The Ricochet Podcast - On A Rant

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

We discuss the events of the week, we talk to AEI’s Yuval Levin about leadership in a populist age and Andy McCarthy about the 25th Amendment and pardons. One of our hosts is dealing with a medical issue which he discusses here and in some members only content with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (available here). Keep calm, carry on, and be nice to each other. This too shall pass. Source

So I'm aiming to lose all the viewers and all the members today. I have a dream. This nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. This is the forum. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court hasn't heard the case. There's no other court to go to to hear the case in the state. And so this is the appropriate place for these concerns to be raised, which is why I have raised them here today. I'm the president, and you're fake news.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Today we talk to you, Paul Levin, about populism and Annie McCarthy about the 25th Amendment. So let's have ourselves a COVID-related podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 526. The edition where we make nobody happy. Absolutely nobody. I don't see it's possible we can make anybody happy today.

Should that be our objective, Peter, Rob? I mean, we can't please everybody, so why not just alienate absolutely everybody? Can we come up with that one position about current events that is like the neutron bomb of alienation? Because right now, we're all kind of dancing around it and figuring it out and whatabouting and root-causing and all the is so it's like the neutron bomb of alienation uh because right now we're all kind of dancing around it and figuring it out and what abouting and root causing and all the rest of it it's it's it's a hard place to be um but it's fun it's interesting it's certainly making 2021 a zesty uh that is a very very positive spin yeah i'd like to think remember last year everybody thought that 2020 was going to be great, and then all of a sudden,

you know, kawang, you got this you know, Suleimanias and chum chunks on the airport, and people realized, oh, that's right, the previous year did carry over into this one. Same thing here. So what do we do? Peter, Rob? Oh, I think the answer is very simple. What we should all three of us do is aim

to please the man most richly endowed with common sense in all of america or at least in all of minnesota james i view you as the man of you are the you are the median american at this very moment we should we should spend the next hour pleasing you that's that's wow james what did you do i i don't know which of that to that, but I I'll accept this responsibility. Maybe Peter just went into the comments yesterday at Ricochet and realized that I'd said in teasing this that I actually have the solution to national unity and going forward. I do. I do. It's very simple. It's very easy, which probably means it's wrong as the old adage goes, but I don't think so. Let's go back to the Capitol events.

What was your, let me ask this, what was your first reaction? And then what did you come, what did you settle into? Rob, Peter? My first, I was working pretty hard that day and had turned off my internet connection for a certain number of hours. So I missed everything. I missed the lead up. I missed every, and then I turned on. And at that point they were already showing things that had happened. And, um, honestly it was what it reminded me of in my own mind. My, my reaction reminded me of my reaction on nine 11, which was, I i could i just could hardly believe what i was seeing it was just very hard for me to to process and i i guess to put it the way the kids put it and then i spent what some just anger angry at uh the protesters or the intruders or whatever, rioters, whatever the term is going to be. Everyone seems to have settled on angry at Trump.

I missed the speech that he gave that morning, but the speech that he gave the taped remarks that appeared, what was it? A couple of hours after the incident, I was that, that one that appeared on Twitter after I had done my day's work. And I thought that was reckless, frankly, reckless given what had already happened. And then, um, I guess my final, my sort of settled view of the day was that, uh, this turned out to be unpopular on Twitter. Um, Mitch McConnell gave remarks twice. He gave remarks before the proceedings in the Senate

ended in which he said that challenging the vote was wrong. It set a terrible precedent. And he laid out the case for certifying the vote in a way that was lawyerly and compelling. And if you look at the screen, it was that shot, that head and torso shot that we always get, because apparently by the rules of the Senate, that's all the camera is allowed to cover. But ordinarily, when Mitch McConnell is speaking, he keeps turning to his left, because the people he's trying to persuade are on that side, the Democratic side of the aisle. And in this case, he turned again and again and again, and seemed to be making eye contact with particular senators on the right of the speaker's roster, which was, of course, Republicans.

So I put up, I retweeted that video with one word, magnificent. And almost immediately, I got tweets saying, he's in bed with China. How could you? He's a member of the deep state. And I thought, wow, this is a rough moment. There, you just heard the story of what went through my head. Rob, I remember we were all chatting via messages messages on this and you were um you were sanguine about it all um well uh you were you're praising trump's handling of it i believe do i

recall correctly or were you you get you get the gist um well look i you know you already know what i think of trump i think he's disgraceful i think he's the worst president we've ever had i think that the republicans are the stupid, most incompetent political party on the face of the earth. They deserve the extinction that is coming. The leaders, the yapping leaders like Hawley and Cruz are not even, they're not men. They put their manhood in blind trust. They don't deserve the roles that they have.

They should cover themselves in sackcloth and ashes and beg for forgiveness. The Republican Party is over for a while at least. And it deserves to be because it is not a serious party filled with serious people. They did this to themselves. And this is how stupid and incompetent the Republicans are. Let me finish. I'm almost done. And they are so stupid and incompetent that they didn't realize in November that they won, that they had had a successful election all told. Ask yourself this question. Is the Republican Party stronger now than it was a week after the election or weaker it is weaker and why is it weaker it is weaker because donald trump is an atrocious lowlife who was unfit for the office and his lick spittle acolytes in the senate

brought the party down low and i don't care because I'm not a Republican. But if you are a Republican or you have any loyalty to that ridiculous bonfire of a party, you should be enraged, not at the people pointing out the truth, but at the people who made it happen. And unfortunately, I don't see any Republicans now willing to do that. They have all become liberals. As you said, root causers, and we must understanders, and you have to understand, I hear my voice. Oh, this is all the language of the crackpot woke left that the Republicans have adopted and taken as their own. It doesn't represent any of my beliefs. So that's my feeling.

When you said that they were to blame for this, was there a specific thing? Did you mean the riot? Did you mean the general talks? Well, yeah, obviously, when you tell everybody to come to D.C. and say, oh, January 6th is going to be lit, you've got to expect something. I don't think that Donald Trump is guilty of incitement legally.

I don't think he did that. His remarks are not really that bad, actually. But the Republican Party certainly did. It kind of winked and nodded and said, oh, well, we'll just go along for a little bit. He'll be fine. He'll be fine. He'll be fine. And it turns out he wasn't fine. They are going to pay the price and they deserve to. The liberals are going to have a field day with this. We ran against Hillary Clinton for 20 years. And before that, we ran against Jimmy Carter for 20 years. You don't think they're going to. Oh, my. I could cut the ads right now. And they deserve to. They deserve to. They have the upper hand. They deserve to use it. And the

Republicans have just got to figure out now how to get their manhood back. I don't know where it is. It certainly isn't anywhere where Ted Cruz is, that's for sure. Well, before we end this up and go to Yuval, your line is always that there's always, there's the elasticity of American politics means that a punishment is inevitable. And so are you saying that there's going to be democratic overreach on this? Because when people say they're going to use this, when people say they're going to use this as an example, they're really going to crack down on right-wing speech now as if that hadn't possibly been in the cards before but are you saying that there's going to be an overreach that will be corrected in two years or four years when people maybe if we're lucky maybe if we're lucky but that's all this idea

that somehow there's this magical thing that happens that oh well they'll do this and then we'll do that it's all part of grand plan. No, sometimes you lose. And when you lose, you just have to take your lumps and figure out how to win again. This was not the way I just I continue to say the same grand plan. I continue to say the same thing. Is the Republican Party stronger now than it was two weeks after the election? And the answer to that question must be no and then the answer to why must be because trump and his weak lick spittle acolytes in the senate abetted by crackpot media figures brought it down low well that's just one of the facts or you don't no well that's your set of facts the other set of facts of course says that there was a break in the water main and the people weren't

allowed to go back and get in the ballots and the Dominion machines had their innards hollowed out and all the rest of it. We didn't have an audit and none of that stuff means it was a glorious victory. It was a glorious, wonderful, overwhelming landslide victory. I love you. Go home. But actually, you stay right there to

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And our thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the you've all 11 he's the director of social cultural and constitutional studies at the american enterprise institute and the editor of national affairs welcome you wrote a piece called failure of leadership in a populist age it's almost the worst of all possible worlds isn't it um when you when you have actually uh when you have all the energies of the crowd summoned and gathered, and the person at the top seems unable to shape and direct them? Or was that all part of the plan? Tell us what you wrote in that piece exactly, and what do you think it means for the future?

Yeah, so that piece, which was written before the events of Wednesday, I wrote it on Monday, was really a warning about the danger of lying to people and creating a fantasy world in which you then expect politics to happen. The failure of leadership in a populist stage is a failure to deal with the fact that populism, even though it often addresses genuine grievances and concerns, is also always vulnerable to falling into conspiracy and fantasy and lies. And that we had seen that happen dramatically in the wake of the election and that it was being fed and encouraged by Republicans and not just by Donald Trump, though certainly most prominently by him. The piece was ultimately a criticism of Josh Hawley. It was even before Ted Cruz had joined in, so it was mostly of Josh Hawley,

who was playing this game, sort of saying, well, we should look at this. We should consider these questions. People are saying, people are complaining that there are these irregularities, and so we have to stop the counting and create a commission, building this sort of space where you can say, i'm not exactly the person lying but i'm building room for the lies to drive a political movement and the argument was that is enormously dangerous and it certainly seems to me we've seen in the course of the week that there are ways where these fantasy worlds collide with reality and the collision doesn't look good and the collision

isn't good it's very bad for the country it's always a danger in a populist time. And leaders in a time like that have to fight against that danger rather than encourage it. Yuval, people use the word populist and populism in all, even after four years of Donald Trump, it gets used all kinds of ways. You think very precisely. How are you using the word populist and how would you distinguish it from ordinary or traditional strength in what ways have we are we in a populist moment now that we weren't in the 1980s when ronald reagan won big what distinguish if you would between this moment and that yeah i i would say populism fundamentally and especially the american experience is a resistance to elite power. It's an argument that says the people in charge with power and money are in charge with power and money for bad reasons. And the reasons are corrupt, and so the people are corrupt.

Now, there's often truth to that, and there is some truth to that now. There's a process by which we form our elites, what we call the meritocracy, which basically involves a kind of selection process that I think has huge problems, that admits people into elite universities where they're formed into progressives and then sent out into the world to run all the institutions. There was a lot of problems with that. But that kind of populism, which is very powerful right now and in some ways on the left as well as it's especially important to resist it becoming confused with conspiracies and fantasies. There was a populist element to Reaganism, no question about it. And Reagan worked with that in a constructive way rather than a destructive way. He turned it to patriotism. He turned it into a defense of the institutions more than an attack on the institutions. I think in every way

that's the opposite of what Donald Trump has done and what a lot of Trump's enables. I know Rob has a question, but if I may, one last question for me, helping us to understand this moment in a larger historical context. I don't mean centuries. I mean, by comparison with recent history. I was doing a little reading the other day on the Cold War, and I knew because I was there that Reagan won in 1984 by 49 states out of 50. What I'd forgotten was that he won in 1980 by 44 states to six. And it seemed Nixon won big. It seems as though within living memory, at least my living memory, the country was able to say, okay, this guy, okay, that guy. And now we've been in this 49%, 49% stalemate for a couple of decades now. Why is that? What has changed? Well, I think that's a long story of polarization, which is well told through presidential elections, I would say, because most presidential elections in the second half of the 20th century were pretty

clear. And by today's standards, we would think of them as as massive routes for the winning candidate. They were often close state by state. It wasn't the case that that Reagan won by 40 points in the popular vote. That's not what happened. But we didn't have the the the the kind of sorting of the country into intensely polarized regional differences that now mean that every presidential election is basically half and half. And not only that, but that by just becoming the candidate of one of the two parties, you start out with something like 46 percent of the vote. And it doesn't matter who you are. You could be Donald Trump. Right. We've seen that you're going to get 46 percent of the vote and then it's up to you to get another. You know, if you're a Republican, maybe you only need two percent more beyond that to win the Electoral College. So polarization has meant that we are stuck in this kind of rut.

You see it in Congress where in every election there's a possibility of either party winning both houses. That's actually very unusual in American history. But it's been our situation now since the late 1990s hey you've all it's rob long thank you for joining us so um why is that bad i mean i have two questions for you one is why is that bad we keep talking about it's polarized polarized polarized but i'm an old person i remember before 1994 before newt gingrich that there was a unit party in control of congress that wasn't very good that was stability of course but it wasn't a good kind of stability. It seems to me that what we're looking at not as polarization.

I think that's probably a word that we keep using. It's not quite right. It's really volatile, really volatile politics. And they're volatile for the parties. The party apparatuses are what's polarized. The people themselves seem to be happily

ticket splitting left and right. The voters in Wisconsin happily voted against Trump and for their Republican representatives. The people, the electorate seems to be enormously capable of making subtle and interesting distinctions. It's our leadership that is so derelict. Well, I certainly agree with that. But I think one implication of that is why this is bad, which is that we basically have two minority parties in our politics now. And neither one has been able to establish itself as having something like a majority coalition. Having a majority coalition makes you responsible in a particular way. your tent, you have to elect people or you run expecting to elect people both in the deep south and the northwest. And that means you run as a party that thinks about the country's interest. When you're running to barely win, you're running to get your voters out. And I think that is worse for our political. I agree. It means that you're basically trying to win the extremes of your own

party rather than win over voters who might be persuadable, might be ticket splitting, who might be the kind of voters that make responsible choices. And who continually do that. I mean, the voter behavior is continually, continually reminds you that they are willing to do that. It's the it's a market failure on the part of the absolutely product side, not on part of the consumer side so uh so my next question is like when i think of the great you know meaning large true american populists ronald reagan would be is a perfect example huey long is a good example of that right the most famous populist probably we can think of as american politics 20th century there was something about them and harry is terry truman in a way had that appeal there was something about them and Harry Truman, in a way, had that appeal. There was something about those people.

One went to Eureka College. One went to I don't know where. And the other went to I don't know where. And now we have, and I know that I- Truman never went to college. Yeah, Truman was one of the few presidents without a college degree, in fact. And now we have a pseudo-populist president, a billionaire real estate financier who went to Wharton, aided and abetted by this ridiculous cosplay populace of Ted Cruz went to Harvard Law School and Josh Hawley went to Yale.

I mean, these three ludicrous figures haven't a clue what the American populace or the American populism could possibly be. Isn't there something just, the secret here is our, how decadent Americans have become in their adoration of credentials. And now we have this, these capering lunatics, these capering cowards in the Senate who are Ivy League graduates,

like me, by the way, who insist on, you know, dropping their R's and like acting like they're real people. And there's something so false and bad about that. I mean, what we probably need in this country are real populists. I mean, isn't I mean, now I went on a rant, so stop me. No, I think that part of what we're seeing here is that what what become of populism is something that blurs the line between entertainment and politics. What people are looking for is a kind of show. And that's what these folks are putting on.

They're putting on a populist show. There is such a thing as populism, which is not just a show. And it is a response to some real problems. I think you can see some of that in the sorts of people you talk about, whatever you think of any one of them. But what we are looking at now is a populism that simply understands itself as a form of entertainment that is appealing to viewers more than to voters. And that's, even for populism, which always has problems from my point of view,

which always is a challenge to our form of government, is a particularly low form of of appealing to voters. And as you say, so much of it is fake. You know, it's OK to go to the Ivy League schools. Right. As we say, not everybody can go to the University of Chicago. That's all right. But you have to own what you are. And yeah, the idea that these guys are speaking for the people is just absurd and i i have been corrected holly did not go to yale he went to stanford and stanford law so it seems to me like just from looking at the evidence that yale's okay uh no i think he went to yale as an undergrad but i'm not sure i don't know that that usual that striking lack of self-knowledge rob uh hey you've all rob rob is attacking the parties the parties the parties and i think i mean

i understand why he's looking at this he's going back to ted cruz and josh hawley they're republicans got it where how where does the disintegration or the the dissolving of the old-fashioned party structure fit into this story uh there is in california there's a something that calls itself a Republican Party. But in the old days, actually, if you had a problem with a neighborhood park, and you were in the Republican Party and you're in a Republican town, I grew up in a place like this. You could call the town supervisor. And there were Republican Party, likewise, on the Democratic side,

although those were more, and much of that has dissolved. It seems to me, Rob is attacking the parties, but I suspect, but haven't thought this through, that the dissolution of the parties may be more of a, you just have figures up on top who get to open their mouths. And if they get some traction on an argument, they don't have to actually worry about moving party regulars with them. They just get results in polls. It's a lack of structure, lack of party in a way, I think. Yeah, I think it makes sense to attack the parties, but I would attack them for being too weak, not too strong. What do the parties actually do in politics? The function of our two big parties is to broaden their appeal, not to narrow their appeal. The party is that institution that has to run a candidate in both Alabama and Oregon. And so is that I think social media in some ways has played a big part. And in general, the democratization of our politics has meant that the parties have become, rather than being in the business of candidate selection and agenda

building, the parties now are platforms, the places to stand. And they've just become, and frankly, like a lot of our other institutions, Congress has become a platform too. And for similar reasons, they're just a place to stand and they're a stage for narcissists to use to elevate themselves. And so I think the way back is stronger parties, not weaker parties. But stronger parties means institutions with a sense of identity who can say this guy should be or this guy shouldn't be our candidate our parties are just nothing like that at this point well you know the question about

whether an elite can be a populist goes back to clodius pulcher in rome so we've been having this debate for 2 000 years what seems to be unique about this moment is the way james did you go to an ivy league school too you're trotting out all this learned. University of Minnesota. No, I'm doing my best. You're the populist on the show. My best VDH. You're the authentic man on this show. Oh, yes.

That's me, man of the people. But was I going to say, oh, that there's something so peculiarly media age, postmodern about the populism today because it's blended with these narratives that are complex and and and full of characters and full of stories in a way that just general reagan era populism wasn't that was a fairly simple you know project back then now when you have q infesting everything i mean q anon is the x files of of of modern day politics and in the trueuest sense, in that Chris Carter could never write his way out of that program, Q kept coming up with more and more elaborate nonsense until you have these stories in which people are invested. How do you, last question, how do you dynamite us out of that where you have so many people, as you mentioned, social media,

involved in things that are simply fantastical nonsense that that that that creep their tendrils upward. Yeah, this is an enormous challenge. And it's in a sense where we started. I think it's always a challenge in populist politics. And this kind of thing did exist beneath the surface in prior forms of American populism. But it's effectively dealt with by leaders basically by being pushed to the side, by being ignored. Populist leaders have to take some of the concerns their voters raise and say, this is what we're about, and take other concerns their voters raise and put them to the side and never mention them or ridicule them. You know, the Birchers were part of the populist right in that golden age of American conservatism. But there were also leaders on the right who were willing to say, this is not who we are,

and that's not what we're concerned about. I think a lot of what we're lacking now are leaders who are willing to do that, to say there are some populist concerns that belong in our politics. There's also this patent nonsense, which has no place in our politics. We're seeing a lot of the opposite. And, you know, that's a way to appeal to some voters. But I think it's a failure to understand the role of a political leader in our system of government. And our system doesn't just trust leaders and give them all the power, but it doesn't just trust the people and give them all the power either. It requires each to constrain and contain the other. And right now, the failure that's happening is a leadership failure to grasp that responsibility. Well, I'm the last man to talk

about this because when I lived in DC, Comet was my liquor store. And of course, they peeled off that facade and sold it to Comet Ping Pong. And of course, that's where the portal to the underground pedophilia network began. Okay. Yuval all thanks so much for joining us today in the podcast and we'll talk to you again thanks thanks you all all right well how do you feel about that do you feel gentlemen as though the populism is a bugaboo that's keeping you from you know attaining your personal happiness well i think it's interesting i wonder what a democrat would say because the democrats have been saying their parties are too strong that's what led them to defeat in 2016 um you know they had all those superdelegates they had that was that was a strong party superdelegates so they get rid of them

so we just you know with that with that maybe two parties are in two different places who knows i don't know so we just literally spoke about how i was going to set up the ad that i would do later before we go to oh i'm sorry you could. You could ask a question. So I answered it. Right. And you actually took a segue interruption as a mandate for a serious response. Rob, you've been under the weather. Are you OK? I have. I have COVID. You're attacking a COVID survivor, a COVID hero. So essentially you're attacking a first responder. That's right. Just the same as. All right. Hey, is there something interfering with your

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with the help of an experienced professional. Special offer for us here at Ricochet. Listeners, get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash RICO21. BetterHelp.com slash RICO21. And our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. We are joined now by Andy McCarthy. Andy, thank you for joining us. I don't even know where to begin. Every single question I have and I've had for the past 48 hours almost, I thought, I got to ask Andy. So there's no organization to this. I'm just going to jump in because it's the

first thing I thought of. Donald Trump writes a piece of paper pardons himself the only way to know whether that pardon works is for that him then to be charged and to see what the courts say is that right correct yes i mean i, I think that there's no reason. I mean, other than our sort of moral and ethical sense that you shouldn't be able to pardon yourself, which is very influential on the way the rest of the Supreme Court does. You start with the text. There's no textual prohibition on the president pardoning himself. And it's unlikely to me that there there was any intention of having one because the framers went out of their way for the for the to say that the president can't pardon himself from impeachment so it's i don't think you can plausibly say they didn't think of this possibility so it's possible that the very people who are arguing that by the text of the constitution donald trump can in fact pardon himself would also be arguing by the text of the Constitution that Vice President Pence cannot change the election.

Right. And neither you're an originalist or you're not an originalist. It doesn't seem like that's that those two things don't seem like they are logically the same. Right. Yeah. Although, you know, I would wish that everybody interpreted and applied the Constitution in a principled way, but my experience is that tends not to happen, well, what a great act of patriotism in a way, because now we can finally find out what it is, right? And he's charged. What on earth could he be charged with? I mean, I think the guy is a piece of trash. But I read the speech that he gave on the mall,

and I don't think that sounds, doesn't sound like incitement to me. Doesn't rise to the level of incitement as a legal matter. If you were a prosecutor, would you be confident taking that case? I happen to be one of the few former now federal prosecutors who actually did an incitement case. Oh, really? We charged we actually convicted the blind shake on two counts of incitement to crimes of violence. So I can tell you with confidence that there is no incitement case against the president.

The incitement case against the blind sheikh was, despite the fact that I had unambiguous evidence, I mean, he said, you know, attack U.S. military installations and kill Mubarak, right? Could not have been more clear. But the First Amendment makes incitement a very tough proof. And I had to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt that when he said those things, this is a position to make it happen. And he knew that. So with with a notorious international terrorist who's done this sort of thing before, that's one kind of case. But when you have a president who makes demagogic statements, but not really anything that actually explicitly called for violence. You know, there's one way that you would analyze this as impeachment, but there's a different way that you'd analyze it as a matter of the criminal law.

Under the criminal law, there's no incitement case. Under, you know, what Hamilton's idea of impeachment was. I don't think there's any doubt that it's impeachable. So, Andy, Peter here. Sorry, can you hear me, Andy? OK, yeah, I can. So can you just take me through this is layman to a professional. I'm the layman. Obviously, you're you're very much the professional. It's dominating the headlines today, all the calls for removing Trump from office, 25th Amendment, the suggestion, the argument, the demand in some quarters that the cabinet get together and that Vice President Pence and the cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment

and remove Trump from office that way. As I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong. That's the point of asking the question. That's a no-go because the 25th Amendment specifically states grounds of mental or physical incompetence. The man is robust. He's mentally, in other words, it would be misusing the 25th Amendment to remove Trump for an office for an action of which everybody disapproved, but that would be a misuse of the constitutional amendment. Correct or not? Correct, Peter. And I think the last point that you made about misuse is the key one, because oddly, I think, because we're so close to the end of the president's term, the temptation is there to abuse this because it would be a much easier, if you were willing to do that, it would be much easier and you could run the clock out than trying to do an impeachment with a, you know,

a House impeachment proceeding and then a Senate trial at this point. Because if you were willing to abuse it, what happens under the 25th Amendment is once the vice president, and I should preface this by saying I understand the vice president has no interest in invoking this. But let's say hypothetically, if the vice president and more than half, that is a majority of the cabinet, were to invoke it, immediately the file a writing with the president pro tem of the Senate and with Speaker Pelosi saying that there is no disability and he wants his power back. And at that point, Pence could either accede to that or he and the half the cabinet that he has, the majority of the cabinet, could contest it with the Senate and the House, they would then have 21 days to act on it, during which time Pence would remain acting president. So the reason I think this is tempting to people is even though legally it should be inapplicable, because we're not talking about a profound medical disability here.

Right. The temptation here is that practically speaking, you could run the clock out past January 20th before you'd have to really get down to the point of whether this qualified as a real disability under the 25th Amendment. If the impulse is to get Trump, that would be one way of satisfying the impulse, even though it would abuse the Constitution, roughly, is the. Yeah, I mean, I I wouldn't put it that way because I think, you know, to the extent that there is a legitimate concern that he could do something wild and crazy in the next few days. It's not so much getting him as getting the power. All right. All right. Fair enough. It's not so much getting him as getting the power away from him. All right, fair enough. That's what the temptation is.

So another one, just sort of layman to professional on impeachment. You said a moment ago that you have no doubt that the president's remarks represent an impeachable offense. If you could explain that, but first, just the nuts and bolts. The House, we know, is run by the Speaker. As a practical matter, if the speaker wants something to happen fast, this speaker, any speaker can cause it to happen fast. That's the way the rules of the House operate. So the House could draw up. It would still take some time. She'd have to have lawyers draw up articles of impeachment, but they'd have to.

She could move them through in, what, 48 hours, perhaps. But then the rules of the Senate offer the accused a trial, and the president would have the right to legal representation and to call witnesses. How on earth could that, just as a mechanical question, how on earth could that move in the next 12 days? Let me preface this by saying that this sounds trite, but it's important. Due process is the process that is due, number one, and that always depends on the circumstances. And number two, as Justice Jackson famously pointed out, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, right? So let's put President Trump to the side for a second

and imagine that we woke up to smoking gun news that the elected president was a Russian spy and that everybody agreed that the evidence was undeniable and you had to get this guy out instantly. Like you couldn't wait another second to get him out. to a president who had been impeached, that we become a slave to that desire to accord that quantum of due process if the national security of the United States required moving the president out of office as quickly as possible. So the fact that we have an ideal of due process doesn't mean that we have to come up to it if the situation is too exigent, just like in a, you know, in a wartime situation, we don't give due process to the people that we attack, you know, because due

process in wartime is military force. So it always depends on what the emergency, what the crisis situation is and what you can afford to do under those circumstances in the way of due process. That said, if I'm Mitch McConnell and let's remember now, Chuck Schumer does not become the majority leader until after Kamala Harris is sworn in. So this is really on McConnell at this point. He has to be concerned with the precedent that's being set for future impeachments, because if they try to zoom something through like we're talking about, you would have to strip down due process to a bare minimum, and a lot of people would say it was beneath the bare minimum. So, again, it's a situation where you would have to weigh how profound do you think the crisis is versus what due process do you owe to the president under the circumstances. And Andy McCarthy views the correct outcome as? It's not just what happens in Washington. I happen to think that, you know, President Trump was very demagogic in connection with the election in the last two months. But whether I like it or not, the fact is that tens of millions of people, and I'm not talking about people who want to burn the Capitol down. I'm talking about, like, tens of millions of people who support Trump, you know, 20 million, 30 million, whatever it is.

A lot of them think the election was stolen and will not react well to an impeachment. And I just think in the year that we've had with all the violence that we've had and all the stress in the and the division in the country, if we can get through this without having to remove the president in the next 12 days, we should do that. On the other hand, I have a lot of respect and confidence in Pence, in McConnell, in a lot of the leadership in the executive branch. And if they thought that they don't have this thing nailed down and that President Trump is going to do something ruinous, then I think they have to act at that point. I hope that what we saw last night where he came out and said, yes, there ratchet the thing, the pressure down, and let's get through the next dozen days. I think the best thing for the country would be for the president to resign with an agreement that Pence would pardon him,

because I don't think there's a criminal case against him anyway. So it's not like you're giving anything away. The federal pardon wouldn't have any effect on the investigations in New York state. I actually hope they don't go anyplace either, but it wouldn't make any difference. And I think what you would get is Pence could do that with Trump giving an agreement that he would not seek elective office anymore, because I think if he doesn't give that agreement, the penalties for impeachment under the Constitution are not only removal but disqualification. So you could actually see the president being impeached after he leaves office if the Democrats badly enough want to disqualify him from holding office in the future. Andy, you mentioned the New York case. There's a belief on the left, belief on the right, that Trump is going to face a welter of indictments and accusations and lawsuits

and arrests, that there's this vast quantity of malfeasance waiting to be answered and exposed. What are they talking about exactly? Well, James, remember, I think it was 2018, the Times did this blockbuster, God, it was thousands of words i think it's 20 25 000 word report on uh the trump family's financial practices in in the uh real estate business right and there were a lot of allegations about tax fraud and bank fraud and that sort of stuff My sense of pouring over that at the time was that a lot of what they were talking about was time barred and that most of the reason that they were doing this report was because of what it said about, you know, Trump's propensity to engage in what they

allege was dishonest conduct. I want to stress none of this has been proved in court. But I don't know that it's, you know, the attorney, the district attorney in New York County, Manhattan, has been looking at this. Whether there is a case that's live that involves financial fraud, you know, that isn't like, you know, 20 years old, some of it. I have my doubts because there are other people in Trump's family who could have been charged by now if they actually had a case. I mean, it's one thing to say you don't want to you know, we're not going to charge the president. No one's been charged. So I have my doubts about whether they'll actually go forward with this and i i don't know you guys probably have the same uh take on history as i do in this regard usually once you've moved on to a new administration nobody wants to go back over um you know the

your your political opponents uh as potential criminal targets in the rearview mirror. It's one thing to say, you know, going forward, you know, we need to lock Hillary up and we need to lock this one up. We need to not once once the election is over. I think especially, you know, I have some confidence in Merrick Garland, who I got to know during the. Wait, wait, wait. He's alive. Merrick Garland is alive. Attorney General General Garland. Attorney General.

But I don't think he or Biden is going to see any upside in pursuing Trump. And I kind of think Democrats in general. I know that, you know, people are insane about Trump. The thing I've never understood on the right or the left is how Trump has either a cult grab on some people or causes derangement in others. You know, he just he is what he is. And I kind of think once he's gone, hopefully cooler heads will prevail and people just want to move on. But as I, as I said a second ago, I think if he's still alive potential office seeker for 2024,

then everybody's calculation has to, has to factor that in. Of course, if he, and it's Rob again, of course, if he runs in 2024, he's going to be in some Iowa state state fair, you know, fried butter eating stall with his former vice president. It's going to be very interesting debate in Iowa and New Hampshire. So I got to here's I know you got to go. I'm going to ask you an incredibly unfair thought experiment. So get you, Rob. Yes. Very unfair. Imagine that the Democrats had not already gone through what I think we agree on. Maybe we don't. But certainly I think was a completely pointless and frankly, unfounded impeachment exercise. Right. Would it be different right now? Would the impeachment conversation now be different?

I don't think so. And only because I agree with you that that was a completely pointless exercise but i think it's so pointless and the trump years have been like dog years in the sense that we're just you know by the time that by the time we got to um by the time we got to the democratic convention that thing was never the fact that they impeached it was never even mentioned in their um in their convention so i kind of feel like it's like it never happened. It's a good question because it should matter to us. But I think the only thing, the only impact it may have now is because they've just done it, they could probably do it again faster.

Like, you know, you could make the machine work a little bit faster than you could before. But I don't think in terms of people's perception of it, I don't think it's- You've already got the page bookmarked on your browser. Yes, that's right. I do, yeah. I was ready to give Peter, I have my whole shtick about, you know, it doesn't have to be a criminal offense, but indictable on the federal law. I did that speech enough times I could do it in my sleep. I just hope not to do it in

everybody else's sleep. Well, Andy, it's been great as usual, but I've just learned that you were on a national review cruise and that invalidates everything you said, because it just means that people come with a little cruise ship icon next to your name on a Twitter feed. And that's it. There's no reason to listen to you, even though you wrote ball of collusion and that, that, that great story about the Trump years. Sorry, sorry, sorry. That's how people, that's how you are declared

an un-person these days. So we'll have to let you go. But we hope to talk to you soon. And we hope to talk to you about, I don't think we're going to be talking about the Biden legal strategy to deal with all of the impeachment talk about his China Burisma Hunter Biden financing, because I for some odd, strange reason, I don't think we're going to go there, but we'll see. So thanks for joining us today. We'll talk to you later. Thanks, Jen. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you, Andy. And by the way, one of the reasons that we know that Andy McCarthy was on a national cruise is because we've uncovered documents that show his Internet access happened in the Virgin Islands. Yes, we've got the records.

How do we do that? Those records can actually sync a man's reputation. Those records are very secure, as you know. There's no way to breach them. Log your Internet activity, and they sell that data to other big tech companies or advertisers. Yeah, we know what's happening. You don't like it. To prevent ISPs from seeing my internet activity, I protect my devices with ExpressVPN because I'm not stupid. I'm not paranoid. I just don't want them to know. So what is ExpressVPN? Well, it's a simple app for your computer or your smartphone that encrypts all

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Yeah, I'm fine. But here's something I didn't say, which we could have talked about at some point, was that I acquired the virus, is what you say you know in in the virus community uh i acquired it in dallas in dallas texas so despite all my uh loathing of the ridiculous senator from texas ted cruz i have to say marched in with my mother my my my 82 year old mother to get our covid positive covid test. And the irony of course, is he looked at my mother and said, so how,

what medications are you on ma'am? And she said, none. Cause my mother doesn't, she's fine. And he says, what medications are you on, sir?

And then I sort of had to hang my head in shame and list the various prescriptions that I take daily. And he looked at me and said, okay, well you're kind of in a risk group to me, to my, me and not my mother. But in any case, cause you're in Texas. The first thing they did was they juiced us up with steroids.

They gave us a Z-Pak, and they sent us to CVS to get hydroxychloroquine. Did they really? Yes, they did, which we did. But he did say something kind of alarming. He said, my advice to you is to go to CVS, not Walgreens. That is alarming. Why? I guess he'd heard that people at Walgreens were like, whoa, we're not really this is not really indicated for your, you know, because it's Walgreens is too woke. I guess I don't I don't I don't know.

This is it's not up to them to say. Exactly right. But now. OK, so then then we then quarantine the house and split it down the middle. It was me and my nephew and my mom and then my brother sister-in-law and niece on the other side basically we met out outdoors on the front porch and the back porch how old is your nephew hey cat 15 little typhoid uh football player um but very mild case for everybody right very much but at some point it was like you know because they had already gotten negative tests you guys should go back and get another test so they go back and get another test and of course they're positive too so now the whole house is positive oh but this is what

they said my brother now very mild symptoms so i'm not you know no complaints here they said to my brother uh okay here's what we're gonna do you get i get, I think you have a Z-Pak, no steroids, no hydroxychloroquine for you, but we do want you to take ivermectin. Now, ivermectin is a miracle drug. They're using it in the third world. The third world has tons of ivermectin. Ivermectin is a drug that eliminates scabies. It's a scabies medication. So in Pakistan and India and in Africa, where there are scabies outbreaks, scabies is a skin is a skin, itchy skin. The fungus, I think, is what it is. And it's it's blood borne and ivermectin kills it. And that's what they gave my brother, ivermectin. So somewhere there are doctors actually doing the work of trying stuff. And there's plenty of evidence that is just ivermectin

it's effective we should get dr savage and dr j back on here to find out and plenty of evidence i mean and that's no evidence but i can say exhibit a and my mom hydroxychloroquine they whatever we did it would seem to work so um at some point when we're all done uh trying to tear the country apart we'll we'll have a nice big uh roundup of what happened when covid hit how how do the cures work and what should we do next time and i look forward to that yeah i thought that ivermectin was a producer of wildlife documentaries in the 50s yeah yeah he was i think that this the the undersecretary the duma yeah ivermectin you said you had very mild symptoms yeah one day in the back of my mind is i have several times had a

terrible sinus infection yeah and then i get the z-pack and i actually can feel i feel better within within six hours say three, three, four hours even. Could you, hydrochlorin, the Z-Pak, did anything make a dramatic difference? Do you feel better? I don't know because we took it and then developed symptoms. Oh, I see. Right? Because it's so early.

I think with the steroids and the hydroxychloroquine, you take it early on and it's good for you. Again, this is really a conversation I had with Dr. J and with George. I should bring them back and have that um there was one day for everybody of sort of a kind of like awful bad fever flu not feeling good tired all the time not hungry um and were you worried at this point for your mom yes right and worried for me according to the doctor okay your mother is a national treasure right exactly no i think uh that is the other the the most stressful thing about it for me i mean other people have it worse but was that it's like it's like going through life with spooky music playing every time anything happens it's like wait a minute i just coughed is this the

beginning i think i have a kind of headache is Is this the beginning? And so you end up, you know, we ended up, it was absurd. My, my nephew and my mother and I went like every 30 minutes, we were like, have you checked your temperature? Have you done your blood oxygen? We had the thing on our finger, the thing in our forehead. And we were like, and at some point at one night it was just became, I just started to compete with my nephew because I was was you shoot the gun at your forehead it has it does it with beeps so one beep you're fine two beeps three beeps you got a fever and uh i just got i got one beep for like three and a half hours in a row i said i'm i'm president of the one beep club and my net really bugged my nephew he's very competitive he's an athlete he's

like give it to me. And he always got two beeps or sometimes he got three beeps. You're like, ooh, you know. Guess you got to get up a little earlier to be a part of the One Beep Club. But that's about all that I could say. And then, you know, then is the humiliation of putting a thing on your finger and your 82

year old mother has her blood oxygen saturation at 99% and I'm at 93. Like, what happened to me? She's like, 99%. It's like, give me some of that oxygen. But what do I care now? I've got the antibodies. I'm like

a demigod at this point. Are you drinking that coffee with cream? Has taste returned? Taste has returned. I never drink it with cream. I always drink it black. Okay. But it did go away. It did go away.

And the weird thing is it goes away like when you have a cold, but you're not stuffed up. So you're breathing fine, but you just can't smell anything. You can taste. You can taste sweet, sour, bitter. You can taste that stuff. Oh, you can taste. Yeah, you can't smell anything. So you can't really taste anything. And can taste that stuff. Oh, you can taste it. Yeah, you can't smell anything, so you can't really taste anything.

And that is very weird. And then when you finally can, it's like smelling a cup of coffee that's across the room. You can kind of... Oh, I see. Kind of, but

it's like distant. It's very interesting. The number of people who have revealed themselves to be perfidious agents of the deep state and the rest of it grows every day. And it's, I mean, I go to websites that I used to really enjoy and don't enjoy anymore because they're just involved in tightening the circle to this little, small little ring in which the elect shall stand. And it's dismaying. No matter what you said or accomplished or did before, you are instantaneously banished as an unperson unless you follow along certain prescribed ideas.

By the way, just there's no room for, if anybody who, who, who attacked Mitch McConnell by way of a note to me yesterday saying that he's in bed with the ccp communist party of china i believe what they're referring to is that his wife elaine comes from a chinese family a elaine who was Secretary of Transportation, just stepped down. She resigned yesterday in protest. But B, and this is really important, Elaine's family is Taiwanese.

They are not mainland. Now, like many people in Taiwan, there's business that goes back and forth between Taiwan and the mainland. But Elaine's family feels no warmth or sympathy for the communist party of China. All due respect to Secretary Chao, she's an old lady. Her parents are old. Like, they're not just recent Taiwanese zillionaires. They are freedom fighters. Oh, yes.

That is like saying, well, you know, the Solzhenitsyns, they're in bed with putin it's like no quite the reverse uh that's the weirdest thing too also i feel like you know the mitch mcconnell mitch mcconnell be an interesting story to tell because the hatred and then the embrace of mitch mcconnell from republicans i mean just forget democrats from people in his own party from trump supporters just just that one subset of trump supporters is whiplash inducing he should have been primaried and then we're not going to primary him and then he's the greatest guy and then we're like you know well gentlemen before we go and wrap it up i promised everybody in the comments yesterday that i had a solution that was going to bring the warring elements of the right

together do you think that's possible first of all all, I mean, we have these two camps, the, you know, the, the, the, the Trump can do no wrong and the absolutely the test the man. And there's just a lot of us in the middle and the rest of it. How do we bring these things together? What one man, what warrior, what one weird trick as they say in the internet, could we do to go forward and have productive conversations? And I think it's this. We stop talking about Donald Trump. Just imagine it.

I mean, just imagine if after he's out of office, we just not to banish him or not to say we're not going to talk about that evil spirit. But if we just don't talk about it, we don't have it because everything comes back to that. I put up a piece on Ricochet last night about pushing a guy out of the snow. And it was almost a test to see how long it would take to come back to Trump. I haven't kind of checked all the comments yet, but it's entirely possible that it does. If we just remove that and just say we're moving on and we we don't view each other through the prism of Trump. If the word doesn't come up, we don't have the opportunity to view other people through the prism of their stance on trump i actually think we can get something done is that the most hopelessly

naive thing you've ever heard in your life i think it's naive i think it's hopefully naive i don't think it's bad i think it yeah that could happen i think, I had a very contentious dinner party in August. I told you about this in which I recommend I was the only, there were two people there saying the same thing, me and ironically and culture. And we're all saying the same thing to a bunch of people who are very, very rich and very, very smart and much too rich and much too smart to be saying what they were

saying at that part. And we both, I predicted, I told you that there was going to be a blue wave in November and I was wrong. I mean, you know, it turns out I was kind of technically right, but I was not right in the spirit of it. But what I said, which I still do believe in, is that the Republicans, if they want to survive, if they don't, it's fine. They need to cut him loose.

Start a bonfire, throw him on it. Not just not talk about him, trash him. Kill the demon and then move on. Because if they don't, if they weasel word it, if they equivocate, if it's like, well, well, well, the other side, I'm just predicting, the other side is going to have a field day and they're going to be raising money off this guy forever.

The best thing to do is, I think, is not only your decision, but as tactical matter, as a practical piece of political strategy in a country in which that actually matters, you want to get something done, trash him, cut him loose, bury him 20 feet deep. And Peter, you would do this while preserving a admiration of the accomplishments of the administration how i don't know honestly i just i am just going to say that i don't know my uh i'll tell you who i'll be keeping an eye on rob has mentioned um ted cruz and josh holly I mentioned Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley a number of times in this podcast as having disgraced themselves. Tom Cotton strikes me as having covered himself in a certain kind of glory.

I agree. He represents Arkansas. Arkansas is as supportive of Donald Trump as any state in the union. Tom Cotton has tried to be used these last four years in a politically creative way. We don't often think of politics that way, but he kept looking for openings to get things done that were useful and important. And that meant working with the president and his administration as often as he could. And Tom Cotton said, no, what you are suggesting would damage the Constitution. I will not challenge the electoral vote.

And for a guy whose constituents support Donald Trump powerfully, that was a certain that was a certain i actually i i think of the old kennedy slash sorenson book profiles and courage we now now it's uncontested that ted sorenson actually wrote the darn thing um but he seems to have talked it over with young senator kennedy and which there are moments, profiles of people just doing things that are courageous. And I think that was one statement. There's more. But that was a remarkable thing

for Tom Cotton to do. I'll keep an eye on him. And you know what? I mean, I don't know. I need to know more about this before I say it, so I'm going to spout out this. I could be wrong.

I mean, am I crazy to think that the governor of Florida is a incredibly impressive chief executive of the state? You are not crazy at all. Ron DeSantis has the, he reads, he's this square built guy with a gravelly voice and he reads as though he just climbed down from a cab that just tanked up at james's family place up in fargo and then you look at his record in other words he comes across as a as an as an ordinary person of the kind that you were described then it turns out he went to Yale and Harvard. Oh, I guess that's true. I can't remember which was undergrad and which was law school.

He was a Rhodes Scholar. There's that. And then he was a decorated officer in the United States Army. This guy has a tremendous resume. So there's a second person worth watching. And I mean worth watching with regard to the specific question that James raised. What is the right way to handle Donald Trump? Ignore him?

Bury him? For Ron DeSantis, this will be a special problem because Donald Trump, as far as we can tell, intends to—he's established residency in Florida. He intends to make Mar-a-Lago his base. But Ron DeSantis is tremendously impressive, in my opinion. Worth watching. Right. We need new voices. We need new people.

Yep. I mean, it's instructive. I said, you know what, let's just stop talking about Trump. And Rob says, I agree, but first we have to encase him in a lead vault and drop him in the Mariana's trench. Yes. And then the other people, I agree, but first we have to make sure there's a statue in the national mall. Both of these things. No, no, just, just, just we'll all be happy. We have been so focused on this man for half of the century. He has consumed all of the oxygen in the room and you just have have the weirdness at the end.

The naivete for the night. I love the hopefulness, but the naivete part of it is that the debt. This is if you care about Republican Party politics, if you care about the conservative movement, which is now, you know, which and the Republican Party, for better or worse, has been the only the only force for conservatism in American politics for decades, right? So if you care about that, then I think you have to care about this. If you're a Democrat, you're not going to stop talking about Trump. You're not going to stop talking about Trump forever. You're going to talk about Trump all along. Every time Trump appeared with a Republican,

anybody running against a Republican politician is going to run the picture of him or her standing next to Trump forever. We did it with Jimmy Carter. We did it with Hillary Clinton. We gave him this gift, the Republicans should be saying, of Donald Trump. So Republicans may want to not talk about Donald Trump, but the Democrats are going to love it. So we need to have a point of view about it. the point of view i think for the republicans should be the guy was a disaster i repudiate him completely good riddance to bad rubbish instead of this well you know good riddance to bad rubbish politics is is a rough sport he gets no zero loyalty that would be my pitch to the republic because he's toxic. He is Chernobyl. But, you know, I fully expect the Republicans to do the stupid thing because that's what they've been doing for a long time. Rob, I didn't expect that from you. Actually, all of this comes as quite of

a surprise. 230 comments in the post at Ricochet, which I advise you all to do. And one of the reasons that Ricochet is still around, by the way, is because it's brought to you by fine sponsors like ButcherBox, by Better Help, and ExpressVPN. Support them for supporting us. And of course, if you, well, you've already gone to Apple, you know, the podcast thing and given us five stars. I know that. But why don't you log in under a Zoom name and do it again? No, that's not ethical. No, what are you? You haven't gone and given us five stars? Give us five stars. It helps. Makes people see Ricochet, services the podcast, and the next thing you know, we got new members. Because new members are what keeps the site going. And the conversation in the member feed this week has been

lit, as the kids say. And we're working through things. But it's a community that does this stuff, and we're grappling. We're grappling. We are. And we'll grapple some more next week. Gentlemen, it's been fun. Got to wrap it up. Got to let people get back to whatever they're doing. Because I imagine that even if those who are listening to us in a treadmill stopped at some point, just contemplatively and put their arms on the crossbar and just stared into the middle distance and listen to the wisdom here. Right? Right? Yep.

Right. Yes. Yes. Okay. Wisdom. Got it. It's been fun, guys. We'll talk to you next week. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Happy. Okay. Wisdom. Got it. It's been fun. We'll talk to you next week and we'll see everybody in the comments at

ricochet 4.0. Vitamin D, vitamin C and zinc. Zinc. And Ivan Torres. I hurt myself today To see if I still feel I focus on the pain

The only thing that's real The needle tears the hole The old familiar sting Try to kill it all away

But I remember Everything What have I become My sweetest friend Everyone I know Goes away in the end. And you could have it all. My empire of dirt.

I will let you down. I will make you hurt. I wear this crown of thorns upon my liar's chair. Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair. repair beneath the stains of time the feelings disappear you are someone else

I am still right here what have I become? My sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end. And you could have it all. way in the end and you could have it all

my empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt if I could start again I will make you hurt. If I could start again.

A million miles away. I would keep myself. I would find a way. Ricochet. Join the conversation.