Should Democrats Save Kevin McCarthy?

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Speaker 3 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 5 I'm Fire Exit user John Lovett.

Speaker 3 I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 3 On today's show, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal joins to talk about whether Democrats will join Matt Gates' plan to oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump is in court for his fraud trial and making all kinds of threats. Joe Biden is framing the 2024 election as extremism versus democracy.

Speaker 3 And Gavin Newsom appoints LaFonza Butler as California's newest senator. But first,

Speaker 3 Congress has averted a government shutdown for now.

Speaker 3 Because Kevin McCarthy caved to Democrats at the last possible minute, 126 House Republicans joined 209 of their Democratic colleagues to keep the government funded at current spending levels for the next 45 days.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump and most Republicans had been demanding huge cuts to everything from healthcare to education, more immigration restrictions, and all kinds of other crazy stuff.

Speaker 3 They got none of that, though they were able to keep additional funding for Ukraine out of the deal, at least for now.

Speaker 3 President Biden said he's confident the Ukraine aid will pass and told Republicans to pass the full budget deal they agreed to last summer.

Speaker 6 Stop playing games. Get this this done.
I'm sick and tired of the brinksmanship. And so are the American people.
I've been doing this, you all point out to me a lot, a long time.

Speaker 6 I've never quite seen a Republican Congress or any Congress act like this. Enough is enough is enough.

Speaker 6 This is not that complicated. The brinkmanship has to end.
There's no excuse for another crisis. Consequently, I strongly urge my Republican friends in Congress not to wait.

Speaker 6 Don't waste time as you did all summer. Pass a year-long budget agreement.
Honor the deal we made a few months ago.

Speaker 3 Joe's angry. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I like it. It works better on audio because you can't see the ice cream cone.

Speaker 3 There's no ice cream cone. There's no ice cream cone in the podium.
What do you think happened here?

Speaker 3 Why do you think McCarthy caved at the last minute to avoid a shutdown that almost everyone thought would happen?

Speaker 3 I mean, like Friday heading into the weekend, it was like, it was like, most certainly, most likely. What do you think happened?

Speaker 5 The thing that I don't understand is McCarthy clearly felt like he needed to prove to his caucus that there was no way out of this without Democratic votes. And

Speaker 5 a lot of the assumptions were that, okay, in order for that to happen, there has to be a shutdown. There has to be some pain before that can happen.

Speaker 5 And for whatever reason, McCarthy decided he didn't need to wait for the shutdown to actually transpire to have the vote.

Speaker 5 And I think part of it might just be that it was becoming increasingly clear that no matter what he did, there was no avoiding this motion to vacate coming in the next week.

Speaker 3 Yeah, seems right. I mean, he blinked.
Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, I think

Speaker 3 he

Speaker 3 originally thought that maybe he could pass something through the House with all Republican votes.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, it obviously wouldn't pass the Democratic-held Senate and the White House, but then he could trigger a shutdown and everyone could argue about it.

Speaker 3 I think he realized last week after several votes that he couldn't get anything past the House with just Republican votes.

Speaker 3 And then he realized he was going to get jammed by the Senate because McConnell was going to throw in with Democrats and the Senate to pass a bipartisan funding bill.

Speaker 3 So if there was a shutdown, it would have been McCarthy versus not only Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, but Mitch McConnell and a bunch of Senate and House Republicans who wanted to pass a bipartisan funding bill.

Speaker 5 And a bipartisan funding bill that would have included funding for Ukraine.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I think he realized, look, it's, you know, probably hard to win a shutdown fight when it's just a Republican bill passing through the House.

Speaker 3 But when you can't even get something passed through the House, it's going to be really hard to win a shutdown fight. Yeah, they couldn't even get a defense appropriations bill passed.
Right.

Speaker 3 They can't do the basics of anything. Yeah, they couldn't get anything done.
How big of a problem, Tommy, is the lack of additional Ukraine funding? I mean, I think it's a big deal.

Speaker 3 For Ukraine, it's obviously existential, but I think that,

Speaker 3 well, the broader context is I think the U.S. has passed something like $75 billion for Ukraine and aid so far, and Biden wants another $24 billion, which is a lot of money.

Speaker 3 And for a while, there was a broad, pretty bipartisan support and polls for supporting Ukraine and giving them, you know, stuff, guns, et cetera. And now that that polling has eroded over time.

Speaker 3 There's a CNN poll in August that found a majority of Americans opposed more U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Speaker 3 So, you know, I always thought that an up-or-down vote in Congress would probably pass and probably pass in a bipartisan way.

Speaker 3 Like there's more support for Ukraine in Congress maybe than in the broader electorate. But I just, I'm not sure how you get an upper-down vote right now in the House.

Speaker 3 And Matt Gates seems to think that McCarthy, is it Gates or Geitz? What are we going with these days? I thought it was Gates. Is it Geites? I don't know.
Gates.

Speaker 3 I just, all I see is the Botox in his forehead. It seems so strong.
That's my opinion.

Speaker 5 But so, defamation training.

Speaker 3 This,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 you have to say the joke. Now we're going to get sued for that.
God damn it.

Speaker 3 I suspect that you could get a bipartisan majority if you had an upper-down vote vote on some sort of like reasonable amount of funding, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 And McCarthy, Gates, Geitz thinks there's a secret deal that the White House made. Biden seems to suggest there might be one that the White House won't comment on it.

Speaker 3 But I just don't know how you get to that vote. Right.
Because the strategy was let's pair Ukraine money with disaster relief money and other popular stuff and force everybody to vote for it.

Speaker 3 But now they passed all the disaster relief money. So what do you do? Maybe some border security money? I'm not sure.
Yeah. I don't think McCarthy, he's got enough problems.

Speaker 3 He doesn't want to be talking about any secret side Ukraine deal right now.

Speaker 5 By the way, how could he keep all these secret deals aside?

Speaker 3 It's like

Speaker 5 he's like Mrs. Doubtfire at the end.

Speaker 3 He's just running in and out, changing in the bathroom,

Speaker 5 telling Biden one thing, telling the Republicans another thing.

Speaker 3 It's not. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, look, I think the problem becomes if the next potential government shutdown fight hinges on Ukraine aid, you could then see McCarthy and the House Republicans shutting down the government over that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, and McCarthy was was accusing Democrats of shutting down the government to support Ukraine on the Sunday shows, which royally pissed off a whole lot of Democrats.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and well, I think that there is, you're right that the Congress is behind where the country has moved on the issue. There is still a majority, certainly in the Senate.

Speaker 5 There's still a majority in the House that if it came to a vote would support Ukraine aid. So it's the same dynamic that keeps playing out.

Speaker 5 If a bill came to the floor, there's a majority for it, but there's not a majority among Republicans for it.

Speaker 3 Right, right. And the

Speaker 3 support for supporting Ukraine has slipped precipitously among Republicans in particular.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, but of course, there's also not a majority among Republicans for any kind of funding bill right now. So that might save the Ukraine aid in the end.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Because you need Democratic votes.

Speaker 3 Yeah, right.

Speaker 5 And the dynamic continues to be the same. The only bill that can pass the House and the Senate is a bipartisan bill with more Democrats.

Speaker 5 in the House than Republicans in the House.

Speaker 3 Trevor Burrus: Well, the other thing that might save Ukraine aid and avert another government shutdown is Matt Gates' antics here.

Speaker 3 Because now the fun really begins. Not only are we going to have another potential shutdown fight in 45 days, but we have a fight over who should be Speaker of the House

Speaker 3 that's about to happen right now this week. Kevin McCarthy had a choice between shutting down the government or potentially losing his job as speaker.

Speaker 3 And sure enough, Gates said he plans to file a motion to vacate this week. Here he is on the House floor and talking to reporters afterwards.

Speaker 7 It is going to be difficult for my Republican Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy's lunch money in every negotiation.

Speaker 7 What commitments were made

Speaker 7 to President Biden to continue the spending of President Biden in exchange for doing things for President Biden?

Speaker 7 It is becoming increasingly clear who the Speaker of the House already works for, and it's not the Republican Conference.

Speaker 8 If Kevin McCarthy works for Democrats and utilizes Democrats in order to keep power, that would be consistent with everything we've seen from him.

Speaker 5 Have you spoken to

Speaker 5 President Trump about this?

Speaker 10 I have. And what was his advice to you?

Speaker 8 I think I'm going to keep that between the two of us.

Speaker 3 Have you talked to him? Oh, man, this is fun.

Speaker 3 This is fun. Let's just enjoy this moment of fun before the chaos continues.

Speaker 5 And it somehow redounds to a terrible catastrophe that we're not quite yet under.

Speaker 3 But at this moment, at this moment, very fun.

Speaker 5 Look, Matt Gates is a pig in shit. He is loving every fucking moment of this.
And then he's going to the floor and giving speeches that you could just copy and paste into Democrats.

Speaker 3 He's cutting ads for the Biden campaign. I love it.
Thank you, Matt Gates. Unbelievable.
In-kind contribution.

Speaker 5 By the way, it is pretty remarkable where we're at, where the current Speaker of the House, like

Speaker 5 we're inured to it in so many ways, but it is a bit unusual that it is just a thing that Republicans and Democrats all agree Kevin McCarthy is a liar. They call him a liar with an L.
It is wild. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because he is. Well, at all.
And also, I mean, not to defend Kevin McCarthy here, but he kind of had to lie because he put himself in a terrible situation.

Speaker 3 And the root of this is, in order for him to become speaker, to get the job after 15 votes, he said, okay, we'll insert this rule into the agreement where

Speaker 3 it only takes one member to trigger a motion to vacate vote, a vote to get rid of the speaker. And so that's his fucking fucking fault.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's why you should have no sympathy for him because this guy so desperately wanted this job that he made it impossible to govern the house.

Speaker 3 I think it was Carl Hulse of the New York Times who said that McCarthy likes being speaker so much that he'll just like post up in public places and take photos with tourists because he just like likes being speaker and being in the speaker's lobby and showing off.

Speaker 5 Like Tom Hanks sitting on that forest gunk bench.

Speaker 3 Monkey's paw.

Speaker 3 That's what you get.

Speaker 3 And careful what you wish for, Kevin. Yeah, you got it.

Speaker 5 But also it's like, Tommy, thank you for letting the people listening to this show know that they shouldn't feel bad for Kevin McCarthy, something that they were all doing.

Speaker 3 Listen, there's a lot of understanding.

Speaker 3 I just said this is why he had to lie.

Speaker 3 Tell us how was he going to keep his job? He's got to lie to Biden and then he's got to do the Mrs. Doubtfire thing.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he had to lie. It was the only way to get the thing he wanted.

Speaker 3 Right, yeah, exactly. Which is power.
And I will just say, it will be

Speaker 3 difficult for Republicans to still make the argument that Joe Biden is feeble because he keeps taking Kevin McCarthy's lunch money. I think they'll still do it, though.
Yeah, they'll take a run at it.

Speaker 3 They'll take a run at it. They took a run at it.
All right. So what does Gates need to succeed here? And what are the chances that he ultimately does?

Speaker 3 So one member, so he can force the motion to vacate vote. That just takes, he can do that alone.
Winning that vote, though, will take a majority.

Speaker 3 So I don't know if he's put it forward yet as of this recording. I don't think so.
But then basically the leadership has two days to bring up this motion to vacate deal.

Speaker 3 There's a couple ways McCarthy could try to kill it. They could basically say, should the House be considering this right now? Yes or no? And vote it down that way.

Speaker 3 They could vote on a motion to table the bill, but again, you need a majority to do that. So in both cases, Democrats have a lot of power because they could vote to bail out McCarthy.

Speaker 3 They could vote to get rid of McCarthy. Or they could vote present, which changes the math and makes it easier for him to win.
So this is where all the kind of machinations start.

Speaker 3 And if I got any of that wrong, please blame Jake Sherman at Punch Bowl.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 he needs a majority of those present present and voting, which means that if someone votes present, the threshold goes down.

Speaker 3 And then, so if every Democrat, here's one way to think about it, if every Democrat votes to dump McCarthy, which they normally would in a situation like this,

Speaker 3 should Kevin Carthy be speaker? We all agree. No.

Speaker 3 So if every Democrat votes to dump McCarthy, then Gates would only need five Republicans to join him in voting to oust McCarthy, which he very likely has.

Speaker 3 Eli Crane, Victoria Sparts, Andy Biggs, Bob Goode. He's already got a couple.

Speaker 3 People think he could get up 20. The kookie cocks.

Speaker 5 He had the same group of people that took us to so many ballots to get a lot of people.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's lost some.

Speaker 3 He doesn't have Chip Roy, doesn't have Byron. Some of them are getting mad at him, Stefanic, right? So

Speaker 3 he's losing some of them, but he probably has enough if he has all the Democrats.

Speaker 3 But the point that Tommy made stands, which is if the Democrats all vote together, they basically decide whether or not Kevin McCarthy remains a speaker.

Speaker 3 So next question, should the Democrats bail out Kevin McCarthy? And if they do, what do you think they can get out of the deal? Love it?

Speaker 5 So, I asked, I think it's worth just

Speaker 5 interviewed Jayapal about this. She didn't get into the specifics.
The other thing I asked was also just sort of, like, is this about

Speaker 5 so there's the vote to oust, and then there's what happens after a speaker is oust, right? There's like a few different places at which the Democrats will have power in this.

Speaker 5 Like, she really didn't want to get into it except to say that the only way she thought Democrats would go along with any kind of plan would be if there was actual rule changes that were written down that Democrats would have, like written extractions, not a promise from McCarthy, not like a side deal, not like we'll do what, you know, not all the kinds of deals he's been making over the last year.

Speaker 3 Yeah, none of which he has honored.

Speaker 3 Right, exactly. No IOUs from that guy.
But also McCarthy's problem is that Gates can just put forward the motion to vacate again and again and again, and he has threatened to do so. So you're right.

Speaker 3 You could, like, the only path forward that seems to fix anything is some sort of grand bargain, as they like to say in DC

Speaker 3 that includes rule changes. Are Simpson and or Bull still alive?

Speaker 3 A joke for three people in this room.

Speaker 3 That put together some sort of rule changes that, I don't know, disempower the right-wing fringe in the House, make it more governable for McCarthy, make it more governable, give Democrats a little bit more power.

Speaker 3 But I don't know. Is that really on the table?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so there's a whole menu of possible concessions. It seems like there's some fantasy politics being played here.
I saw someone.

Speaker 3 Maybe maybe they'll say that the NRCC is not allowed to spend any money on, you know, against vulnerable Democrats on racism 2024. I was like, okay, yeah, that'll work.
Sure.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And Donald Trump has to be quiet for six months.

Speaker 3 Can't say a word. I would rather him say a lot.

Speaker 3 Politico has said that one thing that's not negotiable, forcing McCarthy to stick to the spending caps he inked with Biden in May, that Dem say isn't a concession, it's a given.

Speaker 3 So that is interesting, and it does make more. Like, you're not going to save Kevin McCarthy if then he's not going to agree to the fucking deal he agreed to with Joe Biden in the summer on spending.

Speaker 3 But then if I guess if McCarthy does that, then he's, I don't, I don't know what happens here.

Speaker 5 I don't, the only thing that's confusing about like, okay, so they make a deal on spending. Every McCarthy goes against that deal for what he was trying to pass through the House.

Speaker 5 But McCarthy has to go against that deal to get anything passed through the House because of the promises he made to the House House Republicans.

Speaker 5 And what actually ends up passing doesn't violate the deal. It's just a continuation of the deal.

Speaker 5 So in a sense, what McCarthy ends up actually putting through the House in the end does uphold the deal he made with Biden

Speaker 5 before. It's just that everyone's claiming he broke his deal

Speaker 5 when he tried to pass the House bill, right?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I didn't quite follow that.

Speaker 5 So everyone's saying McCarthy's a liar because McCarthy went back in the deal he did with Biden. Yes.

Speaker 5 He tried to go back.

Speaker 5 But he tried to go back. But McCarthy does a lot of things to demonstrate what can and can't work, right?

Speaker 5 Like no matter what McCarthy passed through the House, what McCarthy passed through the House was never going to pass through the Senate. It was a messaging bill for a fight.

Speaker 5 So in some sense, couldn't McCarthy have just been doing what he did to get a Republican bill through, ultimately, to uphold the deal?

Speaker 5 Because whatever he was going to pass through both the Senate and the House would have uphold the deal anyway.

Speaker 3 Sure, maybe. But the only thing that matters here is if he ends up agreeing,

Speaker 3 like to keep his job, if he ends up saying, okay, if you guys support me, Democrats, as Speaker, then I will agree to the Biden deal and

Speaker 3 at those spending levels, and we'll just, you know, keep the government open and we'll keep it open at the levels that Joe Biden and I agreed to, and that's it. Then Matt Gates could say, okay,

Speaker 3 I'm going to do another motion to vacate. Then maybe ideally, then more Republicans would

Speaker 3 join Matt Gates because, oh, he just did this.

Speaker 3 But I think at that point, like, if you've got all the Democrats on board, saving McCarthy as one block, then, like, I don't think that Gates will have the votes to oust McCarthy.

Speaker 3 Well, the other thing he won't have a majority.

Speaker 5 And it's also why I think that any kind of deal can't just be about budgeting or policy.

Speaker 5 It has to be about genuine concessions in committees and votes and actual power sharing, which is the thing that Jay Paul talked about as well.

Speaker 5 It can't just be to you have to you uphold some policy deal we made a year ago. He already made that deal.
He should be living by it anyway.

Speaker 3 And Matt Gates, I mean, he's an arsonist. He hates Kevin McCarthy.
He's getting a lot of attention and probably could run for governor of Florida.

Speaker 3 So real fiscal conservatives are furious at him that they had a deal that cut domestic spending by 8% and got a bunch of border funding, and they said no to that.

Speaker 3 And now, so what like the trap here for Matt Gates is he will either get rid of McCarthy or he'll say McCarthy is a pun of the Democrats, and that's the only way he is still in power.

Speaker 3 So it's not a great setup for the speaker. Yeah, though I do think this does, it changes the dynamics of the next shutdown fight just because I think Democrats have so much more leverage now.

Speaker 3 I mean, we always had leverage because Republicans only control one House of Congress, and

Speaker 3 there wasn't even a majority of Republicans who wanted to have a shutdown.

Speaker 3 So Kevin McCarthy never really had that much leverage, except for shutting down the government and getting all the blame himself, along with his House Republicans that voted to shut it down.

Speaker 5 And the fact that a bunch of Republicans who are in Biden districts could say, fuck this, and join a discharge position with Democrats and get out of this anyway.

Speaker 3 But I do think that if he wants to keep his job, then he will have to agree to keep the government open and work with Democrats to pass something.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

Speaker 5 And as part of that, you can come up with some kind of rule change because you'd have a majority that would be able to say you need Matt Gates plus 10 other assholes to do a Right.

Speaker 3 And McCarthy's, McCarthy might be banking on the fact that Democrats will look at the menu of options they have in front of them for who could come next and decide that a lying asshole who will say anything is actually their best option.

Speaker 3 Because he has no principles. Give him the votes anyway.

Speaker 5 No principles. How nice to have a, we can look at them.
He'll do anything.

Speaker 3 Now, for Democrats, I think you'd want to make a promise to maybe save McCarthy once or twice or, you know, just to get through the government shutdown thing.

Speaker 3 Because like you were saying, Tommy, down the road, if McCarthy is really, if MacAid is able to prove that McCarthy is now just a quote-unquote tool of Democrats, then you could start seeing more and more Republicans as time goes on over the next several months, over the next year, say like, all right, we're done with Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 3 And then maybe you trigger another motion to vacate someday down the road, and the Democrats are like, oh, I'm not saving you twice. Right.

Speaker 3 That's why I don't, I sort of feel like any real deal would have to change the motion to vacate threshold and some other structural things to make sure that we're just not trapped in this endless cycle of Matt Gates being mad.

Speaker 3 Man, imagine that

Speaker 3 they take away the power of motion to vacate. Then the Republicans would be so pissed at the fun with that.
Right.

Speaker 5 Yeah. That's the other thing about this.

Speaker 3 It's like we, we, we hear a lot about the, like, the Republicans in vulnerable districts, and then we hear a lot about the Freedom Caucus, Caucus but there is this soft middle between the two that for all we know this is a like completely anathema to them and a reason they would say I'm done with Kevin McCarthy it's time to move on to Steve Scalise or whoever yeah I think McCarthy controls like 200 votes and the rest are kind of yeah nightmares up for grabs I just don't know no one has floated an alternative for who could do a better job right everyone talks about Steve Scalise but he's doing some medical treatment um so they're kind of waiting for him to get through that before they'll talk about alternatives even matt gates won't talk about alternatives.

Speaker 3 Tom Amers has been floated around too. He's the majority.
He's the whip now. And he's Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 Even Steve's Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 Steve Scalise even is out there. Like even his, like everyone, even Steve Scalise's statement today was like so lukewarm.
Like I remain committed to Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Well, he needs to be ready for stepping in.
Ready for action. What do you guys think the call between Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz was like?

Speaker 3 Good question. I mean, Trump only cares about harming Biden, right? So he's like, shut down the government, blow up the economy, do whatever it takes to harm this guy.

Speaker 3 And it's not like he's got a lot of loyalty to Kevin.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 He'd dump that guy in a second.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and they're certainly not, you know, strategizing,

Speaker 5 like thinking through the moves.

Speaker 3 No, not doing whip counts. Yeah.
Yeah, they don't know the names.

Speaker 3 Speaking of Trump, he is in court again defending himself against a lawsuit brought by the state of New York that accuses him of committing business fraud.

Speaker 3 Last week, the judge delivered a surprise pretrial ruling that Trump is liable for fraud, and the judge has already revoked the business licenses for Trump Tower and the Trump International Hotel.

Speaker 3 Now, the judge is going to decide the rest of Trump's punishment. Attorney General Tish James is asking for a $250 million fine and a ban on Trump running any business in the state of New York.

Speaker 3 Trump's lawyer told the judge that he will hear testimony from Donald Trump during this trial, but apparently Trump couldn't wait to take the stand to lay out his defense.

Speaker 3 Here he is during a court break on Monday.

Speaker 9 This is a judge that should be disbarred. This is a judge that should be out of office.

Speaker 9 This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he's doing. He's interfering with an election, and it's a disgrace.

Speaker 6 Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 Mr. Trump.

Speaker 3 What do you guys think about the deft legal strategy of threatening the judge who's solely responsible for deciding the fate of your business empire?

Speaker 5 I was like trying to be like, why is Trump madder?

Speaker 5 Because of the substance of what's at issue and the threat to his livelihood or just the fact that he had to sit in a chair and pay attention for a a couple hours.

Speaker 5 Just absolutely bored of his fucking mind getting angrier and angrier and angrier.

Speaker 3 And he's so hungry. He's started to show up.
Like, well, I don't even know. And also there was, there's, I didn't expect there to be camera footage.

Speaker 5 There's camera footage. Oh, there's a great, there's a great moment where the camera comes around and the judge basically does like, hey, how you doing?

Speaker 3 And someone said it to like the credits of some 90 sitcom. Yeah, I mean, I think this one speaks to the fact that Trump never has a legal strategy these days.

Speaker 3 He has a political strategy where he wins pre-election and that solves all of his legal problems. Because otherwise, being like, hey, see that guy over there who controls my fate? Fuck that guy.

Speaker 3 It's a really, really weird thing for him to do.

Speaker 5 He didn't even have the balls to hurt me.

Speaker 3 It's like most people grovel before a judge deciding their fate. I'm not guilty.
He's guilty. He should be charged.

Speaker 5 Well, look, also last week, Trump was like, in one of his truths was something like, I need a judge, federal, state, anywhere. Please, some judge, help me.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's weird that, you know, Trump is very mad that he's not getting a jury trial, but that's because his lawyers forgot or just decided not to request for one. Yeah, they did.

Speaker 3 So now it's in the hands of the fit. His fate is in the hands of this judge that he hates.

Speaker 3 The judge was like, no one asked for a jury. That's why I'm deciding.
You could ask for a jury. No one's asked for one.

Speaker 5 And also just, I mean, like, I don't know.

Speaker 5 I just didn't fully internalize how quickly this trial was going to start. And like, the fact that...
Hard to keep track.

Speaker 3 It's in fairness, hard to keep track of all the trials. It is, it is.

Speaker 5 But, like, you know,

Speaker 5 the judge issues this surprise ruling, say, hey, I've looked at what you've both presented. We can go straight to damages here.
Like, this is this is open and shut.

Speaker 5 And so, who knows what they were preparing for?

Speaker 5 But it must be quite a shock to go from thinking, oh, I'm going to be in a trial where I get to at least try to assert innocence that the outcome is in doubt.

Speaker 5 And now it's purely about how much he owes and how much the damage is. And that is, that is, he that's trapped.
He's trapped there.

Speaker 3 I find it incredibly difficult to believe that these lawyers are going to let Donald Trump testify.

Speaker 3 I saw something that perhaps when the defense lawyer told the judge that they would be hearing testimony from Donald Trump, it might be the testimony that was already pre-recorded in the earlier stages of the trial.

Speaker 3 Yeah, in this trial. And maybe they'll just play it for the judge.
I don't know why they would need to because the judge could have already watched it. But like,

Speaker 3 putting Donald Trump on the stand, it just seems, I mean, great. I can't wait.

Speaker 3 You know, but Trump's probably like, look, every time I show up at one of these things, I get a five-point boost in the polls. So here I am again, ramming about another judge.

Speaker 3 Yeah, maybe he just assumes he's going to lose. He wants to shape public opinion, and he also thinks he's going to appeal this and eventually hit some right-wing judge somewhere on the ladder.

Speaker 5 But he's already lost. He has lost.

Speaker 5 This is going to be about the number. So this is just about a number.

Speaker 3 And like what he owes. There was a criminal trial last year where his CFO got sent to jail.
Yeah. This is like pretty well-established fact pattern here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't think he's going to be too successful, which is also, I mean, perhaps the forgetting to ask for the jury was intentional because maybe Trump just thought he'd have better luck telling everyone that it was a crooked judge than it was a crooked jury.

Speaker 3 Although I don't really think he'd care that much about the distinction. At least with the jury, you get like maybe one MAGA guy.
Yeah, right. You're like Bernie Carrick on there.
Like, oh, sweet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's true. Just like, can we move this thing to Staten Island?

Speaker 5 Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. Maybe that's.

Speaker 5 I just want firefighters from Staten Island. That's not jury.
Please. Please, Your Honor.

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Speaker 3 So, do you guys know that Trump was right here in Anaheim, California over the weekend? What?

Speaker 5 Checking out Disney?

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was checking out Disney. He was there at the California Republican Convention, and he laid out his larger vision for law and order in a second term during a rambling speech.
Let's listen.

Speaker 13 Sure, I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical DA and AG in America for their illegal, racist, and reverse enforcement of the law.

Speaker 13 And you don't like somebody, or if somebody's beating you by 10, 15, or 20 points like we're doing with... Crooked Joe Biden, let's indict the motherfucker.
Let's indict them.

Speaker 14 And we'll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi who ruined San Francisco.

Speaker 13 How's her husband doing, by the way? Anybody know?

Speaker 14 Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.

Speaker 14 Shot.

Speaker 3 I mean...

Speaker 3 So this is all being covered as background noise. Like I had this did not...

Speaker 3 Trump calling for the execution of suspected shoplifters as they walk out the door of the store.

Speaker 3 That did not make a lot of headlines. The Atlantic's Brian class is calling this the banality of crazy, professor.

Speaker 3 He argues that the press needs to treat Trump's incitements and lawlessness as the story of the 2024 election.

Speaker 3 What do you guys think?

Speaker 5 It seems like that's...

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, wouldn't that be nice, I guess? But that's what Biden's doing when he's trying to... you know, draw attention to this.

Speaker 5 That's what we're doing when we're talking about, I don't know how at this point

Speaker 5 he has inured us to this kind of stuff. He is doing this every day.

Speaker 5 Threatened to execute Mark Milley last week.

Speaker 5 That was the fifth story.

Speaker 3 Yeah. That finally bubbled up.
It did bubble up. And also, you know, look, Mark Milley got booked on 60 Minutes and made comments about this.

Speaker 3 And I think his final speech as chairman of the Joint Chiefs reference, you know, sort of like not kowtowing to dictators.

Speaker 3 So I do think this stuff, every time someone yells about something not getting covered, it ends up getting covered. I think this was probably just like a late night speech on what, a Saturday night?

Speaker 3 Friday night, right? In Anaheim. So, you know, not the, it wasn't downtown New York.
But

Speaker 3 you're right, that Biden is making political violence threats to the courts. Like, that was a big part of the speech in the interview that we're going to talk about in the next section that he did.

Speaker 3 So it is becoming part of the narrative in the campaign. But yeah, of course, it's crazy.
To shoot a shoplifter is an insane thing for a president to suggest. And, you know,

Speaker 3 you can't really say, oh, that's just, Trump says these crazy things. Like, he has put out a proposal, a campaign proposal, policy proposal, that if he's president again,

Speaker 3 he will execute drug dealers, right? So it's not that far from drug dealers to shoplifters.

Speaker 3 He's talked about, you know, sending federal troops into cities that have high crime rates using the Insurrection Act next time around, using also troops to start deporting immigrants, right?

Speaker 3 Like he is, he's starting to propose these things.

Speaker 3 And of course, they want to clear out all the bureaucrats in the federal government so that they only have Trump loyalists who will carry out all these plans and not worry about adhering to the Constitution or the law.

Speaker 3 So it's

Speaker 3 something to actually be quite scared about, I think. It's really.

Speaker 5 Yes, I agree. I just, I also like, you know, we, the insurrection pushed it out of the headlines, but like, you know, clearing Lafayette Park, one of the first,

Speaker 5 one of the first, one of the, one of the early 2016 kerfruffles was like, ah, you got to knock the crap out of them. Like, he's been talking about drug dealers being executed for a very long time.

Speaker 5 This is like, the reality is, yes, these are more extreme statements. They are also incremental to the crazy shit he's been saying for years.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I just think it's quickly worth pointing out that he's not alone in making some of these comments.

Speaker 3 Ron DeSantis is talking about executing suspected drug dealers, trafficking drugs across the border.

Speaker 3 And when pressed on how you would figure out someone's a drug dealer versus, I don't know, a parent with a kid, he was like, well, we figured it out in Iraq, so we'll figure it out here.

Speaker 3 We absolutely did not figure it out in Iraq. We had a horrific problem with killing civilians.

Speaker 3 So, you know, like this kind of bloodthirsty law and order rhetoric is gaining a lot of traction on the right. They're all chasing each other to a, darker, darker place on this stuff.

Speaker 5 And what is chilling to me is obviously it is terrible that Donald Trump is saying these things, but joking about how

Speaker 5 Nancy Pelosi's husband was beaten in the head with a hammer during a home invasion, getting laughs, the blood-curdling cheers from people about shooting shoplifters.

Speaker 5 The problem, right, is that over decades, the right-wing media has like stirred these people up and gotten them to this point.

Speaker 5 Trump was the one who figured it out, but so have a lot of other people now, too.

Speaker 3 too. And look, I don't think that the media needs to cover this in a way where it's like, look how bad Trump is, right? Again, it's not the media's job to win the election for Democrats.

Speaker 3 But if we think back to a lot of the complaints around the CNN town hall with Trump and Caitlin Collins, it was

Speaker 3 why are we platforming Trump again, right? Or we shouldn't, there's this whole movement, like we shouldn't amplify his message.

Speaker 3 The mistake in 2016 was platforming Trump and amplifying his message and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like the more Trump that people hear, the worse it is for him, right?

Speaker 3 When does his approval ratings tank or

Speaker 3 go the lowest, right? Trying to take health care away, Charlottesville, January 6th, the daily COVID press conferences. The more people hear from Trump, the worse it is for him, right?

Speaker 3 Like the person who is best at prosecuting the case against Trump is not a Democrat. It's not a Republican.
It's not a lawyer. It's not a judge.
It's Donald Trump. I agree.

Speaker 3 And I just think that like the

Speaker 3 media sort of over-corrected from 2016 in ways and 2020 by thinking, like, oh, we don't need to platform him all the time or have people listen to him.

Speaker 3 Like, I think people need to hear him all the time. Well, especially now when, look,

Speaker 3 Ron DeSantis' super PEC today decided to release a bunch of polls that show him losing by between 28 and 31 in early primary states

Speaker 3 in head-to-head matchups. Donald Trump is getting over 50% in New Hampshire.

Speaker 3 So I think everyone's just got to wrap their heads around the fact that there's like a 90% chance Trump is the Republican nominee, if not 95%, 100%.

Speaker 3 And he's going to have a 50-50 chance against Joe Biden. So yes, I do think the coverage of these kinds of comments and all the other things he's saying will pick up and increase.

Speaker 3 My concern is the overlap of where some of these issues will be popular. I think the really hardline, bloodthirsty immigration rhetoric is more popular than people think, and it's really scary.

Speaker 3 Ron DeSantis is talking about deporting everyone who came into the country during the Biden administration. 7 million, 8 million people.
Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 5 my question about all this is, yeah, like, I agree. Trump is at his least popular when he's most in people's faces, but also memories are short.

Speaker 5 You know, Donald Trump was at his lowest ebb after access Hollywood. And, you know, James Comey putting out a letter, yes, that hurt Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 5 But one of the things it did is it kind of pushed Donald Trump's scandal aside just for a couple days, just for long enough for people to forget just enough that just enough people forgot how heinous he was.

Speaker 5 And like, sure, do I think covering this now is really important? Yeah, I think people should understand how much of a threat Donald Trump is, how extreme his rhetoric has gotten.

Speaker 3 But really, like,

Speaker 5 this is going to be something we're going to be dealing with for the next seven months.

Speaker 3 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I realize that Access Hollywood seemed like a bigger scandal at the time. I think what came after,

Speaker 3 the many years after Access Hollywood, at least made me think that there is a difference between Trump being caught saying things that are horribly offensive and Trump saying things that could end up affecting people's lives in a tangible way because it would result in policy from Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 So I do think that like January 6th,

Speaker 3 like all these things, these sort of these incitements to violence, to physical violence, to political violence, I think that lands with people and lands with voters in a different way than your typical Donald Trump said something crazy today or Donald Trump said something horribly offensive about this person or that person or that person.

Speaker 3 And I just think that we got to, like, the Biden folks, they totally understood this in the run-up to the 2022 midterms and the January 6th committee understood it. And Biden understood it.

Speaker 3 And I think like making sure that that message is out there and that people are understanding what could actually happen if Donald Trump wins is going to be the most important thing to do.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's just really hard.

Speaker 3 I mean, Biden in his speech

Speaker 3 at the McCain Institute tried to get into the Schedule F changes and removing civil service protection from all these federal employees, which is a really big deal. And I think Biden laid it out well.

Speaker 3 Like Trump is going to make civil servants pledge fealty to him and not to the Constitution and not have any protections. It's just, it's a tough thing to explain.
Yeah. And I think, and look at it.

Speaker 3 It was in a, it was an official speech, and he's not in like campaign mode. Right.

Speaker 3 But the easier way, the more understandable way to say that is like, yeah, Mike Flynn in charge of the Defense Department and Sidney Powell is AG, right?

Speaker 3 Like you just, you got to make it easier for people to understand. Then like, oh no, he's going to get rid of a civil servant bureaucrat and replace them with a political appointee.

Speaker 3 Like that's, that's that's not very

Speaker 3 move a lot of people. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 5 you said it, but like, one of Trump's lowest moments wasn't actually because of his rhetorical excesses or threats to violence. It was his position on healthcare, his extreme position on health care.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't say his position. I would say his attempt to take it away from you.
Yeah, his position.

Speaker 3 Which then is in the same category of like January 6th, people worried about political violence in their own community. You know what I'm saying? Like, you've got to bring it home to people.

Speaker 3 And I do think that like losing your health care care or worried about the country falling into like chaos and violence is they both can affect you.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, look, you can say that like people were worried about political violence in their, in their communities.
What they saw on their television was an attack on the nation's capital. Yeah.

Speaker 5 It was in a, so, so I, yeah.

Speaker 3 So, you know, so Biden gave that speech in Arizona. It was sort of little noticed.
It was a good speech, though. It was a great speech.

Speaker 3 Everyone should go check it out, but it didn't get a ton of coverage.

Speaker 3 He honored the late John McCain there, and he warned that today's Republican Party is being driven by an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of democracy.

Speaker 3 He then sat down for an interview with John Harwood for ProPublica, where he laid out the stakes for 2024.

Speaker 15 Somehow we got to communicate to the American people, this is for real.

Speaker 15 This is real if they were to take over. If the former president were to become president again, the things he says he will do are a threat to American democracy.
And by the way, it's not just here.

Speaker 15 As I travel the world, I have heads of state asking me, I mean, conservative heads of state, look, what's going to happen? Does that mean?

Speaker 15 Because democracy is in jeopardy in other parts of the world as well. I never thought I'd see a time

Speaker 15 when someone was worried about being on a jury

Speaker 15 because there may be physical violence against them if they voted the wrong way.

Speaker 3 What did you guys think of the interview, right message for Biden in 2024? It was a good interview. I mean, I think the challenge is just getting enough people to see it.

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, they did it with ProPublica. ProPublica is a great organization.
They've done amazing work digging into corruption at the Supreme Court, for example.

Speaker 3 But, you know, I checked the view count on YouTube. It was like 115,000, right? So got a lot of work to do to reach more people with this very important, urgent message.

Speaker 3 The speech is the other part of that. I saw the White House was deeply frustrated that Fox News took none of President Biden's speech in Arizona live.

Speaker 3 It's par for the course from them, but you know, it's but like reaching people with this message is really tough.

Speaker 3 Shows you what a bubble Twitter is, too, because like I went on Twitter Sunday and all you could see is people talking about Harwood's interview, and it was a great interview, and Biden did great, and it was great questions.

Speaker 3 But 100,000 views on YouTube, you're like, oh yeah, everyone was talking about it in a very small bubble.

Speaker 5 And it got picked up.

Speaker 3 It'll get clipped and shared and picked up other places. For sure.
But yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, here is, first of all, I think the speech was excellent.

Speaker 5 There's been a few different stories about how he's kind of like drawing on his like coterie of historians.

Speaker 5 And this speech is definitely, it is a, there are lines that are clearly meant to evoke FDR's speech at the 1936 Democratic Convention about rendezvous with destiny.

Speaker 5 This he talks about this generation's job. He says, you know, in the rendezvous with destiny speech, he says, you know,

Speaker 5 that other places, they have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. In Biden's speech, he says

Speaker 5 people are giving away that's most precious to them because they feel frustrated. He is trying to evoke the seriousness of what the world faced with

Speaker 5 the rise of fascism in this moment.

Speaker 5 And what is also clear in the interview is how deep, like deeply and personally Biden takes this and how much he views it as like the central goal and mission of his presidency and his life is to be here to make the case for democracy and to make the case for

Speaker 5 not just like democracy as a form of government, but democracy as a practice of being respectful, of treating the other side as opponents and not enemies, like how much he internalized that and how meaningful it was for him to speak about John McCain.

Speaker 5 But there was only, there was one part of the speech he gave where he says, for all its faults, American democracy remains the best path forward to prosperity, possibilities, progress, fair play, and equality.

Speaker 5 And what I found when I was listening to the interview, when I was watching the speech, you're right, it is like. a big conversation about people that are hyper-engaged.

Speaker 5 They are worried about the threat to democracy. Biden is correctly worried about the threat to democracy.

Speaker 5 But there's another part of the case that I don't think comes through in the speech, which is a very grand story about the values of the democracy and why these threats are so dangerous, which is why is democracy the better way to organize ourselves?

Speaker 5 Why do you believe democracy can deliver? What are the ways in which you think democracy is going to be better for people in their day-to-day lives? How can it help them? How does it matter?

Speaker 5 How does it manifest? Because there are portions of the speech, as Tommy points out, where he goes into great detail about Schedule F and the federal bureaucracy and all of these details.

Speaker 5 And there's other parts that are

Speaker 5 very

Speaker 5 emotional and direct and not as sort of bureaucratic. But I do think that that's part of the story that I think a lot of people assume, which is democracy is just better and everybody gets that.

Speaker 5 But one of the issues we see in poll after poll is like, especially for young people, they don't understand why democracy is so good. They don't understand why democracy should deliver.

Speaker 5 And we need to be making that argument too.

Speaker 3 Two things about that.

Speaker 3 One, the Biden administration and the Biden campaign would say that the way that their economic agenda links to their democracy agenda is that Biden's whole goal since being president was to show that democracy can deliver.

Speaker 3 They keep saying that. And so that's all, you know, look, we did this bipartisan infrastructure bill.
We passed the Inflation Reduction Act. We got all this done.

Speaker 3 And we are showing through our action and through the legislation that Biden's passing that democracy can deliver for people, right? And they're hoping they connect the dots.

Speaker 3 It's still tricky, but they're trying to do it. Second, I think you're right that like there's a lot of rhetoric so far, both in the Harwood interview and in the very good Arizona speech, too.

Speaker 3 The next step is to be specific about what the Trump MAGA extreme agenda, anti-democratic agenda will actually mean for people.

Speaker 3 And that's going back to what I was saying where, you know, he wants to send troops into, if you, if you live in a blue city, which is most cities, and he decides you have high crime rates, he wants to use the Insurrection Act to send in federal troops to your city.

Speaker 3 Imagine that. Imagine if you're a business that doesn't seem sufficiently anti-woke.
Maybe he'll have his new loyalist IRS director investigate your business.

Speaker 3 Maybe if you are a political opponent in some way, he's going to come after you with the DOJ because Rudy Giuliani will be attorney general. I do think you've got to actually draw those connections.

Speaker 3 That's like the next step. Well, I think it's also, it's hard to sell that.
democracy is the best form of government and can deliver when all anyone ever hears is that Washington is a mess.

Speaker 3 I mean, we're currently in the middle of a government shutdown debate. So I agree with you, but it's like, it's a tough sell.
I also think this speech, though, it wasn't just about democracy.

Speaker 3 There was also a big like veterans thing keying off McCain because they talked up, he brought back the

Speaker 3 Atlantic reporting that Trump called dead service members suckers and losers at a cemetery. He talked about Trump calling Mark Milley a traitor and floating death as punishment.

Speaker 3 There was a whole like kind of riff on the ideals that McCain stood for that seemed designed to peel off the military vote. He went after Tommy Tuberville for his blockade on military promotions.

Speaker 3 They're just doing a lot of things in this speech.

Speaker 5 Yeah, just, but one more, just, I think everything that you just said was right, but I think there's another piece of it.

Speaker 5 So you're, you're talking about some of the kind of like the ways in which Trump's threats to political violence could be made to feel real for people. I think that's really important.

Speaker 5 But I do think one thing that, and I do think they are doing this, and just this was a speech that was broader about like kind of like

Speaker 5 big, big D democracy, but the threats to basic rights are also tied to the threat to democracy and referring to the basically,

Speaker 5 you know, he talks about the rule of law, but part of this is also live and let live and people being free to live as they want and not coming for the books you want to read and not coming for your kids' teachers and abortion bans and abortion bans.

Speaker 5 And so I think like it's not, but when Biden thinks about the threats to democracy, it's clear in the interview, like he is very much focused on like undermining the rule of law, undermining democratic institutions and the threats to political violence.

Speaker 5 But I think more of it,

Speaker 5 I think it is very visceral for people, especially after the last year we've had, that part of the attack on democracy is an attack on basic rights.

Speaker 5 And I feel like that is just as important and real for people.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. I wasn't just talking about political violence.

Speaker 3 I'm saying like troops in your cities and like book bans and abortion bans and like all of the, you know, what you can't do is just talk about sort of gerrymandering and the

Speaker 3 filibuster and all this kind of stuff. Like filibuster,

Speaker 3 because that all gets into process stuff, right? You're going to say like what the anti-democratic agenda actually means, how it would affect your life.

Speaker 3 And there's a whole range of ways it could affect your life. There's a whole lot of people who like anti-democratic agendas as the problem because it helps their out-group stay in power.

Speaker 3 But anyway, right.

Speaker 3 Do you guys catch there was a very funny moment in the speech where Biden was referencing the 1972 campaign, and he says to John Harwood, who's 66, you're not old enough to remember. I know, I know.

Speaker 3 What was interesting.

Speaker 3 Well, we had another Strum. I got Strom Thurman

Speaker 3 to help

Speaker 3 finally reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, I think, like a long time ago.

Speaker 5 At that moment, he also

Speaker 5 used a term that you don't even hear anymore, which is limousine liberals.

Speaker 3 He started talking about limousine liberals, and I've never been a limousine liberal. I will say, though, you watch that John Harwood interview, and there is

Speaker 3 the whole idea that Biden is like senile and losing a step. He was sharp.
He's on it. He has thought.
really deeply about these issues. He was very good.
He was. He still does his like time.

Speaker 3 Don't take our word for it. He does decades.
Yeah. He does his old-timey references for sure because he's old.
But he doesn't seem like he lost a step at all.

Speaker 5 No, I agree. Actually, that was something I was feeling the same way.

Speaker 5 And the other thing that was interesting, too, about it is like when he talks about the Limousine liberal issue, he's actually getting it.

Speaker 5 We were talking about, which is we have to, like, I've always understood that you need to talk about issues in a way that people can really understand. But the other thing he said that actually

Speaker 5 that I haven't heard him maybe articulate exactly this way, he said that hate never goes away. It like hides under rocks until it's

Speaker 5 given oxygen. Yeah, that was a good idea.
It was a really kind of,

Speaker 5 It was just interesting seeing him kind of by the time it was later in the interview and he was like that was in the Strom Thurman conference.

Speaker 3 Yeah. He's saying he used to think it would be killed off, but instead he's learned that no, it just hides and waits to be resuscitated.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And the thing that's interesting is he always comes back in that democracy speech, he ends by being like, I've never been more optimistic about America.

Speaker 5 I've never been more optimistic about America. And I'm glad he's saying that, but he's not.
He's actually, he is very, very worried. He is very, very scared.

Speaker 5 And he is scared in part because he has this sort of practical understanding of like racism and bigotry, clearly from his own experience and from being a very old man.

Speaker 5 And it was just interesting to see him kind of go there.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that was really I think what probably makes him optimistic is he believes that if enough people are made aware of this and are paying attention, then we can overcome it.

Speaker 3 And again, like we have in the past. But he's worried.

Speaker 5 And he says, but that's why he keeps saying in the interview. It's real.
It's real. It's real.
And he's, and like, and I agree. And it is frustrating for all of us.

Speaker 5 But in that moment, when he's saying it's real, it's real, it's real, he sounds like every resistance liberal that's like, why don't you people see this the way that I see this?

Speaker 5 And I think what is the parts that we're talking about are like, how do you make it real for people? And it has to get out of the historian

Speaker 3 mode. It just has to.
It has to. Finally, we have a new senator here in California.

Speaker 3 Governor Newsom has appointed Emily's List president LaFonza Butler to fill the seat of the late Dianne Feinstein, who passed away last week at the age of 90.

Speaker 3 Butler has quite a resume before leading the country's biggest organization to help elect pro-choice women.

Speaker 3 She led the fight for 15 in California as the head of the Service Employees International Union.

Speaker 3 She's also been a senior advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris during Kamala Harris's campaign and will be the first black lesbian to serve in the United States Senate.

Speaker 3 What's still unknown is whether she'll serve as a temporary replacement or enter the crowded primary race to succeed Senator Feinstein that includes Representatives Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee.

Speaker 3 What do you guys think of the pick and how Newsom handled it?

Speaker 5 I'll tell you what my honest reaction was, which is, oh, this doesn't seem like much of a caretaker.

Speaker 5 I guess the next time Gavin Newsom goes to French Laundry, it'll be because one of the three people currently running will have rolled his head in there.

Speaker 3 I had a different reaction. I did.

Speaker 3 I thought it was really, look, the Senate's full of like rich people and lawyers. And I know it's cool to have like a former SEIU local 2015 president, right?

Speaker 3 And an Emily's List organizer and an activist. I thought she was sort of in the vein of other clearly interim picks who were basically former staffers.

Speaker 3 There was Mo Cowan in Massachusetts, who took John Kerry's seat for a short period of time. There's Ted Kaufman in Delaware, who was Biden's longtime chief of staff.
Maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 3 Maybe she's going to decide to run. If she does, like, she'll have a real head of steam.
But it seems like it was well received.

Speaker 3 I do think Gavin probably regrets putting a bunch of conditions on who he would name in advance. That just always seems to create political problems.

Speaker 3 Like politicians, the one lesson you want is, right?

Speaker 3 Give yourself as much space as possible because Barbara Lee's supporters tried to box him in and demand that she be the one selected to this interim post.

Speaker 3 But I don't know, it seems like people are happy with the pick.

Speaker 3 Yeah, just so people know how this all went down, Newsom made a promise three years ago that he'd fill a hypothetical vacancy by Dianne Feinstein by appointing a black woman.

Speaker 3 This was after criticism that he didn't appoint a black woman to fill Kamala Harris's Senate seat, but appointed Alex Padilla, the current senator, the other senator from California, who has become California's first Latino senator.

Speaker 3 What he clearly didn't account for or wasn't thinking about at the time was that there would already be a competitive primary for the seat when Feinstein retired or in this case died featuring a black woman, Barbara Lee.

Speaker 3 And then he said he wouldn't appoint anyone who's running in the primary because he didn't want to give that person an unfair advantage when voters were going to decide soon anyway.

Speaker 3 Then last week, his office issued a clarification saying anyone who he appointed was free to to also run in the primary which of course was always the case because there is like

Speaker 3 there's no such thing there's no such thing as an interim replacement that has conditions where you can't run that's just that's just not constitutional requirements and so but i do think to tommy's point like lafonso butler first of all her resume is stellar very exciting that she's going to be california's newest senator but because she is such a longtime democratic party activist and organizer close with vice president harris she almost served as newsom's chief of staff uh at one point He tried to make her chief of staff.

Speaker 3 It does make me think that it's very possible she has already decided that she's not going to run and communicated that to Newsom. And he knew that when he picked her.
Again, things change.

Speaker 3 She could decide, hell,

Speaker 3 I'm going to run now. And if so, she would have five months to put together a campaign and raise a fuckload of money.
Adam Schiff was out today reminding everyone that he has $32 million.

Speaker 5 I mean, the other thing about it is that lesbians famously can very quickly come to a decision to pursue something long-term. And

Speaker 5 that's part of it as well.

Speaker 3 I don't even.

Speaker 3 Barely get it. I barely get it.
Olivia. Yeah, Olivia's with me.
Okay, cool.

Speaker 3 Anyway,

Speaker 3 there's now four elections

Speaker 3 for this caliber summary because there is a special election to fill out the last weeks of Feinstein's term, meaning that like once the election happens in November 2024, there would be between November and January when the new senator is sworn in.

Speaker 3 There'd be like

Speaker 3 a slice of like about a month for someone to become senator. But the primary for the special election will be held as the same day as the primary for the general election in March.

Speaker 3 And then the two other elections, the final, the

Speaker 3 general election for the special and the general election for the full six years will happen in November.

Speaker 5 But so do all these candidates are going to file for both and hoping everyone's voting for the same person twice?

Speaker 3 I think they're all going to do what the other ones are going to do because you don't want to have, like, if Schiff decides to go on the special, then Porter and Lee are,

Speaker 3 they're going to file on the special too. So I'm wondering if they'll have some kind of communication.
Like, are we all doing this? Are we not doing this? Like, what's happening?

Speaker 3 Maybe Lafonza Butler will file for the special, you know, and then she'll serve out the last month and

Speaker 3 the other three will say, okay, we're going to film.

Speaker 5 As part of a speech where she says, I have decided to file for this

Speaker 5 and I'm not going to pursue the election.

Speaker 3 And then yeah, that would require, I think, a little bit more of a collegial California delegation that doesn't always get along.

Speaker 3 I'm not sure that Katie Porter is going to do what Gavin Newsom's team wants her to do necessarily.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but like I said, I think they all probably, like Lafonso Butler, they probably all know Lafonso Butler. I'm sure she talked to all of them too, right?

Speaker 3 She's, you know, been part of California politics. And I do think it was a smart pick from Newsom because

Speaker 3 he was getting criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Barbara Lee supporters.

Speaker 3 And he selected someone who is not going to get criticism from any of those people. And sure enough, the CBC applauded the choice of Lafonza Butler after criticizing him on the Barbara Lee thing.

Speaker 3 So I think he sort of headed off any criticism about the pick because it's hard to criticize him picking someone who is progressive and a labor leader and, you know, head of Emily's list.

Speaker 5 Look, this started because he didn't want to be criticized and now he's ending it by trying to not be criticized. And I hope it all works out.

Speaker 5 Hey, just based on this conversation, are there things we could do instead of democracy?

Speaker 3 Are there alternatives? I know. This seems too complicated.
She seems really cool.

Speaker 3 I wonder, She's young, too. She's like 44, 45.
Yeah. The only challenge is she currently lives in Maryland.

Speaker 5 I saw Darrell I saw her someone who was like, question.

Speaker 3 You just have to register to vote in California before you're

Speaker 3 going in. That's all.
That's what the rules say.

Speaker 5 Well, she's got to get an apartment or something.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, she's been in California forever, too. So she's been like a fixture.
It's not like she's a real carpetbagger here. She's been a fixture of California politics for years and years anyway.

Speaker 5 Right, right. She just needs a mailing address.

Speaker 3 Yeah, two decades she was leader of SEIU California. So, all right, before we go to break, two quick housekeeping notes: the Supreme Court is officially back in session.

Speaker 3 And if you want to know what kind of bullshit they're up to this term, strict scrutiny is just the pod for you.

Speaker 3 Melissa Murray, Leah Littman, and Kate Shaw are brilliant, funny, and make the law accessible for dummies like us. Listen to new episodes of Strict Scrutiny each week, wherever you get your pods.

Speaker 3 Also, this week is apparently banned book week. You know, I said last week was.
I don't know if I got that. You always call that too early.
Yeah, how do I mess up? My

Speaker 3 most important week. Anyway, go to votesaveamerica.com, find all the ways to help fight book bans across the country.
We also have some fun merch in the Crooked Store. There is Free the Books merch.

Speaker 3 Are You Afraid of the Books? Tees that are well timed for Halloween, and kids' teas and onesies that say read me a banned book. Check it out at cricket.com/slash store.

Speaker 3 When we come back, Permilla Jayapal talks to Lovett about what role Democrats will play in the McCarthy Gates drama.

Speaker 3 What's poppin' listeners?

Speaker 12 I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time.

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Speaker 12 Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters. I'm joined by guests like Nicole Beyer, Ira Madison III, III, Conan O'Brien, and more.

Speaker 12 Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving? Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway.

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Speaker 11 That's odoo.com.

Speaker 5 The government didn't shut down, but the house is still a shit show.

Speaker 5 After last-minute passage of a bipartisan short-term funding bill that pushes the next funding deadline to November, Kevin McCarthy's allies are in a frenzy trying to save the speaker's job as Matt Gates leads a right-wing rebellion to remove him, an effort that includes reaching out to Democrats to help him do it, joining us to help us understand what is happening and why she didn't send Gates' call to voicemail.

Speaker 5 The chair of the Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal, welcome back to the pod.

Speaker 4 Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 5 All right. So for weeks, we were hearing that McCarthy wouldn't work with Democrats to get a CR pass because he wouldn't risk the gavel, which is, of course, exactly what he ended up doing.

Speaker 5 What can you tell us about how this went down? There was a lot of conversation that McCarthy had to somehow prove a shutdown had to happen to prevent a shutdown. What changed? What did you see?

Speaker 4 Well, I think that's exactly right. I mean, we had to get down to the end, which is terrible, terrible way to run government.
But I think from his perspective, he just didn't have the votes.

Speaker 4 And he kept leaning more and more to the right to try to get the votes.

Speaker 4 But when it became clear that he still wasn't going to get the votes, despite cutting spending by 30% across the board, despite putting in all these terrible border provisions.

Speaker 4 He still wasn't going to have the votes. He realized that two things.
One,

Speaker 4 he was going to need us. And two,

Speaker 4 that the Senate was going to jam him with Ukraine funding, which his people were not going to want, if we didn't pass something first.

Speaker 4 And I think both of those things led to him realizing that one way or another, he's going to have a motion to vacate. He should get this deal done and perhaps bring more people in through doing that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, President Biden, after the deal came through, said that he was hoping that this process would cause Kevin McCarthy to have some kind of a revelation.

Speaker 5 I don't know if you saw any light shining down on him or any kind of religious experience in his eyes, but is the fact that he thought no matter what he could do, that Gates and the far right of his caucus was going to try to remove him.

Speaker 5 Is that in part why the government didn't shut down?

Speaker 4 Look, there was no halo suddenly shining above Kevin McCarthy's head. He didn't undergo some kind of a big spiritual transition.

Speaker 4 I am not close enough, John, to him to look in his eyes and see anything that's changed in his soul.

Speaker 4 Kevin McCarthy exists every day to make sure that he can be Speaker just two hours later, four hours later, six hours later.

Speaker 4 And I think the pressure from a lot of his Republicans and Biden districts was getting intense. They didn't want the government to shut down.

Speaker 4 The pressure from the Senate was getting intense because there was a Senate effort to push a bill over to us. And I think he realized that he was going to get a motion to vacate one way or another.

Speaker 4 So might as well bite the bullet, get this done, hope that he could buy some goodwill. We could talk about whether or not he did, but hope that he could buy some goodwill and just move forward.

Speaker 4 And I think that's exactly what happened.

Speaker 5 So I think there's a place where the far right, and I think a lot of Democrats, I think virtually everyone agrees something that is that Kevin McCarthy isn't a reliable negotiator.

Speaker 5 People just don't trust him.

Speaker 5 Matt Gates reached out to you to find out what Democrats might do in the event of this effort to, you know, a motion to vacate, which is an effort to remove the speaker.

Speaker 5 You told him basically, I'm not dealing with this today. Let's keep the government open.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 what is your take on what Democrats should be doing in response to this effort to remove McCarthy?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, first of all, I did tell him that any shot of us working with him would have to come after we had a CR, a continuing resolution to fund the government.

Speaker 4 And so I think he gets, and I think that helped in making sure he didn't push a motion to vacate soon.

Speaker 4 We have had these conversations and really thought through all the scenarios with the Progressive Caucus. And our aim is to put as much power in the hands of Hakeem Jeffries, our leader, as possible.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 the way to do that, because Kevin McCarthy is completely unreliable, I mean, let's look at the fact that the guy made a deal with the president, signed a bill into law around funding levels, and then immediately flipped.

Speaker 4 on it.

Speaker 4 Let's look at the fact that he apparently told the president that he wanted to do Ukraine funding according to the president, but when the president said that, he immediately flipped and said, not unless we do border stuff first.

Speaker 4 So the guy is completely unreliable. And that is one thing that both Democrats and Republicans agree on.
He's a liar.

Speaker 4 And so if we are going to think about anything, and this is really going to be a call for our leadership, but also ultimately for all of us, we just need to make sure that it is baked into the rules of the House, that it isn't just relying on Kevin McCarthy's goodwill or that halo to suddenly come shining down or, you know, anything like that, but it's actually baked into the rules of the house.

Speaker 4 And so that's, I think, what we're hoping will happen.

Speaker 5 So I'm trying to understand.

Speaker 5 That is similar to what you said earlier last week, that basically we can't trust Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 5 If we're going to do something that involves concessions, it's got to be written down, not one of these side agreements that Kevin McCarthy seems to make where he promises people things and they say that he's going back on his word.

Speaker 5 But then you were also asked if you would do anything to help Kevin McCarthy secure the gavel and you said no.

Speaker 5 Are those two things in conflict? Are they, am I missing a nuance?

Speaker 4 Yes. I mean, what I said is don't look to us to save Kevin McCarthy unless we have some sort of power sharing agreement that's codified in the rules because I don't trust him.
And, you know,

Speaker 4 fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Or if you're George Bush, shame on you again, or whatever.

Speaker 3 Don't get fooled again.

Speaker 4 But I think we have to make sure that we're not just falling for this, oh, Kevin McCarthy has suddenly changed.

Speaker 4 The same dynamics that Kevin McCarthy has been dealing with this whole time are still going to be there.

Speaker 4 And if we have, you know, there are lots of examples of how you can give power to the Democratic side or to the other side so that it's a shared governance.

Speaker 4 Let's think about what pieces of legislation we want to bring up, control of the committees, those kinds of things. That, I think, is

Speaker 4 important to do.

Speaker 5 Is that basically saying that if there is this motion to vacate, are we in a world where Democrats are talking about voting for Kevin McCarthy?

Speaker 5 Or is it a situation where Democrats are just voting present so that they don't need as many votes to keep him? I'm trying to understand what this actually looks like.

Speaker 4 Well, I think

Speaker 4 if there was some serious

Speaker 4 agreement for power sharing, and I think it would be very difficult to convince convince our members on anything other than something that's codified into the rules so I just want to be clear about that yeah but and I also think by the way that there should be there will need to be probably more chaos with the civil war on their side before their members get to a place where they might want to do that

Speaker 4 but remember that a present present vote is essentially taking our vote, it's essentially saving McCarthy. And

Speaker 4 that's a very serious thing. I mean, for our members, saving McCarthy means we're signing on to the rest of his agenda forever and ever.
And

Speaker 4 as long as he's Speaker. And I think that is a very dangerous proposition for Democrats, both now and going into 2024.

Speaker 5 It's a position I think you must be surprised to find yourself even contemplating. Like on the one hand, no, of course not.

Speaker 5 This is a person you moments ago referred to as a liar, someone who has pushed some of the most extreme legislation that we've seen in Congress in years, except at the same time, we don't have a majority.

Speaker 5 If there is going to be a speaker,

Speaker 5 we're not choosing between Kevin McCarthy and Hakeem Jeffries.

Speaker 4 Well, it depends. I mean, I think that it depends.
You know, if things get bad enough, I've had Republicans say to me, we just want somebody who doesn't lie.

Speaker 4 And, you know, that could be a Democrat.

Speaker 4 Now, when I say, well, we've got our speaker, it's Hakeem Jeffries, people are like, oh, you know, well, I don't know if I could go that far to vote for a Democrat.

Speaker 4 So I'm not saying there's consistency here, but what I am saying is the hope of getting anything that gives Democrats real power

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 4 going to be difficult and it needs to be codified. That's my belief.
Otherwise, I don't think we should save Kevin McCarthy because how can you get worse than Kevin McCarthy?

Speaker 4 It's not like Kevin McCarthy has bent at every stage to his far-right people. The makeup of their body is such that their caucus, that whoever is Speaker is going to deal with these same dynamics.

Speaker 4 And one thing I do think

Speaker 4 Matt Gaetz understands is the Speaker is never going to be Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's got to be somebody who can be accepted and get the majority of votes in their caucus.
And

Speaker 4 so that's why I told him that one of the things that I have learned in my seven years here is that you can't run nobody against somebody, right?

Speaker 4 And the somebody has to be, that you run, has to be somebody that's going to be acceptable on your side, because why would we want somebody that's worse than Kevin McCarthy?

Speaker 4 Hard for me to imagine, but let's say it's Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gates.

Speaker 4 And so you notice that the names they're coming up with are quite more moderate people like Tom Emmer and Tom Cole.

Speaker 4 But still, whoever it is, if we don't have it codified into the rules of the House, they they will bend to the right of their party, just like Kevin McCarthy did.

Speaker 5 So we're in this period where we have, what, 45 days until the next potential shutdown. This stopgap kicked a lot of the contentious issues down the road.

Speaker 5 They include funding for Ukraine, this debate about border security, what happens next.

Speaker 5 It seems that there was some kind of promise around Ukraine funding to go to this stopgap that didn't include it. What's going to happen in the next six weeks?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 4 we have six weeks, and that means we have to get the ultimate government funding bills done. And the bills that the Republicans are putting forward right now are total non-starters in the Senate.

Speaker 4 I mean, things like a 70% cut. in the LIHEAP program, which is heating for

Speaker 4 needy residents across the country. Winter is coming.
People need that heating.

Speaker 4 Things like kicking out

Speaker 4 tens of thousands of teachers

Speaker 4 out of work, just complete non-starters.

Speaker 4 And so, what we need to do is essentially get to a place where the Senate bipartisan funding appropriations bills, all came out of committee unanimously, all 12 bills, are the bills that we move forward.

Speaker 4 And those bills do have funding for Ukraine. We have plenty of votes for Ukraine funding from all Democrats, plus

Speaker 4 a good number of Republicans, I think half of their caucus. But the problem is that

Speaker 4 it has to get put up. And I think the best way to do that is to put it within the context of the government funding bills, because

Speaker 4 somebody is going to have to explain, if they vote against those, why they voted

Speaker 4 against, you know,

Speaker 4 keeping the government open or funding the military

Speaker 4 just because they didn't like funding for Ukraine. So to me, that's the best way to do it.
And frankly, it's the best thing for our constituents as well, because

Speaker 4 we won't have people saying, well, you funded Ukraine, but you haven't funded the government for us yet. You haven't funded SNAP.
You haven't funded WIC.

Speaker 4 You haven't funded all the things that are part of

Speaker 4 keeping Americans healthy and safe. And so let's, I think they need to be combined.

Speaker 4 And, you know, in an ideal world, the Senate would do this very quickly and get it to us before we get to the next deadline of the shutdown so that once again, we can be clear that there is a bipartisan solution that's passed the Senate and all we have to do is put it on the floor and it would get enough votes.

Speaker 5 One more question on this. As this is all unfolding, this is going to be in the context of this fight over the speakership.

Speaker 5 When the far right is reaching out to Democrats, is it because they want to know whether or not Democrats are going to in some way help McCarthy keep the gavel, or is it because the far right wants Democrats to step aside so that McCarthy loses the gavel?

Speaker 4 I don't know that there's

Speaker 4 too much of a difference in that at the end of the day, because

Speaker 4 they

Speaker 4 literally, you know, some of them have, obviously, it's been written about some personal objections to McCarthy, but I do think that one thing that McCarthy did that has really hurt him is he's lied to everybody.

Speaker 4 I mean, he's lied to the president, he's lied to the far right, he's lied to the moderates, he's lied to everybody.

Speaker 4 And so that means that he doesn't have the kind of trust he needs for anything he says. And that's why they keep holding things up because they feel like certain commitments were made.

Speaker 4 And I'm not weighing in on what the, you know, whether that's true or not true, but I've seen it from our side, what he did to biden what he's done around ukraine aid um consistently he is he has lied and so i don't know that it matters from from our perspective i think what matters is we number one we do not support a speaker who has a right-wing agenda number two we do not i mean we have our own candidate that's hakeem jefferies we took 15 rounds of votes on him we can take a 16th a 17th 18th 19th if we need to but we've got our speaker.

Speaker 4 What we need is for them to recognize that and to create enough instability, or, you know, we're not creating it, they're creating it,

Speaker 4 but to not feel like we have to step in to save them from their chaos, because at the end of the day, we need to get power for Hakeem Jeffries to be able to have some control over the legislative agenda, over the proceedings of the House.

Speaker 3 Or,

Speaker 4 you know, as long as we continue to keep the government funded,

Speaker 4 if they're unable to move any of their legislation, that's okay with us. All of it's bad.
So, you know, I don't think

Speaker 4 we need to get into why they, I have no idea why they, I don't, I'm, I'm not interested enough to be close enough to like figure out what their what their rationale is.

Speaker 5 Is there any part of you late at night that thinks, well, look,

Speaker 5 McCarthy has, doesn't act on principle, something everybody agrees. But here we are, the government's open.

Speaker 5 We came to within an inch of default, but we didn't default.

Speaker 5 And that there's a world in which anyone that replaced McCarthy who would be worse might be in a position even worse than McCarthy was, unable to do what is necessary to prevent us from really.

Speaker 5 crossing the line, from going into more shutdowns,

Speaker 5 from the risk of default.

Speaker 4 I mean, I have

Speaker 4 thought about that over over and over again, and we've actually gamed out the scenarios all the way to the end, like multiple scenarios of what could happen. And

Speaker 4 I feel very confident in saying

Speaker 4 that the extreme mega right of the Republican Party is governing right now.

Speaker 4 I mean, we have been relentless as Democrats in fighting back, whether it's on the impeachment, baseless, absurd impeachment of President Biden, whether it's on these extreme cuts that are so cruel that you can't even pass a Department of Defense bill, which is normally bipartisan, even if progressives don't always support it.

Speaker 4 There's usually enough in the middle to support DOD appropriations.

Speaker 4 That couldn't even happen this time because they put in a nationwide abortion ban, because they put in a ban on trans kids, because, or you know, or transgender affirming care, or they put in, you know, they took out all the quote DEI woke policies, which are really just about teaching about slavery in schools.

Speaker 4 I mean it is so extreme that I don't think we can fool ourselves into thinking that somehow McCarthy is this person and there could be somebody worse. So no, I don't really think that.

Speaker 4 And I think the only reason, I just want to be clear about this, this keeping the government open was an enormous victory for Democrats because we continued to hold the line.

Speaker 4 And, you know, last week when we heard about these border provisions that both the Senate and the House, including some, quote, Democrats or independents in the Senate, were trying to put in, the Progressive Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Asian Pacific American Caucus, and the Black Caucus all came out and said, we are not voting for something that has bad immigration, bad border policy.

Speaker 4 And so once we made that really clear, then it had to get stripped out. We said, we are not voting for things that are not the fiscal 23 cuts.
cuts and this is the whole Democratic caucus.

Speaker 4 And once that came out, the cuts had to get stripped. And so I think we, and we all said we want disaster aid, and we on the Democratic side said we wanted Ukraine aid.

Speaker 4 Ukraine was the toughest, obviously, but we got

Speaker 4 what we wanted with that one exception of Ukraine, which by the way, Rand Paul was holding up in the Senate as well.

Speaker 4 You know, I think

Speaker 4 we have held the line consistently, and I think we're going to have to continue to do that, no matter who the Speaker is. And

Speaker 4 at the end of the day, again, unless we've got some real power sharing and control over the House with Republicans, which is not unheard of. This is not a crazy idea.

Speaker 4 I mean, the Senate had it last year when they were 50-50. Yes, the Republicans have the majority, but they don't have a governing majority.
They can't govern. They're unable to govern.

Speaker 4 So I think you have to look then at the same thing that kind of happens with the coalition government, right?

Speaker 4 When you have coalition governments in Europe or elsewhere in the world, they have to put together a coalition. And in order to put that together, they have to give something of great significance.

Speaker 4 And it's usually done through actual rules, not like a, hey, let's, you know, give a pinky swear and,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 prick our... fingers for a little bit of blood.
I mean, that's, it's just, we don't trust Kevin McCarthy. We shouldn't.

Speaker 5 Well, you know what? As true today as it has been for the entirety of his speakership. Congresswoman Jayapal, thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 4 Thank you, John. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 3 Thanks to Congresswoman Jayapal for joining us today, and we'll talk to you later this week. I'll show a question for you too.
Sure.

Speaker 3 Do you think it's weird that we still refer to the Hastert rule, knowing all the rules and laws that he broke in other parts of his life? Maybe we just get a new term for that. Yeah,

Speaker 3 the pedophile guy. It's kind of at the bottom of my list of things that annoy me, but it's a weird one.
Well, it's an outchancho.

Speaker 3 You know, and I agree.

Speaker 3 I didn't say let's make it.

Speaker 5 We should pitch on it. For God's sake, we should pitch on it.

Speaker 3 How about we pitch on it? Okay. I'm willing.
Well, the only reason I would say

Speaker 3 the only reason I would say let's keep it is because it should remind people that their caucus is fucked in the head.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, that's true. That's true.
But then when we're in charge, we try to use it. We're like, oh.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, but we shouldn't use it. Anyway, thanks for bringing that up, Tom.
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Speaker 3 What's poppin' listeners?

Speaker 12 I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week, I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time.

Speaker 12 Want to know about the fake heirs? We got them. What about a career con man? We've got them too.
Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins.

Speaker 12 Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters. I'm joined by guests like Nicole Beyer, Ira Madison III, Conan O'Brien, and more.

Speaker 12 Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving? Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway.

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