Jim Clyburn

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.

Welcome to the ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Well, Joe Biden has once again won the presidency.

The Electoral College voted this week, confirming his victory and setting the stage for his inauguration.

After 60 fruitless legal challenges this past month, it feels like Biden has won the presidency over and over and over.

But I have to say, that outcome looked pretty unlikely at the beginning of 2020.

Despite being a popular former vice president, Biden started the primary season coming in fourth in Iowa and then fifth in New Hampshire.

All that changed in South Carolina, though, leading Biden to win the Democratic nomination and eventually the presidency with one endorsement.

My guest this week, Congressman Jim Clyburn.

So when Congressman Clyburn came out and endorsed Biden three days before the vote, it was seen as as a turning point.

Biden went on to handily win the state.

Now Clyburn has gone from Biden kingmaker to Biden dealmaker.

As the House majority whip and a leader in the Congressional Black Caucus, any legislation the new president wants to pass will, in part, go through Clyburn.

I spoke with the Congressman for an Atlantic Live event this week about the transition, and I wanted to bring that conversation here to the ticket.

Does he think that Biden is keeping his promise of having the most diverse cabinet ever?

What does he think of the party's future, with progressive stars shaping how issues are framed, but Biden preaching moderation and a return to normalcy?

And as the chair of Biden's inaugural committee, what does he expect from a very unusual transition to power?

Take a listen.

Congressman, welcome.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you very much for having me.

So the transition has been moving quickly.

We're going to get a few more secretaries named this week.

President-elect Biden said he would have the most diverse cabinet in American history.

He's expressed his intentions to nominate people of color to top positions, including General Austin at defense, Mayorkas at DHS, Marsha Fudge at HUD.

Is he fulfilling his promise?

I think so.

It seems that way to me.

I've looked at the overall diversity of all of his nominees.

I think it's shaping up very, very well.

I would always caution, however, that diversity to me goes beyond skin color.

It gets into backgrounds and experiences.

And I think that that's what's so important here.

It also gets into visions and what our party stands for.

I've often said that if we were to limit this concern to skin color, then I would be satisfied.

with the Clarence Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

I am far from satisfied with that.

It seems like

there

has been some dissatisfaction that more Latinos haven't been named to the cabinet or more Asian Americans.

That's what you're getting at in part here, is that we can,

it's not just about that, but I wonder how, if you worry about that sort of thinking sometimes overwhelming other questions about how the administration will function.

Well, let's be clear here.

That is important.

What people see is very, very important.

It keeps people focused on what you're doing.

My dad used to tell me all the time, son, what you did spoke so loudly, I cannot hear a word you say.

And I apply that to my political family as well.

And so I want to see the symbols, but I also want to see the substance.

There is no substitute for substance.

And so when you start talking about the Black experience or the Latina experience, please take a look at the people who live that experience.

And all of that is sort of internal as well.

I often talk about my own family experience with my own wife.

with whom I was married for 58 years.

Our backgrounds were totally different.

We met on a college campus.

We got married off of that campus.

But soon after marriage, I realized that her, having grown up on a little farm down in Berkeley County, South Carolina, walking two and a half miles to school, having not been allowed a school bus.

White kids had school buses.

That experience was totally different from mine, where my elementary school was three blocks from my house, and my junior high school was six blocks.

And I'm a graduate of Mathler Academy back in those days that we called a boarding school, where my dormitory was 25 steps from my academic hall.

So those backgrounds, those experiences, though we were both the same skin color, same complexion, we were different.

So

when you're vetting candidates, You need to take a hard look beyond gender and color.

The supporters of of Joe Biden in Congress are all Democrats, but there's a lot of diversity of ideological flavor in the Democratic Conference at this point.

There have been a lot of questions of whether Joe Biden's cabinet is progressive enough, and people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raising questions about that.

What would you say to that?

There is nobody

in the Democratic Party that is more concerned about police behavior than I am.

Nobody.

I've got a 25-year-old grandson that I worry about every time he gets into his automobile.

And I've had the experience of growing up in the South where I have lived under that kind of oppression and suppression.

And so I'm concerned about that.

And nobody is any more concerned about affordable housing.

And I have a record here in this Congress to prove it.

So I am a flaming progressive on all of those issues.

But I'm also concerned about allowing my opponents to weaponize my words and phrases.

And so that's why I have spoken out strongly against us using catchphrases.

that can undercut the movement.

That's what happened to us back in the 1960s.

I organized the very first sit-in in South Carolina.

John Lewis was first beaten physically in South Carolina.

And I know what happened to our movement when Burn Baby Burn

became the clarion call.

And they kicked John Lewis out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee because he refused to adopt that slogan area.

And that's all that

those of us who are progressive, you know, it's kind of interesting to hear what people say about John Moose today.

We have lionized him and he's deserving of every bit of it and even more.

But within a year after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which he nearly gave his life for,

They kicked him out of SNCC.

Yeah.

So that's all I'm talking about here.

And so I don't see why people cannot understand that.

Let's speak a little bit more broadly about what the Biden administration has to look at.

There's so much that is ahead and so many crises, as everybody knows, that are facing the country.

One of the lessons from the Obama early years that many people took was you got to move quickly.

If you wait around,

then it's too late.

So what do you do?

We haven't had any of the systemic reimaginings of education or the economy, all the things that people were talking about at the beginning of this pandemic.

What is the first thing beyond the basics of COVID relief and recovery?

Where would you have the Biden administration start beyond that?

Thank you very much for making it very clear that we're talking about beyond COVID-19.

Yeah.

So listen, let me be clear, because I don't want anybody to misconstrue it.

COVID-19 is first and foremost in everything that you ought to be doing.

So let me say it.

Now,

after that, our very first order of business has to be, in my opinion, a broad,

very well-funded infrastructure program.

That's got to be first and foremost.

Because if we get beyond this pandemic, what we are going to find is that our healthcare system is in dire need of repair, our educational system.

And so you're not going to do what's necessary for healthcare if you don't have telehealth and telemedicine, for education, if you don't have online learning.

And you're not going to be able sustaining good health without water and sewage.

And you're not going to be able to have safety in our communities.

without good roads and bridges.

So there must be a broad infrastructure program, much like

that which came about after the Great Depression, and we called it the New Deal.

And I don't know what Joe Biden would have called it, but building back better

has to be what he's all about.

Building back our healthcare system, building back our educational system, building back.

our good infrastructure programs.

We used to be number one and we're not there now.

So I think that you have to redefine what infrastructure is all about.

Affordable housing to mean infrastructure, schools, construction, infrastructure, broadband, infrastructure.

That's what we have to do.

And if he were to do that, he will hit everything.

Now, that's number one.

The second thing, which I think can be going on simultaneously, is to build back our law enforcement system.

It is broken.

I know it's broken.

Everybody knows that it's broken.

He knows that it's broken.

We got to fix it.

And I think that recent studies on what we need to do by two former attorneys general, one Democrat and the other one Republican, one black, the other Latina.

They have come out with a great report.

Let's use that report as a foundation upon which to build back our judicial system.

And this time, let's make it fair and equitable.

We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, I ask Clyburn about what Biden can expect to get done with Democrats in control of the House, but with a much narrower majority than they had expected.

CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships.

Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much,

which means you may have sunk a fortune into software that just bounces customer issues around but never actually solves them.

On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.

With AI built into one platform, customers aren't mired in endless loops of automated indifference.

They get what they need when they need it.

Bad CRM was then.

This is ServiceNow.

You have a majority of Democrats in the House.

It's a slimmer majority next year than than it was for these last two years.

We don't know yet whether the Republicans or Democrats will be in the majority in the Senate, but one way or the other, it's going to be slim.

Yet over the last couple of weeks, what we've seen is that so many Republicans have been unwilling to acknowledge the results of the election and the legitimacy of Biden's presidency, at least so far.

I wonder how you think

you balance, and the president-elect has been trying to do this, but when it comes to negotiations and you want Republicans to be part of any of these efforts,

you want them to come to the table, but it seems like a lot of them just want to burn the table down.

How do you deal with that?

We've always had that.

It's not always been controlling.

You know, I've been around the city for a long time.

We've had that within the Democratic Party as well.

We had people who left this party.

Strom Thurman used to be a Democrat.

Sure, but 126 House Republicans signing on to that lawsuit, saying that they want the votes to be tossed out for Biden?

Yes, it's much more pervasive today than it was back then.

We didn't have the internet today.

The internet has been a great blessing, but it's also been a curse.

People are afraid of 10 and 15 second sound bikes today.

We didn't have that fear before.

So I do make accommodation for that.

But I don't believe for one moment.

that those 126 people feel that this this election was unfair.

They don't believe that at all.

They are articulating what they think is necessary to find favor with that whom they would like to install as an autocrat.

This is a democracy,

sometimes tainted as it is.

It is the best thing going,

and these people know better.

So how do you deal with them when it comes to governing next year, people who have made the decision that they've made?

You have to have leaders who will put the country first.

And I do believe very strongly if Mitch McConnell would put some of these issues on the floor of the Senate and not put anything on the floor unless the Republicans agree, if it's for the benefit of the country, put it on the floor and let Democrats and Republicans have a go at it.

That's what Joe Biden is going to do.

On a scale of one to 10, how hopeful are you that Republicans are going to do that, that Mitch McConnell is going to do that?

10.

I'm hoping that he will.

But they won't.

They probably won't, but I think that the American people are waking up to a lot of that.

I'm not too sure what's going on in Georgia.

I thought I knew two days ago.

Today, I'm not too sure.

I don't think anybody knows.

We've learned, I think, to be a little bit skeptical when we see poll numbers.

If there's one thing that America should have learned over the last couple of years, it seems like that's it.

Let's just talk briefly before we go about the inauguration.

You're the chair of the inaugural committee.

We learned this week that the inauguration is going to be smaller and reimagined.

Biden and Harris will be sworn in at the Capitol, but they're asking people not to come to be on the mall, to do all that traditional stuff.

There won't be the balls, any of that.

Does that matter that Biden won't have that big send-off into the presidency that we've gotten used to and the mass show of support?

And especially when you contrast that with it seems likely, at least, that President Trump will not come to the inauguration and will be staging some kind of counter event of his own.

How does that all come together in a way that you think will hit people's minds?

You know, I look back at our conventions and I remember what President Trump had to say about the convention.

They were going to have his convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Then we're going to go from Charlotte, North Carolina, and we're going to be in person down in Jacksonville.

All that got canceled when

thinking people got into the process.

We've got thinking people in this process up front.

And what we're going to do with this inauguration can be looked upon as a mimicking of what we did at our national convention.

And people loved it.

I've talked to people all over who told me that they were pleased to be able to stay in their pajamas and experience

that national convention.

That's what we're going to do with this inauguration.

We're going to have enough tradition with the swearing in here, just below this window behind me.

They're building the platform there now, and the swearing in will take place there.

Hopefully, they won't blind

this spot out for me as it's done before, so I can look out this window at it.

I don't need to be standing standing on the capitol it may be too cold in the first place

so we're going to have enough tradition but then we're asking people to stay home stay and enjoy it on television we'll have enough tradition for it to be an inauguration but we want to practice what we preach we will not sponsor a super spreader for our inauguration.

We want everybody to be around when we have the big celebration of this presidency, if not July 4th, 2021, and maybe January 2022.

We will celebrate this presidency and hopefully with a lot of successes that people can be a part of.

Congressman Clyburn, we're going to have to leave it there.

You've got work to get back to in Congress and I appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you for having me.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to our new senior producer, AC Valdez.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you have thoughts on the show or ideas for guests, email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

And a note before I go, the show will be on a break for the holidays while I'll be finishing a book about the 2020 election.

Our next episode will come out Thursday, January 7th.

As always, thanks for listening and stay safe.