Overtime - Episode #451: Voting Age, Gov Class, Billy Graham, Jeff Sessions

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

David and Cameron, and the first question is for you guys.

Should we lower the voting age to 16?

Would that incentivize schools to teach civic engagement earlier and with more urgency?

I think schools could just teach civic engagement earlier and with more urgency.

We're taking our Gov class senior year, and that's when most people I believe take their gov class.

I think we should be doing that every year.

Is that what we used to call civics?

Yeah.

Gov class.

That's what they call it.

That's my AP Gov class.

That's what the kids these days call it.

And they teach you like how government works.

Like things like Trump doesn't know.

Like there are three branches.

There are three branches?

A House, a Senate, Supreme Court, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Well, no, I pre-registered to vote the other day and I...

I think that's what we need to be doing because

right now a lot of the kids my age are voting the way their mommies and daddies are voting.

And that's a little daunting to think about us.

I mean, that still happens when people are adults, but you know, there could be a little bit more freedom as

it goes on.

And again, that's the number one predictor of what political party you'll be part of: is your parents passed.

And that's terrifying to think about considering that our parents have failed us.

Oh, yeah.

You really don't like us.

Yeah.

They're in the audience.

Dad, I'm looking at you.

We are.

Okay.

Let's not piss off the kids any more than we already have.

Okay, just get some tide.

I know.

How do y'all really feel?

Don't filter it.

Don't filter it.

Come on.

How do we feel about it?

You're being very subtle.

Tide pods or gun reform.

So, yeah.

Well, the way I feel about gun reform is

we don't have many limitations on the Second Amendment right now.

I believe in owning a gun.

My father has a gun.

Cameron's dad has a gun, I believe.

Both our parents were in law enforcement.

I do see

the reason to to have a weapon and I do see the reasoning behind the Second Amendment.

But I think we should have limitations on the Second Amendment the same way we have limitations on the first.

Where you can't scream fire in a crowded theater.

You shouldn't be able to get an AR-15 if you're a mentally unstable individual.

I don't get what's so hard for people to understand about that.

I'm not trying to take your gun.

Remember when Al?

Remember when slavery was a thing and women weren't allowed to vote and we did something about that?

You know?

It took a while.

Well, but if the only thing that comes out of this tragedy is that we outlaw bump stocks and we raise the age at which people are allowed to buy an AR-15, that will be a failure.

That'll be a failure.

Because the reality, from my perspective, is you need to do what we've always tried to do, which is to ban the sale of AR-15s, have universal background checks,

and also take away the ability to buy these large magazines.

See, but the problem with that is it makes way too much fucking sense for our elected officials to take care of.

There's a study that's out today from the RAND Corporation that shows that these kinds of measures actually have an impact on gun violence.

I mean, there's empirical evidence now that shows that.

What's your opinion on the fact that the CDC can't research most of this stuff?

Yeah, that's another thing that has to be.

This guy, Dickey,

this Congressman put in the funding for the CDC so they were unable to study the impact of gun violence and the causes of gun violence.

But that's another thing that has to be.

Who is this guy?

He's a.

His name was Dickey.

I know, but he's a.

He's a legislator?

He's a Congressman, I think, or anything.

I think he was a Congressman from Markets Awesome.

Oh, oh, yes.

He's like the Republicans Wiener.

The other thing is,

Anthony Wiener.

What did you think I meant?

What's up with ATF having all of their records be papered?

That's just insane.

And that's required by law, right?

Required by law passed by Republicans who want to hobble ATF.

When we've tried to modernize these things and keep the records in the way any other corporation or big entity would keep them electronically, Republicans have said, no, you can't do that.

Limit the amount of time that you can hold on to these things and so that you have to keep them.

Okay.

We have other issues to get to.

John Meacham, would the Founding Fathers agree with Billy Graham lying in honor at the U.S.

Capitol?

Probably just because

it would not be a violation of church and state inso much as a recognition of a cultural figure.

Madison, who wrote the Bill of Rights and was a hugely important thinker about religious liberty, was actually presented with a case late in his life about why is the U.S.

military paying for chaplains?

Isn't that a violation of the Establishment Clause?

Almost certainly,

in a strict sense.

But he said some things are just not worth fighting.

And I think that's where they probably stand.

Eric, if you're in Jeff Sessions' current position, would you resign?

I mean,

when I read the - when you read these tweets where Trump is going on, and it looks like this is the kind of tweet you would write if you were in the opposition party.

Why isn't the Attorney General, wait, he's your Attorney General?

It's so through the looking glass.

And Jeff Sessions, I mean, you have nothing in common with him.

He's a Confederate soldier.

He said that.

Do you feel sorry for him?

Do you feel something?

No, I mean, he took this job knowing who Donald Trump was

and who he is.

Right.

And, you know, at some point, though, you would hope that you would have the intestinal fortitude or the pride to simply say, you know, I wanted this job all my life, but it's not worth it.

And I'm not going to take that kind of abuse.

And I'm simply going to tell you, you know, go screw yourself and I'm out.

But he's kind of doing a service for the country by not doing that.

Because if, right, John, don't you agree?

If he left, then Trump could appoint someone who would fire Mueller.

Here is a sign of where we are in March of 2018.

Jeff Sessions has become a pillar of democratic order.

Right.

But you're right.

That's true.

But you're right.

A man who could not be confirmed for the federal bench.

Right.

Right.

Amy, is there any one particular cause that you see has the potential to unite the many different tribes in America?

Is there anything I think it's pot, but you go after that?

You mentioned that.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Well, it's one of the few things that does unite red and blue America.

You know, conservatives smoke pot.

Yeah, you know, I think of a different.

Ted Nugent.

Jeff Session Pot.

You know, I mean, look, for the Olympics, people come together.

I mean, a little, oh, I mean,

I think

they're going to rally around.

No, no, not the Seattle.

I think that if

people, well, the studies that are most optimistic in my book are that if you actually pull people out of their tribes and have them interact as human beings,

enormous progress can be made.

So, for example, the integration of the military in the 50s was one where everybody said there's no way this is going to work, and they went through, and then afterwards, there was a study.

No, but what the study showed that the integrated units were

equal or superior to you.

And what they said was when you're forced actually to live with people, talk with them, and your lives are in their hands,

you see each other as human beings.

And same attitudes towards same-sex marriage, too, actually, dramatically changed when people started seeing these people as their neighbors, their children.

It went from like 90% disapproval to 62% approval in just 30 years.

It's hard to demonize somebody that you know or a group that you know.

It's hard to demonize those people.

We should introduce the Democrats to the Republicans.

But no, it's not just exposure.

The studies also showed that just diversity and exposure is not enough.

That can make you hate each other more.

You have to actually interact with each other as human beings.

And that's the hard part when you are so tribal right

in a circle it's no mistake that the civil rights movement the women's movement the probably the victory in the cold war ultimately came after the mixing experiment of world war ii the the sailors on pt 109 were people that jack kennedy would never have they might they would have carried his bag into a hotel right and he swam through the pacific to save them

and he remembered them as he as he came through and And the prosperity was important.

I just, you know, we always, the tribes come together, but it's always brief and it begins to fall apart again.

I wouldn't over-romanticize the past.

But I don't think it's assimilation I'm talking about.

I mean, I think where I get my optimism is: as I say in this book, I think that alone among the major powers, we're what I call a supergroup.

That is, we, this is not saying that we've met all these ideals, but that we have this overarching national identity that's strong, you know, not like Libya,

but it's strong.

And at the same time, we allow individual subgroup identities to flourish.

So they don't all have to melt away.

I mean, we, and I think it's, if you look through all the different powers,

not England, not France, they have one or the other.

But it's strong because it's built around ideas, that we're all different, but we are all, we all cut into the same idea.

And that is what I think is going away.

It is, but what Eric's doing is so important too, because you can't just getting people to, how do you get people to buy into this national identity unity?

It's not just by cheering the anthem very loudly, right?

The system has to seem legitimate and the dream has to seem accessible to all, otherwise, people aren't going to buy into it.

We have got our work cut out for us.

Thank you very much, everybody.

You're a terrific audience, and of course, a terrific fan.

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