The Dispatch Podcast - The Politics of Relief

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

The Senate is set to debate the Biden administration’s COVID-19 relief package this week, and today the gang talks about the politics of getting it passed. Steve posits the administration’s strategy is more focused on public opinion, rather than what Republicans want: “They say ‘we care about bipartisanship outside the beltway, not inside the beltway.’” Along with the relief bill, the group discusses the ongoing situation in Afghanistan and debates whether an “endless war” in the country is a good idea or a bad one. Jonah and Sarah disagree on how important voting actually is. And finally, some good old-fashioned election punditry. The hosts talk about the strategy memo that came out from the GOP on how to retake the House in 2022. Show Notes: -The Remnant with Michael Strain -Morning Consult polling on COVID stimulus -“Last Exit From Afghanistan” by Dexter Firkins -SCOTUSblog write up of the Arizona voting rights case -House GOP 2022 strategy memo -Democratic Party autopsy - New York magazine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and the inimitable David French. Lots to talk about today. We're going to start with the COVID package proposed by the Biden administration, move to Afghanistan and the ongoing negotiations there, and end with some talk about the election. Election law changes in states like Georgia, as well as the strategies being pursued by both Democrats and Republicans. in the 2022 midterm. Let's dive right in. Jonah, talk to us about the COVID relief package. It's large. It's very, very, very, very large. You can see it from space.

And, no, one of the reasons why I picked this topic is because I had my colleague, the head of the economics department from AI, Michael Strain on the Remnant this week. And Michael's a good guy, but he's a bit more of a squish than I am on, like, economic stuff. And even he thinks this thing is just, it's just too big. And there's a lot of extraneous stuff in it. We can talk about the economics of it all if we like, but what sort of is interesting to me about, it is the politics of it. And we talked on here before about how the Biden team, which is dominated by Obama retreads, as we used to call people like that, they're fighting the last, they're picking a weird last war to fight without replaying the stimulus battles from 2008 or 2009 again.

And I think that's a bad, bad model for them for the reasons we've talked about here before. And I guess the question I have about all of this is, does Joe Biden, is he choosing not to be bipartisan because he thinks it's a fruitless path and that there's nothing to be gained from it? Does he actually think that this $1.9 trillion is honestly the best policy, or does he understand, as I think he should, that if he were actually to push for something, even if required coming down a little bit on the money that was bipartisan, it would really almost destroy the Republican Party and be in his real interests to do it, is it that he doesn't realize that? or is it that the signals from the base of the party are so strong that they don't want them to do it, that he's just caving to them? And I cannot make up my mind about all of this, but I just don't think that this path is in his best interest. Steve, how do you see it? Yeah, a combination of all of those things. Look, I think what, I think sort of fundamentally, they've just made a different strategic calculation than the one that you think,

is the best path. I think they're pursuing sort of an inside out, an outside in strategy. You've heard from the podium in appearances on the Sunday shows and in virtually every chance they get to talk about it. Biden administration officials talk about how the country broadly supports this relief package, even with a price tag of $1.9 trillion. And when you say to them, but it's not bipartisan. You're ignoring the Republicans who have come to you and offered to negotiate in good faith. You're not even really listening to them. They say, you know, we care about bipartisanship outside the Beltway, not bipartisanship inside

the Beltway. And they point to polling, which backs them up. There's a new morning consult poll. 77% of voters back the stimulus plan when it's not described as a Democratic plan, 71% still back it when it is described as a Democratic plan. And then if you take that question into just Republicans and Republican leaders, 59% of Republican voters say they support the $1.9 trillion stimulus package. And when you tell them that it's a Democrat plan, they've 53% of them supported anyway. So that's their big argument, I think, is a bet that the plan itself will

be effective, that it will keep progressives on board, and that Republicans outside the Beltway support it. And when the recovery happens, and I think people are increasingly confident with good vaccine news this week, reasonably sunny economic projections that the recovery will come, that people will look back to this and give Joe Biden credit. Sarah, do you see the politics any different? I think that there is this lingering hangover that is hard to quantify from the Obama years where they felt that Democrats, in this case, felt that not only did Republicans not work with them, not want to work with them, but they did so in bad face that they would sort

of say that they were going to work with them, but really it was just a delay tactic. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of bad feelings from the Obama year still, from the Democratic side, there's a lot of bad feelings from the Trump years from the Republican side. And so you're coming into these negotiations, not fresh. Like, things didn't start in January 2021. You know, I think they started circa 2006 or so with each side blaming the other and this like one-way ratchet, a phrase that Justice Scalia always really hated, which every time I say it, I hear him saying how much he hated that phrase. But it's like, you know, speaking of Justice Scalia,

it's a little like these confirmation battles where each side looks to the last one and says, but they screwed me last time. And so I'm not surprised this is where things are. I think that if you look at the minimum wage fight, that's sort of the Joe Biden presidency in a nutshell for me. it's a it's a you know the they said we would lose millions of jobs and joe biden wasn't really for it had to say he was for it the parliamentarian says it can't be included joe bide you know breeds a sigh

of relief at that uh it's not going to be included bernie sanders sort of gets his talking point everyone gets to like sort of shrug and be like well we tried and then joe biden says we'll do it is a standalone, which probably won't go anywhere, unless there are some of these compromises made, because Lord knows Joe Manchin isn't voting for just a standalone $15 minimum wage. I think that's where you're going to see the Joe Biden presidency sit to Steve's point about the popularity of this bill, to your point about the politics of it, and to this hangover point. And so, you know, when you're talking about things that are pretty popular and the Republicans aren't coming to the table with a lot of good faith

in the eyes of the Democrats, yeah, I don't think Joe Biden sees a lot of downside. Okay, one quick follow-up. Was Galea's complaint that it was a redundancy? Like, it was... Correct. Just called a ratchet effect. Don't have to say one-way ratchet?

Correct. Yes. Okay. I can get behind that. That was the important part of my point, of course. David, isn't all of us talk about you know, the minimum wage and divisions among Democrats and whether or not increasing unemployment benefits so that they are actually better than what you could get if you went back to work is going to have a suppressive effect on the recovery. Aren't all of these weighty public policy

issues infinitesimally insignificant when compared to the Dr. Seuss controversy? Well, Jonah, it depends on what news outlet you're watching. If you're watching Fox or Newsmax? The answer to that is absolutely yes. Dr. Seuss. The fate of Dr. Seuss and the Dr. Seuss books on your shelf is the number one story of the day. Look, I think that I was listening to a podcast recently. I believe it's, yeah, it's an Ezra Klein podcast where he was talking about his takeaway on some of the Obama years. And I would, I think that Steve and Sarah both nailed it, and that is with one additional wrinkle. And that is, part of the lesson was pass popular things when you have the majority, even if you don't have Republicans on your side,

but also make sure that people feel an immediate tangible benefit from passing the popular thing, which is what a lot of the Obama veterans feel was lacking in the Obama stimulus. It was a super technocratic stimulus that moved the levers. here and there and here and there but not in a way that people felt on that in that really tangible way that they when they would get a $1,400 check. And so the $1,400 check, which not a whole lot of people think is awesome policy is also something that, however, that makes the rest of the policy that people like better from a technocratic standpoint makes that medicine go down. And so I think they're nailing it that the idea is for right now, COVID relief is popular.

They're going to make it to where as soon as this thing is passed, people feel something very tangible and see something very tangible in the $1,400 check that's added to the $600 from previously. It's a much more generous benefit than came from the Republicans in the Republican administration. And then, you know, if they want to do something else, like if he's going to turn to public option or if he's going to turn to any other sort of bill, then there might be a necessity to compromise if anything's going to happen and if anything's going to get through. But I think the salient lesson that a lot of these folks took away was, if we have a popular bill and we can pass it, pass it, and then make sure that people know that we have passed it in a way

that they recognize. And I just think the bottom line here on this, at least for the first year, year and a half of the Biden administration is going to be, does the vaccine get to people in a timely basis, either as timely or sooner than they expected going into his presidency? And is the economy cooking again? And if those two things happen, for a while anyway, the rest is just details. If people are out, and oh, and if he's turned down the temperature to where it's just not politics isn't constantly in their face they're going out to restaurants the economy is doing well they feel safe i i really feel like a lot of this is just sort of like insider baseball filler um you know barring some other you know major crisis or catastrophe

but jonah let me let me see if i can tease out your point a little bit more are you is it your case that had he been able to bring along some republicans let's say he could have gotten the 10 Republicans who wanted to negotiate about this. And maybe it's not $1.9 trillion. It's $1.3 trillion. And you cut out some of the non-COVID, non-stimulative spending. You don't get everything you want. You get some heat from progressives.

But ultimately, given the broader dynamics at play, he would have then been able to take credit for this, surge in vaccines, the coming recovery anyway, if you believe that the 600 billion doesn't matter to the coming recovery, and I don't. I mean, it matters, but not, it's not going to determine whether we have one or not. And then Republicans have fewer arguments to make against them, or the Republicans who want to say, Joe Biden is a socialist for having done this, have to also indict, you know, a dozen of their own members of the Senate and a number of members.

members of the house? Is that, is that the play? That's part of it. Yeah, yeah. So look, first of all, I think, um, I think the, the lessons from the first, the Obama stimulus are in part, um, the wrong ones that, um, and I, I take David's point about, you know, past what you can that's popular now and all that. But if, if the Obama administration had co-opted a significant number of Republicans back in the day, Obama's presidency would have been much, much different and much more beneficial for him. And similarly, if Biden could pick off, it doesn't have to be half the Republicans or anything like that. It just has to be

enough that you can claim that it's a bipartisan thing. Then it takes away one of the last talking points that Republicans have right now about Biden, which is that he hasn't pursued unity. Well, the major significant legislative policy was bipartisan, you know, check that box and then you can move on to whatever else he wants to do. But moreover, I think there's a weird irony at work here that for five years now, someone can correct my math on this, we've been hearing that the one thing that both parties would agree on is a really robust infrastructure package. Infrastructure, infrastructure,

infrastructure. And I am open to the idea. I haven't studied it enough. I'm not a big pro-rail guy, but there are some rail projects that make sense and maybe getting rail from areas of high unemployment in California to places like Silicon Valley where there is a real shortage of labor. Maybe that makes sense. Maybe it doesn't. But you could pull that out as part of a process of trimming down the 1.9, get Republicans to commit for an infrastructure package down the road, which all the Democrats want anyway, and all these Republicans are on record saying they want.

And you've got two pieces of legislation now that could be bipartisan. And I think that the problem is, I mean, getting back to my point, my original point is, I think it is in Joe Biden's interests as a president for his way he'll be remembered, what he says he wants to do for the country, to distance himself as best he can from the left-wing base of his own party

and try to bolster forces that his own previous administration under Obama you know, eviscerated. The number of moderate Democrats in the Democratic Party was just eviscerated by the Obama years. And if he could help build up a moderate wing of the Democratic Party and build up a moderate wing of the Democratic Party

and build up a moderate wing of the Republican Party that he can work with so he can govern more from the center. It's difficult, but a lot of that is just about optics. He will deliver a devastating blow to the own-the-libs crazies on the right and the AOC types who, it's now becoming clear, probably cost the Democrats a huge number of winnable races because of the defund the police stuff and other lunacy.

And that's his, like, that's the legacy he's supposed to be going for. I think it was doable. And much like, you know, you see, you strike the Ironwild Todd at the beginning of your administration, the only chance you have for this kind of bipartisan sort of governed from the center stuff is in the beginning before everybody hardens into their positions. And I think he's blowing it. I don't think it's in his interest. I don't think it's in the country's interests.

And instead, they're measuring this based upon what David would describe as these inside the Beltway technical wonky things about accomplishments. No one remembers the scorecard of like, oh, how many pieces of legislation did you get accomplished? That is a very inside the beltway kind of measurement. But if you could actually seem as if you're restoring the American

center as the place where politics gets done in America, that would be remembered. That would be recognized by people out there and it would send all sorts of proper signals out. And I just don't think, and I can't figure out whether he knows this and just thinks it's too hard or whether he's being told not to do this because it's not in his interest to do it. And I can't figure that

it won out yet. But Jonah, so take this minimum wage fight, which I find so fascinating for the reasons that you're talking about, you're looking at COVID relief and I'm looking at this other thing, but it's the same philosophical questions. So Holly proposes a $15 minimum wage for any company that has, I think, net revenue over a billion dollars. I forget exactly where- Senator Josh Hawley, Republican from Missouri. Yes. Republican proposal. Yeah. Worth, worth clarifying that. When Josh Hawley initially last year said that he was interested in a $15 minimum wage, Bernie Sanders was like, cool, bro, let's do this.

Fast forward, Josh Hawley proposes this again in a way that would, I think, take a few Republican votes with him, perhaps, from the sort of populist wing of the Republican Party. And I think Democrats largely feel like they cannot work with someone like Josh Hawley because of January 6th. I wonder how much that is factoring in a way where, for the moment, right now, these Democrats all feel like they're going to get whacked if they just said like these people tried to have an insurrection and now we're sitting down at the negotiating table with them. But I also wonder to you and David's point, how much inside baseball that is. there's a $15 minimum wage for companies over a billion dollars. Are people really going to say how dare you work with Josh Hawley to do it? Yeah, I don't have an answer for that.

I mean, I think the $15 minimum wage thing is a bad idea on policy grounds. And I think Holly's assumption that like so many of Republicans these days, they seem to think that the only important voters are these sort of Obama. Trump voters, there's the five or seven million of them out there that, and that the entire Republican Party should be geared to that tail rather than the rest of the dog. And they're doing all. And I think that's a mistake politically. But I agree. I mean, look, I mean, the problems that I rail about probably too much, you know, about how the own the lives culture is bad and and everything is becoming narrative maintenance

rather than actually governing and all that. It's a problem for Democrats, too. And the way they talk about, you know, you know, Ted Cruz and and Josh Hawley, as much as I criticize Holly and they deserve all of my criticism and more, they want to anathematize people.

They want to say that certain people are evil and it doesn't matter if we agree with them. we just can't live in a world where they're treated with respect. And I get it about Cruz and Holly given January 6th, but I think it's the general approach to everybody brings to politics these days, is that it's all about virtue signaling. I mean, that's kind of why I brought up the Dr. Seuss thing. There is literally no public policy element to that entire conversation.

Right. Private owners of a series of books who made, I think, a PR mistake of announcing that they weren't going to publish those books anymore. but so they're not published using some books. There's nothing for the government to do. Everything is about just sort of signaling to the world your feelings. And it's very difficult to have a constructive conversation about the minimum wage or anything else in that kind of environment. Well, Steve, let's move on to other conversations that are difficult to have.

Afghanistan. Those are conversations that people are finding increasingly difficult. Yes, in part because of the conversations that took place during the Obama administration. in part because of the conversations that took place during the Trump administration and in part because of who was invited to participate in those conversations and who was not. So you have the U.S. scheduled to withdraw troops May 1st, 2021, a date that is coming up pretty quickly. And as you watch the news from Afghanistan, and there isn't a lot of it. I mean, we are a country that seems to have lost interest in looking much at Afghanistan.

and treats it as almost an afterthought, both in our policy and in our media coverage of it. There's a terrific exception to that rule in this week's New Yorker in a piece by Dexter Filkins. It's covered Afghanistan for a long time, covered Iraq for a long time. And he points out the naughty challenge that this is for the Biden administration.

On the one hand, I think Joe Biden would like to continue to draw down troops and would just as soon have the United States out of Afghanistan, not having to focus as much attention there as had been focused during Barack Obama's administration. On the other hand, it is a problem if the United States leaves and the government there collapses either quickly or after a while. the Trump administration and its negotiations with the Taliban deliberately excluded from those talks the current Afghan government. We argued at the time it was a mistake. I think it was a horrendous

mistake not just because of what that meant for the actual negotiations taking place, but the lasting damage it did to the perceptions of legitimacy for the current Afghan government. If they weren't participating in talks between the Taliban in the United States, they weren't viewed as a central player. And I think that's the challenge now, as we look to the final couple months before potential additional U.S. withdrawal. I guess big picture question to David first, you know, there's a significant chunk of the American population that just says we should be done with this. We're not paying a ton of attention. We've spent $2 trillion. Thousands of Americans have died fighting this war.

You know, Al-Qaeda still has a presence but isn't dominating Afghanistan. The Afghan government is weak and racked with corruption. Does the Afghan government collapse if we leave? And if so, does it matter? And third, what obligation do we have to make sure that? that doesn't happen. Well, I mean, we have an obligation to defend the United States of America, and if the argument is that, well, Afghanistan is all the way over there and what happens there doesn't

really matter to us, well, we already know that's ridiculous. We're there because what happened in Afghanistan was brought to our shores in the worst possible way. Look, I mean, we've got a real problem here on a couple of fronts. One is nobody will, for odd reasons, nobody. or maybe not nobody, but almost nobody, in the political spectrum, will say the obvious truth, which is that our aggressive military stance has worked to defend the United States of America. If you had gone back on 9-12-01 and said, we are going to implement a military strategy

which will result in zero large-scale 9-11-style attacks on the United States for almost 20 years. Zero. Not to say that we haven't had any terror at all, but nothing remotely approaching the scale of 9-11. You would have said, where do I sign up for this strategy? Because I don't think that's real. Because we all know how we felt at that time, which was this was the opening salvo of something that could get even more grim as time we're on, because the terror networks at this point were heavily entrenched, well-funded, and formidable. And so what we have now are a after a series of military actions we're in a position where with relatively low investment of troops we're able to keep um terrorist jihadists at bay to such an extent that they're basically the threat of jihadist terror is now an afterthought it's like not even part of our politics and what is part of our politics is these small remaining forces that we that military planners would tell you are pretty darn important to securing the gains that we've won. That's what's controversial.

And so, you know, I think Biden should say, look, you know, and so long as the threat of al-Qaeda exists, we're going to at least have enough of a footprint to keep it at bay. As long as the threat of ISIS exists, we're going to have enough of a footprint to keep it at bay, because why we learned a lesson, he'd never say this. but we learned a lesson in the Obama administration, which is if you declare victory and leave, even when al-Qaeda is on the ropes. I mean, there was a point in time in Iraq after the surge

when al-Qaeda, by best intelligence estimates, had been reduced to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to ISIS, had been reduced to less than a thousand people, like less than a thousand in the whole country, and that if you sort of declare victory and leave, well, that doesn't always work out very well. And so what we have to do is, you know, there's got to be political leadership, which apparently does not exist, to get past this, quote unquote, endless war rhetoric and say, look, our obligation to defend this country is permanent.

We can't just simply say, well, you know, we've had enough, we're done. If the enemy doesn't say, okay, we're done to. And that's the circumstance that we're in. And fortunately, because of previous military successes, we're able to keep this threat at bay with a fraction, just a tiny fraction of the military force we've used in previous eras. But to yank that out is a extremely disproportionate risk that we're gaining for the benefit we're losing. David, if I told you that, you know, you could come up with some relatively airtight agreement with the Taliban where they say, like, look, we're not going to. going to attack the United States. And if we do,

the rules of war are suspended and you can come assassinate these six people or something that would make it, you know, a little more believable, then would we, you would still say we should stay there? You mean something that an air, something that can't happen? Law school hypothetical. Yeah, I guess. But my point is like, you're saying we have to stay in this country forever because they could, you know, a group within this country. Because they are. Not because they could, but because who they are. And that's the issue.

But there's groups like that throughout the world. And all you're doing is incentivizing that we need to have this presence and all these places throughout the world. Yep. Yes. Do you? I mean, that's a real question. Does the United States, by your logic, then have to have a presence everywhere?

where there's al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, franchises, Al-Qaeda-friendly groups. I mean, when we're talking about a presence, we're not talking about invading Iraq presence. We're talking about small bases scattered across the globe, which is a very easy lift for our military, quite frankly. It's a very easy lift for our military. It's a very easy lift for us budgetarily.

it has not it's been what more than a year since we've had casualties in afghanistan um we're not talking about putting you know the third army cavalry regiment is a trip trip wire in the fold of gap with 300,000 troops behind them uh in like in the 1980s um you know a lot of the rhetoric around this stuff makes it sound like we're still in the surge you know either the afghan surge or the iraqi surge we're talking about a very light lift 2500 troops yes yeah relative to the American military. I mean, this is a, this is what I'm emphasizing. Explain why having 2,500 troops there, you think, prevents anyone from being able to fly

planes into buildings, for example. Like, how does that connect up? So, for example, one of the things that we know, we, what, one of the things we know about counterterror operations is that the existence of safe, while we can't predict any given terror attack, here is what we, we can predict. If terrorists have safe havens, terror attacks are coming. And so one of the things that even as light footprint of troops does is it strengthens the ability of our allies to respond to destroy safe havens. It helps maintain our intelligence operations in these countries

to prevent safe havens. Heck, if there had been in 2014 in Iraq, even essentially a battalions worth of combat troops to help stiffen the Iraqi government to provide the kind of force necessary to deal with these ISIS attacks, which in a conventional military sense were nothing. Like we could have swatted them away. The amount of heartache and death and destruction and despair that we could have prevented, even with a very small American military footprint, is astonishing. And so again, it's a risk-reward calculus here. We're not talking about a large-scale commitment of American troops at all. We're not talking about ongoing military operations where we're incurring, in some cases, in some of these theaters, casualties at all. We're not even talking about

a significant outlay of military expenditure relative to the military budget at all. And so my point is, why is no one communicating the actual stakes here? We're treating this as if we're in the middle of like, you know, the battle of Mosul still, or we're still in the middle of Fallujah, when we have an extremely light footprint that is keeping at bay a threat that we know that if left unrestrained can be quite significant. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I think the politics of it, President Biden's afraid of the politics of it, right?

Yeah. He doesn't want to make that. even that limited argument he doesn't want to make. So real quick question to Sarah, going back to Sarah, and then Jonah, I've got a question for you. Sarah, what gives you any confidence to take seriously your hypothetical that it's possible to craft an airtight agreement with the Taliban? Oh, nothing. I just wanted to test David. But let me tell you about the political reality that I think is potentially true. Let's say that we don't listen to David, that everything gets pulled out. still think it would take a few years for this potential terrorist attack that David's talking

about to happen in the United States. Potentially, Joe Biden would be out of office. I just wonder if there are any real political costs, you know, after a, let's even say, like a 9-11-style attack, a huge national attack on the United States for folks to say, like, well, it's, you Because of what the Biden administration did, are voters really going to hold a future Democratic candidate responsible? And if not, where are the political incentives to do this? If you don't think it'll happen on your watch. Jonah, are there?

Political incentives are few and far between. I think that there's, you know, the national security voter isn't, it's not quite a snipe hunt, but it's close um and until there's an attack until there's an attack and then we're all national security voters that's right that's right so um i think that the part of the problem is is that again sort of going back to sort of the the the virtue signaling form of politics that we've got these days there are a lot of people who have huge problems in theory with military deployments

overseas and quote unquote forever wars um but they don't have much to offer about the actual practice of of foreign policy and military policy in this regard i mean it's it's there the there's a there's a major overlap in the venn diagrams between the stupidity of the sort of ron paulist understanding of the world and say the i don't know the for want of a better example the Code Pink or AOC view of the world and they talk about empire and all these kinds of things.

Most Americans do not give a rat's patoot that we've had troops in Germany or had up until recently lots of troops in Germany for decades because no troops are getting killed and if you're not getting killed that's oh, it's cool. They have a base.

My nephew, he brought me this cool Beersstein back from Octoberfest. That's how it resonates with a lot of people. similarly troops in Japan we have troops to one extent or another in i don't know 80 countries something like that um and no one cares if people if americans aren't being killed and nor do i think should they care if americans aren't being killed and there's a good reason for it um the only thing and i'm sure it was just david using shorthand the only place where i would disagree with him and i don't think we actually disagree is i don't think we have to have troops in all of these

places where al-Qaeda is a threat if there is a serviceable government that can do it themselves there, right? I mean, we don't need to send, you know, major deployments of new troops to Great Britain because we trust the Great Britain will take care of its own al-Qaeda problem. The problem with Afghanistan is it's a failed state and or quasi-failed state. And I'm increasingly sympathetic. I used to think Bing West, my friend from in our world, highly decorated combat guy who was also like an undersecretary of defense under Reagan. He was telling me 15 years ago, look, Afghanistan is a basket case. We are not going to turn that into a glorious democracy or anything like that.

But we have an obligation sort of to David. point of keeping our enemies at bay. And his argument was, hold on to Kabul. You cannot use Afghanistan as a serious way station for launching terrorist attacks if you don't have the central city of that country. So we hold on to Kabul and we use it as a launching pad every now and then to do strikes. But the rest of the country, you know, we try to do good where we can, when we can, but that's not why we're there. We're trying to defend America. It's very real politic, but it increasingly makes sense to me. And if that means that Afghanistan isn't like a serious thriving country for another

generation, I'm not trying to be too glib. That makes me sad, but I don't know what the alternative is. And I think that the sort of the isolationist or quasi-isolationist right and left, they both talk about all of these things in a very literary, theoretical style without just looking at the facts on the ground and the reality of it. And during times of peace or relative peace, that kind of narrative, because it's easily understood, gets a lot of traction politically. And I think that's where the gravity is pulling us on both the left and the right. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss,

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What do these voting changes mean? We're seeing them across the country. Is this all about November? Yeah, what we're seeing, and I'm looking right now at a chart that's showing the number of bills that have been introduced in various states restricting voting access or when you say restricting voting access, things like limiting the days for early voting, limiting the circumstances under which, for example, you can get an absentee ballot or limit who can turn in an absentee ballot. There are a variety of kinds of proposals. In the three states, Sarah, that are leading the league in bills, will become as no surprise to anybody, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Yeah, all states that went for Biden but have Republican state legislatures. Correct. And so the interesting question, there's a number of things that are interesting about this, but one of which seems to be that the Republicans appear to be taking the position that it is worse for us when more people vote. And that, the clear import from all of this is that what we need to do is, at least on the margins,

make it a little bit more difficult for people to vote. It is worse for us when more people vote. Now, some of this is justified as this is a quote from one of the sponsors of the GOP bill in the Georgia House, that it's designed, the bill is designed to bring back the confidence of our voters into the election system. But it's unclear to me how limiting in-person early voting is doing that because nobody's really said anything, even in the Trump election contests about in-person early voting. But the argument seems to be, and I'm not quite sure it's supported by much of anything, empirically, that if we're going to win in the future, we being the GOP, we need to engage, we need to have tighter restrictions on the vote. And I've got a couple of questions about that. One, and I'll just fling it right back to the sweep author, Sarah. One, if you are trying to build a multi-ethnic working class party, as everybody is saying

sort of in the populist wing of the GOP, is that your sweet spot? Is that your sweet spot to try to restrict early voting hours and the circumstances under which you can drop off an absentee ballot. And number two, without stealing any thunder from advisory opinions, or we're going to be really breaking down the Voting Rights Act oral arguments. How much do you buy that this will be actually suppressive

to the vote as compared to sort of essentially a meaningless window dressing? Let me take the second one first. Republicans in state legislatures and at local levels have been doing things like this. for a long time. So to the extent that these things were already in place,

then in 2020 we should have seen significant amounts of voter suppression and we didn't. Instead, we saw record turnout. Now you could always ask like, okay, but what would it have been without all those bills? Fair. Don't know. So, no, I don't actually think they have the effect

that Republicans think they have because because Democrats have gotten very good at weaponizing the messaging on that and saying they are trying to suppress your vote. Don't let them win. There are plenty of ads that are run by rock the vote and, you know, get out the vote organizations on the left that I think very effectively make that point. And so I think it has a turnout effect on the left. I think it will be hilarious, not really in a ha-ha way, in 10, 15 years when everything flips on the legal arguments on these

voter laws? Because right now, Democrats are saying, no, no. It's not that we want more Democrats to vote. It's that we are representing minority voters. I had this argument with Mark Elias on Twitter last night. And his argument was that the Democratic National Committee had standing in this voting rights lawsuit in Arizona because they represent minority voters. And I was pointing out to him that like, no, actually, the Democratic National Committee would not have standing to represent all minority voters, they have standing to represent Democratic voters. And the Republican Party has standing to represent Republican voters, not white voters. And the Republican Party's argument is, no, these weren't racial restrictions. They were partisan restrictions. Yes, we absolutely are

trying to hurt the ability of Democrats to turn out their vote. But that's not unlawful under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which again, if you're interested more about that, please listen to advisory opinions. I won't get into Section 2 here, or you'll all turn it off. But fast forward, and Republicans become the party of this blue-collar, less educated working class. Democrats take over the suburban vote. Republicans win over more of the Latino vote, for instance, maybe pick up a little bit more of the black male vote, for example. And it will be, I mean, sorry. Republicans are then going to have to sue to undo their own laws that they said were lawful,

arguing that it's now not in their partisan interest. And I promise you they will say it is because they are unlawful under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. And by the way, that has no bearing on whether it is unlawful intersection two of the Voting Rights Act, only that don't for a second think that these aren't just partisan hacks arguing partisan hackery on both sides, frankly. I think that they will artists argue in their partisan interest for as absolutely long as it is in their interest to do so. The question is whether it has political ramifications in any of these elections moving forward. For example, in Georgia, where they're trying to basically allow counties not to have Sunday early voting, which steps on the souls to the polls from a number of black churches,

is what the argument is on the left. Will that actually limit the number of black voters in Georgia? I don't think so. I think it's going to piss off a number of the black voters in Georgia and they're going to go vote on Saturday or any of the other days to prove that you can't simply prevent them from voting. So, yeah, I think this is a bunch of

hogwash nonsense that will hurt the Republican Party in the long term and potentially in the short term. So Jonah, is stop the steel double hurting the Republicans because what they're doing is now putting,

hurdles, no matter how high they are, at least some marginal additional hurdle in front of low propensity voters. And it was, in fact, some of the low propensity voters that helped propel Trump into the White House. So is Stop the Steel doing, Stop the Steel seems to have cost Republicans the Senate. Is Stop the Steel going to be costing the Republicans some of those low propensity votes going forward? Yeah, it's, I mean, or it won't I mean look it could have the effect of sort of as Sarah was saying about how

some of these maneuvers could piss off African American voters and make them more like it stop the steel could conceivably mobilize more low propensity Trumpy voters but the problem is it's a double-edged sword it's this wedge issue that the more oxygen you give stop the steel

the more you turn off reliable suburban voters so it's like maybe you're wrong about like it turning off low propensity voters but if it doesn't it will turn off the more moderate sort of suburban ones or vice versa

and that's the problem that Trump is playing right now in a party that basically gets between 43 and 48% of the electorate depending on the issue climate and the political climate It's absolutely true that the non-pro-Trump, you know, the anti-Trump of the party is very small compared to the pro-Trump, you know, bulk of it. But if you're below 50%, every slice of the coalition matters a lot. And Trump is basically continuing to serve as a wedge issue.

But I want to take a second here to sort of back up. I find this whole conversation problematic for me. don't mean like it's a bad conversation to have. It's that, um, it's like, I think we all hear no one of the, I wish there was a good German word for it for that feeling of discomfort when somebody agrees with you for the wrong reasons, um, and how angry it makes you. You know, um, I have been arguing for years and I stand by my arguments on the merits that we fetishize voting too much in this country, that we're making voting too much. easy, that all of the arguments about how voting is, encourages citizenship and all these

kinds of things, have put the cart before the horse. The voting should be one of the end stages of civic engagement, not the gateway drug of civic engagement. I have zero problem philosophically with requiring all voters to pass the same test that immigrants have to pass to become citizens. my problem is is that a lot of these jack-wad Republican state legislators are doing all of this stuff

for nakedly immoral and cynical reasons rather than anything based in any kind of serious principle and they just want to screw the other side's coalition and dampen voter turnout of people that they are unwilling

to try to persuade to join their coalition in the first place and it is deeply loaded down with all sorts of racist garbage that I want no association with. And it is one of these weird tensions I get into where I'm willing to make the principled conservative argument for a conservative position, but it becomes very difficult to do so when Republicans use that position for purely venal reasons. And that's why the whole conversation makes me very uncomfortable. Jonah, can I agree with you, but for different reasons? Dasvarundskine's knight.

That's my native German word for that. I think I feel that way a little because in the past, there were efforts to make it harder for ineligible voters to vote. Voter ID being the prime example. Voter ID, though, is to prevent someone who is not a legal voter from casting a ballot. Now, whether there's a whole bunch of that going on and everything, we can have that discussion. But that at least is an end goal that I think people can understand would maybe strengthen, you know, faith in our elections, et cetera.

What makes me mad now is that I don't know how many people are noticing the nuance of the pivot. We've gone from trying to limit ineligible voters from casting a ballot to trying to limit eligible voters from casting a ballot. from casting a ballot. And again, whether it's unlawful under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, let me mention one of the Arizona things, which I think perfectly encapsulates this. So Arizona passed a law saying that if you voted in the wrong precinct, your whole ballot was thrown out. Well, now, that's usually an eligible voter. And when they voted for president, their senators, potentially, usually their house member, all of those was the correct ballot. The right names were on it. You could count their vote. Arizona doesn't argue that it's somehow too,

difficult to count that vote. They're just saying it's within their discretion not to count it. That's not, and then you wouldn't count, by the way, the parts of the ballot that would be incorrect because you voted in the wrong precinct. Your judicial districts and stuff like that that might have the wrong names on it. So we throw out that part, we count the top part. That's how it was being done. They're saying it's within their discretion. Fair enough. But this isn't about preventing ineligible voters anymore. It's simply about looking at the numbers and seeing who is more likely to vote out of precinct, and they decided that it was Democratic voters

who were more likely to vote out of precinct. So while Joe and I take your point that we don't need to necessarily encourage voting, surely also, though, there's a nuance here of these people are voting. I mean, my God, it's not that easy to find the right precinct. Our precinct has changed, and I've only lived in this house for three years. You know, very easy for me to just show up at the wrong precinct one day.

So I find that I agree with you for different reasons. I don't necessarily agree with you on the we need to just overall not fetishize voting. I'm pretty into fetishizing voting, actually. I've gotten that sense from listening to various advisory opinions. Yeah. I'm in time. Long, making an election day 30 days long makes total sense during a pandemic. I don't think it should be the standard policy.

I think it's a bad idea. I think it's bad public policy. What about national holiday on election day? I'm in favor of that. I'm actually in favor of that. Or making voting weekend. But you want everyone working from the same information, voting, you know, like you don't want to have some revelation.

We saw this in 2020 in the primaries where thousands of people voted, millions of people voted for candidates who were no longer running because they voted so early. And that's crazy. Everyone should be faced with the basic, fundamental same information and vote around to the same time. And if you wanted to make it a two-day voting weekend or a national holiday, I'm in favor of that. If you want to absentee voting for troops and people living abroad, fine with that. But making it this thing where you just harvest votes from people for a month when there's not a pandemic, I'm flatly against it. But doesn't that run into one of your other

fetishes, Jonah, which is federalism? I have so many. I'm sorry. No, I mean, doesn't that run into at least create some tension? with sort of federalism and the way that we run our elections now. We don't have, these things aren't uniform precisely because states determine what they're going to do. And if you're talking about the kinds of rules

that you've suggested, which I think are smart, don't you have to have a federal rule there? No. I mean, one of my understanding of federalism is sufficiently capacious that I can imagine a world in which all 50 states are wrong.

And in fact, There are plenty of circumstances where I think all 50 states are wrong. I think all 50 states should adopt basically my point of view on this question. But that doesn't mean I think the federal government should go big footing around and forcing all 50 states to do what I wanted to do. So you're in favor of making it more uniform, but you're against the things that would make it more uniform. If, yes.

It's actually not that. No, I don't think. It's a collective enlightenment, like it's everyone enlightened at once. You could also, though, pass a ceiling and floor. You could say, you know, you may have early voting up to two weeks. You may not have less than three days of early voting. You may allow people to vote absentee for X, Y, and Z reasons, but you cannot have no excuse absentee voting.

I mean, you could have like just sort of a window of things and then states can pick and choose. I don't think that would work very well. But that would sort of... You could also have the federal government... You could also have Congress do what they did with like a drunk drive, with the... Yeah, tie funding. We'll give you lots of money to buy lots of cool machines if you do X. No.

I don't love that stuff. Yeah. You can imagine them doing that. Look, it's all a theoretical discussion because this... The place that we started this conversation, that these are all partisan hacks doing partisan hackery things will prevent any kind of real consensus even on a federal level for any of this happening. I do think that I have a very simple view of all of this and it sounds like in some ways it's it's not lined up with where you guys are. You know, make it as easy as people to to vote as you can for people to vote

within reason. I agree with you. I don't want a six-month early vote. I don't really want a 30-day early vote. But, you know, a week's worth of early vote, including weekends, that seems entirely reasonable to me. My basic view is the more people who vote, the better. But it should be exceedingly difficult, near impossible for people to cheat. And I think that speaks to Sarah's point. I mean, she makes sort of a key distinction there. You don't want ineligible voters voting. I would like to have as many eligible voters voting as possible. And that sounds maybe overly simplistic. And again, these arguments are going to take place in the context of this partisanship today.

So I don't expect to see a lot of these reforms. But it'll be interesting to watch the states. I mean, there are interesting sort of debates inside the parties inside these states taking place. I mean, the Georgia Republicans in the Georgia state legislature are, more aggressive in their proposed reforms than the governor of Georgia, Governor Kemp, who was a former Secretary of State. He's gone out of his way not to endorse some of the farther-reaching proposals included in legislation in the Georgia State Legislature precisely because he doesn't agree with them. Now, he may end up having to go along with them, but he implemented some

reforms as Secretary of State that did expand the vote. He certainly took a lot of grief from Democrats for some of his other moves, but there are these interesting intra-party debates, and I think that's likely to determine the direction of this as much as anything. So there's also this fun thing going on where you have H.R. 1 in the House, which is the Democratic Party's sort of national election changes ideas

because they control the House and the Senate and the presidency. And then you have Republicans who control 61% of state legislatures saying, no, no, let's do it at the state level. I think this is going to, this is going to be an issue we're going to talk about again. I don't think this is the last time we'll be discussing voting changes. But before we leave, let's do a quick note on 2022 strategy. So a group called the Congressional Leadership Fund put out a strategy. This is the, basically the Republican House super PAC. They spent $140 million in the last election cycle. They credit themselves with a number of the wins. 15 seats flipped in 2020

toward the Republicans. It was kind of a shock. More than half of those overperformed President Trump in their districts. So they feel like they've got the magic sauce. And the magic sauce to them is, I mean, they have like five things, but really it's two things. One, candidate recruitment, candidate recruitment, candidate recruitment. They said all 15 of the seats Republicans flipped were won by a woman, a minority, or a veteran. And remember, if you're flipping seats, you're flipping purple-ish seats, generally speaking. So this is their point. Like, if you want to win more seats and not just hold on to the ones you have, candidate recruitment

really matters in some of these suburban purpleish districts. Number two is on fundraising, not that interesting. question to you, Steve, is, is there any hope they can actually do any of this? It's one thing for, you know, Dan Constan, who I think is a brilliant political operative to say, we need to recruit more women, minorities, and veterans to run in these districts in 2022. And quite another, if nobody's behind him, the, you know, the super PAC alone does not do candidate recruitment. No, I think that's right. I think this is a very, it's a very, very smart memo. It's actually worth, we'll stick it in the show notes. It's actually worth

if you're sort of a junkie. It's worth spending time reading it and I agree with you. I think Dan Conson is very smart, one of the smartest youngest, young Republican strategists in the game today. Having said that, I think it gives short shrift to one thing in particular. And it's the current divisions in the Republican Party and the lack of actual agenda, policy agenda. from Republicans. The memo addresses this in a three-paragraph section that he calls the right contrast, and basically says, look, Democrats are socialists, Republicans should run against socialists, and then Republicans will win.

And he kind of mocks at one point Democrats' efforts in 2020 to tie Republicans, particularly Republicans in suburban districts, to Donald Trump and says that didn't really work. And now Democrats are going to try Republicans to QAnon, and that's not going to work either. In fact, he even goes so far as to say, we embrace the strategy, sort of bring it on, do it, tie us to Q. That's a little risky, it seems to me. Because while it's certainly the case that, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green, who is the original QAnon Congresswoman, isn't necessarily. necessarily representative of Republican, House Republicans, in a broader sense. She's not nobody. And she's got a loud bullhorn. And you've seen Republicans embrace her or some of the things

that she says or some of the craziness about the 2020 election or broader conspiracies that aren't tied to QAnon with increasing frequency. And I think that's a problem. I think it's a challenge. So I think Democrats are smart to try to run that way. Well, you know, a lot's going to happen in the next couple of years. And the issues that will be at play in November of 2022 are not the issues that we're focused on right now.

But if Democrats, if the vaccine push happens the way that it looks like it might happen, if there's an economic recovery that's, let's say it's not as robust. as the Biden administration or the CBO have projected, but it's a pretty good recovery. That's a pretty good broad political environment for Democrats to operate in. And I think would make it harder for Republicans to say, ah, Democrats are a bunch of socialists vote for us.

And in that case, if Republicans haven't been part of any real policymaking at the federal level, that much easier for Democrats to say, oh, by the way, these guys are still, you know, defending QAnon types or embracing conspiracy theories. That might work with a Republican base. I mean, you've got, you've had 70% of Republicans who still think the election was stolen or Joe Biden wasn't legitimate. You've got 50% of Republicans who believe, despite testimony this week from FBI director, Chris Ray, that Antifa was mostly responsible for the attacks on

the U.S. Capitol. That might work if you're only appealing to Republicans, but there is a significant chunk of Republicans for whom that won't work. And any crossover vote, I think, is unlikely if that's the way Republicans continue. Jonah, there's this sense in D.C. that, you know, the National Republican Congressional Committee, this group, the Congressional Leadership Fund, Kevin McCarthy, name your sort of inside Washington player still has control over some of these races in 2022. Do they?

Is that done now? Is this all going to be local folks nominating their own and saying FU to D.C? Or will memos like this matter? Because in fact, these are the people who have sort of the donor base behind them and it's a $140 million dollar, you know,

swinging hammer. I'm skeptical. I think the answer and also it leaves out this other thing, which is that Trump is building up this massive machine, you know, fundraising machine to support Trumpy primary challengers,

Trumpy candidates, candidates who just like his musk, you know, whatever. And and so I think it's going to be a bit of a free-for-all. And I can very much imagine the sort of the grown-ups, who write grown-up memos, getting into lots of fights

with the sort of Jason Miller types about what races should look like and what support should look like and what candidates should look like. I was like there's a very interesting piece in New York Magazine that I was reading today right before we came on,

which is why I mentioned to fund the police earlier. There's now just really good evidence. I mean, I was writing about this in the summer that there was good evidence, but now there's even better evidence. That one of the reasons why Trump overperformed against historical standards for among non-whites was all the defund the police stuff.

And lots of people, you know, lots of people who live in poor, marginal minority-dominated neighborhoods, they spend a lot of their time complaining about why there aren't cops around, not why they don't like the cops. And I understand it's a double-edged sword and there's bad cop behavior, but there's also there are also a lot of people who want to make sure that their kids are safer than they are and that their neighborhoods are safer than they are. And the only reason I bring it up is one, because it's sort of fresh in my mind and interesting. But two, I think that the role that the media plays, and I'm not trying to do a, you know, media criticism thing

because media criticism punditry is the lowest form of punditry. but even when it's 100% accurate. But the way in which so many of these kinds of issues get highlighted because the media thinks they're good for ratings and conversation and they rely on experts who aren't actually an activist who aren't actually representative of their communities distorts a lot of this stuff. And I could see how the Democratic Party could actually become

a major, I mean, getting back to my point about Biden trying to govern from the center, both of these parties still seem so determined to be minority parties that they, the way they end up making their choices is almost mysterious if you don't, if you don't understand that they're all governed by short of short term incentive structures, rather than long-term incentive structures. And so I think we're going to get a lot of these kinds of memos about here's the smart thing to do and people are going to look at it

and say, this is very interesting, thank you very much. Now let's talk about how they're canceling Dr. Seuss. And I think that that is going to be, I guess, I know I'm rambling here, I guess what I'm trying to say is things are going to get a lot dumber. That's what I think.

David, last word. Yeah. So a couple of things thinking about 2022. I mean, one is a lot, just a lot is going to depend on what is the economic health of the country at the time and what is the actual physical health of the country at the time. And if the Democrats can roll in and say, we vaccinated America and we brought America back and the Republicans are going to say, we're saving Dr. Seuss advantage Democrats. But to Jonah's point, you know, it's entirely likely that what will happen is a lot of the culture war stuff that Democrats are trying to get through that they're not going to get through now, whether it's repealing a Hyde Amendment or the Equality Act with its very explicit anti-religious liberty provisions, that if the message is, well, you know, all of that sort of culture war stuff that we tried to get through in 2021, but we couldn't, if you elect us, we'll get it through in 2023, could be all the contrasts, need to kind of get over that hump combined with some midterm advantages.

But if the question is, instead of all the culture war stuff, hey, the Republicans blocked us from all this popular stuff that we want to get through. Like, say, for example, a public option, then it's a different deal. I do think that the defund the police argument, for example, was very potent. Democratic members said it was potent. there will be an advantage going into 2022 that Biden will be able to say, look, we didn't defund the police. We got you vaccines and got the economy going. But again, the question will then be, what would the Democrats do with more seats? And if the answer is, aha, as Jonah was saying,

the parties seem to be determined to be these minority parties. If it is, aha, now we're going to move to the stuff that isn't popular, that's extremely divisive, that really, really is what our base wants, and basically nobody else, then you've got a lot of possibility for the Republicans. And they don't even need an agenda. They can just say, not that. We're not that. And the we're not that message often turns out to be pretty darn compelling. I mean, Biden's campaign was, I'm not him. They can, the Republicans' message in the House raises in particulars, we're not that when it came to defund the police. And so, you know, It's tough to predict, but I would say at this point,

if the Democrats really try to double down in culture war, and that's going to be the opportunity in 2022 that they're going to try to seize, then I would look for Republicans to do pretty darn well. And with that, we are out of time. Thank you so much for joining us today. We love our listeners. We love that you guys tune in for this. We're so appreciative.

Rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're getting your podcast from. It'll help other people find this podcast. And until next time, Steve Hayes still has the worst takes. Back check. Nice. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

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