The Press Box - Midterms Madness | Damage Control (Ep. 543)

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

Florida passed an amendment giving people with felony convictions the right to vote (1:15), voter suppression became a big story in Georgia’s gubernatorial race (12:45), and Nancy Pelosi launched a campaign to become the next speaker of the House (26:11). Hosted by Kate Knibbs and Justin Charity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. On Tuesday, there was a midterm election, and now there's a divided government. Democrats want a House majority,

and now they need to choose their next speaker of the House. The job will possibly, likely, maybe go to one of the Democratic Party's most divisive. of figures, Nancy Pelosi. And we're going to talk about just what makes her so divisive among voters and pundits and among conservatives and liberals alike. But first, we're going to talk about one huge victory that came out of the election and one huge problem.

So let's get into it. Did you vote? I voted. Me too. Did you vote in New York? Yeah. I used to vote in Illinois because I was born and raised there. but when I moved here, I changed my registration.

I waited forever to change my registration to New York, but I voted. I voted in the primary, voted again in a general. I love voting. I vote all the time. Voted at 7 a. Only once per election, though, I should say. I was going to say, I think we're going to talk about this.

This is going to be a theme in this episode. You said Illinois, I'm like, how many times per election is Kate vote? Oh, just once. Okay. I probably would have tried to hang on to my old location. if I lived in a swing state, but like Illinois always goes blue anyways. I'm from Virginia, so I feel sad that I changed to New York. Yeah.

My vote counted, and now it counts, but it counts just a little bit less. This midterm is interesting for me because it was the first time I've really ever waited in like a huge line to vote. In a midterm election. Yeah. No, just in any election. No, that's what I mean. It's like, of all elections for there to be a huge line for you to wait to vote, it's, you know, it's not even a presidential year. It was like pouring rain and I went at 11 to try to beat the lunch rush.

But people were lining up. There was like a weird like snake situation in the line where it was. I thought you said there was a snake in the line. No, that would have been more interesting. It just like the line sort of organically turned itself into this like bizarre puzzle. And it was funny. People were like super angry about how inefficient it was more than anything. Like they weren't mad that they had to wait.

They were mad that they had to wait in such a stupid. way, which I was sympathetic to. But yeah, I wasn't mad about waiting in line because I was just happy that people were voting. Right. It's good to see people vote. It's good that people are enfranchised to vote. Let's talk about voting. Yes, because so I know, like, the midterm happened two days ago and since then so many

things have happened in the news. It's Trump is being very much himself. we're praying for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her ribs. Sessions went back to the North Pole. A lot of... I'm so mad. A lot of stuff is going on. But I wanted to talk, like, just focus in on what happened in the election and what happened with just voting in and of itself.

Because so there were a lot of happy things that came out of the midterms for us. The most women ever were elected to Congress. The first Muslim woman was elected. an openly bisexual 31-year-old woman flipped a district that had been Republican since 1993. And, of course, the House flipped back into Democratic control for the first time in a long time. And that means the Trump administration might finally get some power checks. So there's a lot of stuff to be excited about. But the thing that made me the most excited was that Florida passed Amendment 4, which will restore voting rights to ex-felons.

And I wanted to talk with you about why this is going to be such a game changer for Florida politics and potentially national politics. Right. First, can we talk about like what all happened in Florida? Because Amendment 4 is interesting because it was the first, from my recollection of election night, it was the first decisive election outcome that got confirmed. Yeah. And I was surprised like it passed easily. Right. It wasn't close.

Right. And unlike the later races in the evening, which were the Florida governor's race and the Florida Senate race, which ultimately broke in favor of the Republicans narrowly in both cases. But that came much later in the night and like I said, by a much narrower margin than Amendment 4. But let's talk about what Amendment 4 is. Yeah. So it restores voting rights to people who have been convicted of felonies. There are some caveats.

Like, you have to be out of. of prison and it doesn't apply to murderers, or I should say people convicted of murder or people convicted of sexual crimes, some sexual crimes. But it's huge. It's actually the biggest case of a group of people being enfranchised at one time since women suffered. And it's going to allow 1.5 million people the ability to register or to vote if they want to. And it's just monumental in that way, but also because Florida specifically is such, it's been called like the swingiest of swing

states. So any big change to voter demographics in Florida can mean a big change for the state and for the country. And it's not that all of these people who are now eligible to vote will. They, like, a lot of them might not vote anyways. In the same way that lots of Americans do not vote.

Yeah. And also it's not to say that this is like a huge definitive win for Democrats or Republicans because the people who are now able to vote, it's not like they're all Democrats. I think that there's like an assumption that it's a huge automatic win for liberals. That's like just not. Why is that the assumption? I mean, let's talk about that because like why you're right. It's so much an assumption and it's so sort of like high pitched actually that I don't actually see that necessarily spelled out in a lot of coverage of either like Amendment 4 or I think even in general discussions of enfranchising like felons. But you're right.

It's this just unstated assumption that enfranchising people have been in prison means like. like it's only good for Democrats. And like that's the only reason anybody would want to do it is because they want Democrats doing elections. I mean, I do want Democrats doing elections, but it's definitely, that is not what is driving this. It's more just, there's been like a bipartisan effort. A lot of the activists, some of them are Republicans who are trying to get this. I think that there is a tendency to assume that. People are going to go Democrat just because it seemed like voter reform seems like a liberal issue.

Right. We'll talk about other election outcomes that sort of inform that dichotomy. But we'll put the partisanship aside for a second. But one other thing I think is super important is that like America is a country. It is a liberal democracy that. nonetheless, like, incarcerates a ton of people, right? Like, the half-century trend in America are just, like, absurd rates of, like, convictions and incarceration.

So it's not like we're in a country where enfranchising felons in a single large state is just, like, giving a few people, a few more people a right to vote. Like, that's a significantly sized chunk of a population that is that, that one. was formally, like, disenfranchised. Millions of people. Right. And alienated from civic participation, right? Like, that's why it seems important.

It's not just about giving felons, like, the right to vote. It's about doing it in a country that has a lot of people on the wrong side of the criminal justice system. And then one of the reasons why I think people assume that it's going to be good for Democrats. And there is some evidence that it will. be like there was Washington Post analysis today that said that if felons had been allowed to vote, it would have changed the results in the Florida Senate race. Of course, that's hypothetical. And like with Florida, you never know what's going to happen.

Right, right, right. But it is likely that it's going to reshape Florida politics in some way. Right. I think if you take this, if you take enfranchisement, let's take a public policy concern that like people just sort of disagree about, which is like healthcare, right? Or tax cuts or things like that. Like those are things that obviously affect who is excited to vote for which party in any given election.

But then you take things like who is allowed to vote. How are congressional districts drawn? Like those are issues that on a meta level determine who is excited to vote and who gets to vote. And like, again, it's like in all of these elections where the margins between the winner and the loser are relatively small. It's sort of bewildering to consider all of the factors that aren't even left-right, red-blue, political factors or conventionally left-right.

It's just like who can vote. Right. And totally. Like what are the institutional barriers to not only, it's like what are the institutional barriers to voting? And then what are the institutional definitions of like a voting population? And like when you're talking about like the congressional district. right? And you look at how congressional districts are drawn, that's even more sort of arbitrary and alienating and disenfranchising in a lot of cases.

One other good thing is that Maryland, Michigan, and Nevada all approved ballot measures this election that will also expand voting by allowing same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration. So there have been other like little victories in that way. And correct me I'm wrong, but also there's been some good news about gerrymandering coming out of the midterms? Well, yes. Okay. I think some of that actually is, it predates the midterm elections themselves, but it's sort of like indifferent in one of the Carolinas and in Pennsylvania, like you have states

that have had high profile legal challenges to their congressional maps based on like arguments about gerrymandering. You know what I would do? Just have all the districts be squaboard. Well, but isn't that complicated? Take Illinois. How do you do that in Illinois? Because you got those jagged, you got those crappy jagged borders of Illinois.

Perhaps not all perfect squares. And then Virginia is a big triangle. Just as square as possible. As square as possible. Good Jerry. Nibs mandering. Squares. That's my fish.

Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. But so the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, besides my incredible. plan to make all of the map. I also like that you think that you're not, that you're the first person who has had this idea. Who has introduced this square plan?

I just think that there are arguments that people have considered about it. All right. Okay, but the other thing I wanted to talk about in regards to voting and the midterms. So Amendment 4 is good. We're very happy about that. Another narrative that has emerged from the midterms is that voter suppression is still a real issue. And in Georgia in particular, people have been taking a pretty close look at voter suppression because of what happened in the governor's race. Right.

So right now, we're not quite sure what's happening. There might be a runoff. Brian Kemp is in the lead. Right. Brian Kemp, the Republican nominee for governor, the current Secretary of State for Georgia is like in a narrow lead over his opponent. Yes, the Democrats, Stacey Abrams. So we don't know who's going to be governor yet. It's looking like Kemp, but there might be a runoff. We don't know. Politics is crazy. But so because Kemp was Secretary of State, he had a lot of influence over how this election was held. And he, his office did some things that have rightly upset people. They carried out purges of registered voters ostensibly to remove dead people from the registries, but they were so sweeping that they ended up knocking a lot of living people off. They closed 214 polling places, most in minority and poor neighborhoods.

And they put 53,000 voter registrations on hold using a system that would sort of knock you off if there was any little problem with your name, like if a hyphen or comma was in the wrong place. And that was really detrimental to Abrams campaign because she was really focused on mobilizing new voters and registering people who weren't previously registered. So the fact that Kemp's office set up all these barriers to getting new voters to the polls could have possibly cost his opponent the race. So those are the broad contours of the race. But even just the two candidates, right? Stacey Abrams, the Democrat, and Brian Kemp, the Republican, they are themselves, like, even just predating the election. They are personified contrast in terms of, like, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party's respective outlooks on voting, right?

Like, the policy you're talking about in terms of, like, the suspended, or it's really pending, the pending, the applications that were pending. in the Secretary of State's office before the election, we're basically subject to a policy known as exact match. And the exact match basically is looking for discrepancies, however minor, however small and trivial, and like an applicant's submitted information, like how they've written their name maybe, or how they've, like, written their address in one instance,

versus, like, cross-referenced information. And it's that, like, having an exact match, is it's so easy not to get one. My husband always has problems when we're at the airport because you're required to put your middle name in when you buy an airline ticket and his passport doesn't have his middle name. It's like a huge issue. And people like, if you forget to put your middle name or you like put your nickname down or something or any tiny thing like that that happens to people all the time, that's going to cause their voter registration. to get on hold. It's just like, it sets it up so that it's difficult, unnecessarily difficult.

Right. And so Brian Kemp throughout his term, like I said, predating his run for governor has been fighting for the exact match policy and trying to tweak it and trying to sort of come up with like legislative backing in Georgia to sort of support that policy. So you have Kemp who's doing that. Basically, like, his office has made voter fraud its priority, right? They've identified voter fraud as, like, the office's problem. And that's what they've set out to solve. And that's why you get these purges of the voter rolls. That's why you get all of this sort of, quote, unquote, tidying of who is even on the

roles, who's allowed to vote and whose information is pending. It's because the state is supposedly trying to, like, clean up its vote. voting system. Yeah. And so Kemp is basically a really glaring example of something that is happening across the country. Republicans are pushing this narrative that there's widespread voter fraud. Okay, there's not really research to back this up.

Voter fraud is extremely rare. And yet you have these efforts to combat voter fraud that seem to frustrate and demoralize way more like regular people who just want to vote than they are demoralizing any like fraudulent criminal enterprise that's trying to elect anybody in any state. Kemp is a really egregious example of this, but it is happening. Like I just want to stress Georgia is not the only place that it's happening. Since 2011, 24 states have passed new voting restrictions in. the name of stopping voter fraud, but what it does in reality is just, it makes it harder for

people to vote. So this is sort of the one of the darkest things that happened in this election, I think. Well, it's dark on the Brian Kemp half it is. So then you turn to Stacey Abrams, right? Stacey Abrams is the Democratic nominee in Georgia. She's a black woman. She's a former minority leader in the Georgia legislature. And importantly, Stacey Abrams is also, again, predating this election itself. Like, Stacey Abrams is a voting rights activist. She's led high-profile campaigns in the state to enroll new voters from disenfranchised communities. For years before, they were facing off in a gubernatorial election.

Like, Brian Kemp, again, as Secretary of State of Georgia, had launched this, like, long fraud investigation of, of the new Georgia project, which is like that is the organization in Georgia that's D.C. Abelman's founded that is all about, like I said, enrolling new voters, many of them from black communities. And so the context for the Kemp Abrams rivalry is so rich and so deep and so necessarily about voting rights, that the fact that it's come down to dispeliorably. over like why certain polling centers were closed and why certain polling machines were decommissioned. It's become this avatar of like the fact that voting rights are a very palpable concern.

Like at this point, it's like the Georgia race is a race where voting rights were just as prominent of an issue as like healthcare. voter fraud is just this very stark, like even that term is like loaded. It's almost like death tax. How somebody talks about that, whether they talk about it super sincerely, is like voter fraud. You know, it's a real problem in America and we have to make sure. You know, you can tell whether somebody's liberal or conservative based on like how they interpret the term voter fraud. Well, it's kind of like are you talking about voter fraud or you're talking about voter suppression? Right.

Right, exactly. Yeah. Also, are you talking about voter fraud or are you talking about black people voting? voting in general, right? Like, that's the other part of the litmus test. And again, I think that that applies to the Florida issue too, right? Like, are you worried about felons voting or are you worried about more black people voting? You know what I mean? Like, that's what it seems like these issues have become. It's just been interesting in these past few election cycles to watch that become such an explicit

left-right red-blue issue. So, wait, you said I should feel not sad about this because... I didn't say you should, listen, I'm sad all the time.

Because it's so obviously villainous that you think, like, do you think we're... Well, no, it's like, at least now, it's like the partisan divide is so explicit and stark that we You know it is one of the big issues dividing Democratic and Republican leaders at the state level, right? We should say, like, a couple weeks before the election, Jimmy Carter, who Jimmy Carter is from Georgia, former Georgia governor.

Most famous peanut farmer ever? Really, yes. Currently lives in Georgia. I think he still lives in planes, which is where he's from. But Jimmy Carter wrote this letter to Brian Kemp. And he was like, hey, you should resign. Because like a big part of this is not just that Brian Kemp's policies as Secretary of State have been restrictive. It's also just there are people who, and I feel sort of more complicated about this,

but there are people who just think it's fundamentally corrupt that like Brian Kemp is the Secretary of State overseeing elections while running for governor. You know, and that that's like constitutes an unfair advantage. It's sketchy. And yeah, but I didn't know what to think about it. I was like, I don't think that's really an unprecedented situation. Like, Secretary of State in a lot of states is a pretty high profile position such that it's the sort of position that somebody would get just so that they could run for governor later, if that makes sense. Or because they like seeing their name and all the DMV stuff. That's why you would do it. That's a

very key to be Secretary of State. But now that the election has happened, the camp is like very narrowly ahead and now it's this disputed election and Abrams hasn't conceded. A couple hours ago, Brian Kemp stepped down as Secretary of State in Georgia. So he seems to have at least finally heeded that part of all this. Yeah, it's unclear how this is going to play out just on the level of Stacey Abrams versus Brian Kemp. But it's also unclear to me. I have ideas, but it's just unclear to me how this is going to play out as like a national concern, as a broader concern of like, what do we think about how easy it should be to vote? Like, do we do Americans really think that there is some widespread epidemic of voter fraud? Like, what are the ideological motivations for even believing that that is an existential, like, threat to our democracy when really it's a pretty marginal fluke of a problem?

Well, I think that people just don't have a lot of faith in our institutions anymore in general. And people are also very racist. And you put those two things together and what you get is voter suppression. So I want to talk about a vote that's coming up with you for our next topic. Oh, I thought you said a vote for me. I thought he was like, wait, am I being, am I running for something? Oh, no. Don't vote for me.

That would be awful. Please don't vote for me. I wrote you in for Secretary of State, actually. I wrote my name on all the IDs already. I'm just kidding. We don't commit voter fraud here. No, we don't. Okay, but yeah.

Let's talk about Nancy Pelosi. All right. The thing in the past quarter century of, like, American politics and, like, Congress and congressional leadership, there have been, like, a few different Republicans. who've been the speaker of the house. You've got like Newt Gingrich, iconic Newt Gingrich. You've got Dennis Hastert, the child molester convicted, child molester, Dennis Hastert. You have John Boehner, weepy.

That man loves to cry. The weepy, angry former speaker of the house, John Boehner. And currently you've got Paul Ryan, who is, one, I mean, he's just, he's leaving Congress. Wait, so like every single Republican Speaker of the House has just been a fucking creep show in some way. They've been weird. They've been different. They've been weird. Let's call them different.

They've been different. I don't want to care. I don't want to compare any other than to Dennis Hastert is the problem. Dennis Hastert is like, evil. Yeah. Dennis Hastert has, you know, did really bad things on like a personal level that I at least am not accusing Newt Gingrich of having time. No. So you have all these different people that represent sort of different facets in my mind of the Republican Party and its agenda and like different kinds of Republican.

But in the same, in the period where like the Republicans have had all those speakers of the House, the Democrats have had only one. Their one speaker of the House in the same period is the Congresswoman we all know and love, Nancy Pelosi. Let's hear more for preexisting medical conditions. So the Democrats recaptured the House on Tuesday, right? So that means that they will have a new speaker. Or maybe they'll have an old speaker because currently it seems like the person most likely to be speaker of the House is just Nancy Pelosi again, right? I think there are some whispers in Congress about like a desire to see somebody else. But there hasn't really, no real challenger.

There hasn't been a leading sort of challenger to Nancy Pelosi to emerge. And the day after the election, Trump gave a big long-winded press conference, right, where he sort of gave his take. But the person who gave the congressional response to the Democrats recapturing the House was just Nancy Pelosi alone. It wasn't her flanked by a bunch of people. It was Nancy Pelosi. And it was sort of the aesthetics of it were her being, I mean, one, it was just her saying. It's great. Like we get to reign in Trump, et cetera, et cetera.

But visually looking at it, I just looked at her and I was like, what she's asserting, just by her sheer presence and the fact that she's not surrounded by other sort of people on her leadership team is I'm in charge. Yeah. Didn't she say something weird? Like, let's give it up for preexisting conditions or something. We'll get to that. Nancy Bose is a little awkward. A little awkward.

I feel bad. Like I respect a lot of things that she's done. but she also has the charisma of like a lukewarm cantaloupe. Like, just like, yeah. It's very like, oh, okay. Oh, okay. Right, right. That's it.

That's it. But she stood up there alone. She had this sense of like, I'm in charge. Like, I'm the person. And I thought that that was interesting because Nancy Pelosi is not, it's sort of like what you're saying about her being a sort of cantaloupe in the moment. mind she's just the thing that no one no one's going to pick first well it's I don't know about that I mean I think the problem is that she's not even it will be one thing if she were sort of a plan to figurehead the real

problem is that she's polarizing I think Republicans have just spent but who loves her who is like let's let's set it up let's set it up okay let's set it up I'm just saying that the republicans have spent like since the bush years the Republicans have had a very specific very persistent characterization of Nancy Pelosi, who by the way is a congresswoman from San Francisco. So we're starting there. San Francisco liberal. That's where we're starting with this. They've had a specific characterization of Nancy Pelosi as this liberal boogie woman who just

represents all of the out-of-touchness and all of the expensive excesses and cultural chauvinism of like modern liberalism. Right. And that's whatever. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like. the Republicans and Democrats all have like cartoon versions of each other. I totally get that. The problem is that those characterizations have been in the air for so long.

And Pelosi herself is like not really great at sort of counteracting a lot of the characterizations of her that I think Democrats also just don't like her. Especially like among younger Democrats, a young, among like the further left you go on the spectrum, the more people sort of look at Nancy Pelosi, and I think they just, they don't trust her. And I think it's complicated. I mean, one, she's the first and only woman who's ever been the Speaker of the House.

I think a lot of the dislike for her is very gendered. Yeah, probably. But I also think it, I don't think you can just summarize it as entirely gendered because I think there's a central dynamic with Nancy Pelosi that I was sort of teasing at the top of this segment. which is that like the Republicans, it's like you can feel all sorts of ways

about all sorts of different Republican leaders. There's only one Nancy Pelosi. Like Nancy Pelosi is it. She is the, like, whatever you think about the Democratic leadership in Congress for basically my entire voting age life, Nancy Pelosi is the face of it. And I think a lot of Democrats, a lot of liberals feel like the Democrats, suck compared to the Republican.

If you're talking about being effective and being accomplished in, in like legislation in the past quarter century, it's just like outside of Obamacare being this really big achievement, I think it's hard sometimes to be a Democrat and look at the definitive face of congressional leadership for Democrats in Congress and think, oh, man, I like this. You know what I mean? I mean, I don't think you can discount the fact that Pelosi ushered Obamacare into being. I don't want to denigrate that accomplishment.

I think during the Obama year, she was an effective speaker, and that often gets sort of lost when we're talking about her. Right. I don't think she should be speaker anymore. Why not? Several reasons. One is kind of controversial, and I'll say it's. for the last. Oh my God.

Like, first reason, we just need a new, we need a new face of the Democratic Party. Like, the Democratic Party has been in shambles for a while. And we just, we need someone new in, just for optics sake. I don't think that Pelosi will be as effective as she was during the Obama years at getting legislation passed just because the tenor of Congress has changed. We just need someone different. Those are my main reasons. My other thing is just more broadly.

She's too fucking old. She is 78 years old. I think that politicians are too old. No more old people. I'm putting a cap at 65. I'm not talking just about Speaker of the House. Why are all the politicians so old? Trump is too old.

Clinton was too old. No more old people. This is a hot take. I know. This is hot. I know you might think I'm being super ageist right now. And I just want to say there are many people who are old as hell who would do a good job in American politics. But the fact that there's such a critical mass of people over the age of 70 in charge is a bad sign.

Get some of them out. Are you in favor of term limits? Kate Nibs, are you coming out in favor of term limits on the? I'm in favor of people over 70 retiring. I think that's, this is a lot. I know. This is a lot. I know this is very, this is going to probably get some negative feedback, but I just, I am being

ageist. There are too many old people. That is my take. I understand where you're coming from. Yes. Well, Paul Ryan agrees with you. Paul Ryan is young as hell and he's speaking. Why you go vote for Paul Ryan?

I think Pelosi is, here's the counter argument, because you just talked about optics. Have you ever met someone in their? 70s who's in their sharpest phase of life. Yeah. Well, the sharpest, I don't know, because those people I didn't know them when they were 30, you know. In fairness, have you met anyone in their 30s who was in their sharpest phase of family? No.

Okay, then. 40s? 40s, 50s. 40s is a good rate. Yeah. I can't wait to be 40. I'll probably be really smart. But hold on.

You were talking about optics. I think, and this is the weird thing with Pelosi. It's always sort of like fascinated me. you have optics as let's put that as one half of the consideration here the other half is like governance and I think that the defenses I've always sort of read between the lines with Pelosi and with a lot of a lot of people who you maybe look at in Congress and you're like what the hell does this person do like they suck like why is this person in charge of anything all they do is like mess things up all the time Pelosi in particular is somebody who like among her

colleagues in Congress, people regard her as like a really strong tactician, like as a really strong negotiator and a strong leader. And I think part of the problem with someone like Nancy Pelosi is like that that may be true in these like esoteric contexts behind closed doors with Trump and with like other leaders across the island Congress. but it seems like those qualities only bear out in those private contexts and that I as a voter don't have a lot of context for seeing Nancy Pelosi and being like she's a great negotiator. Like it seems like the only way for me to perceive that is to get elected to Congress and work with her.

And again, it's like I take that sort of bullish view and I try to like pair it with a more pragmatic view of like, yeah, Nancy Pelosi's been around the black. Like she knows like there's a certain institutional sense in which like, sure, maybe I'm supposed to count on her to, like, outwit Trump because Trump basically, I don't even know if Trump knows, like, anything about Congress. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know if he could give me, like, a schoolhouse rock recollection of how Congress works at this point. But I don't know. I just don't. I get, I feel like I get why a bunch of similarly old legislators might like her.

Yeah. and might like Steny Hoyer and might like all of these other people in the Democratic leadership. But it's like she represents such a specific thing in like the broad American political imagination. And it's I do think that it's largely not her fault. It's largely like this like misogynistic specter that a bunch of Republican strategists cooked up in the odds. I sympathize with her that much. But it's also just like, I don't know. if you're a Democrat who came up in this generation,

like, you're just stuck with these people who just continue to represent a very specific period of decline and incompetence in democratic politics in Congress. Kate, just tell me what you, like,

I get what your general argument is about why are all the politicians so old. What do you think? Like, what's your impression of Nancy Pelosi? It doesn't have to be highfalutin. Just what's your basic impression of Nancy Pelosi. I am very grateful towards Nancy Pelosi for getting Obamacare

passed, for trying her best as Speaker of the House during the Obama years. I don't like, I'm not an anti-Pelosi person, broadly speaking. I think that like the vilification of Pelosi Pelosi is completely unfair and sexist. When I vilify her, it's ages, damn it. Like, I don't want to vilify her at all. I just think that it would be healthy for the Democratic Party to change it up at this point. Yeah. It's weird to think of like the other Democratic leaders in the Senate who've served like coincidentally with her term as like the House Minority Leader and a Speaker of the House. It's like Tom Dashel. It's Harry Reid, who I interned for back in the day.

It's, and it's Chuck Schumer currently. Right. And it's like, Harry Reid, I think was pretty beleaguered by the time he left. Chuck Schumer is just,

I think people don't like Chuck Schumer either. And like, that's actually a helpful contrast, right? It's like Nancy Pelosi's Democratic counterpart in the Senate is Chuck Schumer. And Chuck Schumer is like,

it's certainly among, if you look at it like left Twitter, like post- Trump Twitter. People look at Chuck Schumer as this guy who just represents like Chuck Schumer more than anyone represents Charlie Brown and Lucy in the football for Democrats in the Senate to a lot of people. But I think the reason, as much as the left and the right, I think don't like Chuck Schumer, Chuck Schumer at least seems like one guy out of like a bunch of other guys. It's like there was Chuck Schumer, but there was Harry Reid before him. There was Tom Dashel. You know what I mean? He seems

like you can only blame him for so much. Whereas again, because Nancy Pelosi is this like iconic constant in democratic politics, it's like on the one hand that means that she's been effective enough to stick around. She's played hardball well enough to stick around. But like it also means that it's so easy to look at her and just see the entire history of the Democratic Party in recent years flash. before your eyes. The modern history of the Democratic Party is so fraught. She's got to stink of failure on her.

Right. And again, it's like, that's not to say that she herself is a failure in that categorical way. It's just that like every Democratic failure of my generation, it's like she had something to do with it. That's what it feels like. It's like she had something to do with it. Yeah, no, she can't, she cannot.

There's very little she can do. Yeah. Do you at least, I mean. Retire ma'am. That is my. No, but that's like, okay, I still think that that's all about her brand though. And I just wonder if like even apart from that, like, is she at the very least could I count on her to be like a competent opponent? Like legislative, a competent, effective legislative opponent of Donald Trump.

No. Why not? Because she is from a different era. She. So is Trump. Trump is like 90. Okay. No, I'm not talking about age.

I'm talking about she was very competent in the Obama Congress. I don't think that she will be as functional as speaker in this Congress. She has too much baggage. I think that her ability to negotiate with a new generation of like Trumpian Republicans. and we don't know if she can do that and I don't think she can't. I don't know if anyone can negotiate with them. So if they can't, then we might as well have someone bringing fresh energy. Who's the ideal sort of person that you would imagine then?

I don't know. I mean, Hakeem Jeffries, maybe. Why? Because he's younger. I don't know. Like, I don't really have a good answer. So maybe Pelosi is better than somebody else. But I'm just, I'm not excited about her being speaker.

and I'm not optimistic. Maybe I'll reserve judgment in case she comes up with some radical reinvention of self. I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. You'd be a good speaker of the house. Oh. You'd be so good.

You can never get elected. You could get elected. Again, it's the house. Kate, I'm not talking about the Senate. Kate, this is the house. I think we could put the three that I will not. Dunkin Honor got reelected to the house. He literally has his grand jury date for a federal indebted.

statement is the week after he won his re-election. You know who else got elected to the house? You know who else got elected to the house? Dennis Hoff, the brothel owner from HBO's Cat House, got elected this election. And he's fucking dead. He died. He died. They don't know how he died.

But he died before the election and he still won. Did people vote for him out of respect? I don't know. I don't know if I'd say respect, but they voted for him. Okay. There's a, yeah. So why are you talking about how you? you can't get elected.

Okay, now maybe I can. Yeah, I feel like you're fine. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'll be speaker. Okay. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Just solve this whole segment. Thank you, Kate. You just find another co-host now. Great. Thanks a lot. All right, I'm Justin Charity.

And I'm future United States speaker of the House, Kate Nibbs, and I swear, I do respect the elderly. And that's it from us this week before Kate says anything else that will get any of us upset in a midterm election to come. You'll hear. from us again in a couple of weeks. Thanks for listening.