Live with Heather Cox Richardson

So let's start right there.

Democracy, what's going on here?

Well, we're at a very perilous moment where, you know, the fate of the country is really unclear.

We are certainly, I think, on a very swift slide towards authoritarianism.

We're seeing things we never saw in the first Trump administration.

We're seeing things we never expected we would see in this country.

The Justice Department used to go after the political enemies of the president.

We're seeing companies extorted to pay percentages to the Trump administration or the Treasury, or in some cases, to pay the president personally, as we've seen with now two media companies capitulating to the president, one after another, paying him personally to get a merger approved or just to make a nuisance lawsuit go away.

And we're seeing most painfully these masked agents roaming around the country, grabbing people indiscriminately off the streets.

Many in my home city of Los Angeles,

citizens, non-citizens alike.

We're seeing a Supreme Court that has enabled all these abuses, enabled them further.

So we are at a very precarious moment that we will get through, but it falls on us, I think, every day to figure out, okay, today,

what can we do to mitigate the harms until we can get to another day when we can put them behind us?

I think you're right.

And I do think that the degree to which the Trump administration has doubled down on authoritarianism and fascism has surprised a lot of people, but maybe in that case, given us some opportunities because a lot of folks that insisted that we were crazy to be worried about him are suddenly on board, which seems to me to be a good sign.

I think that's exactly right.

People who voted for the president.

were hopeful that he would deliver what he said he would deliver, which was lower price and lower prices and a lower cost of living and more.

And that central campaign promise has been betrayed.

Instead, his tariff wars have just pushed prices up.

His attacks on immigrant communities have meant that construction costs are going up.

Americans' lives are getting more difficult.

And that big, ugly bill is about to result in just

intensifying costs for health insurance.

Price increases are going out of 50%, 75% increases.

This is what he's delivered.

And I think it is turning a lot of people who voted for him because they were deeply dissatisfied with the status quo and ready to try anything.

I think it's causing him to recognize, okay, he's just making my lot worse.

And

the corrupt way he's going about it, the fact that as individual Americans are struggling more than ever to pay the rent and buy groceries, His personal economy is thriving like never before.

He's bringing in billions to his personal and family fortune.

It's all the more egregious.

Yes, and the corruption is historic.

I will say that.

I mean, the sheer volume that we're talking about is enormous.

But while I have you here, I think many of us are aware of how bad things are going, and certainly plenty of writers are covering that.

One of the things that you have recently done is introduced into Congress

a bill to protect our democracy.

It's actually called the Protecting Our Democracy Act.

And I think that's a really interesting act.

I'd love it if you would talk about what is in it.

But the reason that I'm interested in it is because it strikes me as being both a look at where our democracy might have gone wrong and a way to think about fixing it.

So can you tell us about that and why you did it and where you hope that that will go?

Certainly.

And let me start from the beginning, how this whole project came about.

I would say about midway through the first Trump term, I was on the House floor talking with Speaker Pelosi, and I said, you know, it may not be too early for us to start thinking about our own post-Watergate reforms in the same way that Congress after Watergate built up some guardrails that served the country well for 50 years.

Maybe we need to start working on the next set of guardrails, our own set of reforms.

And she thought that was a very good idea.

And she assembled a group of chairs of various committees.

And we put together together the first version of the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which we got passed in the House.

But of course, it got killed in the Senate or stalled in the Senate.

We are taking up that mantle again.

And because the first Protecting Our Democracy Act was a response to a lot of the abuses in the first term and those have multiplied, the second iteration contains even more guardrails.

So it would, for example, attack the president's self-enrichment.

The problem we have found with the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which should prohibit these kind of gifts of $400 million aircraft from gutteries,

is that it has proven unenforceable.

So this

bill would create an enforcement mechanism so that we can make sure that the president is not selling U.S.

policy at the highest bidder.

It would apply, for example, the conflict of interest laws to even special government employees like Elon Musk.

So they can't, you know, essentially pad their own pockets or their own interests at the expense of others, their competitors, or the American people.

It would do all we can to curb the abuses of the party power.

It would prevent a president from dismissing a criminal case against himself.

It's a whole host of things.

It would increase Congress's power to hold executive accountable and enforce subpoenas instead of what we saw during the first Trump administration when effectively the president said, pound sand when we subpoenaed him.

So these are some of the guardrails we want to re-erect.

Let me ask you a couple of questions about that.

First of all, you said that in the first Trump term that this Protecting American Democracy, Protect Our Democracy Act passed through the House.

That was a Democratic-dominated House.

Is that correct?

Yes, it was.

Okay.

So then the next question

that I want to ask about it is that it sounds to me, you know, one of the reasons I feel like we're in the mess we're in is precisely because the Republican Party put partisanship above country in the two impeachment cases against Donald Trump.

So a lot of what you are putting into that act, it seems to me, is legal recourse for a situation in which members of a presidential party refuse to take the idea of impeachment seriously.

We've never had to deal with the emoluments clause, for example, in the past, because presidents recognize that if they broke it, they would find themselves at the losing end of an impeachment.

Am I correct about that?

Oh, you're absolutely right about that.

And, you know, that gets to another realization of these difficult times, which is you can have the best written constitution in the world, and I believe we do.

You can have the best written laws meant to constrain the worst impulses of human nature, and maybe we do.

But none of that will be enough if people don't give meaning to their oath of office, if they're not guided by the truth, if they're unwilling to recognize facts,

then none of it will be enough.

And sadly, what we have seen is Republicans, I think much to the

consternation of what our founders would have anticipated, have completely sacrificed the ambition of their institution to the ambition of the president.

And so that vital safeguard has come down.

What I find astounding every day is we could stop all these abuses tomorrow.

We could stop the lawless tariffs.

We could stop the lawless indiscriminate arrests.

We could stop the president extorting extorting media companies.

We could stop all of this tomorrow if we just had a handful of Republicans who put their oath and their Constitution ahead of their either fear of the president or their sycophantic desire to please the president.

That's all it would take.

I have to say, that has been the thing that has surprised me the most is the degree to which Republican senators have walked away from the prerogatives of the Senate.

I mean,

if you had sworn an oath to the Constitution and then walking away from that power just strikes me as being mind-boggling.

I really did not see that coming.

Not necessarily to say they would turn against the president, but that they would protect the power of the Senate.

And they're not.

That is so very true.

I mean, our most potent power is the power of the purse.

It's the power to say, we're going to fund that and we're not going to fund that.

And if you keep doing this, we're going to cut off the funding for this too.

That's our most potent tool.

and Republicans have completely walked away from it.

In fact, even as we enter these discussions about the funding bill that's due at the end of this month, the president is telling us, Republicans are telling us, they're going to renege on the deal.

They're going to impound funds they don't want spent.

They're going to rescind funds they don't like.

So they're saying, tell us your funding priorities and we're going to ignore them.

We want you to agree to something, but we're going to renege on it.

It's like Lucy with the football and Charlie Brown, except here Lucy is saying, I'm going to snatch that football away.

I just want you to know in advance.

So that's what they're telling us.

And if Congress is willing to say, we're going to completely abdicate even this most important power, then what is left to constrain a runaway presidency and a, in particular, presidency that is heading more and more towards dictatorship?

Well, that's the real question, right?

The question of why that they are willing to walk away from the prerogatives of the Senate and the prerogatives of Congress to do things like control the power of the purse, which is, of course, the very first thing that the framers of the Constitution paid attention to almost exactly 248 years ago, this moment.

But also.

Heather, I think the answer to the question is really two things.

I think it is fear and it is ambition.

It is ambition to stay in office.

It is, on my Republican colleague's point of view, it is fear of a mega primary.

It is fear at times of personal safety that if they cross the president, they will lose their jobs.

And it is as simple and as terrible as that.

I would have thought coming into this crisis that should we have ever faced a man who wanted to be a king, there would be a hundred Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinzingers, and there turned out to be only two.

That has been the terrible surprise.

The Fabers did anticipate someone like Trump.

Hamilton described him perfectly in describing the man who would stir up the passions of the populace and then try to ride the whirlwind.

The man who would affect military heirs, that would whip up the passions of people, that would denigrate the government, described Trump to a T.

What maybe he didn't anticipate is that people would so walk away from the institutional interests they so carefully architected in

the Constitution.

Amen.

I know you don't have a lot of time because you have to run to a vote.

So I want to ask you something that people always ask me.

And that is, while you are working in the Senate to try and slow down the destruction that the MAGAs are causing and to try and preserve the guardrails of our democracy, what should we be doing?

What can ordinary people be doing to protect democracy in this moment?

Such an important question, because at the end of the day, the most important tool we have to fight the administration is not the Congress.

My Republican colleagues are simply unwilling.

It is not the courts, even though the courts have been probably the most successful tool we've used to stop and at times delay some of the harms, but rather it's all of us.

And we are seeing that play out.

For example, in Chicago, they're learning the lessons that we learned painfully in Los Angeles about these massed ICE agents and these militarization of our streets.

And you see parents taking immigrant children to school so that their own parents don't risk being arrested in the process.

You're seeing people drop off food to immigrant households like they did during the pandemic so that people don't have to leave their house to buy food and potentially get arrested.

You're seeing people donate their time in litigation.

You see people take to the streets on No Kings Day by the millions.

You're seeing people show up at the polls in extraordinary numbers.

We're seeing changes in the electorate since that disastrous presidential election, where in Republican districts, you're seeing a flip of

the electorate in just dramatic terms.

So this is what it's going to take.

We need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that there is a magic legislative button or a perfect piece of litigation or even a perfect and simple step that we as citizens can take, the answer is we need to do it all.

But most particularly, if I had to point to one thing that we can do, and that is be courageous, be hopeful and be courageous, because what they're trying to do is make everyone afraid, to make you afraid of speaking out, to make a media company afraid of crossing the president, to make a corporation afraid, to make a law firm afraid, to make colleges afraid, to make legislators afraid, to divide us from ourselves, to pit us against ourselves, to cause people to hunker down and hide and hope to ride it out and not be noticed.

But that way lies dictatorship.

The alternative is a million acts of individual courage, of people standing up, of institutions standing up.

It's the prosecutor who says, I'm going to leave the department before I do something unethical.

It's the parent that intervenes for their neighbor to protect them from

mass ICE agents.

It's all of us doing what we can, all of us recognizing we can't do everything, but there is something we can do.

That's what it's going to take.

It is going to take, it sounds like, we the people.

which is a wonderful way to end this interview and to thank you very much for being here, Senator.

And please do come back whenever, but please do keep us posted on what happens, not only with the passage of your legislation, which seems unlikely in this particular Congress, but in discussions around it, because it does seem like a vision for moving forward to a nation that does not have to grapple again with the situation we have now where a party is putting its own interests above the nation and where a president is trying to become a dictator.

Well, I want to end, Heather, by thanking you again.

Really, you have been such a courageous champion.

You have passed on such vital information to all of us.

You've given us actionable items we can undertake.

So thank you.

Thank you to all your Substack subscribers.

Thank you to my Substack subscribers as well.

So grateful to you for all you're doing.

Well, back at you, and let's do it for another six years, Senator.

Let's do it.

We will have the good fortune, we know, of watching the door hit the president in the backside on the way out.

Can't wait.

Thanks a lot.

Take care.

Take care.

Thanks for being here, everybody.