The Dispatch Podcast - Welcome to New York City

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

Incompetence strikes again in New York’s mayoral race, a blow to American’s faith in government but not, our hosts argue, fuel for 2020 election fraud claims or a ding on ranked choice voting. The gang then discusses Vice President Kamala Harris’ belated visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. Steve points out that Harris’ clumsy handling of immigration is more than just a messaging failure, and says just as much about the Biden administration’s policy failures. David dives into why governors don’t call up the National Guard more (as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem did recently for a border mission.) They also tackle an underreported aspect of infrastructure negotiations on the Hill and discuss what divides that drama reveals about the Democratic Party. Lastly, our hosts discuss Bill Barr’s defiance of former President Donald Trump on 2020 election fraud claims and whether the most hardcore Trump supporters qualify as a religion or a cult. Show Notes: -New York Times article about the chaos of the New York mayoral race -Texas Tribune article about Kamala Harris’ visit to the border -A Washington Post article about Kristi Noem’s deploying national guards to the border -Yuval Levin’s article in National Review about how what the media missed in the infrastructure reporting -Jonathan Karl’s story in The Atlantic about Bill Barr’s final days in Trump-era Department of Justice Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isiger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and David French. This week, we're going to start with the New York City mayor's race and the results we do and don't have. And then the infrastructure bill that will or won't pass and the immigration trip that did happen, kind of. And we'll wrap up with the latest bombshell coming out of what happened at the end of the Trump administration with Bill bar. Let's dive right in. Steve, New York City. Yeah, pretty amazing. I'm going to just go to the New York Times with its typically understated headlines and subheads just to give people a sense of how the New York. Times is playing this news in the New York City mayor's race. New York mayor's race in chaos after elections boards counts 135,000 test ballots. And then the subhead is the extraordinary sequence of events through the closely watched Democratic primary contest into a new period of uncertainty and seated further confusion about the outcome. The basic takeaway here is that the city accidentally included a test run of 135,000 votes reporting earlier in the day showing

that the race had tightened between Eric Adams and the second and third place finishers. Then the board put out a sort of a difficult to decipher tweet or statement sort of early evening, late afternoon, early evening time frame, which told people that there was a discrepancy but didn't tell people what the problem was. And then late at night put an equally indecipherable statement out filled with acronyms and confusing terms, the sum total of which meant we totally screwed this thing up. My question, do you, Sarah, the chief enthusiast here of the ranked choice voting process? One, does this have anything to do with ranked choice voting. And two, does it dampen your enthusiasm for ranked choice voting?

No and no. Because actually, anytime you're using new machines, you're always going to run test ballots through it. So this could have happened with non-ranked choice voting, where they just very, very sloppily left in 135,000 test ballots. So it has nothing to do with ranked choice voting. It has to do with adopting new software three weeks before an election. and not really having the time to test it. And it has to do with what always is really the case, which is bureaucracies often fail at new things. And so this is more about New York City.

It's more about a city that didn't prepare for their election. And frankly, we saw this in the run-up right after the pandemic, if you remember, in 2019, they were having, sorry, 2020, they were having, you know, problems with their voting then. So this is a New York City issue, not a ranked choice voting issue. Here's something I found interesting right after they posted that, which showed Eric Adams in the lead with Catherine Garcia only 15,000 votes behind with 120,000 absentee ballots outstanding.

The Eric Adams campaign put out a statement that basically said, like, we're calling into question these results. There's an extra 100,000 votes. And, I mean, blue checkmarked Twitter blew up saying, Eric Adams was the Donald Trump of the Democratic Party, how dare he question election results. This is, you know, undermining faith in our democratic institutions, et cetera, et cetera, until an hour later when, in fact, they were exactly right. And I think what, I think, look, the Eric Adams campaign should have actually put out a much

different statement than the one they put out. They made it sound like they didn't really have evidence for what they were saying. And it was sort of the short defiant statement if I had still been in my operative days and working for the Adams campaign, I actually would have put out a fairly lengthy statement saying, here are the number of votes we were told on election night that had come in person. This was an in-person count. And now the New York Board of Elections is reporting this many votes. We don't understand the discrepancy and call on them to explain it. Like, show your math. Put out a longer statement, especially if you're confident, you're

right. So either they weren't confident they were right. And then it was kind of intended to be a Trump-esque statement. Or it was a little bit of political malpractice. Either way, that is adding to the chaos of this, of people like throwing arrows and everyone's confused and the campaigns are saying it undermines the results of the election. I actually don't think it undermines the results of the election. This is a pretty explainable problem. But that's me who's following this pretty closely. If all you're seeing is the New York Times headline, chaos and the initial results were incorrect, I think it very much undermines the results and the trust in the electoral process, which is not great, Bob. Yeah, so David, let me pick up on that point. This couldn't

have come at a worse time, I would argue. If you look at the debate that we've been having in this country over the past six months and the kinds of baseless claims that Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters have been making, they're seeking. They're seeking. to undermine confidence in our electoral process. That's the explicit goal in many cases. And there's, you know, there are several corollary goals, I think, maybe less realistic. But the most likely outcome is the effects of what they've been saying and doing will shake that confidence.

This doesn't help that in any possible way. You have at least Stefanik, who is a, you know, was a sort of once moderate, and I think most people thought reasonable Republican, now a super nationalist populist Republican, a Trump devotee, now the number three ranking Republican in the House of Representatives tweeted several hours ago, secure our elections, audit the vote. I'm looking forward to the far left Dems of NYC joining me in supporting election audits and strengthening election integrity, exclamation mark. Will the media melt down like they do about Republicans who want to strengthen elections? Meethinks not.

So setting aside, the me thinks, what do you make of her complaint? I mean, it's... We're not going to talk about the me thinks? You can talk about the me thinks. I was saving that to come to you. I mean, look, I mean, we know that that referring to the 2020 election and continuing audits of the 2020 election, which, in which there have been multiple recounts, dozens of legal challenges, and no merit found to any of them, that's a bad faith exploitation of what is, though, actually an stunningly incompetent moment. I mean, this is so incompetent.

They're calling the Iowa Democratic Party right now for crisis management advice. I mean, this is unbelievable. And, you know, one of the things that you find when you dive into a lot of these issues is how often grotesque incompetence is predictable. And in fact, it turns out people have been warning about New York elections for a while. Let me just read the first couple of paragraphs from my October 26th, 2020 New York Times article. The official who oversees voter registration in New York City is the 80-year-old mother of a former congressman. The director of Election Day Operations is a close friend of Manhattan's Republican chairwoman.

The head of ballot management is the son of a former Brooklyn Democratic district leader, and the administrative manager is the wife of a city council member. What they are making the point is that as the workings, next paragraph, as the workings of American democracy have become more complex with sophisticated technology, early voting, and the threat of foreign interference, New York has clung to a century-old system of local election administration that is one of the last vestiges of pure patronage in government, a relic from the era of powerful political clubhouses and Tammany Hall. So this place is not a meritocracy, shall we say.

It's a cesspool of nepotism and is not up for the task. And it's not been up to the task for a while. I mean, you know, this same article was saying that in last year in the primary, they failed to mail out many absentee ballots until the day before the primary disenfranchising voters. They sent erroneous general election ballot packages to many other residents, confusing people. I mean, you know, I'm going to go back to something that I was pounding on through large parts of 2019 and 2020. Look, corruption undermines faith in

government. Incompetence also undermines faith in government. Rightfully so. I mean, you know, in circumstances like this, the message should not be, okay, wait a minute, let's still have faith in New York's democratic processes. The message should be, something here is broken, and we're going to do our best to fix it. And oh, by the way, this election, for which we already have evidence that there was a massive mistake, we're going to put under a microscope when the final results when the final results are announced. We're going to put these under a microscope. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I just keep going back to this, Steve. a basic, be competent in the basic functions, government, in the basic functions be competent. We talk a lot about decaying trust in institutions. We talk a lot about the fracturing of this republic. Well, this is a reason why we have decaying trust in institutions right here. And then when you lift up the rock of New York's elections and you see all of this ridiculous nepotism, why should anyone have confidence in this entity? So it's going to have to do things. And right from here on out, it's going to have to be transparent, and it's going to have to open itself up to an extreme level of scrutiny to give people confidence in whatever the final election

results are. Can I just add one thing to that, which I think is really important, which is, unlike the audits that they're doing across the country, this error would have been caught immediately, no matter what, because you always have the paper ballots. That's what gets run through the machine. That's why the numbers didn't add up immediately for the Eric Adams campaign. So this isn't one of those things we're like, oh, this is evidence that we need the audits across the country, not at all. This error was always going to get caught within an hour of them posting the results. It would have been caught in any other jurisdiction during the 2020 election within an hour of the results posting. So in that sense, I just want to be clear on how this stuff works

behind the scenes. Like, this was not something that would have slid under the radar at any point in any other place in the country. That was literally my question for Jonah. but I but since you since you raised it let me address it all all true right I mean I think that's true and you saw you did see some other places and and I I probably shouldn't guess but if I remember correctly Antrim County Michigan was one of them where there there were tabulation mistakes they were caught and corrected pretty quickly and then the count could could move on And it is notable that given all of what we've heard from Donald Trump and Mike Lindell and Sidney Powell and others making claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, they've never been able to come up with anything so much as this and actually show the problems this way, which I think is a fair point. Turning my question slightly to you, Jonah, even if it's a fair point, does it matter?

If 50 plus percent of Republicans who think the election was fixed or fraudulent or illegitimate and, you know, or at least maybe flawed because of gross incompetence, to David's point, this is going to strengthen their case and deepen their suspicions, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that it strengthens the most is this argument. which we can talk about the motivations of the Republicans who passed it in state legislatures another time or at least later this argument that state legislatures

should be able to second guess the results of election officials if they find them untrustworthy which is one of the things they did if I understand it right in Georgia which has been cast entirely as a 2024 gambit to steal the election

by by rabid democracy hating Republicans in these state legislatures whether that's a little true a lot true not true at all again can discuss another time this buttresses that argument really really well just as a superficial talking point kind of thing if nothing else um beyond that i mean david it was right people should read that in new york times piece from 2020 it's pretty eye-opening um but he didn't read my favorite stat from that piece which was that And investigators found that something like 10% of everybody who worked at the Board of Elections was related to somebody else who worked at the Board of Elections, which is just, you know, that's like almost, if that happened in a normal random population, the amount of sort of incestuous, you know, child weird, it would be bad. I just, I could see myself, I could see Sarah waiting to pounce on my, my, my, my, poor taste jokes. I'm just not going to go there. But he's learning.

I think this nature is healing. I think that there's a massive disconnect, which I've talked about a little bit here on air on this podcast, I think, about the level of sanctimony and self-righteousness that comes from the heart of blue America

about elections and democracy when, in fact, the barriers to entry at every level for democracy in lots of blue metropolitan areas is arguably much, much worse than in a lot of red states. It's just that it doesn't map the comfortable narrative of blocking minorities from voting or Jim Crow stuff or or any of that kind of thing. It's it's about a municipal or or state level elite who are the last vestiges of machines that want to make it difficult and also major unions, particularly teachers unions and whatnot, want to make it very difficult to have high turnout because they benefit from being

able to calibrate who actually votes. And the fact that the board of elections was allowed to fester this long. I mean, Bill de Blasio, put down the bong long enough to all. offer these guys like $20 million to fix their problems, and they refuse because they didn't want to fix them because they're not problems. They're not bugs to them. They're features. And it would be so much better if everybody on the right and the left who is sincere in their talking points about what's wrong with America looked at the people in their, the institutions and people in their own camps that violate the principles that they claim to be standing for and try to fix their own side first before pointing out all the flaws.

and the other side. Republicans should care a lot more about fixing their own flaws about democracy rather than saying doing what about his games about Democrats and vice versa. There's a lot to be, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit on both sides, but everyone just wants to pretend that they have a monopoly on virtue, and it's the other side that falls short of the ideal. David, I believe that's something about a, for the speck in your eye, I missed the plank and mine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think Jonah's advice about getting involved locally and see what's happening locally, I mean, this is just a consistent theme across a whole host of issues. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important.

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slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Let's move to our next topic. Immigration. More than one million migrants have crossed the U.S.-Mexican border since last October, already surpassing. the 2019 numbers, and we still have three months left to go. Vice President Harris visited the border on Friday after receiving a lot of criticism, especially following her interview with Lester Holt, where she kind of laughed off the very idea of visiting the border, said she didn't understand the point of the question because she also hadn't visited Europe.

That was seen as sort of a, you know, a PR problem. she visited the border, but she visited El Paso, and she didn't really lay out any roadmap for the Biden administration. It was kind of a checkbox visit. She was criticized by House members from her own party for not visiting parts of the border that were in more crisis, not visiting some of the children's detention facilities that had received criticism for their conditions, and sort of a pop-in, pop-out, not really meeting with the people who are on the front lines of what's going on there. So my question is to use Steve first, where should Democrats go on immigration, both from a policy standpoint, but also politically? Yeah, two different questions, two different answers. I mean, I think from a policy, part of the reason that they're confused on a policy standpoint is because they can't figure out what to do from a political standpoint.

point. What we've seen at the border should be a surprise to no one, certainly should not have been a surprise to the Biden administration. If you remember, you had Susan Rice and Jake Sullivan, top advisors to Joe Biden when he was president-elect, top advisors to Joe Biden now, give interviews back in December before Biden was sworn in talking about what was coming. They gave warnings. They said, don't, you know, to migrants don't come now, but help is on the way. They, they sort of broadcast their intentions to ease many of the Trump era restrictions at a time when people were warning about a coming influx of migrants. And they didn't know what to do and what to say. And I think it's, it's evident in everything that we've seen since. And Kamala Harris has continued inability to answer basic questions about what she's doing. I mean, I think, Reparpley, Republicans for a long time have been going for what I, you know, what felt to me like a cheap shot. Oh, she was named the head of Biden's border committee and she's not even been down

to the border. And it felt like, yeah, come on, you know, if she, if she's actually serious about it, if she's having meetings in Washington, if she's working with with the countries in Central America that are sort of at the root of the problem, that is really that important that she do a photo how much real work is she going to do if she does a photo op at the border right but in retrospect i think maybe the republicans making that argument had a point she actually isn't that attentive to to this she doesn't have sort of serious policy proposals to get in front of it and i think her her inability to answer questions to be specific is a reflection on the messaging side of the lack of serious policy decisions on the policy side. And it's unclear.

If you asked me today, what is the Biden administration policy on the border going to look like in two months? I can't, I can't give you an answer. And I can't even guess at this point. Jonah, Trump is headed to the border to wade into this issue as well. Is he going to make it better or worse? He will make it worse. Look, I mean, he'll make it worse. And because I just really need to be explained. I mean, I mean.

All right. That was a bit of a trick question in the sense that there was nothing more really to say about it. Let me expand a little. So Greg Abbott is going with him. Greg Abbott is polling ahead of Joe Biden in Texas specifically on the immigration issue. Greg Abbott has said that he is a state. is going to, you know, do these things to tackle the immigration problem himself. Christine Nome is sending South Dakota National Guard down that way.

I want to touch on some of the legal problems with that, maybe with David, but politically are Republicans strengthening their hand on immigration heading into the 2022 midterms by continuing to highlight it or by having Trump get involved by sort of doing, I think, some things that look a little more like stunts, they get attention, but then also can be seen as stunty. Are the Republicans doing the right thing to highlight the difference? It's obviously a winning issue for Republicans, particularly border state Republicans. I mean, everyone's locked into their stance on immigration in a partisan sense, who's already been elected, right? I mean, except for a handful of Democrats, you know, was Quayar down there is kind of more Republican-friendly on these issues than

than a lot of other Democrats, but for the most part, they're using it as, you know, this is the problem with immigration writ large, is that everybody wants to have the issue rather than solve the problem. And before when you were asking, you know, what about the policy versus the politics of this, I've been saying for 20 years that my preferred immigration policy is to have one.

And I'm serious about that. I mean, I could give you preferences about like what it would look like. But at this point, I would pretty much be happy, with any single immigration policy that's relatively humane that you could come up with, so long as it was then enforced. Because non-enforcing it, getting to sort of David's point earlier about how incompetence breathes faith and distrust in government, so does willful neglect of enforcing the law.

It creates everybody, it creates all sorts of pernicious incentives. And I think that the Republicans like the, immigration stuff, mostly as a culture war issue now. And mostly in some ways, I mean, you know, depending on the actual part of the country where in some places, the illegal immigration stuff is a real, is as much more of a real issue in terms of the life you live. But if you look at where the intensity of views on this stuff is, it tends to be in places with very few illegal immigrants. I mean, South Dakota is not a hotbed of illegal immigrants. And that just highlights how it's more of a culture war, us versus them kind of thing. And in some ways,

it's an own the libs kind of thing. And that's why everyone is pouncing so much, and I use pouncing advisedly on the Kamala Harris stuff, because she's bad at this. She came up in California politics. She's like a basketball player who can only dribble with one hand. She only knows how to do a certain kind of rhetoric about hope and inclusiveness

and how the other people don't like you and how we love all immigrants and all those kind of stuff. And I'm not saying there's no merit to any of that kind of stuff. but you don't put that person in charge of a border crisis and expect them to do well. And that's why I'm enjoying watching a lot of Democrats think that she was set up. They're talking about how this is unfair to her. And I don't think it's unfair to her. She's got the job.

She took the job. If she had the political chops to see that this was a trap, she should have seen it if it was a trap and not taking the job. But instead, she handled it very badly. She could have gone to the border in the first week after getting the job and instead she suffered 90 days of bad press and then went to the border in a half-assed way anyway. So it's a hot mess and it will get worse before it gets better.

So David, something I was sort of watching with the Harris trip. I think she has a problem with the staff around her, which is interesting. So this is why you don't ever set your principal up for a layup because if they hit the layup, people are like, oh, well, it was just a layup. And if they don't hit the layup, it's like, oh, dear God, she can't even hit a layup. And I've noticed in a bunch of the reporting on her team, they haven't been with her very long, and they're incredibly protective of her is actually the wrong word because that's not,

they may think that's what they're doing, but it's not. They're shielding her, they're creating this tight bubble around her because they don't trust her. They don't see her skills and how to actually use them and let her sort of, of run free in her own domain. So I think it's a huge problem for her political future, which I think is why you're seeing this problem. They don't know how to map her political future with this issue. And I'm curious, David, on the policy side, what are the things that the Biden administration can do on their own? Let's assume Congress is totally unwilling to tackle this, which I think is a fair assumption. What can the Biden administration,

do on their own? What can we actually expect of them? And what can states do on their own? When we see Greg Abbott talk about this, what can we roll our eyes at? And what can we say like, oh, okay, well, that's, that's real. Well, you know, let's start with the states, because there's a lot of talk about the National Guard. And there is actually some pretty broad ability of a governor to call up and command the National Guard. In theory, so in theory, when a National Guard is under state status, the guard is actually under the command of the governor. Now, why don't governors call up the guard then and use the guard to secure the border more? Well, I'll give you a one word answer.

Money, calling up a military unit is extraordinarily expensive. I'm talking expensive on a level that is tough for mortals to comprehend. And states have budgets, have balanced budget. requirements, they don't have the kind of resources that the federal government has. They just can't initiate military operations for any length of time at all, certainly not enough time to make any kind of difference at all. You also, by the way, I would just note, have the Supreme Court case, the SB 70, 1070 out of Arizona, which held that states are somewhat limited simply because the federal government is in charge of immigration also. Right. I mean,

creating a statutory scheme that supplements federal immigration law is going to be a no-go or strengthens federal immigration law is going to be a no-go. But I get a lot of questions from people around here are quite worried about immigration. Why don't, why didn't Abbot just call up the guard? Why didn't he, you know, why didn't he use state resources? And the answer to that, one of the big answers to that is, it's just flat out too expensive. And so you have little stunts like Kristi Nome, sending the guard down, and then allegedly, you know, there might be private funding going into the state treasury

to help fund the deployment. Well, that's a good way to make a billionaire, not a billionaire anymore. But so the states have some profound limits. They have the legal limits that you describe. They have the practical financial limits. But on the federal side of this, look, as far as the things that the Biden administration can do

on its own, it is in a political box because some of those things might gasp, mirror some of the things that the Trump administration did to try to control the border during border surges during the Trump term. But right now, look, this is an incredible, and we've talked about this before, this is an incredibly difficult challenge. It is incredibly difficult. And it is a symbol of the dysfunction of our government. It's hard. hard to think of a more, of a better symbol of the dysfunction of our government than the total inability of Congress to act here in the complete desire of the political parties to own the issue rather than to solve the issue, as Jonah just said. And look, I mean, from

Kamala Harris's team, there's this saying we used in the army, a good leader sets you up for success, a bad leader sets you up for failure. I think there's very little question that Kamala Harris has been set up for failure, maybe not intentionally, well, I'm not going to say intentionally at all, but set up for failure because you put her in charge of something that is desperate for a legislative fix where she has no ability to achieve a legislative fix at all. And there's just a limited amount of stuff that the president can do on his own authority, especially when the president is of a political party that essentially the issue is framed like this. The Republicans are mean when they want to restrict inflow of migrants.

into the United States, and we're compassionate because we welcome migrants. And yet, if you take that compassionate stance, sadly enough, you're often going to create a humanitarian crisis through your compassionate stance. And so they're in a box, and Congress is broken, and I don't see a way out. All right, Jonah, your turn.

So, um... A few years ago, it was a, it became a sort of one of these things that sort of liberal journalists made fun of, which was the headline Dems and Disarray. And because they really weren't in disarray and it was just this go-to narrative and that kind of thing. And it kind of reminds me of the moment that we're in talking about what we just talked about with immigration, with the New York election, with Kamala Harris, and with infrastructure, I kind of feel like Randy Quay, in the movie, the paper, where he starts yelling at Michael Keaton saying, come on, you got to say it. You got to say it. No one ever gets to say it.

And then finally Michael Keaton gets to yell, stop the presses. Because we actually get to say Dems and Disarray. And it's kind of fun. Which brings me to the infrastructure thing, which contrary to the Dems and Disarray part, it looks like Dems and Disarray. In many respects, it is Dems and Disarray, I would argue. but it's a traditional form of American politics, of the messiness of American politics.

And that's sort of what I have a, I have a contrarian thesis about the infrastructure mess, which I want to float by you guys, which is that in, for the last 20 years, we've basically had this, everything has been boiled down to these narratives that we're all familiar with.

Republicans are obstructionists. You know, both parties are basically run as parliamentary system, as if we lived in a parliamentary system when we don't. Everything's done through the leadership. And when Biden went out there and said the quiet part out loud, which is one of the cliches

that's operating right now, and said that these things are linked, Republicans all went screaming to the cameras to complain very loudly and whine very loudly about how this was outrageous and I think they had a very strong argument on their side and that became what the story was

but the real story about why Biden had to have this bizarre flip-flop I would argue you've all of in argues is that behind the scenes moderate Democrats were flipping out and people like Chris Coons and Joe Manchin and

Kristen Cinema and all these others said hey look you're screwing us here if we can't do this Bernie Sanders wish list thing, this is a good infrastructure bill. It's $1.2 trillion in infrastructure. It's the kind of thing that, and you just went out and said it was awesome, and it was the kind of thing that you were elected to do, and then you cave to Pelosi Schumer and AOC and Bernie on this, you're screwing us here, and you're going to cost us Senate seats. And so Biden backtracked and did one of the most nakedly unsightly cleanup operations

we've seen in presidential communications in a long time. And my take on this is that nature is healing. That this is actually this coalition that used to be the block that used to govern our politics most reliably. We're essentially moderate

were moderate Republicans and Democrats who controlled the center in one sense or another. And that's been gone for a very long time. They're re-emerging, and people don't know how to talk about it, because they haven't seen it in so long. And most of these reporters are 20-something and 30-something.

All they've ever known how to cover on the right and the left is sort of own the lives or own the cons, kind of rockem-sockham, obstructionist versus, you know, glorious transformational politics stuff. And this is actually how sausage got used to get made in American politics for most of our lives. And it's a good thing that we're seeing this, even if it's kind of ugly.

Sarah, explain to me why I'm wrong. So I was on this week, on ABC on Sunday, with someone from the progressive side. And it was so interesting, to your point a little, that nature is healing, but people still are, like, kind of trying to use their old talking points. She kept saying that they couldn't let Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema get away with not supporting this more progressive bill.

And that's why this is the Republicans' fault. And it was the most confusing set of points because, like, obviously, she wanted to be able to pin this on the Republican when, in fact, this is a problem within the Democratic caucus. This is pitting the progressives against the moderates. Folks like Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema do not want to support this bill. They have not said they're going to support this bill, in part, by the way, because there is no bill yet.

Just to like borrow Joe Biden, there is no bill yet. This is like a notional idea from Bernie Sanders that right now the notion is let's spend $6 trillion. dollars, where that money's going, how it's going exactly, unless you just want to throw out some buzzwords like climate change. There's nothing really to sink your teeth into right now. So, yeah, they don't have the Democratic votes because they don't have any votes yet, really, because there's not a real bill yet. The problem with what Joe Biden did, though, again, yeah, Republicans complained. He walked it back for Republicans. Republicans are kind of sitting there going like, okay, we're fine. It's the Democrats now who Joe Biden like really kicked in the Hornet's nest because Now, Elizabeth Warren and don't forget, they can't lose more than four people in the House without Republicans, all of those progressives have realized that it's not just Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema who can potentially hold this up. They get to say now, oh, no, no, sorry, you said they were going to be linked. We're holding you to that. We're now not going to

vote for the bipartisan bill unless you've already signed the progressive bill, which kills the by partisan bill unless they can get their house in order. So Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, whoever, they all want to find a way to blame this on Republicans. And I think it's really hard to come up with a way in which this is Republicans' fault. They were never going to vote for your partisan reconciliation bill. That's why it was the partisan reconciliation bill. They're on the sidelines for this one. This is all your mess. Figure out your own house. And, you know, I see people roll their eyes from the left when like, well, Joe Manchin's the only Democrat who could get elected from West Virginia.

They're like, that's not true. Okay, let's see you elect someone else then. David, is nature healing? Is this the path towards normal politics? This is sort of my thesis is that when you become, when dysfunctional politics has become the new norm, nothing seems more abnormal than normal politics. Right? And like for most of our lives,

You know, Democratic coalitions had these, you know, like, remember in the 80s? You had Sam Nunn who was like a foreign policy hawk and yada, yada, yada, and the reality is that voters create moderates and centrists more than anything else. And that's because the people from these states are interested in getting reelected. And if voters in their states are like down for $1.2 trillion in roads and sewers and that kind of thing, but not down for $6 trillion for babysitting, as AOC kind of put it. Isn't this a good thing? I'm looking for some green shoots here, man.

Help me. I mean, I'm going to say it's a trial balloon for a good thing. You know, this is, when I saw that this deal had been reached, I sort of had this like, because I'm, you know, as the oldest, as the elder statesman of this podcast, in addition to, you know, my hip being a little bit sore when it rains, I still, I still remember political compromise from back in the day. And I had some flashes of memory from those hazy days in the 1980s and early 1990s when you would see these political compromises. And I thought it was interesting how much the contemporary body politic tried to generate, antibodies against compromise with the revolt of sort of the progressives. And I do think what we have

is a trial balloon for normal politics. And this is something, I mean, I want to flip a quick question to Sarah about, because I think that you're kind of seeing a trial balloon for different kind of politics taking place in one state. And that state is Arizona that now has two Democratic senators. And it's very, very, very swingy. It's very, very purple. It's not red or blue anymore. And so you have Kirsten Cinema, who is one of the compromisers, and she has the wildest favorable, unfavorable ratings I've seen in this hyper-polarized era. So she's approved by 52% of Democrats, 51% of Republicans, and 44% of independents. And her comrade, Senator Mark Kelly, has one of these approval ratings that I'm quite used to seeing in this hyper-polarized area. He's a

Democrat. He's approved by 82% of Democrats, 17% of Republicans, and 46% of independence. And although he has only a seven-point favorable gap, he's 48-41 favorable while Kirsten Sinema is 50-37 favorable, there's an argument that he's in a stronger political position. And Sarah, you're nodding. Yep. So we've had senators with approval rating similar-ish to that. Pat Toomey, Rob Portman, Corey Gardner, two of those are retiring. One of them lost. Basically, what we've seen in the past, at least, unfortunately, to undermine Jonah's point,

is that these people do lose their re-elections or they're forced out into retirement because they're so convinced they're going to lose their re-elections. And so when you- Do they lose? Factual question, do they lose re-elections because they're primaried or do they lose their re-elections in the general? In the Cory Gardner case, he lost it in the general. you know, I think there's a little bit of both in history that you can point to in the last four or so years. We can maybe expand it to six years. Also, Trump makes things a little weirder too. It does.

Some of that, yeah. You know, I think like Corey Gardner in effect, it's like having your foot in two different boats and the boats are kind of moving off in different directions. So what you see in those approval numbers for Kristen Cinema is, you know, both sides like are equally well, but not so much. Like the Republicans would rather have a Republican than Kristen Cinema. and the Democrats would rather have someone more to the left than Kristen Cinema. And so, you know, without rate choice voting, for instance, you end up losing that race if you're Christian Cinema eventually. So, Steve. So we're doomed.

You're saying we're doomed. This has been a real uplifting conversation so far today. So, Steve, just on the pure politics of it, is it really good for even? blue state like hard blue state politicians I mean forget Bernie Sanders and AOC specifically

but for your genetic generic liberal Democrat is it a win to sabotage $1.2 trillion dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill

because you didn't get your $5 to $6 trillion human infrastructure bill? I mean is that walk me through the policy because it's seems like a bluff that a bunch of Democrats are going to get called on and and and and waiver yeah I mean so I'll totally dodge the question by saying uh it depends on the state right

I mean if it's a really really blue state it's a win if it's a purpleish state um you know it's much more complicated proposition I think but there's there's I mean to me that the most interesting part of this entire debate is the Joe Biden question, because what we saw, I think, last Thursday sort of distilled in that five second soundbite where he sort of stumbled over his words and then said, these things are going to pass in tandem. To me, is what we've seen in domestic policy in the Biden administration for the entire time he's been president. And we saw this in the first fight over COVID relief where you had Joe Biden sitting down with Republicans, by all accounts of people in the room, he seemed actually genuinely

interested in doing sort of nostalgic for the kind of old school negotiating that used to take place in the Senate. You give a little, we give a little, going through the process, leaving Republicans in the room with him with the impression that he was serious about a bipartisan COVID deal. until he wasn't. And talk to people who were involved in those conversations or people who spoke directly to the president about his approach to COVID. And they will say they were convinced he was going to do a deal. And then Democrats in Congress and the progressive White House staff got a hold of him. And it was all over. It was over quickly. I think that's what you had here. If you go back and listen to what Nancy Pelosi said, just hours before Joe Biden made his in tandem comment that

had to then later be walked back. She said precisely the same thing. This wasn't new for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to link these bills. They'd been doing it rhetorically for weeks. But she made very clear that one would require the other in order to pass. Biden was basically mimicking her language and, you know, saying what Nancy Pelosi was saying, saying what the progresses were saying, when he had just come from, just emerged from these negotiations with Republicans, where he had said precisely the opposite.

I think Joe Biden is torn. He doesn't know what he is. He doesn't know where he wants to end up. I think he's taken by the argument that he could be the next FDR, that he could be transformative, that he could expand government. But he also remembers his days as this negotiator. In fact, in the press conference, the same press conference where he made is in tandem comments. He sort of waxed nostalgic for 30 seconds on how great it was, the old, I mean, basically making your initial point, Jonah, like, isn't it great that we're back to the old days of the U.S. Senate when we can go back and forth and I give a little more than I want to and Republicans give a little more than they want to. And we come to some agreement that nobody really loves, but it's an agreement nonetheless

and then we move forward and improve the country. That's basically what the guy said. So he seemed happy with that outcome, but he also understands that he needs Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to be happy with what he's doing. And so you saw in display, In that moment, the in tandem comment in the press conference at large, I think what we've seen from Joe Biden over the first six of six months of his presidency, he doesn't know what he is. He doesn't know what he wants to do. See, I think this highlights something that a lot of us were saying for years about Biden, which is that he has never been a centrist. He was a centrist within the confines of the Democratic Party. He was always trying to balance the right wingers, you know, the Sam Nuns. and that crowd with the with the more left wing um crowd and that meant he was always a moving target and as the party went more left wing as there were fewer and fewer of the right as the moderate coalition of democrats shrunk that made him move leftward because he always wanted to be

at the equidistant center of the democratic party not the center of american politics and i guess the point I'm trying to, I'm groping at, you know, thumblessly here is that for politics to get better, we need to move away from what the political scientists call a party, you know, a party leadership rather, or what I keep talking about as if we live in a parliamentary democracy where you elect a party and the party has one unified will. And instead, as Steve Tellers and a other political scientists and talking about what we need are more factions within the parties at war with each other and those factual coalitions eventually if you have factions within a party they eventually realize that they can enlist aid and support from outside the party and that's

how you get back to more normal politics and so i i personally think that you know mansion you know, you know, Lord of West Virginia, first of his name, is doing wonderful things for the country precisely by being a democratic pain in the ass. And I don't mean that in a sort of own the libs way. I don't mean that in a sort of policy way. I mean in a way of forcing a reckoning on our governing institutions to understand how to actually work within the Madisonian structure as intended.

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Learn more at amex.ca. slash Y Annex. Speaking of our Republican institutions, David, let's talk a little bit about the Department of Justice in its final days under the Trump administration. Yes, but first is style guide point. Joe Manchin's actual title is more poetic. Lord of the Coal Soked Hills.

I apologize. So yes, yeah, that's, we need to, these titles are very, very important. Okay, Bill Barr, and I'm going to flip this back to you so fast, Sarah. So remarkably candid on the record interview with Bill Barr that was in the Atlantic. by Jonathan Carl, in which he recounts a very dramatic confrontation between Barr and President Trump after Barr had told an Associated Press reporter that there had been no evidence of fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the election, and which led to this extremely tense confrontation in the White House. And I want to focus in on something here.

You know, there's a lot of people who've said Bill Barr, hero, others who've just vilified Bill Barr. And there was something that I wanted to focus in that struck me as remarkably naive at this point. So this is Barr initiates an investigation or an inquiry into basically frivolous fraud claims, which was highly unusual before the election was certified. And Jonathan Carl asked him about this. And it says, Barr told me he'd already concluded that it was highly unlikely that evidence existed that would tip scales in the election.

He had expected Trump to lose and therefore was not surprised by the outcome. He also knew that at some point Trump was going to confront him about the allegations and he wanted to be able to say that he'd looked into them and that they were unfounded. So in addition to giving prosecutors' approval

to open investigations and to clear incredible allegations of substantial fraud, Barr began his own, unofficial inquiry into the major claims that the president and his allies were making. Question, Sarah, given that, we know that Trump was not ever going to accept any conclusion that there was no fraud. And given that that is now a position of a large number of Republicans, did that decision to open those inquiries do more harm than good? that's a very good question because this has been proven over and over again but i just i do think it's worth underlining if there is no one close to donald trump no matter how loyal they've been

no matter how supportive they've been through thick and thin and everything else who when they raise their hand and say nope that's not right this isn't true we can't do this if then you refuse to leave that person, call them a traitor, say, well, they just hate Donald Trump. That is not a rational. That's a religion. That's a religion. And so what you have here is Bill Barr, someone who had, you know, sky high approval among Trump supporters, raising his hand and saying, actually, on this thing, he's been right on so many other things. But on this one thing, Donald Trump's not right. There's no evidence of fraud. And the full-throated reaction from the vast, vast majority of Trump supporters was, well, too bad that Bill Barr is also a turncoat. Same as Mike Pence. We saw that then obviously

play out on January 6th. So then the question becomes, is it ever worth continuing to try to do that to highlight the religious fanaticism of this certain type of Trump supporter? Or do you stop highlighting that. Look, on the one hand, I think, for instance, the Mike Pence refusing to not certify the election on January 6th was a really important moment, because I think everyone then saw, like, nobody has been more loyal than Mike Pence through everything. I would do anything for love, but I won't do that, that being end America as an experiment in self-government. So, okay. So was Bill Barr an important moment in that run-up to this, like, the evidence for this hypothesis? I guess I think it was. I don't like that he, you know, broke with DOJ tradition

of not investigating an election until after it was certified. I think that if I had still been there, I would have very strenuously sat in the room advocating to not do that. But that's why I was not the Senate confirmed attorney general. And I think that despite the vast majority of people discounting what Barr said, I do think there are some people who saw that and thought, well, I mean, Bill Barr did say he looked into it. And Bill Barr is saying it's all bullshit. That hopefully was meaningful to a few people. and that's worth something.

I think my personal rant on this whole thing, by the way, is a footnote is for four years. I dealt with people, particularly on the right, that Jeff Sessions' recusal was the original sin. If only he hadn't recused himself, all would have turned out right in the Trump presidency somehow, and that he should have known

that he couldn't accept the position of attorney General because he would have to recuse himself from a campaign investigation that he did not know existed until after he was confirmed as Attorney General because the Department of Justice does not confirm the existence of investigations. I appreciate the Bill Barr situation more because it eviscerates that argument about Jeff Sessions. It was never the recusal. It was never the appointment of the special counsel. It was never about facts or reason or logic. When Bill Barr told Donald Trump there was no evidence of voter fraud that he had simply lost the election, Donald Trump's response was, you must hate Trump. That's it. That's the

test. Yep. So Steve, is Sarah right that all things considered launching the investigation outside of normal DOJ policy was the right course of action? And to be fair, Sarah's conclusion based on difficult circumstances? Yeah, I think on balance she is right. I think the final comment from Barr when it went out in that Associated Press story, then it took over cable news first, broadcast news afterwards, was a big moment and turns out to have been a very important moment. you're never going to convince the people that Sarah characterizes as sort of religious

Trump supporters. It doesn't matter what new facts are introduced. Doesn't matter who they might have trusted before, who's now questioning Donald Trump or challenging Donald Trump. It's always going to be Trump is right. It doesn't matter. None of that stuff matters. You're never going to convince them.

So I don't think they were the target audience. Also, Steve, don't forget that if they had followed DOJ protocols, and Barr believes that Donald Trump has lost the election, to wait until after certification to look into potential election fraud would mean post-January 6th, and very much the person announcing that there was no election fraud would have been Garland or, you know, a Biden attorney general. Less credible with Senator Wright.

So Barr was in a really hard spot in that way. Yeah. Look, I think the other sort of big picture point that's worth making is how many people went into the Trump administration, took jobs in the Trump administration, including very important jobs in the Trump administration, anticipating precisely this kind of moment. Now, I don't know, bar well enough to know whether this was what he did. I don't know that he went in saying, look, I'm going to make these public arguments, that defend the president, I'm going to be loyal publicly so that the president likes me so that I can be in the room when an important decision is made or so that I can cut against

the president in a public way on something of, you know, truly huge consequence. I think that that explains, you know, certainly some people went into the Trump administration in these senior positions out of pure ambition. But I think there are a lot of people, I would include people like Ryan's Prebis in this category, Mike Pompeo, in this category, John Bolton, in this category, John Kelly, in this category, who went in saying, I really want to be there to potentially prevent a catastrophe, shape an outcome in a huge moment. And again, I don't know bar well enough to know to say with certainty that that's what was happening here. But it certainly fits the pattern, right? I mean, he said this. He made a point of saying it publicly.

He's now made a point of talking about it and giving further background on his decision to challenge the president. When we got to a point where I don't think it's hyperbolic to say, you know, as Sarah just suggested, we were looking at long-term damage or potentially long-term disruption of the American experiment in self-government. I mean, that's what this was talking about. And so I think Barr may have taken this opportunity to say, I've been loyal. I even played along on questions of election integrity. I mean, remember, Barr said things that were, that suggested he thought foreign governments

might be involved. He sort of egged the president on in this way, and I think in an irresponsible way. And that when it came to it, he had to stand up for this moment because that's what he got into government for. So, Jonah, I'm going to close with you. And really, this is a question that's just designed to trigger your general thoughts on the subject. But I got to deal with the closing of this article. And here's two weeks later, this is after Trump just unloading. on Barr in the most ridiculous way.

Two weeks later, it says Barr went down to the White House to tell the president he planned to resign before the end of the year. It was their first meeting since their confrontation. To diffuse the tension, Barr had written an effusive resignation letter, which he handed to the president when he got into the Oval Office. The letter praised Trump's record and played directly into his complaints about how he'd been treated by Democrats, saying his efforts, quote, had been met by a partisan onslaught against which you and against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of

bounds. Trump read the letter while Barr was sitting across from him, quote, this is pretty good, unquote, he said. So I have two questions. One, what are your general thoughts in this matter? And two, on a scale of one to ten, how cringe is that closing anecdote, an 11 or a 12? I take Steve's point. I think he's right. But I think there's a flip side to this where the idea that there are a bunch of people who convinced themselves that January 6 or his election stuff was a break from the man we had seen for five years that somehow like I didn't sign up for this. to a certain extent, a lot of these people did. Like, there is no, like, every time there's some new Trump perfidy, people are like, well, this goes beyond the pale, or, you know, this isn't what I signed up for, or this is, it is, like, it's Aesopian.

It was pretty obvious the guy was a scorpion from the beginning. That doesn't, that doesn't lessen Steve's point about some people seeing that and wanting to be guardrails and circuit breakers in the administration to do good things or to prevent bad things from happening. There were a lot of those people from doing it. But there are also just a lot of people who just simply deluded themselves. And I think, look, we have a nice relationship with Mick Mulvaney. He's a nice guy personally. He's one of them. I think he is steeped in delusion about Donald Trump. And his strange superpower is his ability to talk himself out of his own delusions long enough to give coherent answers that don't hold up, you know, in retrospect.

And I think that the useful thing about this Barr episode is sort of getting to Sarah's point is that, yes, we're not going to convince anybody who still believes the election was stolen that still thinks Trump is right, not because just with what Barr said, but because of what 40-plus judges, including a bunch of Trump-appointed judges, including a bunch of appointed Supreme Court justices said all sorts of investigations, yada, yada. These people are unpersuadable. I don't like Sarah's use of the word religion. I would prefer cult because good religions actually have coherent bodies of theology and doctrine

that you can look at from the outside. And this is just simply I like Trump's Musk as far as I can tell, which is not a coherent theological position. That said, the useful thing about this heuristically is that. Anybody who still believes the election was stolen and that bar is in on it, right? That bar was lying in wait like some sort of sea snake that the guy describes in the movie Gladiator, waiting for his moment to betray Trump at the 11th hour or the 12th hour. If they still believe that, you know you don't have to take them seriously anymore.

You know you don't have to argue with them anymore. You know that they're either working from a place of deep and profound delusion or from a place of deep, cynical villainy because they know the truth and they just don't care because they're making money or they're advancing their cause by playing into a outrageous lie.

If you still can look at the bar episode and say, well, we don't have all the facts or there's still some troubling stuff or, you know, whose bar for me to, you know, take his word over Donald Trump, then we know how seriously

we should wait your complaint about the election or about any of this kind of stuff. And that alone is helpful to know, oh, okay, you're either a dangerous hack or you're deeply, deeply diluted, but I don't need to, like, engage you in good faith anymore. And I find that helpful. All right. This has been an illuminating podcast, but I do want to throw back. David was saying he's the elder statesman on this podcast, which is obviously accurate.

But I am not. And a little bit of Twitter today, a little bit of 1998 coming back. It was the heyday, if you will. Oops, I did it again. Jeannie in a bottle. And today, Christina Aguilera shows her support for Brittany Spears in a series of heartfelt tweets. This obviously has to do with the conservatorship and whether Brittany will get out from under it. Although, Jonah, when I read this line, I thought, hmm, I bet Jonah has feelings about this.

while I am not behind the closed doors of this very layered and personal yet public conversation, all I can do is share from my heart on what I've heard, read, and seen in the media. As in no, there's no information here that's other than like any of the rest of us can also think. It's like Salieri and Amadeus where he, you know, just as too many, where the emperor says too many notes. I don't know what that means. So just have some nostalgia for 1998. And, you know, I had jelly, little jelly platform heels that were pretty awesome. Those little butterfly clips you would wear in your hair, blue nail polish, some glitter eye shadow.

Me too. It was good times. And with that, thank you for joining our podcast. Make sure to rate us wherever you're getting your podcast, not just because we like seeing all those five stars. But it actually helps other people find this podcast. So definitely go do that. It will help other people join you in this family of 1998 nostalgia. We'll see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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