeper examination, and maybe I'll take six months

off and dive into the numbers myself. Maybe. David, let's talk about red states. There are plenty of states that are under, that are one party controlled the other direction. Do you think that red states are equally as hypocritical? Do you think they've had more or less success implementing conservative policies? You know, we're going to have to wait and see a little bit because there was some low-hanging fruit in a lot of the red states that was taken care of pretty quickly. For example, Tennessee is relatively recently a one-party state. When I moved here in 06, I believe it wasn't another four years until the Republicans

gained supermajority control in both houses and had a hammerlock. So there are some low-hanging fruit about tax policy. Many of the states around here had been right-to-work states, much more sort of libertarian in their outlook. But what's happened recently in the red states has been the diversion of legislative energy into culture war and away from good governance. So you've got legislation trying to censor the way big tech moderates.

You've got legislation designed to create speech codes and K through 12 education. You've got a lot of culture warring going on that seems to be designed to fight national fights more than deal with local problems. But at the end of the day, though, a lot of that is irrelevant to people's daily lives. At the end of the day, though, you still have this situation like we have right now in Tennessee where a lot of people are moving here, a lot of people are moving here. And why is that?

They don't give one rip about the anti-CRT law. They don't give a rip about the constitutional carry bill that was passed in Tennessee. But they do care that property taxes are low, that there is no state income tax, that there's a pretty good bit of economic freedom here. Government's pretty much out of your way, and you've got lots of opportunity. There's actually another fascinating. We'll put it into the show notes. but a fascinating article in the New York Times about why are so many people moving to Texas, which is, again, part of, you know, like you've got all of this culture warring stuff going on

in Texas, but it comes down to the day-to-day lives that people lead and the way in which government either inhibits or empowers the life that you want to lead, or just not in your way at all, not really a factor at all. A lot of these red states are, doing better, and I do worry that absolute one-party control will mess that up. But for right now, a lot of these red states are magnet states. People are voting with their feet. And you can totally see why when you live in a place like Tennessee, if you've been in a situation where, say, in California, you're dealing with a hyper-regulated economic life, a hyper-regulated schools that didn't open. You're dealing with a lot of governmental intervention that just flat out

made your life worse. You can begin to see the appeal of some of these competing states. All right. That'll do us for today. Thank you all for joining us. And always, please just go rate us wherever you're listening to this podcast. It helps other people find it, which is really helpful and fun for us. And if you're not subscribing to the morning dispatch, it's my go-to newsletter in the morning, and I read a lot of news. So check it out. It's pretty darn good. And with that, we'll see you soon. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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