BONUS: Bourbon & Biden (Live from Louisville!)

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What's up, Movoo?

Welcome to Pod Safe America.

I'm John Papper.

I'm Perry Bacon.

I'm John Lovitt.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

We have an outstanding show for you tonight.

Your Congressman Morgan McGarvey is here.

Your state senator, Karen Berg, is here.

And we are so lucky to be joined by Louisville native Perry Bacon, also a columnist at the Washington Post.

All right, let's get to the news.

I believe we have breaking news here.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Major shakeup in the Republican primary.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has suspended his campaign for president.

His surprise announcement came at the end of his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition.

He said, It's become clear to me that it's not my time.

And he called on voters to give our country a Republican standard-bearer that will, as Lincoln said, appeal to the better angels of our nature.

Little digged Donald Trump, who Pence will now go from running against to testifying against in the January 6th trial.

To endorsing.

You know what the Republican Jewish Coalition said to Mike Pence after he dropped out?

Terrible in such small portions.

You know what I mean?

How do you guys think this bombshell will change the race?

Dan?

I don't think it'll change the race.

Okay.

Who's going to get the Pence endorsement?

The vaunted Pence endorsement?

Well, I think what will likely happen is this 0.6% support in the polls we divide up evenly among Nikki Haley, Rhonda Sands, and Tim Scott.

I think Doug Bergham's making a move.

All right.

Let's talk about, that's enough of Mike Pence.

That's more time than Mike Pence's campaign deserved.

Let's talk about Mike Pence's spiritual successor, Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House.

New Speaker of the House who thinks Noah brought dinos on the ark.

That's not a joke.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, he, yeah.

He fought for tax breaks for a park right here in Kentucky.

You guys know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you anyone been to the Noah's Ark?

No?

With the dinos?

I got to say,

you think he was right.

No,

look, we can debate whether or not the dinosaurs were on the Ark, but he was right to fight for those tax breaks.

That's right.

I'm not saying the museum was accurate.

All right.

So Mike Johnson, he finally sits down for a hard-hitting interview with Sean Hannity.

We learned in the interview that Johnson doesn't want to keep the government open unless Republicans get some policy concessions, though they're still fighting with each other about what those are.

On the menu are massive budget cuts, immigration restrictions, a national ban on mailing abortion pills.

Johnson also admitted that he doesn't want to expel George Santos because Republicans can't afford to lose the seat.

He said he wants to change the motion to vacate, which makes him smarter than Kevin McCarthy.

And he told us a little bit more about who Mike Johnson is.

Someone asked me today in the media, they said, it's curious, people are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?

I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.

That's my worldview.

That's what I believe.

Comments you had made both in writing and advocacy for this group about homosexuality, calling it sinful, destructive,

and

not supporting gay marriage,

quote, no clear right to sodomy in the Constitution.

You have been getting hammered on this.

And I want to ask you about it.

I want to know exactly, you know, where you stand.

Some of these comments were 15 years ago.

I don't even remember some of them.

Do you see in Joe Biden a cognitive decline?

And if so, is that a danger to the country?

I do.

I think most of us do.

That's reality.

This is not a personal slight to him.

If, in fact, all the evidence leads to where we believe it will, that's very likely likely impeachable offenses.

You know, that's listed as a cause for impeachment in the Constitution.

You know, bribery and

other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Bribery is listed there, and it looks and smells a lot like that.

And I think the evidence, we're going to follow the truth where it leads.

We're going to engage in due process because, again, we're the rule of law party.

I want to thank my dedicated wife of almost 25 years, Kelly.

She spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord, and she's a little worn out.

It's Mike Johnson.

Perry, what's your early take on the Mike Johnson era?

I mean, just, I know we're trying to keep it light, but when I just,

we lost McCarthy and we have a less experienced, dumber,

way more radical speaker, in all honesty.

I mean, this is a sign of how bad things are.

This guy, I'll be honest with you, I had not heard much about Mike Johnson two weeks ago, but

I don't really really know.

And all I've learned about him is that he is significantly more conservative than McCarthy, who was no moderate and terrible at the job in a lot of ways.

So things are bad.

And also, he's doubled down on impeachment, particularly, which it seems like

McCarthy did not seem that invested in.

And maybe, I mean, if you're doing an interview with Sean Hannity, you probably can't downplay impeachment.

But that's it.

It looks like all the things that we were, you know,

there was a lot of chaos, but ultimately we ended up with a speaker who's going to try to do the exact same things that McCarthy was, that Matt Gates wants, a speaker who's even more in Trump's pocket.

Also, and yeah, and

James Comer just said the other day, too, that he doesn't know if he wants to have another impeachment hearing.

And he's the guy that was leading the impeachment charge.

And Mike Johnson's talking about doing impeachment now.

Because the first one went so well.

Yeah, so he wants a better impeachment trial.

Tommy Johnson also said in that Hannity interview that he respects the Supreme Court's decision that legalized same-sex marriage and that he thinks abortion should be left to the states, even though, of course, he has long supported national bans on both abortion and same-sex marriage.

What do you make of his comments to Hannity?

So, you know, look, I think he presents well, right?

He looks like Harry Potter's older brother or like a friendly English teacher who doesn't teach evolution or believe in it, but like he seems like kind of a nice guy.

But to Perry's point, he is a super, super conservative lawmaker.

He's a sort of white Christian nationalist.

He believes there is no separation between church and state, as he said there.

The Bible is his worldview.

So, when he says that there shouldn't be a national abortion ban should be left to the states, I don't think we should believe that at all.

I think we should treat that as a comment made with political expediency in mind, the same way all of Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominees said they respected precedent, right?

That Roe v.

Wade was settled law.

Now, I mean, he's a smart guy, and maybe he will not try to advance wildly unpopular things like overturning gay marriage or a 15-week abortion ban while he's the Speaker of the House and Democrats control the Senate and Joe Biden is in the White House because he knows it'll go nowhere, but it will make his moderate members take really bad votes.

But you know, like a friendly-looking ideologue is still an ideologue, and I think he's someone really should worry about.

Yeah.

Well, and he, and

it's very recently that he sponsored bills on national abortion bans.

He refused to vote for codifying gay marriage as legal.

He

introduced the legislation to make Ron DeSantis's don't say gay law a national law and expand it from schools to public libraries, hospitals, military, anywhere that gets federal funding from the government.

So he's pretty extreme.

And if he had a majority, he'd probably do that stuff.

Yeah, look, I think there are Republicans who got into politics for a bunch of different reasons, a messy coalition.

There are Republicans that do the evangelical shtick, the anti-gay shtick, but their mission in life is deregulation

and lowering taxes for corporations and rich friends.

This person has a genuine motivation

based around

sort of Christian nationalism.

If you go back and look at the speeches he was given when he was running for Congress, if you look at his work as a lawyer before he was a public official, it is all around around advocating for these hard-right, socially conservative views.

He advocated not just against gay marriage,

but against

legalizing gay relationships.

After the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v.

Texas that the sodomy laws in Texas were unconstitutional.

He wrote several pieces where he excoriated the Supreme Court, said that there was no right to basically against a right to privacy, and explicitly saying that states should have the right to discriminate discriminate against same-sex relationships versus heterosexual relationships, that he explicitly believes that a state can outlaw gay relationships because there is an inherent good in heterosexual relationships that doesn't exist for gay people.

That was his view for many, many years.

And he can play games here and say, oh,

I don't even remember half of the things I've advocated for, but

I don't really take him at his word.

I do think this brings into sharp relief what a Republican trifecta in 2025 would look like.

You have Mike Johnson with these incredibly retrograde views on reproductive freedom, sexual relationships, same-sex marriage.

You have Mitch McConnell, who has advocated for a federal abortion ban, who in the early part of the century was one of the leaders in demonizing gay people in order to win the 2004 election with a bunch of trumped up bullshit about same-sex marriage.

And then you have Donald Trump, possibly in the White House, who we we know will go along with all of these things because that's what he did the last time he was in office.

Like you can pretend like, oh, he's this guy from Manhattan, but he immediately did the ban on trans people serving in the military.

He used the, or at least allowed his staff to use the administrative state to

to make access to abortion that much more difficult.

And he appointed three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v.

Wade.

And so for all, this is, I think, something we are going to have to make a huge issue in 2024 because it is what is on the ballot now because of Mike Johnson.

So, Love It.

Johnson's first order of business this coming week is dealing with some House Republicans from New York who will force a vote to expel George Santos, who's still in Congress.

Yeah, all right.

Marjorie Taylor Greene will force a vote to censure Rashida Tlaib for speaking outside the Capitol at a rally of activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

And Congresswoman Becca Bailant will try to force a vote censoring Marjorie Taylor Greene for about 40 different actions and statements,

including public appearances with white nationalists and comparing vaccine requirements to Nazism.

How big of a deal are all these votes, and do you think they go anywhere?

I don't think they're a particularly big deal.

Mike Johnson has already

poured cold water on the Santos one, which is hard for him to do because he barely can get above the table.

It's the era of the short king, and I'm loving it.

I was going to say, it's interesting.

Your attack on Mike Johnson is height.

That's where you're going.

How tall is he?

My choices, but you're going high.

Actually, I've looked.

I could not find anywhere, because he's so unknown, we don't yet have publicly available height information,

but he has short king energy.

Like McHenry.

And as does McHenry.

So that's exciting.

I think that's...

you know, there's a Napoleon movie coming out.

Being short is happening.

It's very right now.

So I don't think the Santos thing is going anywhere, especially because you need two-thirds

of the House to expel.

So

I don't see that happening.

But the,

but, you know, stranger things have happened.

These other resolutions, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene's resolution, I think, goes after to leave for things that actually there would be a majority in the House to vote against,

but then goes way too far and calls her an insurrectionist for participating in this peaceful event.

So, like, you know, I think that there is actually,

Tlaib has received a lot of criticism from Democrats and Republicans for some of her statements around what is happening in Israel and Gaza.

But this goes

well beyond anything related to that.

And then this tit-for-tat thing with the Marjorie Taylor Greene resolution.

I can't imagine Republicans going along with that, but passed, don't pass, it doesn't matter.

Really, this is a sideshow to what is ultimately facing Mike Johnson as speaker, which is the same dynamic that felled Kevin McCarthy, which is

if a

bill to keep the government open is going to pass, it's going to have to be bipartisan by definition.

And these people find that anathema to their

whole vibe.

I sort of feel like the whole censure thing has gotten a little cheapened.

Like, once they did it to Adam Schiff for basically no reason, now it's like, you're censured.

No, you're censured.

Well, the other thing, too, is like the tit for tat censure thing.

It's like, I think that there are people, there are even Republicans that don't particularly like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but

they're not going to vote to censure Marjorie Taylor Greene to get back at the Republicans for the to leave thing.

It's like, hey, can we just, can we all just chill the fuck out?

Can you just keep the government open?

Once you've kept the government open, you can have a fun day where you just fucking go ham on each other.

Fair.

It'll be interesting to see how many Republicans vote to expel Santos.

I think the swing district Republicans don't want to defend Santos because who does?

He seems like he's validated 97 laws.

So I think there will be

10, some number of Republicans will vote for that.

And there is a divide on the Democratic side about what's happening in Gaza.

And I wonder if the number is higher than zero of people who will be, there's a congressman in New Jersey, for example, who I think might be open to censoring Tlaib.

So I think the number is probably low, but I think it'll be interesting to watch in terms of the divides in these two parties.

I do think, though, like for both of these, Johnson gives Republicans the talking point, which is we should just let the due process play out and people can hide behind that.

And then on the Marjorie Taylor Greene point,

you can just say something along the lines of, look, I have strong disagreements, but the idea of calling this anything like the insurrection on January 6th, like both sides have given the other side just an easy out to get away from this thing.

If you're a Democrat, you can criticize Rashida Tlaib and not vote for censure.

Voting for censure is such a fucking, that's a move.

And I think on the Santos is interesting because I think Santos, I don't think he'll get two-thirds, but he'll get a major, I think he'll get a majority because he'll get all the Democrats and, like you said, he'll get every Republican in New York, all the New York Republicans.

I mean, it was the New York Republicans who introduced it.

They're leading it.

Yeah, which is interesting.

Dan, more importantly, government runs out of money in a few weeks.

We've now heard from Mike Johnson and some House Republicans on the issue.

How likely do you think it is we're headed for a shutdown?

If not, November 17th, I think that's when the government runs out of money, like in another month or so.

I think it's a question of when, not if.

I think there is a chance that

no one likes a shutdown.

You want me to just come up here and say Mike Johnson's going to solve the problem?

Well, once you get him a phone book to sit on.

Oh, boy.

Wild.

I'm five foot six and a half.

I think there is a chance that Mike Johnson could delay this into next year.

Republicans are tired.

Everyone's exhausted.

He did propose in his nomination speech before he became the speaker nominee that he was advocating for a short-term extension so the Republicans could pass appropriations bills so that they theoretically have some negotiating position in a negotiation with the White House in the Senate.

They actually passed a couple of those bills in the immediate aftermath of Johnson winning.

So I think there's a chance that maybe we get through the holidays and then we have this confrontation next year.

But at some point, it's going to come to a head because Mike Johnson cannot stay speaker and extend, keep the government open at current levels or at the levels the Senate, Democrats, and Republicans want and keep staying his job.

So at some point, there's going to have to be a fight over there.

It's going to have to be a shutdown.

Yeah.

And all these Republicans,

some of the ones that ousted McCarthy in the first place and some other Freedom Caucus types, they want these massive cuts.

They don't like the bipartisan budget deal that McCarthy struck with Biden,

which already offered some cuts.

So they're already annoyed about that.

So they're going to ask for more.

And like, I don't know, I don't know how Johnson gets a bill through the House, even if he wanted to, that doesn't have a bunch of cuts that then the Senate and the White House immediately reject.

I guess the question is whether there's any appetite, even among someone like Matt Gates, to go through the whole motion to vacate process again.

Yeah, well, that's they might change the threshold too to make it harder, right?

So and then also there's the

they can kick this can down the road because one thing Mike Johnson is promising is that they'll go to, rather than sort of these omnibus bills, but they'll go to kind of whatever department by department budgeting, like the kind of the thing that the sort of the Republicans in the House claim they want that actually Republicans and Democrats have been doing together in the Senate despite what's been happening in the House.

But even then, you lead to sort of, even if that were to take place, it's sort of the promise of mini shutdowns or sort of smaller versions of this fight over and over again.

Another thing he's going to have to contend with, Tommy, the president wants the Speaker to pass a $100 billion aid package, most of it for Ukraine, but also for Taiwan, Israel, and some humanitarian aid for the Palestinians.

What have you taken from Johnson's comments on those issues?

So the Hannity interview was interesting and sort of a departure from where he's been before.

He told Hannity that he basically has written a $14.5 billion bill that would be basically military aid for Israel.

And it sounds like that's ready to go.

They'll pass that.

They'll send it over to the Senate side.

I don't know what the Senate folks will do about it.

I don't know if they're not going to want to divide the Ukraine support and the Israel support necessarily yet, but that'll get passed and that'll happen.

The Biden request for aid for the Palestinians is much, much, much less money.

It's $100 million as opposed to tens of billions of dollars.

Unfortunately, he and Hannity in in that conversation immediately started demagoguing that money, suggesting that it would go to terrorists and not to people who are, you know, in week three of getting shelled relentlessly and like sort of living in a nightmare scenario.

So I have less hope there.

On the Ukraine funding, in the past, Johnson has voted against support for Ukraine.

In this interview, he said, you know, we're not going to leave the Ukrainians hanging.

We can't let Putin prevail.

So it sounds like he's willing to allow a vote on a standalone Ukraine bill.

Will it be the amount that Biden wants?

We don't know.

Could his caucus sort of upend it somehow?

I guess probably.

But

the things he was saying were better than where he's been in the past.

And then in terms of Taiwan, that's a little harder to divine.

I mean, I think the one thing that unites Democrats and Republicans in Washington right now is fear-mongering about China.

And especially for the sort of like far-right evangelical Christians, they're particularly worried about like the godless communists taking over the world.

So So I suspect that he will be in favor.

Those are their words, not mine.

I suspect he'll be in favor of support for Taiwan to help them kind of harden.

It's this like porcupine strategy thing, sort of get all the weapons and things they need into Taiwan before a Chinese invasion that everyone thinks is going to happen at some point.

So I bet he will get there on the China support, but it all sort of remains to be seen.

Trump gave a speech today where he said that

across our southern border with Mexico, there there are young, strong Chinese men coming over the border.

Buff.

Chinese men.

Very strong, very young, very buff, very virulent.

Coming over the border.

I'd be like, what?

Love it.

Can you confirm?

What is it?

Every once in a while, a Republican will just kind of...

Like, remember when that guy, Steve King, was like, they're coming across the border with calves calves the size of cantaloupes?

It's like, they can't help but paint a vivid picture of these just sort of rippling muscles

swimming over the Rio Grande to get into the country.

And Trump did produce Broadway musicals,

or at least he wanted to.

So something to think about.

Last question on Mike Johnson for everyone.

Perry, do you think Democrats should make Mike Johnson famous?

Like, should he be a central figure in the 2024 campaign?

You know, I was thinking about this this morning because you all asked me about this, and I it's hard to raise the profile of the speaker on some level.

Like Pelosi was famous in part because she was a woman from San Francisco.

I don't think that John Boehner was well known by the average voter.

But I think I'm more convinced by what Dan said, which is like you now have Johnson does fit the kind of MAGA, ultra MAGA, ultra, ultra-mAGA way thing in a way that McCarthy really did.

McCarthy at least seemed moderate in his persona on some level, versus Johnson has said every conservative thing possible on every issue, including on the sort of cultural, anti-gay.

So I think in that way, it would make sense to sort of not maybe not necessarily talk about Mike Johnson, but talk about the idea that the Republican Party is going to be very radical

if it wins the House, wins the presidency, and it sort of makes it easier to trumpify and to describe the Republican Party in a sort of a universal way.

Yeah.

I mean, just think about this as the most powerful elected Republican in the country wants to ban abortion, ban gay marriage, ban gay sex, does not believe in evolution.

All across the board, that is a very, people don't, won't fully get that.

He believes in evolution.

He just thinks it happened in six days.

And again,

again, dinos on the ark.

Plus all the food they'd have to eat.

And where do they poop?

Well, here's something I've never quite understood.

What kind of dinosaurs were they?

What?

Were they the little ones, the compies?

So having looked at the actual.

Were there raptors on the ark?

They have a whole, there's a whole, listen, there's a whole like, you know, what was it called?

The, uh, the, the, when, when they wanted the earth to be the center of the universe, they had the kind of, they,

they had the different circles to, to keep complicated circles to explain the more complicated circles because it, because it didn't work.

And so they have like a complicated philosophy around not different like Tyrannosaur nids.

Like there were, there were dinosaur families that were on the ark as represented by certain kinds of dinosaurs here's what I've never understood I don't care what's on that ark when they get off the ark did a tiger not want to eat one chicken because if that tiger ate one chicken no chicken donezo

you know what I'm saying like what did they eat for the first couple weeks what did the what did the predators eat when they got off the ark for the first couple weeks or years takes years to make new prey also what happened what ultimately happened to the dinosaurs in this scenario Was it a double-decker arc?

I would just say there's the dinosaur deck, there's the Lido deck, the Fiesta deck.

Anyway,

I would just run the Mike Johnson Noah's Ark stuff.

That'd be my thing.

I like it.

I could bring people in with that, then talk about all those positions.

All right.

When we come back, I'll talk to Kentucky State Senator Karen Burke.

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

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While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arrizona.edu.

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Please welcome the Democrat who represents the 26th district here in Louisville, State Senator Karen Berg.

Hi there.

Hello, hello.

Thank you for being with us tonight.

We are honored to have you on the show.

Well, thank you very much for inviting me.

I really appreciate it.

Of course.

So you first won this seat back in 2020 when the district at the time was much more conservative.

You are now just one of seven Democrats in the state Senate?

I think we're down to six.

Are you down to six?

Okay, six.

Do you have any advice for all the progressives in the red states who are always asking us how they can elect Democrats like you and turn their states a little bluer?

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I have a lot of advice in that regards.

First of all,

vote.

Vote like it freaking matters because guys it actually does.

It actually matters whether or not you vote and here in the state of Kentucky we we have a real serious problem with turnout if we get 32 percent of the electorate to get out and vote we think we have done a good job with turnout and that is really the problem

because people on the right

i promise you guys they are voting voting.

They are voting like their life depends on it because they think it does.

And then the rest of us who like would prefer to go around and not have to deal with this stuff.

You know, just go through your day-to-day life and let's be normal people and let's not have to worry about politics.

And then they don't vote.

And then all of a sudden, you look up and we have really bad people elected in this country.

Vote.

Vote.

And the other thing I can tell you guys:

run for office.

I know that

sounds like such pie in the sky, but it actually isn't.

What John Yarmouth told me years ago is: first of all, the closer to home your seat is, the more impact you will have on the people around you, which means running for school board, running for metro government, running for your local mayor, running for

elections close to home,

and then running

like I did.

Just put your name on the ballot, guys.

Get out there, shake hands, tell people that you care, ask them to vote for you, and they will.

And that is the truth.

So vote and run.

Those are the things

I have to say.

Good advice.

You have been outspoken about losing your son, Henry.

He was a transgender rights advocate who tragically passed away by suicide last December at the age of 24.

I read that he was the person who inspired you to run.

What was he like?

Oh, wow.

What was Henry like?

Henry was a handful.

Now,

Henry had a heart.

He had too much of a heart.

He was one of these people that if he saw somebody in a room who looked like they didn't feel comfortable, he would immediately go up and he would immediately introduce them to people and sit with them and ask them who you are, what do you care about, because he could tell

so intuitively when somebody didn't feel like they fit into the space they were in.

And that's because for so long in his life, he had felt that way.

And he didn't want other people to go through that.

My son was

big-hearted, big-hearted, soft-hearted.

He cared about this world and he cared about making this a better place.

So Henry came out in 2012 at the age of 14?

Yes.

How did the other kids and teachers react and how did you and Henry handle that experience?

Well guys, this is a long, long, long story.

And it depends on the day, it depends on the person, it depends on the situation.

For the most part, you know, when my child came out at the age of 14, he was the first kid in his school who had ever come out as transgender.

The school had never had a child in that position before.

And honestly, we had, at the time,

very few,

if any,

children in his class who were willing to be openly gay either.

So

he came out to his classmates, to his teachers, a a couple weeks later, to me and my husband.

Henry honestly thought

that

he had gone to the same school from kindergarten through 12th grade.

And this was the beginning of ninth grade.

And he honestly thought that once he told his classmates and his teachers who he really was,

that things would sort of just magically fit into place and people would understand sort of why it was that he had never really

fit in in the first place.

And that's not what happened.

Unfortunately,

Henry's first suicide attempt.

was December of that year.

He came out in September.

December of that year.

And what he told my husband and I at time is that he thought when he came out that things would fit into place.

And instead, it just made it that much worse, that he could no longer hang with the girls, that the boys wouldn't have anything to do with him.

He had nobody to sit with, nobody to talk to.

And he was very,

very

lonely.

Some of,

I know some of your Republican colleagues have said kind words about Henry, have said they've learned from you, but they keep voting for these anti-trans bills, and it seems like their minds aren't changing.

But I imagine that there are parents out there who maybe don't know any trans people, and they hear these Republicans saying that all they're doing is trying to protect kids, and maybe they aren't sure what to believe.

What would you say to those parents?

It's a long story.

And

it's not actually a very pretty story.

It's a story about politics.

And, you know,

I mean, I may be a politician at this point, but I never considered myself a politician.

I'm a doctor by training and a mother.

And, you know,

that's how I identify.

But

really, what happened with this trans

youth movement

was that

the right

and certain organizations on the right, like groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which you all, if you all don't know about the Alliance Defending Freedom, I think the New Yorker just did an article on him last week.

Mike Johnson worked for them.

Yeah, Mike Johnson is them.

That is who we have now elected as Speaker of the House.

He comes from a right

Christian nationalist ideology

that really believes,

believes that homosexuality is ungodly and is a sin.

But since they were losing politically on gay marriage and homosexuality and they were losing politically on abortion and a woman's right to choose but what they found out about five six years ago was that this issue about trans

athletes polled well

it was polling at 70 percent 70 percent and so they went with it because they thought this was their winning political issue.

Never mind that they were attacking children.

Never mind that they were taking rights away from parents to decide their own child's health care.

Never mind that they are literally invading the most personal of spaces that belong between a patient and their family and their physicians.

They didn't care what they were doing because if this polled well, this was going to be their message and so we got i mean literally they they they hooked up with

physicians who left standardized medicine back in 2002

2002 when when the american academy of pediatrics decided that it was okay

for a gay couple to raise a child.

These physicians broke off because they felt that the homosexual lifestyle was a moral

basis

that they could not under any circumstances accept.

It's a

basic ethical morality.

So they broke off.

There's about four or five hundred of them.

They have gone around, funded by the Alliance Defending Freedom, literally to now like 30 state houses in this country.

It is quack medicine.

It is being supported by Christian nationalists who do not, guys, believe in democracy the way we know it.

I mean, I point blank asked a House Representative who sponsored House Bill 470 this last session.

House Bill 470 in its face would have any health care provider who offered

any sort of affirmation to to a trans child,

mental health, physical health, any healthcare provider whatsoever, automatic revicature of your license, automatic and permanent revicature of your license for just being reported that you acknowledged a trans child existed,

existed.

And I went to her

and I said, you know,

do you believe,

do you believe this?

Do you actually

believe in separation of church and state?

And her answer to me was,

under the appropriate circumstances.

Under the appropriate circumstances.

And then she tells me that

we don't like these people

that testified

because they're Christian.

And I'm like, honey, 97% of the people in this country are Christian.

Being Christian is not an ideology that says that you have the right to pass laws to make normal health care delivery illegal

because you're

the the base that you're playing to

likes this

i mean

i mean you hear them say that it's about parents rights but i know that you introduced an amendment to a bill that was in the legislature where they uh you know, if a child wanted to be called by certain pronouns, they said the teacher, the bill would would say the teacher doesn't have to call them by those pronouns.

And you added an amendment, I believe, that said, well, they do if the parents say that they

with a note from a health care provider that this was important to the child.

And they wouldn't vote for that.

They wouldn't do that.

No, actually, guys, there are

good studies, good data

that shows if a trans child

is affirmed in one setting,

either at home, at school, at church, one setting, it can actually decrease their lifetime risk of suicide by up to 70%.

And what's interesting, what's interesting about this data is that it has to be

authority, it has to be school, it has to be work, it has to be church.

Having your friends affirm you doesn't offer the same immunity from suicidality as having somebody

these children want to belong these children want to fit in

so sb 150 which was this bill that that max wise brought forward that basically said teachers don't have to use a child's preferred pronouns.

What that does

is go to the absolute

heart

of that child's identity and that child's struggle to belong and to fit in.

It is, in my opinion, simply the cruelest, cruelest thing that you could do, much less make it legal to do.

Yeah, and your point that Henry and transgender kids everywhere just want to belong, I think is so powerful because

the right is trying to

let people think that if there is this culture that allows kids to identify as transgender and be protected and stuff like that, then kids are just going to choose this.

Henry Kraft went on our airways

and said twice,

I will eliminate transgender

from the classroom.

Like, what does she mean?

You're going to take these children.

First of all, being transgender, guys, is not contagious.

I promise you, it is not contagious, nor, for the most part, is it something that's a phase?

Yes, there are tomboys.

Yes, there are girly boys.

Sometimes you grow out of it.

Sometimes you don't.

But these are not the children that are coming to to their parents and saying,

I

feel

inside like my gender is this.

It's a whole different world.

It's a very,

very small percentage of the population.

It is not growing.

People think that because we're allowing these children to express themselves, that somehow we're promoting this.

We are not promoting this.

The reason that you see and you hear more now about transgender children than you did 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the best analogy I can give you is the same thing that happened in the early 50s when we quit requiring children to use their right hands.

The number of left-handed students increased exponentially and then leveled out.

And it's not not that we were promoting them, not that we were,

it's that they were already there, they already existed, guys, and we were letting them exist.

My last question, Senator Berg, you've had an unimaginably hard year.

You serve in an extremely right-wing legislature, but you are still here and fighting as hard as you can every single day.

What keeps you going?

Honestly, what keeps me going, and this is the truth,

I believe in the goodness of people.

I do.

Well,

I'm very glad that you're here and still fighting.

So thank you, and thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

State Senator Karen Burke.

I still think the left hand is the devil's hand.

Lefty.

Yeah.

And it should have been traded.

And by the way, you should have been forced to use your right hand.

Outrageous.

All right, back to the news.

So before we get to the 2024 campaign, you guys have a big election here in Kentucky on November 7th,

just one week from Tuesday.

Your governor, Democrat Andy Bashir,

is,

at least in the polls we've seen, polling ahead of his Republican challenger, Attorney General David Cameron.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

It's a race where a lot of the ads and a lot of the debates have focused on the issue of abortion.

Cameron has long supported the state's current ban, which makes no exceptions for rape or incest,

though he now says if the Republican legislature sent him a bill adding those exceptions, he'd sign it.

Bashir has vetoed abortion bans as governor.

Harry,

there aren't too many Democratic governors left in solidly read states like Kentucky.

What is Andy Bashir's secret, and why do you think Cameron has been trailing him in the polls?

So I'll start because I used to work at 538 with

the data website with a very sort of structural analysis, which is that the last four presidents have mostly been unpopular.

Like Bush is very unpopular most of the time.

Obama had some moments of popularity, but up and down.

Trump, very unpopular.

Biden, pretty unpopular, unfortunately.

But governors, for whatever reason, people like their governor.

The average governor's approval rating is 57%.

So Andy Bashir is at 62 or 63, so he's doing better than average.

And that's good for him, but I think people like their governor, and I've been trying to sort of figure out exactly why, because some of the governors suck,

to be totally honest.

And the second point is like,

Bashir is a great last name to have here in Kentucky.

His father was a two-term governor, a very effective two-term governor, you know, famously sort of expanded Medicaid and was invited to the State of the Union arrest when Obama was president.

So those are the two factors that have nothing to do with kind of Andy Bashir, who he was, who his dad was, and kind of that he's an incumbent governor.

But there are two things he's doing right.

And the first is he's good at the kind of I feel your pain kind of dynamic of he's good.

He's very empathetic.

Like if you watched his press conferences during the pandemic, and I know people here probably did, he was just great at seeming genuine and like he cared, like he wasn't like every other politician when there's been flooding or tornadoes or other things that have happened, a mass shooting here.

He's always there.

He connects.

If you talk to him, he's, you know, either he's very good at faking sincerity or he's very sincere.

I hope the second.

But he comes off well.

He just, and Daniel Cameron does not come off that way, I don't think.

So there's a sincerity factor that matters.

And the other thing I would say about Bashir is, as somebody who's pretty progressive, I'll vote for Joe Biden.

There's been some great days with Joe Biden as president.

There are some days that I've not been as thrilled, let's put it politely.

But

with Andy Bashir, he rarely does things that I disagree with.

I'm guessing it's probably not going to help his campaign that I'm saying it that way.

Keep it quiet.

But that's it.

He's, you know, Kentucky's a conservative state, but he vetoes abortion laws.

He vetoes terrible anti-trans laws.

He doesn't do a lot of like punching the left to show how moderate he is.

He's not a Joe.

People call me about Andy Bashir.

I have to tell them, this is not a Joe Mansion type.

This is a person who believes in the right values and does the right things and has been a governor.

I'll be very excited to vote for.

That's great.

That's good to know.

So, Dan, abortion has been central to this race.

We'll be in Ohio tomorrow where abortion rights will literally be on the ballot.

Do you think the results from these 2023 elections can tell us anything about how big of an issue abortion will be in 2024?

Or is it just, is it hard to draw conclusions from non-presidential elections?

I think it's hard to draw conclusions from not presidential elections.

Like, for example, we're talking about Ohio.

In 2022 the turnout in ohio was 4.2 million in 2020 it was almost six million and so like that there's a huge gap there's a huge difference between midterm elections and general elections here in kentucky turnout was about 20 higher in 2020 than it was in 2019 when bashir won but i think that there it tells us a couple things that are informative, if not instructive.

The first is how salient abortion remains more than a year after Roe.

Like, it makes sense that abortion was top of mind in November of 2022, only five months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

It was interesting that it did so well, that abortion was so powerful in the first Ohio special election a few months ago.

Will it remain that way?

Really interesting.

But I do think there is a powerful, powerful symbolism.

if Andy Bashir wins, because here you have the governor of Kentucky, one of the most Republican states by presidential choice in the country, the states that Donald Trump wins by more than anywhere else, running on abortion, his first ad about abortion,

vetoing anti-abortion bills, in debates, fighting aggressively against abortion bans.

I think that should send a powerful symbol to every Democrat all across the country that abortion is not a blue state issue.

It's not a purple state issue.

It's an issue that Democrats can run on everywhere in the country.

We, just to underscore, in Kentucky, I'll be honest with you, when Bashir's staff came out one of their abortion ads, I called one of his aides and was like, you realize this is Kentucky, right?

Are you, you know, what are you thinking?

And they said, basically, you know, the dog has caught the car, so to speak.

Like, the Republicans tried to ban every abortion of all time, for everybody.

They've done this for a long time.

Now they have an abortion ban.

And even in Kentucky, the average person does not want no, you know, abortion ban in all circumstances.

Like, it's been striking to see here how much Bashir has talked about abortion in this campaign and how Cameron is nervous about this issue.

He sort of backtracked into this whole,

I'll support some exceptions.

That was not his view.

His staff seems very nervous about it.

But I think, again,

this issue has changed American politics fundamentally.

We were canvassing today with Planned Parenthood and we were...

Shout out them, not us.

And we were at doors and we were talking to folks who looked, you know, like, let's be old, older white people who are saying, saying, I've never,

because the folks we were canvassing with from Planned Parenthood were great.

They were like going all the way down the ticket.

And there were two different people said,

you know, I've never pulled like straight ticket Democrat before, but this year I have to.

And it was clearly because of abortion.

Yeah.

And a couple people we talked to like knew that Cameron is pretty extreme on abortion.

Like that was something that I already registered with them.

And I want to ask, this just came to me, so no bad ideas in a brainstorm, but Dan Perry, Louisville played Duke today.

Okay?

They won.

The Duke fans are known as Cameron Crazies.

Cameron Crazy, is there a thing there?

Is that something?

Could be.

People don't like Duke here.

Yes, that is.

So we can

stay with the Second Game - to Duke.

Love it, your thoughts.

I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

This is working.

I just want you guys to know that, so I went canvassing with Lovett.

Tommy and Dan were together, and we went up to a house.

There was someone watching TV.

They didn't want to come to the door.

Lovett kept knocking.

This guy came to the door.

He seemed pretty Republican.

Yeah.

And he told us, he's like, I know who I'm voting for, but that's all I'm going to say.

And then Lovett did the whole spiel about Cameron and abortion rights.

And he said, and he goes, okay, I'll think about it.

And then Lovett's like,

I feel like this interaction's not going well.

What do you think?

And he's like, I'll think about it.

It was good.

Here's the thing: it was impressive.

It was impressive.

I don't.

Well, it's going to happen.

You got the lady with a labberdoodle.

We got a lady with a labberdoodle.

Whenever the conversation went a little awkward, I just asked about a hot brown conversation.

Yeah, he did.

He did.

And that really helps.

The hot brown conversation helped.

All right.

Speaking of elections, with just over two months to go until the Iowa caucuses, Joe Biden just got a last-minute primary challenger.

Dean Phillips, a 54-year-old Minnesota congressman with a moderate voting record who's worth about $50 million.

Phillips says he mostly agrees with Biden, but that he's running because of polls showing that most voters think the president is too old to run again.

He launched with a short speech in New Hampshire, where he's now running this ad.

I'm Dean Phillips, and I'm running for President of the United States of America.

And I'm coming to New Hampshire to answer your questions.

I love New Hampshire.

I spent my summers as a kid in the White Mountains going to camp.

Got to canoe the Saco River, learned how to fish, learned how to shoot a gun.

And it's also where I learned to love my country.

And that's why I'm back as a candidate for president.

We've got some challenges, that's for sure.

We're going to repair this economy, and we are going to repair America as long as we do it together.

I'm Dean Phillips, and I approve this message.

You know, I'm from Massachusetts, but New Hampshire is where I learned to love my country, too.

Sam, yeah.

I couldn't learn to love it in Massachusetts.

I had to go north.

Who among us didn't learn to love our country at summer camp?

Summer camp.

First of all, if you close your mind and picture

gelato nepo baby, isn't that what you picture?

You summered here?

Come on.

It's just not a strong, it's not a strong method.

Well, I just think, look,

there are polls that show that Democrats are interested in some sort of generic alternative.

And he's like, well, I'm some sort of generic alternative.

Yeah, that's what it is.

Tommy, what did you think of Dean Phillips' campaign launch?

Speech, the ad, the overall message?

The whole vibe.

So he did a long interview with The Atlantic where he kind of laid out his theory of the case and why he decided to get in.

And there were some things he said in that interview.

that resonated with me.

He's anxiety about Joe Biden's poll numbers.

He has concerns about Joe Biden's age.

I feel the same way.

I'm concerned too.

And I think that like, we shouldn't criticize anyone for

talking out loud about their concerns about the need to win this next election because it is enormously important.

But what I think is frustrating for me is just the execution has been terrible because, first of all, he just waited way too long.

You know, if you wanted to run and try to primary the president, you can't do it three months out.

It's very, very hard to primary a sitting president in any scenario.

But when you give yourself only three months to build a campaign, raise money, get your name ID from negative that vests to net like Tory needs to be, like, it's going to be really hard.

And which makes me wonder, like, what is your goal here, sir?

Because again, in this Atlantic article.

Very respectful of you, Tom.

Sir.

I mean, listen, he seems like a nice guy.

I'm not trying to be addicted to him.

In this article, his campaign manager is apparently a guy named Steve Schmidt.

Steve Schmidt worked for George Bush, John McCain, joined the Lincoln Project, left the Lincoln Project, quit politics, got back into politics.

Now he's doing the Dean Phillips thing.

And he said one of his

strategic imperatives or whatever is to hire content creators in six different time zones so they can have the Biden campaign reacting at all times and on edge.

And it's like, okay, so you've set up a campaign infrastructure where you got in too late to get on the ballot in Nevada, but your plan is to fuck with Joe Biden's news cycle every single day for the next three months or so.

That seems like a setup where there's no chance you're going to win, but there is a great chance that you could make it harder for Biden to tell a story about himself and what he's done and for the Democratic Party to

you know, hit back on Donald Trump when it's very clear he's about to be the nominee.

And so like, listen, maybe Dean Phillips will catch fire.

What do I know?

Maybe.

I don't think that like the progressive primary electorate is hungering for a extremely rich nepo baby, as Lovitt said, who's extremely moderate.

But maybe they are.

But I think more likely than anything, it's just sort of, he's kind of like a milquetoast guy who's going to maybe cause some problems in New Hampshire, and that's about it.

I think it's important to

dig into the origin story of the Dean Phillips for president campaign, which is laid out in this very extensive article in The Atlantic, a populist website available all throughout New Hampshire for free.

So

this is where you go to find Democratic primary votes.

You go to the Atlantic, you talk to Tim L.

Dean Phillips

has been very public about his concerns about Joe Biden and his electability.

And not that Joe Biden is too old to do the job, but that Joe Biden is too old to win reelection, has been his point to date.

And at some point in mid-September, Steve Schmidt, current podcast host, DM'd Dean Phillips.

Careful.

Hey.

Don't trust the podcast host.

Yes.

DM'd Dean Phillips and said, will you come on my podcast?

Dean Phillips did.

Afterwards, Steve Schmidt sent him an email that said, all my friends who listened to the podcast said something to the effect of, this guy has to be president, which definitely happened.

And before that conversation was over, Steve Schmidt had a job running Dean Phillips' presidential campaign.

So I'm suggesting that perhaps not a lot of thought was put into this plan.

And we know this because he is on the ballot in New Hampshire, a state that has exactly zero delegates.

Yeah, that's a problem too, because New Hampshire is still going to go first, even though the DNC decided that South Carolina is going to go first.

So they're going to strip New Hampshire of their delegates if they go forward with the primary, which they are.

And Dean Phillips is trying to take advantage of that.

So, because Biden's not going to be on the ballot in New Hampshire, so he's going to try to win New Hampshire, even though he doesn't get any delegates.

And of course, he's not going to get any delegates out of Nevada because he missed the filing deadline for Nevada.

Yeah.

First of all,

just a reminder that

every member of Congress is just waiting for someone to say it's your turn.

To DM them.

Yeah.

We have one coming out next.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No.

Present company accepted, maybe.

But

also.

Love, but do you know how tall Dean Phillips is?

Honestly, I I just think he seems like a generic 510.

I like this.

He gives off 510 energy.

But,

you know, look, I read his campaign announcement speech with great interest.

I read it because the full video is not available on the internet.

Wait, I looked for it for like hours.

The full video of his campaign announcement, speaking to Dan's point, that this thing was cooked up in a DM three weeks ago.

No website.

No website.

There's no SEO going on.

It's not on YouTube.

If you you Google Dean Phillips, you got to, you got to scroll down, make sure you're on the right Dean Phillips.

But you can read the full speech if you're a playbook subscriber.

You could read the full speech.

And the full speech they released was in, this actually gave me like a pang of anxiety because they didn't release a transcript the way a normal campaign would, which is like a press release.

They just put out the copy that was clearly for him to read.

It was in the big font

with the kind of spacing of a speech.

First of all, extremely generic.

It's an insulting document.

It's a cursed text.

Did you love it?

I had this urge when I was reading the document to start editing.

Yes.

This is so fucking bland.

You can't just, what are you doing here?

Like, we need to be, we need to be fed and we need to be free.

And it's like, it's a lot of that.

It's like the 90s shit.

It's a lot of like sentences that

loop back on each other.

But the thing that's so insulting about it is that there's no real argument in it, right?

It's basically, you're meant to read between the lines that Joe Biden is too old.

We need an alternative.

I am that alternative.

The problem with that is he then goes and does these interviews.

He did an interview on Meet the Press.

And

Kristen Walker's first question is, what are some places where you disagree with Joe Biden?

And he's like, I'm not running against Joe Biden.

I'm running for the future.

And it's like, okay, that's a sentence a person can think,

but don't, but then when you put it on its feet, it falls the fuck over because the follow-up is, but that's exactly what you're doing, sir.

You're running against Joe Biden.

So, where are there some differences?

Then he kind of fumfers around to kind of find some.

And the other problem with this is: look, he saw, he says in that interview, said in other interviews, he said it publicly that he's wanted there to be an alternative to Joe Biden.

This is not the popular governor of a Midwest state who's shown the ability to build a coalition.

This is a known name congressman who's making references to his subcommittee work as part of his qualifications.

Hey,

subcommittees matter.

I'm just saying, it's like it's not gonna, it's not gonna to move the needle.

Which subcommittee?

Who can remember?

But it's just like, he then redounds to this electability argument, but it's like, who are you to make that argument?

Why do I have any reason to believe you, Dean Phillips, a person who I Googled right after I Googled Mike Johnson?

Why are you more electable than Joe Biden?

He doesn't really have, he doesn't have anything to say that's actually a cogent-specific argument.

Yeah, Perry, what did you think of the speech?

He did like, I mean,

and Playbook picked this up, and clearly steve schmidt told playbook this but like he if you read between the lines he sort of he dinged president biden on inflation border security crime he says he had a line about we're funding wars we're you know we're we're funding fighting and more than we are feeding and he said we the new generation will rise not through war but through peace do you think he's leaning into policy contrast what is he trying to do there I don't.

I think it's a great example of polls are useful, but it's clear if you look at crime, borders, if you look at what issues is Biden weakest on, it's clear that he looked at those issues.

And I'm going to talk about these issues.

Dean Phillips is not known as a leading immigration expert on Capitol Hill.

It's more that, and his whole campaign is Biden is unelectable, or like Biden is too old and people don't like that, and Biden might lose, and therefore I'm running.

Great candidacies are actually not made purely or usually by polls at all.

Like, I didn't support a Muslim ban or whatever Trump said, but his candidacy did sort of of emerge sort of organically.

Obama's candidacy, one I thought was great, you know, emerged from different things.

He had something to say.

He was running for a reason.

Just basing and ground your candidacy on polls just usually doesn't work.

I guess the other thing I would say is polls are not as important as sometimes they are argued.

And I think that parties, I think, are actually more important.

What's happened, and I think it's really important, is there are plenty of Democrats who, if they started running tomorrow, if Gretchen Whitmore or Raphael Warnock said, I'm running president, I would probably consider, I would probably vote for them myself in the primary.

But that said, they're not doing that.

And I think it's worth considering whether, whatever the polls say, the people who are actually Democratic candidates, actually in charge of the Democratic Party, have decided our candidate is Joe Biden.

And that's like, no matter what, that's why the media is sort of struggling with this.

We're all sort of struggling with this is parties have power.

One party has decided,

well, one party to be, you know, to the part of the Mitch McConnell is trying to stop Donald Trump, but the voters would prefer Donald Trump.

But in this party, like the voters are actually like Joe Biden, but even more, the viable candidates for president people might actually consider are not running.

So, and I think Dean Phillips should have assessed that, too.

He's not, you know, there's no demand for Dean Phillips.

And I think that's pretty well, you know, Tommy said he might not win.

I'm going to go further and say Dean Phillips will not be president.

Yeah.

Well, so, and I don't, and it's not, and I don't think Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsome and

the other governors, popular governors, are not running.

Who?

Josh Shapiro, of course.

Are not running because someone in the Democratic Republic.

Right, yeah.

They have assessed that they either cannot beat Joe Biden or that they would damage Joe Biden or that maybe they'll run down the road and that's going to be better.

So like they have made that decision.

And look, I'll take Dean Phillips at his word that he is just someone who is freaked out by the polls, tried to get other people to run against Joe Biden, couldn't do that, and decided, well, I'm so freaked out about the polls that I'll do it myself.

But that doesn't seem like a great reason to run for president, but that seems like what he's doing.

And what is gelato other than just like ice cream with a master's degree, you know, that it's always telling you about?

Yeah.

I think it's important to recognize that the Democratic Party does not lack people who want to be president, who think that they would be better presidents than Joe Biden, probably.

But the reason that Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro and Gavin Newsom are not running is that Joe Biden is incredibly popular with Democrats.

This This gets lost.

Donald Trump's up by 60 points in Republican polls.

His approval rating is 77% among Republicans.

Joe Biden's is 80% among Democrats.

It's just, it would be incredibly hard to beat him.

And even in these polls that show that two-thirds of Democrats want someone else, 80% of those, of all those Democrats say they approve of Joe Biden, they have a favorable opinion of Joe Biden or approve of Joe Biden.

And that's a big deal in a primary.

And Dean Phillips voted with Joe Biden 100% of the time.

Literally, according to 538, Perry's former workplace.

So it's like, sir, you know, again,

I don't know why I'm so respectful of this guy.

His vest is like half zipped up.

It drives me crazy.

I mean, look, the guy has a vest that zips from the top down and the bottom up.

That's pretty cool.

Yes, yeah.

Like what we need to do for the middle class.

There we go.

We need to stop these zippers from the bottom up and the top down.

We need a zipper from the middle the fuck out.

If I were a Democrat getting into the presidential primary right now I would run hard to the left on of Joe Biden on Gaza or anti-war politics I would like pick an issue that I think that could get the progressive left excited and motivated and giving me money and endorsing me and Dean Phillips is just pointedly not doing that so it makes you wonder that would definitely be party apart

but you know but look and again I don't I don't want to suggest here that like Dean Phillips' anxieties about Joe Biden are unwarranted, right?

Like he's like, who knows?

We don't know if the polls are right or wrong.

Like, yeah, there's clearly reason to worry, but like looking at the polls, worrying, and then deciding like going from that point to be like, oh, I should just run for president.

It's a little bit of a talked a lot about how you manage your polar coaster anxiety in this podcast over the years.

This is extremely good.

They're going to do it.

They're going to do it.

Dean Phillips, knock some doors, buddy.

Like, you'll feel better.

Anyway, well, that's Dean Phillips.

We'll see if we talk about him again.

Who knows?

Maybe we will.

Maybe we won't.

He could be a guest on the pod.

He could be be a guest on the pod.

Yeah.

I know it.

If he is, he's going to like me, not you guys.

Yeah, well, yeah, well, yeah, Tommy will be calling him sir.

Yeah, I guess Tommy's the one that's going to get some of that faggy ice cream.

Okay,

we'll be right back with Congressman Morgan McGarvey, who I'm sure is going to be thrilled to join us.

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Please welcome to the stage a member of the Bourbon Caucus, which is what John Favreau calls himself after he's had a few of the babysitters staying all the way till 10.

It's Kentucky's own Louisville-born and brewed and perfectly aged Congressman Morgan McGarvey.

Look over there.

Good to see you.

Thanks for being here.

Congressman, thank you for being here.

All right.

I didn't know my parents were here tonight.

Yeah.

There was no reason to take your shirts off.

Now, we would be remiss, Congressman, not to capitalize on your love of bourbon.

And frankly, it's just been that kind of a week.

So we're going to play something we're calling drink the fifth.

All right.

Here's how it works, just casual conversation, but if we ask you or you ask us a question we don't want to answer, we just take a drink.

And as we do, we have a couple of bourbons up here that you're going to tell us about because you are the congressman from Bourbon Town.

We have a couple different ones.

So I'll kick it off.

I just wanted to kick it off with just sort of before we get to

the nonsense.

The House is a speaker.

They ultimately had ChatGPT create someone with the prompt, what if Paul Ryan truly believed there were dinosaurs on the ark?

Mike Johnson popped out.

First of all, what of any relationship have you had with him?

And do you have any observations as this chapter of Republican chaos draws to a close?

So I'll be honest, I didn't know who Mike Johnson was.

And he's a colleague.

You were at the college.

Hey, it's okay.

He doesn't know who I am either.

But, you know, there's a great thing in law school when you're studying.

They call it the reasonably prudent person.

it's a made-up character to decide if someone owes somebody a duty if they've been hurt that sort of thing I view my wife as the reasonably prudent person and hearing you guys talk about Dean Phillips now we're talking about Mike Johnson when the Mike Johnson thing hit and then Dean Phillips announced for president she actually looked at me and she goes okay are you guys just making up members of Congress now

I felt that too

So

no, you know, I didn't, I'm not on any committees with him.

I didn't know him at all.

I mean, mean, but look, he represents a very extreme part of their party.

I think it's an extreme part of their party.

I think it's a dangerous part of their party.

When you talk about national abortion bans, when you talk about targeting LGBTQ youth, when you talk about bringing that type of extremism, whether it's on foreign policy or domestic policy, it hurts people in their daily lives.

And so my hope is that He can rise above some of the things he has said and done and lead the institution as a a speaker.

But if not, then certainly the Democrats are going to be unified.

We're going to continue to fight what we fought for.

And Perry, you said this earlier, I think, too.

It is going to be something with which now we can run against.

It is a Donald Trump Mike Johnson speakership right now with that sort of MAGA element.

And so

I think we're in a really interesting time with the budget coming up.

That's the first big test of his speakership.

Let's see what happens.

Point of order.

Are these Kentucky socks?

They are Kentucky socks.

Nice.

Nice.

Those are cool.

They are Kentucky socks.

And appropriately for this room, they're blue, which I thought was a good thing to have.

Now,

we have three kinds of bourbon up here.

This is Old Forester 86 proof.

Yeah.

This one is...

Old Forester 100 proof.

This one is Old Forester 1920 Prohibition style.

So I think you

drink this one while being very quiet.

Which one should we try first?

So yeah, definitely try the Old Forester 86 first.

And there's a reason for this.

You know, first of all, when you're trying bourbon, you want to start with the lower proof and work your way up.

If you start with the higher proof, work your way down.

Then by the time you get to the last one, you'll be like, what is this?

Is this water?

So Old Forrester 86, it is 86 proof.

The 100, obviously 100 proof.

The prohibition is 115 proof, which is fairly hot for a bourbon.

So start with the 86.

All right.

Glad we did this segment towards the end.

This is good.

Now, when you taste bourbon, you know, there's a right way to smell it.

Don't dip your nose in it like a wine glass.

If you dip your nose in it like a wine glass and take a big whiff of it, you're just going to get a whole bunch of alcohol and burn those nose hairs.

You hold it right below.

You actually breathe in with your mouth.

So kind of hold it up to your mouth.

Not at your chin, love it.

Not at your chin.

You You hold it up to your nose.

You know,

trying here.

You're trying.

It's good.

It's good stuff.

I like the 86.

It's a great bourbon.

I think you can find it for about 23 bucks.

And I think Old Forster 86 is just one of those bourbons that punches above its weight.

You can put it on the bar shelf.

It can taste at a mid-shelf level at sort of that lower price.

So I'm a fan.

How many members of Congress are in the bourbon caucus not enough um

after this week i'll

i hope it's more look you know obviously it's a bipartisan group uh andy barr the congressman from lexington is the co-chair of it with me

hey not for this segment

shut the up you show some respect

is it uh is it the senate included too is mitch mcconnell in it the senate is allowed to be there they don't come over to our side as much it's you know it's a little different

but we've we've done two bipartisan bourbon tastings since I've been there now.

The last one, we had about 40 members of Congress there from both parties, which is a good number.

And, I mean, look, there's a lot of dysfunction up there.

Henry Clay, I think, is the one who said that bourbon can lubricate the wheels of democracy.

Solid.

We're doing our best.

Talk about that later.

That's all fucked up now.

I was going to say, when you talk about content issues, you know what else?

I don't have something else for you.

What?

Dean Phillips is 5'8 ⁇ .

Honestly, honestly, thank you for telling us.

I'm so confident because I have 5'10 energy.

And

you know what?

I gotta say, I gotta say, it's a classic 5'10 guy to be like, that guy's 5'8.

That is.

That's it.

That's the reason.

All right.

You know, they told me I'd have your chair, and I was excited because I thought it would be higher, but no, it's the same as everyone else's.

Wow.

Unbelievable.

It's the same as everybody else's.

All right.

He's flustered people.

The 100-proof is also good.

It's also good.

Next question.

Lube us up, love it.

Come on.

Well, now I'm going to skip to a dunk.

Oh, oh.

Nothing on the cards, Fizz, huh?

Like, what is happening there?

How many cards do you have?

Got a lot to get through.

All right, but as someone who's been vocal about gun violence, what are your thoughts about Speaker Johnson saying that the problem isn't guns but the human heart?

Are you aware of any proposals for human heart reform?

And what is wrong?

What do you think is so bad about American hearts compared to hearts in other democracies?

Is it

good question?

All All of them, no matter what, can buy a gun anytime, anywhere they want to.

And, you know, the reality is we've got to have common sense gun reform in this country.

You know, look, I mean, right here in Kentucky, we had a mass shooting in April that rocked our community.

You know, Louisville, I tell people, Louisville is, it's the smallest big city in America.

And Perry knows this.

Everybody's one or two degrees of separation away from everybody else.

If you didn't know somebody directly impacted that shooting, you knew someone who did, truly.

I lost two friends in that shooting.

I knew several others who were shot.

It happened the Monday morning after Easter.

And what happened?

You had a young man who had a long history of trouble who went in six days before and bought an AR-15 and walked out in 40 minutes with an AR-15 and rounds of ammunition.

Six days later goes, kills five of his coworkers, injures eight others, shoots a police officer in the head with an AR-15 round.

It's unconscionable that we don't have common sense red flag or extreme risk protection laws that keep people safe from themselves as well as others.

It's amazing that we can just buy these weapons of war.

That right now in Kentucky, you don't even have to have a license to have a concealed carry permit.

That in our hospital right here, Norton Children's Hospital in 2021, there were 80 kids who came in who were shot.

And 85% of those kids shot were accidental.

We're not talking about safe storage laws.

I think if you have an American heart, you should be talking about common sense gun reform so that we can keep our communities safe.

Let's go back to bourbon.

Now, this is 100-proof, bourbon.

Yep.

We're going up the...

Kicking it up a notch.

Kicking it up a notch.

Where's the best place to smell this?

Across the room?

You've already had a glass, just drink it.

But 100-proof, obviously, is 50% alcohol.

Alcohol, the most it could be is 200-proof.

So 100 proof is 50% alcohol.

You know, it's important to note what has to be in a bourbon, right?

When we talk about bourbon, what has to be?

Is this part of, was this one of your questions?

Am I messing with you?

No, this is good.

This is good stuff.

This is good stuff.

To be a bourbon, you actually don't have to be made in Kentucky.

Now, all of the good stuff is made here.

Obviously.

And truly, 95% of the world's bourbon is made in Kentucky.

But it has to be made in America.

It has to be in a new charred white oak barrel.

It has to be aged for at least two years.

has to come off the still at no more than 160 proof, into the barrel, no more than 125 proof.

And the lowest it can be bottled at is 80 proof.

So a Basil Hayden is like an 80-proof bourbon, whereas we've got the 86 now, we're at the 100.

It has to be at least 50% corn.

And that's basically, I think, those are our requirements there to be a bourbon.

And so when you're looking at an old forester 100 proof, it's 72% corn, 18% rye.

So it's got a higher proof, a little bit higher proof right there at that sort of 100 proof level.

But the corn gives it more of a sweetness.

And so the rye is what gives it more of a kick if you see more of a high rye bourbon, which I think makes this 100-proof old forester really, really approachable for what the proof level is.

I was going to say, it doesn't taste like 100-proof.

It's approachable.

It is approachable.

It's like a teacher that turns the chair around and raps at you.

It's 100-proof, but it's actually 5'8.

And yeah, it's...

That's good.

That's good.

Have you always known all this shit or do you learn this for Congress?

No.

I mean, this is like some deep knowledge of the bourbon.

You know, look, I mean, I think a lot of Kentuckians do know a lot of people.

A lot of people are proud of Kentucky's own.

I know.

A lot of people do.

People know, you know, yeah.

Well, and I, and I, and I was in the state Senate for 10 years before this, and we really do a lot of bourbon bills in the state legislature in Kentucky, as you can imagine.

So you learn a fair amount about it there.

Yeah.

Tommy, I can't believe you didn't understand that being coacher of the bourbon conference comes with real responsibilities.

Yeah.

I apologize.

If I run for president, I'll campaign on that.

There you go.

That's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Now,

you've been fighting to

the white oak that makes the barrels.

Yes.

What's happening with it?

Because it's not,

the tree is in trouble.

Yeah.

I mean, this is one where you actually see Congress having a little bit of foresight right now, which is good.

There's a white oak regeneration bill, bipartisan bill up right now.

And it's a good thing.

You know, when you look at white oak, again, bourbon has to be made in a white oak barrel.

And there's about an 80-year lifespan to get that tree from plant to where you're going to harvest it for a bourbon barrel.

And so we're looking down the road and going, okay,

we got to have enough white oak trees to make sure not only can we have bourbon barrels, all the furniture, all the other things that you use for oak.

And so it's one of those things that you see a Democrat, Republican kind of coming together because it can also be really good for the planet.

as well as being good for business.

And I think that's kind of a cool thing.

Now let's find out about this last one before we get the...

This is the hottest of the three.

Old Forrester is, it was started in 1870.

One of the cool things about it is it was put in a glass bottle by George Garvin Brown and then sealed.

And so this is at a time when it was before the Bottled and Bond Act.

Tommy didn't wait for the explanation.

That's good stuff.

The 120 was not very approachable.

And so in 1920, when Prohibition started, Old Forcer is actually the longest continually sold bourbon under the same name and the same company in the country.

And in 1920, they're one of the few companies that got a medicinal license.

They had a long history of having a good product, got a medicinal license, were able to keep going.

This was released as part of one of their series to honor that legacy.

And it comes in at 115 proof because during that Prohibition era, as medicine, a lot of the bourbon was a higher proof.

You get like a doctor's prescription.

There are like frame doctors' prescriptions for like bourbon really oh wow yeah you could get prescriptions for bourbon so and you can also take the grease off a carburetor

now when old when old forster did this they were

it's still it's still pretty smooth it is pretty smooth

this is why we tried it last by the way

now go back and try the 86 and see what you think about it but you know they released in 1870 which is when it started 1897 uh 1910 and 1920 and i will tell you for anybody trying this at home, if you ever have the 1920 and the 1910, just mix half and half, we call it the 1915, and it's a really good bourbon.

There's your inside tip.

Are you allowed to say if you have a favorite bourbon I want to ask and you can decline to comment, it might be useful for your future?

I drink the fifth.

No,

I truly don't have a favorite bourbon.

And what I tell people all the time is look at your price points.

And so, you know, if you're looking at a little bit more of an inexpensive bourbon, right, I think that that old Forster 86 is great i think the elijah craig small batch it's a 94 proof bourbon is a really good bourbon uh that's out there um you know obviously you've got some of your makers mark and woodford reserve and those sorts of things move a little bit high up like right now high up for me is 37.99 at costco you can get a bottle of four roses single barrel um

i like that in louisville you don't have to know what a gallon of milk costs

i think that that's cool

Now, before we let you go, you have cards in front of you.

I have some hard questions for you.

Now we're getting into drinking the fifth here.

Throw a question out at us.

If we want to answer it, we'll answer it.

If not, we'll have to drink.

Sure.

All right.

What's the one thing that really annoyed you about Hillary Clinton?

I'm going to drink on that one.

All right.

Here, how about this?

Who is the last congressperson you'd like to see in the Capitol gym?

Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Next question.

Who's the first congressperson you'd like to see in the Capitol Gym?

First of all, she's really strong.

And second of all, a drink.

Bobert.

Bobert?

Because you know what's going on out there with the

beetle juicing.

Better not be any Boberting out there.

Show some respect.

Obviously, we mean vaping, you sickos.

It's my turn, my turn.

All right.

Who was your least favorite person in the Obama administration?

Just drink, just drink.

They're written to be drunk during.

Yikes.

Yikes.

Let's see.

Let's see what we got for you.

All right.

Who would win in a fight, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Bobert?

And the fighting style is capoeira.

Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Look, I mean,

she's very strong, as you all know.

She would win that fight as long as there's no guns allowed.

Good caveat.

Was there any part of you that wanted to nominate George Santos as Speaker?

Since he's already been speaker,

I knew he didn't want the job again.

That's true.

That's true.

I like that.

You want to hit one of these guys?

It's my Tommy.

Oh, God.

Hi.

If Commander Biden bit you in the White House, would you report it or just suffer in silence, maybe sneaking him a few treats from time to time to earn his affection?

Oh, this is easy.

I'd suck it up.

I was going to say, that's a.

Patch it up and suck it up.

All right.

Come on.

What do we do?

Do you have a follow-up for Tommy there?

Okay, follow-up question.

You have a follow-up right there for Tommy, I believe.

Dan.

Oh, for Dan.

And Tommy.

If you could change one thing about Lovett, what would it be?

Make him 510.

Being 510 would be cool.

Congressman, you once said bourbonism has exploded in Kentucky, and the reality is that you can't have bourbon unless you have a barrel.

Where did you get the stones to make up a word like bourbonism?

Bourbonism.

From bourbon itself.

You have enough of it and it just comes out.

But I'm still thirsty, so I'm going to drink.

Yeah, no, you should.

You should.

You should.

I'm sticking with the 86.

Well, you know.

I've really settled on the 100.

I don't dislike the 100.

Yeah, no, I think the 100 is great.

I mean,

the 115 proof stuff, I think, would be great after, say, a divorce or something.

This is a great thing to drink when you have nothing left to lose.

This should be the last thing you remember before you wake up in a new city.

So a couple of things

about that higher proof.

One, better in an old fashioned.

A good old fashion is better in old fashioned.

Two, better on the rocks.

Let it melt a little bit.

Or three, one like, it's a bourbon trick, but on a higher proof bourbon, even if you just take, I know it's gonna sound crazy, but if you take a drop of water and put it in it, it'll totally open it up.

Just a drop.

Just a drop.

What does that mean?

I've heard that before.

Open it up.

What?

Open what up?

What the fuck are you talking about?

Do you remember the face Tommy made when he tried the 115 proof?

Yeah.

You just don't make that face anymore.

You're not like a wimp.

That helps.

You want to do what?

Do you have a couple more on there for

one of our contestants?

Favreau,

if it meant saving crooked media

would you show your feet in discord show my feet

yeah I'll show my feet in discord I didn't know you're into that that's cool

that's cool that's cool that's cool

we've learned a lot about you

love it

I know that that the bourbon caucus is something that Favreau joins with a babysitter.

So do you know the full names of Favreau and Tommy's children?

Do I like it?

Because you guys seem close.

I mean, I'm just, I'm new.

I mean, look, Charlie and Lizette, do their middle names?

That's full names.

Full name.

I feel like they're both something like Franklin.

Just say Mike Johnson.

Yeah.

I don't think you need to know the middle names of our children, but it's Louise for me.

Louise, I did know that.

Harrison.

Harrison, that's close with Franklin.

Final question.

It was the American statesman, Henry Clay, who once said

that Bourbon could lubricate the wheels of government.

Was he talking about having sex with a train?

You know what?

I'll ask you actually, I want to ask you a serious, let's ask you a serious question

to end this.

Delightful experience.

You leave voicemails for your constituents,

who apparently are the only people on earth who like voicemails.

But you have a Democratic governor.

You are the only Democrat in your delegation.

What do you wish people understood about running and winning in the South that maybe some of our listeners don't understand?

Yeah, no, thanks so much.

Don't overlook us, right?

Don't overlook us.

I know we're in flyover country, right?

But we have people here who want their communities to be safe, who want their kids to be able to get a good education, who want to be able to have good, affordable health care, who want to be able to retire with some security and some dignity, right?

Who care about the future of our community and our country.

And if we can talk to them about our plans to do just that

without looking down on them, then I truly believe not only will we listen, but we will find some more common ground.

Congressman McGarvey, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for taking us through these great bourbons.

Thanks for getting us drunk.

Well, we consider ourselves members of the bourbon caucus.

Yeah.

And thanks for being here.

Thank you, guys.

One more time for your Congressman.

That's our show for tonight.

Thank you to Congressman Morgan McGarvey.

Thank you to State Senator Karen Bergen.

Thank you to Perry Bacon.

Thank you, Loyal.

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at the University of Arizona.

We believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arisona.edu.

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