Overtime - Episode #418: Russia Investigation, Dodd-Frank, 2020 Candidates, SCOTUS

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

You love it.

Nice to meet a White House not controlled by the Russians.

Do you think the Senate investigation of Russian hacking of the election, yeah, you're on the committee, right?

You're the Judiciary Committee.

I'm the ranking member along with Chairman Lindsey Graham.

Okay, so do you think that investigation, you're starting it now?

We've started it.

Will yield actionable results?

I would like to add a question to that.

Are the Republicans helping at all?

They are.

Lindsay's being terrific.

Really?

Yep.

We had a really good first hearing, and we still have some documents that we are waiting for and some explanations from the FBI.

And he's indicated that if we don't get what we want, he's prepared to go the subpoena route.

And I think we'll have support from our

full committee level, Chairman Grassley and Ranking Member Feinstein.

So we're on our way.

We've got the next hearing is going to be on the trend.

So the best Republicans are Lindsay and McCain, right?

And they're always.

Well, they're friends of mine, and I think they're terrific.

And they're certainly friends of each other.

They are.

No, they are.

I mean, they do everything in lockstep.

I mean, you cannot separate them.

If I'm not mistaken, John has called Lindsay his idiot bastard son.

But he obviously means it in the nicest possible way.

Yeah, that's a true friend.

That's a great Senate friendship.

That's an S ⁇ M thing, Senator.

I don't think you want to get into that.

No, no, no.

Don't even go into that.

No, no, no.

Don't get into what those two call each other.

Bernie, do you think Trump will be successful in dismantling Dodd-Frank?

No, they've already given up on much of that.

Again, I think he's going to be much less successful across the board.

And one of the things Shelman just indicated,

the Republican independence from him, they were intimidated by, I agree, the solidarity for him in the Republican ranks, but he's pushing them to where they can't go.

Like Chuck Brassley is no rebel, but he said he won't have a hearing to confirm the deputy attorney general, who'll be the only attorney general we'll have as long as Sessions has to recuse himself.

And I think,

no, he's going to, his

two top appointees in this have just said they accept basically what we did with regard to derivatives.

If they do go after the Consumer Bureau, I mean I love Elizabeth Warren, I think she's great, but I don't know if she deserves the great favor they will do for her by letting her become a national leader in defending the Consumer Bureau.

So I think they will make very little headway there, and they've already given up on some of the big parts of it.

Who is going to be the Democratic candidate in 2020?

We cannot fuck this up.

And we cannot

we also can't

live under the illusion that the electorate is going to go for somebody who isn't charismatic okay and a great salesman that you can't Hillary Clinton proved you can be completely competent you can't win an election with I know I'm not that great but this guy's but Bill first of all I want to present you you know you you have overdone this oh how terrible it was and and and this great mighty Trump It was the narrowest victory in American history.

And still a victory, but.

Yeah, but a very narrow one.

And since then, he has alienated a lot of people.

I don't know what world you guys live in, where you think he's so triumphant.

Even the Wall Street people.

The world where he's president every day?

That totally is the world I live in.

No, but that's not.

No, you're living in a world in which he's not just the president, but he's a politically successful and mighty president.

And it's the other way around.

He's losing popularity.

He's not getting anything done.

Of course, I wish he wasn't president.

I worked very hard to try and stop him.

But you've got to estimate where we are.

To answer your question, by the way, it has never this far ahead of a presidential election been able to predict who the non-incumbent candidate of either party would be.

Yeah, but I'm looking around, scouring the landscape, and I see nothing.

I mean, I really would like to see.

Are you seeing Barack Obama at this point?

Yes, I wouldn't have seen that.

I've seen Barack Obama.

I'll tell you how to do it.

I actually predicted it at this point.

At what year?

2007.

Really?

Yeah, but he won the year after, not three years before.

When he gave his speech,

when he gave his speech

his famous speech in 2004, We could see him rising.

I know a guy.

I know a guy.

Please.

I think the people in this state do too.

I did that in Rhode Island, by the way.

Gavin Newsom.

We got a guy.

We got a guy named Gavin Newsom.

This guy should be president.

He can win.

He's going to be governor in 2018.

And I know that's a short time just to be governor before you run.

I don't give a fuck.

His slogan should be, hello, I must be going.

Nice to stop by, California, but I got other things to do.

I don't think that's going to win back Ohio and Pennsylvania and the key states that you need to get back.

And look, I'd love there to be a real candidate.

I just don't see it.

It's too early to tell.

Let's get a Democratic Speaker in the House in 2018.

And she's got a game that we can get.

And that's another thing here.

We have Nancy Pelosi still there.

It's not a popularity contest for her.

It's going to be races in the key districts that go one way or the other.

And we have the chance to win those, and any of them will help stop this madness.

I just look at the Democratic Party, and I think it's pretty pathetic.

I think the way it stood up to Trump has been rather sad.

And I don't

standing up to Trump.

By the way, if you look at the votes in the Senate on confirmation on the cabinet, you have the highest percentage of no votes of any set of cabinet nominees in history because the Democrats have been so overwhelmingly, in some cases, unanimously against him.

They're frustrating him on health care.

This pessimism and this fear, you talk about old liberals Christ.

You guys are cowering before a guy who's a paper tiger.

Yeah, he got elected, but he has been very ineffective and generated an awful lot of people.

But what about after he starts the war with North Korea?

How powerful will he be then?

Because once the war starts, you know, presidents seem to be able to get whatever they want.

I don't believe he's going to start a war with Iraq.

I hope

George Barney is a good person.

We'd have to be crazy to do that.

Well, he pushed started a war with Iraq, and it didn't work out very well for the Republican Party.

He got re-elected handily.

Right, and exactly.

All you need, and he's almost there.

By the way, I'll try to stop him.

I don't want to be elected.

Boys.

I was trying to get you to be calmer the way you said before.

Senator Whitehouse, will you vote to

do anything to stop that?

Will you vote to confirm Neil Gorsuch?

I want to hear him out first.

That's not the wrong answer.

No, no, no, no, wait,

wait, wait.

They stole that pick.

Unless the guy's name is Merrick Garland.

We don't want to hear anything else.

No, the issue.

They can't.

They can't.

The issue that we need to address is what the Republicans do when they get five justices on the Supreme Court and they go on a bender.

Oh, that's the only thing.

They do Shelby County.

They do Citizens United.

The other is.

They do Heller.

On and on and on.

That's what we need to stole a pick.

Obama had a year.

He was president for almost a full year.

The Constitution is not ambiguous about this.

The president gets to pick, and they didn't let that happen.

It cannot stand.

They're the ones who said that 4-4 is okay.

And by the way, there are a number of very good decisions that are coming out of the circuit courts

holding out, striking down Texas's bigoted redistricting.

If it stays 4-4, that gets upheld.

So I hope that nobody votes to confirm him.

Right.

I think we can hold at 60.

Yeah.

And if they try to pull the nuclear option, I think they're going to have a real problem with that.

Let them deal with that on their own.

But you started that, right?

Yeah, fortunately.

I'm sorry, but Harry Reid already nuked the filibuster in the last for hope, not the Supreme Court.

Precisely.

And I'm going to do that.

There's a reason for that.

They said no, Supreme Court.

By the way,

it was very important that Harry Reid.

We had a much better set of judgments.

And just to say, when you've already conceded this, just to show what a different world is.

If you want to give them every single argument, I'm struck by that.

Harry Reid did a great thing by breaking the filibuster because you had a very right-wing court, for instance, in Washington, D.C., overturning all kinds of regulations.

One of the best things Harry did was to break that filibuster, so we got a fair balance on the court.

Have you ever criticized the Democratic Party or the NBFM?

Yeah.

I just said earlier, if you were listening, that

Obama screwed up with with the rollout.

I said that the big pump and the health.

You're wrong on that, actually.

The rollout, I mean, technically speaking, that was an incredibly hard thing to do.

I want to change the subject.

Most people never criticized them, and I gave I criticized.

Guys, where was this hatred when we were on T V?

Well, I saved it for the end.

Okay, I just think it's interesting that when we hear the term nuclear option, it's always been something we talked about and we were talking about the Senate and stuff like that.

And now when I hear the term nuclear option, I think of what happened this week.

Yes, when Rex Tillerson said the first strike option is on the table with North Korea.

That's a little bit of a different thing.

Happy St.

Patrick's Day, everybody.

I hope you have a great weekend.

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