Bill Kristol and Colin Allred: What's So Hard about This, Pres. Bush?

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to the Bullword Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is going to be a big week.

Speaker 6 We've got the debate tomorrow night. We'll have a full debate preview for you on tomorrow's show.
I can only do one day a debate preview. The whole thing just gets me nervous.

Speaker 6 I'm on MSNBC all weekend. I'm like, Tim, what's she going to say? I don't know what the hell do I know.
Hopefully, she's strong and stands up to him.

Speaker 6 the most insightful pre-debate insight i've heard is from my colleague sarah longwell during our live shows over the weekend where she pointed out that trump is kind of the stand-in for putin for people with her and and people are watching to see if she has it like has the leadership ability to do it has the toughness to do it i think that's right i think that that is her main job in addition to introducing herself we'll have a full preview for you tomorrow today we have a double header in the last segment i interviewed Colin Allred in Texas who's running against Ted Cruz.

Speaker 6 I thought it was a really thoughtful interview. He was relaxed.
So we did some Ted Cruz talk. We did some football talk did some joking but also got into a lot of policy issues as well.

Speaker 6 Coming up here in a minute we're going to have Bill Crystal and a bridged version of Bill Crystal Monday. But before we get to both I have a rant.

Speaker 6 I need to get off my chest, and I was looking at the week schedule here and I didn't see where we were going to be able to fit it in. And so we're just going to do it right now.

Speaker 6 Just you and me Monday morning talking about school shootings because I asked Congressman Allred about this in the last segment, and it was a J.D. Vance quote about the school shooting in Georgia.

Speaker 6 And, you know, when you're interviewing a congressman running for senator, it doesn't really call for me to interrupt him and say that was a good answer.

Speaker 6 But I've actually a three-minute rant that I want to throw in right on top of this. And so I'm saving it just for you all right now.
But the question was about what JD said.

Speaker 6 He said, I don't like that this is a fact of life, but if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you've realized that our schools are soft targets and we have got to bolster security at our schools.

Speaker 6 And there was this kind of meta-media conversation around this phrase fact of life and whether that was offensive or not. That JD said that he doesn't like that this is a fact of life.

Speaker 6 And I don't really have strong feelings about that debate and whether people are taking him out of context or not, because to me, it's the next sentence, it's the bad one.

Speaker 6 But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you've realized that our schools are soft targets and we've got to bolster security at our schools.

Speaker 6 I don't really know if JD believes this or if this is just like insulting to everybody.

Speaker 6 This notion that somebody that is running for the vice presidency of the United States thinks that the right thing to do in the face of this epidemic of school shootings that only happens in this country, like the thing is that we need to get more security at our schools.

Speaker 6 Like, I guess so. I'm for additional school security.

Speaker 6 But like the notion that this is the solution to this, or that this is even an important part of the solution, is fucking insulting and ridiculous.

Speaker 6 Because unless we're turning the schools into maximum security prisons, unless we're creating a public school TSA system,

Speaker 6 which would cost like half the defense budget, because there are orders of magnitude more schools in this country than there are airports.

Speaker 6 So, unless that's the plan, where we're doing one in, one out, you know, you got to buzz people in

Speaker 6 and like the gate closes. Well, there are some schools that have this.
Okay. I mean, like you're doing that at every school in the country.

Speaker 6 Then as we all know, the other things will become soft targets, right? Like there'll be soccer games or basketball games or school picnics or school functions. But that, I guess, is J.D.

Speaker 6 Vance's solution that we're going to have maximum security prisons where people come one in, one out. I don't exactly know how we're going to pay for that.

Speaker 6 I don't think that that's a serious proposal that he really thinks that we should do because it's not something that's going to be put into place.

Speaker 6 And there are all kinds of practical reasons that we all know. I think about my high school in Colorado.
It has probably 20 entrances. Right.

Speaker 6 Like, what are they going to build the Great Wall of China around it? As I picture it, I one time tweeted out a picture of my high school from above to somebody that was talking about school security.

Speaker 6 I said, what's your plan on securing a campus such as this? When we were in Dallas, I went to meet one of my college besties, and we did school pickup together before the show.

Speaker 6 And we went there, and it was right after the school shooting. And they go to a fancy school in suburban Dallas, and they have a security guard.

Speaker 6 And, you know, you got to check in to get into the school, all the basic stuff. But at dismissal, what happens? The kids leave.
Like, the kids all leave.

Speaker 6 And some of them walk home, like my friend did with his kid. Some of them have car pickup.
Some of them, some of them have carpool. So multiples of them are running out together.

Speaker 6 I was just sitting there watching this. You know, like you don't want to have these horrible nightmares in your mind when you're doing your school pickup with your buddy.

Speaker 6 But I was just watching all this. I'm like, what is the plan here for securing this situation?

Speaker 6 Like, if there's a kid that goes to this school that wants to, what did he say, make headlines and find a soft target? Like.

Speaker 6 They're going to be able to figure out that they can just do it at dismissal or at pickup or at, again, a sporting event. Like, the whole thing is fucking insulting.

Speaker 6 It's insulting to our intelligence to say that this is a solution. And it's callous.
And it's callous. And the reality is, I almost would prefer,

Speaker 6 not almost, I would prefer if J.D. Vance would just say, I don't give a fuck about the school shootings.
I don't care. I don't think that we can do anything about it.

Speaker 6 I care more about ensuring that 20-year-olds have unfettered access to assault rifles and bullets than I care about this.

Speaker 6 I care more about like my don't tread on me flag and the fact that we're not going to be a country where we have gun buybacks or where we have requirements about how you store your weapon.

Speaker 6 I care more about fetishization of this weapon than I do about these deaths. At least that's honest.
At least that's honest.

Speaker 6 Don't fucking spit on me and tell me that you care about these kids and that your solution is we need fencing around every school. It's ridiculous.
It's not true. It's not the answer.

Speaker 6 We all know what the answer is.

Speaker 1 You don't want to do it, J.D.

Speaker 6 Vance. You're not interested in doing it.
And so you're happy to just do Russian roulette with kids' lives at schools. Like, that's where you've landed on this because you care more about the guns.

Speaker 6 I mean, we look at the situation in Georgia, and the dad, thank God, is going to be. held accountable for this, it seems like.
At least he's going to have to go to trial.

Speaker 6 And it's like the FBI came to this house and warned him that his kid was making threats, and he still gave his kid a gun as a present. Like

Speaker 6 the security at the school is the problem, or the parent is the problem, and the laws are the problem, and what the limitations on what that FBI agent could do is the problem.

Speaker 6 Because that kid, if his school was the most secure school that we have in the entire country, it wouldn't have fucking mattered.

Speaker 6 Could have gone to a different school, could have gone to the mall, could have gone to the movie theater, could have gone to wherever.

Speaker 6 I'm sick of it, and I will not allow these things to go by where people that want totally unfettered rights to weaponry to like gaslight us into thinking that there's some other solution than the one that is obvious.

Speaker 6 That is my rant about J.D. Vance.
I had another rant, which maybe we'll do later this week, about Donald Trump. I don't know if you see this, seeking out school hallucinations.

Speaker 6 Donald Trump was talking, I think for the second or third time now, about how little Johnny can go to school, get operated on, get a sex change operation, and then come out the other side as a woman.

Speaker 6 Well, that's something that's happening in our schools, crazy in our country. So like these guys live in a totally fabricated hallucination.

Speaker 6 And rather than actually deal with the real problems that we have in this country, that's where they're going to live. We're not going to try to live there here on this podcast.

Speaker 6 So with that, I'm not going to be talking about that with our next guest, your Monday favorite. He is the editor-at-large here at the Bulwark.

Speaker 1 It's Bill Crystal.

Speaker 6 Hey, Bill. It was good to hang in Texas this weekend.

Speaker 10 It was excellent. You know, I really enjoyed both Dallas and Austin, and I enjoyed our panel, and I really enjoyed the people there.
You know, the Bulwark crowd is a good crowd.

Speaker 6 We do have a good crowd.

Speaker 10 Bulwark America is healthy. The rest of America, not so sure.

Speaker 6 I agree, particularly in the South. You know, Red State Bulwark America is good.

Speaker 6 We have the liberals that were just desperate to have a call glass of water with us, and the ex-bushies who are equally appalled by us. So it was nice to see everybody.
Thanks for coming out.

Speaker 6 Speaking of ex-bushies who are appalled by what's happening in the world, we talked about Liz Cheney last week, but since our last podcast, she with Mark Liebovich in Austin, with us, said that her father, Dick Cheney, would also be supporting Kamala Harris.

Speaker 6 He put out a statement about how Trump is the greatest threat in the history of the Republic. A couple of days after that, or maybe a day after that, W said he wasn't going to say anything.

Speaker 6 What are your thoughts on Dick Cheney? Does it matter? Does it have any import? Does it just make you feel nice on the inside?

Speaker 10 Yeah, the latter, certainly. I'm not sure.

Speaker 10 AQL need these matter. It would be good to get a few more people, obviously, the John Kellys and George W.

Speaker 10 Bushes of the world, the Chris Christie's, who ran for president this year and said he couldn't support Trump. But

Speaker 10 the good news about Dick Cheney is I got a fair number of people in Austin and Dallas saying, you know, if you had told me 20 years ago I'd be here agreeing with Bill Crystal or we'd be together on the same side, I just couldn't have believed.

Speaker 10 And I feel like Dick Cheney gives me a lot of cover on that because if they couldn't believe they would be with me, they really, really, really can't believe it with Dick Cheney.

Speaker 10 I'm just like a moderate, mild kind of adjustment for them compared to Dick Cheney, you know?

Speaker 6 That's true. I do want the Dick Cheney and AOC joint ad for Kamala Harris.
The thing about the Cheney statement that to me is important is he's in two sentences summing up what Liz is saying, right?

Speaker 6 Like that this is not about policy, right? That the race is not about policy, that this is about the threat of Donald Trump, the greatest threat that he sees.

Speaker 6 And that is something that obviously all of us here at the Bulwark agree with wholeheartedly. And like, that is the flabbergasting and frustrating part about all this to me.

Speaker 6 It's just like, this shouldn't be a hard call. Like, when you read Dick Cheney's statement, it's like, this isn't a hard call.
Like, this other guy tried to overturn the democracy.

Speaker 6 He's this grave threat. Let's just beat him this one time.
America can survive. And then we'll move on to fighting about all the things that all the Democrats hate about Dick Cheney in 2028.

Speaker 6 Like, that seems like a totally rational thing.

Speaker 6 And the fact that it's so few of them and it's two in one family that are actually saying this is, I think, kind of part of what's frustrating about this whole thing.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I was struck. I think you probably were too, how many people correctly pivoted quickly in Arctic's conversations there in Austin from Dick Cheney has done this too.
Well, what about George W.

Speaker 10 Bush and what about all the others? And it's a very fair question. And it's unclear what the answer is as to why they are avoiding saying what they truly believe.

Speaker 10 And it would be helpful for more of them to say, I think.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 And they put out, there was like a six bylined, I forget if it was Washington Post story or one of them about how W is not saying anything.

Speaker 6 And I was like, why did it take six reporters to shake this tree loose? But this is the thing that's just frustrating with the W situation is that I get it. I get it.

Speaker 6 W did not like that his predecessors were commenting on what he was doing when he was in there.

Speaker 6 He said that when he left the Oval Office, he was going to let those that followed him do the job and that it wasn't beneficial for him to be weighing in and nitpicking and the news cycles.

Speaker 6 And I totally agree with that in principle. But again, like we're in this situation where it's not a fucking close call.
It's not a close call.

Speaker 6 And people are not asking for W to come out and

Speaker 6 kind of weigh in on Donald Trump's tariff policy or start to go on the Nicole Wallace panel with me. That's not the request.
The request is just to say that. It's not a close call.

Speaker 6 I disagree with Kamala and things, but the other guy tried to coup. We need to move on from this.

Speaker 6 The four perilous horsemen of the apocalypse, I always talk about, have Donald Trump at the head of all four, and it's time to just vote for Kamala and move on. Like,

Speaker 6 why is that hard? That's the thing that's frustrating.

Speaker 10 I guess it's hard because she's a Democrat. Incidentally, I think they all, including W, supported subsequent candidates from their own parties.

Speaker 10 It's not as if former presidents don't support the next nominee of their party or the nominee after that.

Speaker 10 Bush Bush and McCain didn't really get along, but remember McCain met with him at the White House in 2008. I assume, I don't have a specific memory of this, that Bush supported the Rodney Ryan ticket.

Speaker 10 So fine, he normally supports Republicans. This time you should support a Democrat.
Just support the Harris-Walls ticket. What's so hard?

Speaker 6 Yeah, or senators. He does fundraisers for senators.

Speaker 6 It's like the McMaster thing. It's like, oh, I'm not political.
It's like, well, yeah, you are, actually. You're not that political, right? You don't comment that much.

Speaker 6 But, you know, you have fundraisers for Republican senators and people you know. So again, just put out one statement.

Speaker 1 Come on, W.

Speaker 6 You know, I don't even know if it really matters. Does it even matter, I guess? Would it even help? There's some libs that sometimes I see on Twitter respond to me.

Speaker 6 They're like, are we sure it wouldn't hurt for W to come after her?

Speaker 1 And I don't, you know, I think it would help.

Speaker 6 But for me, it's more just like, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This is not a close fucking call.
Just say it.

Speaker 6 It's almost more about personal satisfaction, which is maybe probably not the most important thing facing us.

Speaker 1 It's true.

Speaker 1 You're nodding. You're nodding.

Speaker 6 Would it help? It would help.

Speaker 10 I think it would help a little.

Speaker 10 I think cumulatively, no one of these may be, but I think if you're on the fence a little bit, you haven't been paying attention, or either you're on the fence and you have your sophisticated, stupid Wall Street Journal editorial page reasons for, oh, I can't be for Harris, this might say, you know what, I should be cast the vote.

Speaker 10 Or if you're really someone who's not paying attention, but you may vaguely admire Bush and so forth, or from 15 years ago, whatever it was, 20 years ago, you might sort of say, okay, you know what?

Speaker 10 I I think I'll vote for Harris. So, yeah, I think it could push a few people over.

Speaker 6 Part of the reason you sense the agita in my voice is this New York Times poll over the weekend. Donald Trump leads Kamala Harris 48.47.
That's a national poll.

Speaker 6 Some numbers that jumped out from me, Trump was 97.2 among his 2020 voters. He was leading among people that did not vote in 2020, 49.40.
47% saw Harris as too progressive.

Speaker 6 Only 32% saw Trump as too conservative. People see Trump as a change candidate.
Numbers among young voters are bad, which you could look both ways.

Speaker 6 Maybe it's a bad poll sample, or maybe that's trouble. So, anyway, what's your level of agita with the New York Times poll over the weekend?

Speaker 10 Well, I mean, it sort of fits into a general level of agita, which is, you know, even the better polls have Harris up one or two, basically. I mean, one or two are a little bigger than that.

Speaker 10 And the state polls are all plus one or even basically in every state.

Speaker 6 Yeah, CBS. Let me just throw in in there.
Let me just throw in there. CBS right now has Kamala plus one in Michigan, plus two in Wisconsin, tied in Pennsylvania over the weekend.

Speaker 10 Is it the same poll or some other one? I saw minus one in Georgia and Arizona or something like that. So, yeah, so it's a dead-even race, basically.

Speaker 10 I mean, this is all so much within the margin of error. It's foolish to almost

Speaker 10 to overanalyze, as I think we've discussed before, but it is upsetting.

Speaker 10 After everything, Trump has as much support, maybe slightly more support, than he had in 2020 or 2016. We We saw him as president for four years.
We saw him January 6th.

Speaker 10 We've seen what he has said about what he will do in a second term, and he's pretty clear about that.

Speaker 10 We've seen the real radicalization of his movement in a way that's doing things now and legitimizing and normalizing things now that even in 2020, even in 2020 Border II, I would say, didn't happen to Tucker Carlson with the Nazi apologists and J.D.

Speaker 10 Vance, fine. Everyone are all fine with Tucker Carlson.
Or there's a little bit of a pushback. Not too much, honestly, though.

Speaker 10 Things have gotten worse, and Trump's numbers have gotten slightly better. That strikes me as slightly problematic for the editors of the country.

Speaker 10 Both the voters and the conservative elites, it's not as if conservative elites, despite Cheney, you know, and a couple of others, are deserting Trump either.

Speaker 10 The Wall Street Journal editorial page is where it was. I think some people, some of them are a little more pro-Trump, don't you think, than they were maybe four years ago? I don't know.
I feel like

Speaker 6 that also strikes me as that strikes me as problematic. I do wonder,

Speaker 6 so on the one hand, it's natural among all of us in the anti-democracy movement to get nervous and get, you know, our little underwear and a bunch when you see bad polls like this.

Speaker 6 But one thing that we had been talking about over the last couple of weeks is that there's a little bit of overconfidence. Like, this is a close race, right?

Speaker 6 And I do believe that it hurt Hillary that people thought she was inevitable in the end. I think it hurt turnout.

Speaker 6 And I think it hurt among some swing voters that didn't like her, that probably would have picked her, push, come to shove. That hurt among some Bernie voters, I think.

Speaker 6 I think it hurt among a couple different groups. So an acceptance that this is a close race, you know, is not necessarily a bad thing.
I don't know.

Speaker 6 But then there's like the Simon Rosenberg theory of the case where these things are self-fulfilling and you want to feel like you're winning because winners go for winners. I don't know.

Speaker 6 Where do you fall on that?

Speaker 10 No, I'm on the first one of that. You want people to be alarmed.
And I think the Simon Rosenberg theory, which is also the Karl Rove theory, he was always insistent that Bush was winning.

Speaker 10 It was great in 2000. And he really had, I talked to him once about it.
I said, it's a little crazy, honestly, what you're saying. And oh, no, you got to convey the impression of victory.
And

Speaker 10 that's why they went to California a week out because he was so confident that he could afford to go fight. People forget this, right?

Speaker 10 He spent two days flying to California and back to fight for California. And I remember saying, they hated me for saying this, honestly.

Speaker 10 I said this, I think it was quoted in the Washington Post on the weekend saying, I think they fritted away their lead. They could lose.
Oh, no, you're crazy. Harry Feischer called me.

Speaker 10 This has been noted in Austin. It's very bad for you to have said this, you know.
And I happened to be right in this case. So, no, I'm not on the side.

Speaker 10 I think voters actually don't like the kind of front-running, you know, celebratory stuff. They kind of almost, there's a little bit of rallying to the underdog at times.

Speaker 10 And it's happened in race after race, right? You've been in some

Speaker 10 gore got votes at the end when he was behind and being counted out in 2000. I think this has happened in other cases.
So, and I think it's you're right about Hillary. So, I'm for being alarmed.

Speaker 6 Good, same. So, that's your silver lining when you see a bad poll, that you know that it will keep people focused.

Speaker 6 Quick aside on Carl Rove, Al Gore, 53 and a half, George Bush, 41 in California in 2000. So they lost that, but ended up losing that by 12 points.
And Carl

Speaker 6 was with us in Austin this weekend and would not reveal his private ballot. So I've asked him to come onto the Bullard podcast to discuss.

Speaker 6 We'll be just counting our chickens because that's sure to happen any day now.

Speaker 2 Greetings from my bath, festive friends.

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Speaker 6 The ads and balance I wanted to talk to you about, not imbalance, maybe. It's just interesting.
So I had a little bit of time for football over the weekend.

Speaker 6 Been churning out content, and I took like 18 hours with my child who went to the Audubon Park, came home, turned on the football game, had a little delivery.

Speaker 6 And, you know, the YouTube TV, NFL these days, you got the four box. And so you get to see the commercials, though, also in the four box in all the different markets.

Speaker 6 The Kamala commercials are Kamala talking about economic opportunity. And the Trump commercials are about Kamala and how she's terrible and immigration.

Speaker 6 And there's like criminals that have been let out and economic stuff. In a way, like

Speaker 6 the media discussion about the race is like a lot about Trump and maybe a little balance. It's a little bit about both.
But like the paid portion of this race is all about Kamala.

Speaker 6 Like Kamala introducing herself, Trump trying to hit Kamala. So anyway, I'm just curious what you think about that.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, one way to put it is analytically, I think for us and really for the country, I mean, in truth, the race is about Trump.

Speaker 10 I I mean, the issue is, is Donald Trump going to have a second term as president or not? And Kamala is a perfectly acceptable alternative.

Speaker 10 And so would be Shapiro and Polis and, you know, Whitmer and many, many other people. And I don't mean to minimize her distinctive virtues and maybe also limitations.

Speaker 10 But analytically, the headline is Trump. The headline in the history books will be Trump wins and Trump loses.
Probably.

Speaker 10 That doesn't mean that politically the most important thing couldn't be people's judgment of Harris, of Kamala Harris, because everyone knows all about Trump.

Speaker 10 So there's a funny disconnect, I think, where we being pro-democracy types want to talk about Trump, and we should, and it's important to.

Speaker 10 But as an actual political tactics and strategy matter, it's about Harris clearing a bar of likability and favorability and presidential character and toughness and so forth.

Speaker 10 And so it makes sense that they're both focused on Kamala. The positive ads, I think, are pretty good.

Speaker 10 A little bland, a little generic, I would say, maybe. I prefer a little more personal.
I think their personal bio stuff is stronger than they think, but they have a lot of data that I don't.

Speaker 10 And I'm, you know, filling in the blanks on the policies. I don't know.
Does that really matter that much? I don't know.

Speaker 10 One thing that made me nervous over the weekends, we've got to talk to a friend in Pennsylvania who's seeing all he does is, of course, he watches football and it's like non-stop ads.

Speaker 10 Someone told me this. They're extending the local news in some parts of Pennsylvania, I think, other states, from like, I don't know, an hour to an hour and a half or something.

Speaker 10 In October, there's such such demand to buy ads, you know, on news adjacencies, right?

Speaker 10 Because it's more, it's the best place to buy a political ad because Oli is the kind of people who watch local news that they, you know, they sort of have to fill up the news, you know, with high school sports, you know, big development.

Speaker 10 So just so they can sell ads.

Speaker 10 So they're going to

Speaker 10 make a lot of money off the streets.

Speaker 6 You got a sucking tree in Harrisburg.

Speaker 10 He said that his judgment was that there was damage being done in Western Pennsylvania on immigration with the negative ads, and that he personally is running to people, he's voting for Harris, but he moves into broad circles and run into people who are either seeing actual news stories about this, some story about Haitians in Ohio.

Speaker 10 I haven't followed this, that they're blowing away wildly out of proportion, maybe not even out of proportion, just inventing, maybe, I don't know.

Speaker 10 And then there are other stories, you know, all the immigration scare stories are being promoted on social media, and then the ads are promoting them as well.

Speaker 10 So his concern is that the negative ads are maybe a little more powerful than the positive ads.

Speaker 10 So I don't quarrel with, as a tactical matter, the Harris campaign thinking their key task is to increase her favorable numbers.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I agree. I don't want to be sexist here, but I don't get in the one positive ad you're seeing everywhere.
She's in like a living room with flowers. It's a feminine set.
I don't know.

Speaker 6 I thought that the convention was very much like a prosecutorial set, which I liked. And I don't know.
So anyway, it's just a thing.

Speaker 6 And the negatives, I don't think negative ads on Trump really work at this point. Like people know Trump, but just what I don't like is, is just

Speaker 6 that the air that people are breathing has negative kamala, positive kamala, and not a lot about him.

Speaker 6 And I almost just want them to get negative Trump stuff just to kind of bring a balance to it, less that it's going to be, you know, moving people.

Speaker 1 But anyway.

Speaker 6 On the immigration front, Trump was in Mosney, Wisconsin over the weekend. And boy, I don't know.
Here he is talking about immigration.

Speaker 6 And for some reason, he's talking about Colorado and Jared Polis. But let's take a listen.

Speaker 11 They're radicals headed up by a radical governor in Colorado that has no clue how to solve this influx of crime into his state. And by the way, Colorado is one state.
It's much worse in other states.

Speaker 11 But in Colorado, they've taken over. I mean, in Colorado, they're so brazen they're taking over sections of the state.

Speaker 11 And, you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. Should have never been allowed to come into our country.
Nobody checked them.

Speaker 6 So on the one hand, we just have this hallucination that there are parts of Denver that have been taken over by migrant gangs, which I'm pretty sure is not happening.

Speaker 6 I have a decent amount of on-the-ground sources in Colorado there between friends and family. But the line there that really struck me is

Speaker 6 getting them out is going to be bloody. And I do think that that is an underappreciated element when thinking about what Trump has planned?

Speaker 10 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean, at some point, you do have to believe what he says. And one of the things he said over and over and over is mass deportation.

Speaker 10 They had signs printed up, didn't they, at the Republican Convention? Mass deportation. And it's 10 or 15 million people.
He uses the number.

Speaker 10 And Stephen Miller seems to have plans for, you know, camps to put them in, pending their, you know, being flown out of the country, I suppose. And now Trump says it's going to be bloody.

Speaker 10 And he says it with sort of relish, not with regret, I've got to say. So the whole thing is pretty astonishing.

Speaker 10 I mean,

Speaker 10 it's one thing to think we should, I don't know, have tougher asylum policies at the border or just cut back on the numbers of immigrants. I don't agree with that, but people want to argue that.

Speaker 10 But this is really another level. And he just, but it is, this is where I think your previous point is important.
Maybe people need to make a bit of a point of this on paper.

Speaker 10 The extremism in Trump, there was that poll last week that I think we talked about maybe that CNN that people do think Trump is more extreme than Harris and they don't like the extremism.

Speaker 10 And bringing home the extremism in Trump, I'm a little worried that's kind of sliding away and people aren't focused enough on that.

Speaker 6 One more thing on this point.

Speaker 6 He put out one of these crazy bleats the other day, and I like the way that Axius framed it up.

Speaker 6 Alex Thompson wrote: President Trump is now proposing two of the largest ever federal arrests of people living in America, including U.S. citizens, if he's re-elected, adversaries and immigrants.

Speaker 6 He gets into the immigrants part and then goes into the Trump on True Social.

Speaker 6 When I win, the people that cheated will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.

Speaker 6 Legal exposure extends to lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and corrupt election officials. So I guess we're on the list there.

Speaker 6 I mean, I get how some of this is like people push it away because it's bluster. They're like, oh, whatever.
He's not going to do this. This is bluster.

Speaker 6 But like from the voters out there that have a libertarian streak, these former Republican voters, I do think that is an important frame.

Speaker 6 Like whatever actually happens, his plan is two of the largest mass arrests in the country. This bloody deportation we just talked about and vengeance against political thugs.

Speaker 10 Lock them up was a bad thing in 2016. It's a lock her up, rather, right?

Speaker 10 It was, it's against the rule of law to be, you know, to say you're going to lock someone up without trials and due process and so forth. But to be fair, the crowd was kind of chanting it.

Speaker 10 I don't know if Trump started it or the crowd started it. Trump sort of played along.
It was always understood to be a little bit, I don't know, you know, rhetorical, let's just say.

Speaker 10 Here he's going out of his way to threaten not, you know, not one person who's, you know, famous and presumably this is the same part of the campaign, but a whole bunch of people ranging from journalists to donors.

Speaker 10 Quite specific, really. He's kind of thought about this a lot, right? I got to get the donors, I got to get the operatives, I got to get the, you know, journalists.

Speaker 10 I've got different, you know, different parts of the government going after each of them and different camps waiver for us as opposed to some of the others.

Speaker 10 You know, do we get to stay with the donors? They probably get a nicer place. You know, I don't know which is weird.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 Anyway, so no, it's bad. We're laughing about it, but it's terrible.
It's unbelievable, really. When is it?

Speaker 10 I mean, has anyone ever said anything like this if you're went for president of the United States who is at all respectable?

Speaker 1 No, of course not. Of course not.

Speaker 6 And it would not pass an acceptable bar.

Speaker 6 And I do think you make an important point because sometimes, particularly in like the cable news, in this podcast world, you get in these situations where Trump is in an interview and some clever reporter is like,

Speaker 6 are you interested in arresting your political foes? And he does the kind of like, well, we're going to have to to look into it.

Speaker 6 And like, you know, sort of, and there's that thing, right, that happens. Right.
And then people are like, Trump leaves door open to arresting foes, which is still bad, right?

Speaker 6 Like, that's still an easy question. You say no.

Speaker 6 But there, it is a category difference from literally putting out a plan that's like, here are all the people that I'm going to arrest and punish long-term prison sentences. It's fucking horrible.

Speaker 6 One sentence on the debate. You have any deep thoughts or expectations for the debate tomorrow?

Speaker 10 It's nerve-wracking. Same.
That's my deep thought. What are we going to do for What are we going to do for the next 24, 36 hours? I mean, do you have a plan for kind of handling the Tuesday?

Speaker 10 Election day is always the worst day, right, when you work on campaigns. Debate day is also a bad day.

Speaker 10 And this is kind of important, you know, that may be the only debate in a denty's been raised where people don't know one of the candidates well. Yikes.

Speaker 6 Pepto-Bismol and close your ears, mom, cigarettes for me, I think. I want just hearing you mention that, this is why we didn't spend the whole day.

Speaker 6 I can't do two podcasts doing debate preview in my stomach. I've got stomach pains just thinking about it.
We'll do it tomorrow. We'll do a debate preview tomorrow.

Speaker 6 We'll have some good people for you. So, everybody, stick with us.
Up next, candidate for senate in Texas, somebody that Bill is very bullish on.

Speaker 6 Bill is the one bringing us anxiety on the presidential race, but optimism on Blue Texas. It's Colin Allred running against Ted Cruz.
Stick around.

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Speaker 9 Hello, welcome to the Bullet Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Good to be with you.

Speaker 1 My guest today is Congressman Colin Allred from Texas. Hey, Congressman.

Speaker 1 Hey, man, how's it going?

Speaker 1 We are here at the

Speaker 1 Paramount Theater. We just learned Harry Houdini played here in 1916.
Houdini Miller.

Speaker 1 It's been

Speaker 1 quite a trajectory. It's come quite down, yeah.

Speaker 1 The wrong trajectory?

Speaker 1 It is 9 a.m. on a weekend in Austin, so we're moving a little slow here.
So not me, I behaved last night. So we'll start with an easy one for you.
Sure. You're running against Ted Cruz.

Speaker 1 ted cruz yay or nay

Speaker 1 i mean

Speaker 1 can we say

Speaker 1 hell no hell no

Speaker 1 no listen i mean

Speaker 1 we've had 12 years of ted cruz uh we've seen

Speaker 1 yeah we we we we've kind of seen this this story play out and you know listen

Speaker 1 He's been an extremist, yes. He's been all about himself.
Yes. He's been dangerous to our democracy.
Yes. But the fundamental thing is he doesn't care about all 30 million Texans.

Speaker 1 That's how you can go to Cancun when the lights go out for all of us. Because what else would you do, right?

Speaker 1 For any elected official, something like that happens. You know, you want to spring into action.
Ted wanted to see if there was a good deal at the Ritz-Carlton.

Speaker 1 And it's funny and it's not funny because Texans were dying.

Speaker 1 And in Dallas, I was working with FEMA to try and bring down federal resources. We were working with our county to find buildings that had power on.
We called them warming centers.

Speaker 1 I mean, can you imagine needing a warming center in Texas, right?

Speaker 1 And there was so much to do. I was volunteering at a local food bank because when the power goes out, the food goes out.

Speaker 1 And for you to be able to just do that, but then come back and say, what was I going to do? I couldn't hang electrical wires.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, listen, Senator, there's a lot that you could do. But the first thing that would be required is to care.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I'm a fourth-generation Texan.

Speaker 1 I'm a fourth generation Texan. My family's from Brownsville.
My grandfather was a customs officer there. I grew up in Dallas, raised by a single mom.
I played football at Baylor.

Speaker 1 Every time I came here to Austin, I let them win.

Speaker 1 That was my gift to UT.

Speaker 1 Although my mom went to UT, so I can say hook them horns.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'll come on too.

Speaker 1 And so I know who we are, and we're not who Ted Cruz says we are. Otherwise, my story wouldn't have been possible.
And And so that's why we're going to beat him on November 5th.

Speaker 1 This is going to sound like a joke question, kind of, but it's a serious one, which is you can't beat somebody without understanding

Speaker 1 what their appeal is.

Speaker 1 And what is Ted Cruz's appeal?

Speaker 1 What do people like about him, and how can you win over at least some percentage of those people since he's won twice?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, this is a

Speaker 1 tough question to ask me. It is tough.
Right.

Speaker 1 I'm genuinely asking because it's a zero for me on every category. Charisma, niceness, policy.

Speaker 1 I got nothing, but some people like them. Yeah, well listen, you know, I went to Baylor.
You know, I grew up around a lot of folks who voted for George W.

Speaker 1 Bush, who, you know, real conservatives who I respected. And I think there was maybe a time

Speaker 1 when there was a thought that maybe he was a real conservative.

Speaker 1 that you could actually that would actually try and conserve right sure in the classic sense and protect uh and also grow the economy and and do the conservative kind of actions that you know I think is by and large what we see have seen in Texas for some time.

Speaker 1 He's not been that.

Speaker 1 He's been a radical.

Speaker 1 He's been a radical who doesn't believe in the Constitution. That's how you can be the architect in the Senate side of January 6th.

Speaker 1 He's a radical who, when we have common sense legislation that conservatives are saying this is a good idea.

Speaker 1 Like when we had the Chips and Science Act come up and John Cornyn is helping to push it through in the Senate and I'm helping to push it through in the House, he votes against it.

Speaker 1 When we were talking about protecting and preserving our role in the world, I'm on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Speaker 1 We had funding coming up for Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and humanitarian aid for what was happening in Gaza and around the world.

Speaker 1 I voted for it. John Cornyn voted for it.
A small handful of radicals in the Senate voted against it. Some on the far left and some on the extreme far right.
He was one of those. right?

Speaker 1 So you don't believe in standing up for Taiwan or Ukraine. You don't believe in investing in our economy.
You're not a traditional conservative. So I think the idea is that

Speaker 1 he might have once been that, I think has been disproven. So whatever that appeal was, I think we know that's not true.
I hope so. I don't know.
It's

Speaker 1 certainly not his personality that's doing it.

Speaker 1 Speaking of real conservatives, Liz Cheney yesterday was over here. I don't know, did you guys see that?

Speaker 1 She read a little bit of news. And she said she is going to be supporting you in the Senate race.
What's kind of your reaction

Speaker 1 to that? Well, Liz is a patriot. She really is.

Speaker 1 She's a friend of mine. But more importantly, I respect her.
And I respect her because

Speaker 1 what she has done is proof positive that there are folks who want to put... their country over their party, over their personal ambitions.
You know, I was on the House floor with her on January 6th.

Speaker 1 I have my story of what happened that day.

Speaker 1 You know, I texted my wife at one point, you know, whatever happens, I love you. She was seven months pregnant with our son Cameron and at home with our son Jordan, who wasn't yet two.

Speaker 1 And you're the only former NFL linebacker in the room, and there's a mob at the door. You're the first line at the head.

Speaker 1 Everybody's like, what are you going to do, Colin?

Speaker 1 So I took off my suit jacket, which is actually a violation of our House rules.

Speaker 1 And I thought I was going to have to hold the door. The president walks through to deliver the State of the Union.
And my colleagues were saying, I'm going to get behind you, Colin.

Speaker 1 I was like, okay, I guess I could, you know,

Speaker 1 my job was to put people on the ground, but one at a time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But on the sixth,

Speaker 1 you know, I saw the determination in her eyes. And she has been so consistent ever since.
And I have tremendous respect for it. Because to me, she is a true conservative.

Speaker 1 And that means that she believes in the Constitution. She believes in the rule of law.
She believes in accountability. And she knows that Ted Cruz is a threat to all of that.

Speaker 1 And so that's why I'm honored to have her support.

Speaker 1 And I want everyone out there in Texas who feels like they are conservative, that they believe in those things, that they're a moderate, that they're somebody who feels like they don't see themselves reflected in this version of the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 They're welcome here. They're welcome in our coalition.

Speaker 1 I want to have their support in this campaign, but also want to represent them in the Senate.

Speaker 1 Yesterday on stage, one of your colleagues offered a different theory for why Liz was supporting you and Kamala Harris. Dan Crenshaw

Speaker 1 said that Liz and Adam Kinziger are putting their feelings above basic conservative policy. He said that their feelings were hurt, that Donald Trump has been mean to them, and that was why

Speaker 1 that's Dan Crenshaw's theory. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1 I think folks should remember that when I got to Congress, Liz was the chairwoman of the House Republican Congress.

Speaker 1 And even at that time, we knew Kevin McCarthy was really weak.

Speaker 1 It was thought that she was going to be speaker. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 And for her,

Speaker 1 the path all the way to January 6th was she had voted for Donald Trump in re-election twice.

Speaker 1 She had not broken with him significantly.

Speaker 1 And on January 6th, she could have done what Kevin McCarthy did. He gave one speech one day.
and said that the president bears responsibility for this and should be held accountable.

Speaker 1 And then a week later, he's taking a picture.

Speaker 1 Looking bringing some Skittles down down there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she could have done that, and then she'd be speaker probably right now. Yeah, right.
So she made this choice because she had she's with standing on her principles.

Speaker 1 And if that's something that's foreign to Dan or anyone else, then maybe they should follow her example

Speaker 1 instead of you know,

Speaker 1 maybe they should revere her, maybe they should look to her as an example, you know, instead of you know, trying to mock her. Because you know, this is incredibly difficult.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 There is, Cheney was on a ticket running for president. There was another name on that ticket you might remember.
You have a constituent, a couple constituents in the Bush family, George and Laura.

Speaker 1 We don't know how they voted, though I suspect how they might have voted

Speaker 1 in the past for you. And I'm wondering,

Speaker 1 have you talked to him lately? Have you made a phone call?

Speaker 1 Lately, no, no. As you said, I represented him and

Speaker 1 he called me after I got elected and I let it go to voicemail.

Speaker 1 And he left me a really funny voicemail. He's like, Congressman.

Speaker 1 He's like, it's George Bush.

Speaker 1 He's like, you can do it. Do the W.
Do the Will Farrell.

Speaker 1 And then I met with him and we had a great meeting. And he was hilarious.

Speaker 1 We laughed the entire time. I'm a big Rangers fan.
I don't know if there's any Rangers fans here, but

Speaker 1 I grew up going to Rangers games when they were basically letting you in for free because they were so bad.

Speaker 1 And he had been a part owner of the Rangers, and we were talking about that,

Speaker 1 but also talking about what was going on in the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 And how, in many ways,

Speaker 1 he felt like he was the keeper of the true flame,

Speaker 1 of what that was, and that it was changing so much. And his dad had just died,

Speaker 1 and they'd had a... you know, great funeral that in many ways was a repudiation of some of these things, right?

Speaker 1 About service and putting country over self and a long career of being a public servant, you know, from serving in World War II to Congress to the CIA to vice presidency, you know, all the long career that his dad had.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I know that

Speaker 1 this is not what he wants for

Speaker 1 the Republican Party or the Conservative Movement.

Speaker 1 And I think our coalition, as we've talked about backstage,

Speaker 1 is a interesting one. You know what I mean? And it's one that I think is pro-democracy fundamentally.

Speaker 1 I think it's pro-constitution, and it believes in who we are and who we can be instead of trying to radically scrap all of this that we've done for the last 250 years.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I think the coalition has some other things together. W wrote about this in his memoir,

Speaker 1 the four horsemen of peril that he wrote about. That's right.
Condi was talking about this on Fox the other day. I was listening closely to see if she would say one important name.
She did.

Speaker 1 Are you going to mention it?

Speaker 1 But the four horsemen were nativism, protectionism, isolationism, and populism he said that they all the if any of them were rearing their heads it would bring peril to the country i i that

Speaker 1 opposition to those things is another thing that the broad coalition has right right yeah and i i just do wonder like if there is a way to kind of leverage that to to speak to these voters that you're going to need these people that have been republicans their whole life yeah well i mean that's that's how i got elected to congress i was in a district that was a republican district uh be a 22-year incumbent Republican to get there.

Speaker 1 It was, you know, in many ways, if anybody knows kind of North Dallas, it was kind of the heart of, you know, what used to be the heart of the kind of the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 Old school big hair, you know, big elephant brooches. Right, right.
You know, we can all picture it. Yeah, I think one of the most

Speaker 1 expensive zip codes in the country

Speaker 1 is in my district, Highland Park. And

Speaker 1 listen,

Speaker 1 that is the coalition that we've always built, and that's the one that I've served in Congress in terms of representing them. And that's the one we have to do here in the Senate.

Speaker 1 But if you care about those things that you just mentioned, and particularly if you care about the U.S.'s role in the world, or if you care about how we're seen, or if you care about this project of ours that we've never gotten perfectly, but that we've been trying to perfect over time,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 to me,

Speaker 1 come on in, the water's fine. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I'm then the most bipartisan Texan in Congress. If you're looking for somebody who will work across the aisle, that's me.

Speaker 1 If If you're looking for somebody who will represent you and not embarrass you, who won't pitch you against each other, that's what I want to do for our state.

Speaker 1 And we have the exact opposite in Tech Fruit.

Speaker 1 Well, it sounds like you have W's number, which I don't. I only have Jeb's.
I'm working him too. But I don't know, man, maybe you just give him a little buzz and be like, hey, Mr.

Speaker 1 President, will you put Laura on the line?

Speaker 1 Put Laura on the line. That's right.

Speaker 1 Maybe we can get her a nudge. Just nudge a little bit.
Because I suspect that

Speaker 1 they're not going to be checking the box for Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 But it'd be nice for them to share that with us.

Speaker 1 What else we got here? So these same voters that we're talking about, they do still have some concerns. I mean, it's nice that Dick Cheney and AOC are voting for the same presidential candidate.

Speaker 1 But like...

Speaker 1 Some of the people in Texas still have some concerns that like the AOCs of the world, God lover, are going to be very influenced over policy in the next administration and kind of rationalizing their vote by talk by focusing on policy.

Speaker 1 So as you kind of think about that, you said you've been the most bipartisan member.

Speaker 1 Are there issues where you feel like there's elements of the Democratic Party that you dissent from? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I'm somebody who never has approached things from a purely partisan perspective.

Speaker 1 So that's part of the background that I come out of because I think when you're a football player and you've been kind of the backgrounds that I've been in, you're more focused on like results.

Speaker 1 And so to me, I feel like I'm in a results-oriented business, which is that my job is to deliver for folks who are out there working hard.

Speaker 1 And I imagine my mom, who was taught for 27 years in public schools here in Texas, and she sometimes had to work a second job to make ends meet for us.

Speaker 1 And I think those folks are out there here in Texas every day hoping that their elected officials are working as hard as they are. But then there are things that come up that you have to respond to.

Speaker 1 And my family's from Brownsville.

Speaker 1 My grandfather joins the Customs Department in 1939.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he was a customs agent at the Gateway Bridge in Brownsville, which is the bridge that crosses over into Mexico. And he served in the Navy in the Pacific in World War II.

Speaker 1 That's where my mom and my aunt were born and raised. I spent a lot of my childhood in the valley visiting my grandmother there.

Speaker 1 And so when you have a huge surge of migrants, we had a record number in December of 23.

Speaker 1 You have to identify that as a crisis and respond to it with smart policy, with resources, and you have to

Speaker 1 have have that sense of urgency. And I didn't see that for some time from my party.
I felt like there was maybe an idea that, well, if it's being said on Fox News, it can't be true.

Speaker 1 Well, that's a pretty decent rule of thumb, but

Speaker 1 the rule of thumbs exists for a reason.

Speaker 1 I disagree with having an inhumane approach to the southern border. You have to have a secure one.

Speaker 1 And there is a difference. And so to me,

Speaker 1 having stunts, like putting buoys in the river with razor wire around it, that's not border security.

Speaker 1 That's just being cruel.

Speaker 1 But what you can do is put real resources into it, have real personnel, real technology. And so I didn't see that.
And so I was very critical of the party.

Speaker 1 I was critical of the White House at the time.

Speaker 1 But then when we had an effort that did come up finally, a bipartisan effort, with $20 billion for border security, that no state would have benefited more from than Texas for 1,500 new CBP personnel, 100 new immigration judges, I think 1,400 administrative personnel helped with asylum, over a billion dollars for cities like Brownsville that have been impacted by the surge of migrants, more money for technology to catch fentanyl.

Speaker 1 And I was for it and said, let's go for it, let's do it, right? Put out a statement immediately. Ted Cruz said no.

Speaker 1 And he said no, and he even openly said because he was worried that the impact it would have in November.

Speaker 1 So what does that mean? It means you think you're more important than Texas, right? That your election is more important than Texas.

Speaker 1 And I describe it as going down to South Texas, going down to the valley, and treating like you're on a safari, where you put on your outdoor clothes, you know. That Lindsey Graham picture.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 1 He's wearing his border agent costume. Right, right.

Speaker 1 You got the tags still hanging off, you know. Drinking a Chardonnay on the boat.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and you want to look tough, right? And you get your binoculars, you point things out. Okay,

Speaker 1 oh, there's problems. I see this.
I see that. Well, then you go back to DC and do nothing about it.

Speaker 1 Don't just point out problems, be a part of the solution. That's what folks in the valley expect.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 and here's where I may upset some of my Democratic friends here. All right, good.

Speaker 1 We have to be much more realistic about energy.

Speaker 1 In Texas, we're an energy state. We're the number one wind energy state in the country.
We're number one solar. We're number one in oil and gas.

Speaker 1 LNG in particular is an incredibly important part not only of our economy but also of our foreign policy, of our national security.

Speaker 1 So when the Biden administration puts a pause on new LNG facilities and

Speaker 1 certificates, that hurts our national security and the Texas economy. So I wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle saying this was a bad idea.
Because you know what we're asking the Germans to do?

Speaker 1 What we're asking the Europeans to do? We're asking them to wean themselves off Russian gas. Right.

Speaker 1 Because that's funding what they're doing in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And you know what we're replacing it with? Texas LNG.

Speaker 1 So it doesn't make any sense. It's a win-win.
It's a win-win. And also,

Speaker 1 it's a better, cleaner fuel than coal or than some of the alternatives that we see popping up, particularly in Asia.

Speaker 1 And so we have to have a more realistic conversation around energy, that our energy mix is changing. But we cannot, you know, in Texas, you cannot talk about

Speaker 1 taking away hundreds of thousands of jobs in the energy industry. And I will never allow that to happen.
Yeah. How do you get the folks that you need to hear your message on that?

Speaker 1 I mean, I was driving between Dallas and here yesterday. And, you know, this is one of these only in Texas billboards.
It must have been 100 feet wide.

Speaker 1 I was like, Biden Harris letting the terrorists come in across the border. We all know that billboard.
Yeah, everybody knows it. Okay.
I don't know. It was new to me.
It was new to me.

Speaker 1 We don't have any of those in New Orleans.

Speaker 1 But, you know,

Speaker 1 that is out there in the water table. You know, like

Speaker 1 the Democrats just don't want to do anything about the border, that they're letting everybody come across, that they want to stop drilling.

Speaker 1 Like, how do you, you know, kind of outside of this room, like, get that message that people that need to hear it? Well, of course, we just have to show up and talk about it.

Speaker 1 But also, I mean, this is the record that I've had.

Speaker 1 And so people don't have to, you know.

Speaker 1 Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. And so, you know, this is what I've done in Congress.

Speaker 1 When we were taking up the Inflation Reduction Act, some of the initial proposals in that were going to be fairly punitive to Texas. And so I and some of my Texas Democratic colleagues.
Like what?

Speaker 1 Well, I was like basically, instead of saying we want to incentivize you to capture all the methane, if you don't, there will be these big penalties. And that might sound fine.

Speaker 1 But when you have a smaller producer,

Speaker 1 Those are the ones who have a hard time keeping up with the regulations. The big guys can do it just fine.

Speaker 1 It's the smaller ones who you then, if you're penalizing them, you might drive them out of business as opposed to incentivizing.

Speaker 1 And so that was the change in the policy that we fought for and that we got along with Joe Manchin in the Senate.

Speaker 1 And that's the kind of thing where you can still move towards having much more climate-friendly policies. And the Inflation Reduction Act is going to reduce emissions by 30%, by 40% by 2030.

Speaker 1 So that's a big climate bill. But you can do it in a way where you're incentivizing the behavior you want as opposed to attacking or penalizing.

Speaker 1 All right. I want to talk about one more kind of.

Speaker 1 policy than y'all thought it was going to be a bit more.

Speaker 1 Yeah, baby.

Speaker 1 We're going to do a little more policy, and then I will then give you a little candy at the end. Don't you worry.

Speaker 1 I know our job up here. It's nice.
It's sour and sweet. You got to do the balance.
You got to get both.

Speaker 1 But what about hallucinations that they got over on Fox talking about those guys? Is that,

Speaker 1 you know, if Kamala Harris gets in there, And if the Democrats hold on to the Senate, Colin Allred gets in there, and there's 50 Democratic senators, They're going to kill the filibuster.

Speaker 1 They're going to pass the Green New Deal. They're going to socialize health care.
They're going to expand the Supreme Court to 19 people. I don't know.

Speaker 1 They're going to like that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is that realistic? The filibuster has to change

Speaker 1 because it's broken.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 if you don't mind, Tim, I'm going to do a little history here. Let's do it.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the history of the filibuster, as many Senate observers will know, was that it was used almost exclusively to block civil rights legislation, to block anti-lynching legislation.

Speaker 1 I'm a civil rights lawyer by training. This is personal for me.

Speaker 1 But it was used very sparingly. And it was a talking filibuster.
What did that mean? It meant that you would hold the floor. and you'd speak.

Speaker 1 And so they'd have rounds of speakers and no other legislation could move while they were filibustering. And so that's how they would prevent a civil rights bill

Speaker 1 for so many decades from passing, even when there were enough technically votes to do it.

Speaker 1 What it has morphed into now though is that it's applied to every single bill and you have a dual track where you can filibuster a bill but something still moves.

Speaker 1 And so this is actually a historical where we are now, which is that every vote is a 60 vote threshold and you're not having to stand and speak and explain why you're filibustering.

Speaker 1 You just say,

Speaker 1 I object.

Speaker 1 And then so what it actually I think has done has contributed to hyper-partisanship and has actually made the Senate less functional than going back to what the original formulation was.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I want to maintain the bipartisan nature of the Senate. I don't,

Speaker 1 I'm in the House right now. It is purely operated on majority rules.
If you're not in the majority,

Speaker 1 you have nothing, right? And with very few exceptions, like the budget that we're going to hopefully pass at some point,

Speaker 1 where we have to come over and do all the votes to get it passed because there's only gonna be about 70 or 80 Republicans who want to keep the government open.

Speaker 1 But except for that, it's almost entirely majority ruled. The Senate doesn't operate that way, and I don't want to see it become like the House.

Speaker 1 But the current filibuster doesn't work. And so, to me, we do have to reform it, we have to fix it, we have to go back to the original formulation for it.
And that is also why we will codify Roe v.

Speaker 1 Wade and make it a lot better.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 we haven't talked about this yet, Tim, but what's been happening here in our state is a tragedy. My wife and I have been blessed with two healthy pregnancies in Dallas in the last five years.

Speaker 1 I've got a five and three year old. I know you have a first grader.

Speaker 1 I never met my father. My birth certificate's in my mom's name and nothing else.

Speaker 1 And so when you grow up the way I did, you go to every single ultrasound appointment,

Speaker 1 every genetic testing appointment, and you hold your breath because you don't know what they're going to say. They're like, oh, you do the little ultrasound.
They're like, oh, it's a boy.

Speaker 1 I'm like, I can't see anything. I don't know what are you talking about.

Speaker 1 And all you want to hear is the doctor say, everything looks good.

Speaker 1 But if you do hear the news that some Texans are going to hear today across our state, that there's a problem with the baby or there's a problem with the pregnancy.

Speaker 1 The next thing you want to hear is, and here's the plan for how we're going to make sure you're okay. But in Texas, what women are hearing isn't that.

Speaker 1 They're hearing and there's nothing I can do to help you. And you're either going to have to bear this or come back when you're sick enough or you're going to have to leave our state.

Speaker 1 And this is not who we are as Texans.

Speaker 1 There's one thing I know of us as a fourth generation Texans that we believe in freedom and this is not it. And so we have to restore Roe v.

Speaker 1 Wade to this country and to the 30 million Texans here who are living under this for people like Dr. Austin Dennard, who's my friend in Dallas.
She's an OBGYN. She's a wonderful person.

Speaker 1 Her husband is an OBGYN. She's already a mom.
And she noticed herself on the ultrasound that her baby's skull wasn't forming.

Speaker 1 And Austin,

Speaker 1 who is just the best person, had to leave Texas. I think she's a sixth generation Texan.
She's even longer than I am.

Speaker 1 had to leave Texas to get the care she needs and come back and feel shame about what was going on.

Speaker 1 We have cities and counties in the state saying, We're going to see if we don't think you should be able to drive through the city or the county if you're going to use it to access an abortion.

Speaker 1 How are they going to enforce that? They're going to pull Texas women over, ask them, What's the nature of your travel, ma'am? Yeah. Can I inquire as to your condition?

Speaker 1 Or with this bounty law that we have here, are they going to turn us all into

Speaker 1 informants on each other? Yeah. Where it's you're looking over your neighbor's fence and saying, I wonder what her condition is, what's going on with her.
This is not who we are.

Speaker 1 And so the only way for us to fix this in Texas is to codify Roe at the federal level.

Speaker 1 The bounty law in particular, for me,

Speaker 1 I mean, I think it's been very brilliant as a marketing strategy, the way that the Harris campaign and you have kind of re-adopted this term freedom around this context.

Speaker 1 But the other thing, the other way that it is anti-traditional conservative, I mean, you know, when I was growing up, when I was a college Republican, we didn't like the damn trial lawyers.

Speaker 1 You're going to try, yeah. You're going to trial We're gonna sue everything.

Speaker 1 This whole notion of like the incentives are so wrong in a way that anybody that's looking at this clearly from a conservative perspective should be able to see, right?

Speaker 1 Where it's like where doctors, there are all these horror stories coming out of Texas where doctors, conservative people will say, well, technically they could have done that. procedure, right?

Speaker 1 Like under the law. But like the doctors don't know.
They aren't sure. And they're fucking scared that they're going to get sued.
And so they're like,

Speaker 1 or they'll go to jail, right?

Speaker 1 And so they're like, well, I'll pass this you know you go to the you go to the hospital down the street yeah you know and and like there have been all these stories that are coming out that the that the incentives are are forcing doctors to not give care that's even legal care that's right that's scary even if you are pro-life there's two Texas women who recently filed a lawsuit to clarify this law who had ectopic pregnancies yep anybody who has been through you know having kids or you know an ectopic pregnancy is incredibly dangerous.

Speaker 1 It is not a viable pregnancy. It forms in the fallopian tube.
And the only thing to do is to make sure that it doesn't become a rupture.

Speaker 1 And they were turned away by hospitals in Texas, in two different parts of Texas, two separate stories.

Speaker 1 They were turned away, or in one case, one of the women's doctors came with her to the hospital and demanded that they treat her. And they were saying no.
And I know who was saying no.

Speaker 1 It was some lawyer. Right.

Speaker 1 up in, you know, headquarters saying, we don't want the liability of treating this woman. And so they were both turned away and they both had ruptures or had to have a fallopian tube removed.

Speaker 1 And now their future fertility is at risk. This is outrageous.
And the other thing I'll say is that from a conservative perspective, turning Texans into

Speaker 1 monitors of each other is how authoritarian states operate. Yes.

Speaker 1 That's one of the things they do.

Speaker 1 Where it's like...

Speaker 1 And a lot of these cases, these are wanted baby. You know what I mean? Like a lot of these cases, these are women that want to have, or couples that want to have the children.

Speaker 1 It's like, even if you're pro-life, even if you're down the line pro-life and believe that life begins at conception, the law is fucked. That's right.
It's an authoritarian, backwards law.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 one quick example of that.

Speaker 1 Lauren Miller, she's an eighth-generation Texan.

Speaker 1 I always laughed because I didn't know we had eighth generations of Texans.

Speaker 1 I met an eighth generation Texans. She goes back to Mexico.

Speaker 1 I met one in the valley the other day who said her family was in Mexico and then it became Texas and so she's an eighth generation Texas.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 she was already a mom and she got pregnant with twins. To your point about being pro-life, one of the babies wasn't going to make it and it was killing the other one and her.

Speaker 1 And at the hospital where I was born in Dallas, Presbyterian Hospital, her doctor threw up his hands and said, you have to leave the state right now.

Speaker 1 And so as sick as she was, she went to Love Field and she flew out of the state and she got a procedure done for 15 minutes, cost her $3,000. And it saved the other twin.
Oh my God.

Speaker 1 And I've met that kid.

Speaker 1 and it's because she got that procedure that she was able to have that baby. So you want to talk about being pro-life.
In Texas, that wouldn't have happened.

Speaker 1 And there are other Texas women who don't have $3,000

Speaker 1 to go out of state. Who that's going to happen to? There are 26,000 Texas women who have been forced to give birth to their rapist child.
This is according to the Houston Chronicle.

Speaker 1 It's not my number. So to go back to your point, this is not pro-life.

Speaker 1 This is deeply, deeply anti-freedom, and it's not a slogan.

Speaker 1 If we want to restore freedom, we have to restore this. That's far.

Speaker 1 Speaking of authoritarian assholes,

Speaker 1 how do we like the Attorney General? We've got this state. Is he Popular in here? There's got to be one.

Speaker 1 Is his sister in here or something?

Speaker 1 Somebody's got to like him in here, right?

Speaker 1 Keeps getting elected.

Speaker 1 There's a story that I just, as an out-of-stater, I just don't, it's like, you know, it's hard to judge.

Speaker 1 It's like, again, for me, the rule of thumb is is Ken Paxson is doing something that seems shady. It's probably shady.
But why don't we talk? There are these raids on

Speaker 1 Democratic activists, Latino groups that were registering voters, and it seems pretty disturbing. But we'll talk about that story.

Speaker 1 So there's that, and there's also that he's suing and threatening to sue two of our biggest counties, Bear County and Harris County. because

Speaker 1 they're mailing out voter registration forms. Travis, they're suing.
And Travis as well. Is that?

Speaker 1 Okay, that was yesterday. I was in the Hill Country yesterday.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And so let's get this straight.

Speaker 1 The counties in Texas run the elections.

Speaker 1 So this is the government entity responsible for the election. That's saying, here's a registration form that you can fill out and you can mail back.

Speaker 1 And then we and the Secretary of State's office will verify whether or not you are eligible to vote in Texas. And all these other steps as well.
It'll be checked against our DPS records.

Speaker 1 And then you'll be able to vote. That's the voter registration process in Texas.

Speaker 1 And so our Attorney General is saying, if you mail out these forms for them to send back in for us to verify, you're going to be getting non-citizens voting in Texas.

Speaker 1 So is he saying that the government in Texas can't verify who's a citizen and who's not? Right. Right?

Speaker 1 But I think we all know that. Are they in charge of the government? Yeah, right.
And exactly, right. It's like the Secretary of State's appointed by the governor.

Speaker 1 But then also,

Speaker 1 your point about these raids on LULAC.

Speaker 1 LULAC is one of the oldest civil rights organizations in the country. It is not new.

Speaker 1 And when you have armed men show up at 7 a.m.

Speaker 1 or something to an 85-year-old's house and go through her underwear and make her stand around in her nightgown while you search her house and take her phone and her computers because she's trying to help seniors vote, we know exactly what you're doing.

Speaker 1 This is not about election integrity. This is about voter intimidation.

Speaker 1 And what they want to do is send a message to Texans that voting is not for you.

Speaker 1 I tell folks all the time that we're a non-voting state, and as a voting rights lawyer, I know part of the reason why.

Speaker 1 And part of it is this overlapping laws, but also this sense that you could get in trouble.

Speaker 1 I've tried to register voters before, before I ever ran for office, and I never, by the way, I never asked anybody about who they were going to vote for. I just wanted them to vote.

Speaker 1 But I'd try to register them and I'd say, you know, okay,

Speaker 1 here's the form, and then I'd say, no, I don't want to. I say, well, why not? I said, well, I've got parking tickets.
I said, well, you know, these systems don't interact, right?

Speaker 1 But then you start to see these things happening in the news. And if you're not, you know, if you're working hard and you're not...

Speaker 1 Setting aside as a libertarian, parking tickets are kind of authoritarian.

Speaker 1 I've got cameras I don't like. It's

Speaker 1 a side.

Speaker 1 Hopefully if we get over the authoritarian threat, we can go back to arguing about things like that. That's right.

Speaker 1 But you know, if you're working hard and you're just seeing this stuff pop up on your news every now and then and you don't really know what to make of it, you might think that and think, listen,

Speaker 1 I don't want to get in any trouble.

Speaker 1 Maybe voting is not for me. And that is exactly what they're trying to do.
And so this is what we have to do now in Texas is say, they're trying to stop you. Why are they trying to stop you? Right.

Speaker 1 Because your vote is powerful. Don't let them.
And that's what I think we're going to do.

Speaker 1 All right. We got to talk about one more tough one and then we can maybe have a little fun.
There's a school shoot, another school shooting in Georgia earlier this week.

Speaker 1 J.D. Vance, I don't know if you know him, he's running for VP.

Speaker 1 Here's what he said about it.

Speaker 1 I don't like that this is a fact of life, but if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you've realized that our schools are soft targets, and we have to, and we've got to bolster security at our schools.

Speaker 1 So that's his solution. This is just going to be a fact of life, and the only answer is to bolster security at the schools.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 1 You and I both have kids. We do.
Little ones. We do.
And I just did school pickup with my buddy's kid in your neighborhood yesterday when I was in Dallas.

Speaker 1 And I was just thinking about it the whole time, watching all those little kids walking out of the school. After Uvalde, the morning after,

Speaker 1 I dropped my kids off at their preschool in Dallas,

Speaker 1 and I watched my little one waddle in,

Speaker 1 and my older one

Speaker 1 was holding his teacher's hand as he walked in.

Speaker 1 And I was just thinking,

Speaker 1 if anything happens to them

Speaker 1 I don't know what I'll do I don't know what I'll become like my heart is outside of my chest right now right and every parent had the same look on their face that day

Speaker 1 and I refused number one to accept that this is how we have to live but number two

Speaker 1 we after Uvalde we did put hundreds of millions of dollars into school safety. We passed a bill called the Safer Communities Act.

Speaker 1 It was the first time in 30 years we've done anything to address gun violence at the federal level. I voted for it.
John Cornyn was the reason it passed in the United States Senate.

Speaker 1 To his credit. Oh man, please clap.
John Cornyn.

Speaker 1 I can do that. I can do please clap jokes.
To his credit. And I'm probably not doing him any favors.

Speaker 1 He was booed off the Republican stage after that. But to his credit, he did that.
We closed some important loopholes in the background check system.

Speaker 1 We increased scrutiny on purchases for folks under 21. had hundreds of millions of dollars for school safety funding for states to set up their own red flag laws, which Texas has not done.

Speaker 1 And so we've, and we also had a bunch of money for mental health because folks say often after these shootings, this is a mental health crisis and this is about school safety. Those two are both true.

Speaker 1 They're always leaving out the third component,

Speaker 1 which is too easy access to too lethal of weaponry.

Speaker 1 I'm a Texan. I know exactly who we are.

Speaker 1 I went to Camp Grady Spruce at at Possum Kingdom Lake. If y'all want to know how country Texas, you know, I can get.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 when I was seven years old, we had a rifle range where I was running. Possum Lake Kingdom.
Possum Kingdom. Possum Kingdom Lake.
Don't sell it short.

Speaker 1 Don't sell it short. All right.

Speaker 1 I'm learning Texas culture now.

Speaker 1 Okay, don't sell it short.

Speaker 1 It's a kingdom.

Speaker 1 I haven't met the king, but

Speaker 1 we had a rifle reach where we were learning how to shoot 22s when I was seven years old. It wasn't until I...
You held on seven? Yeah. Yeah.
No. Yes.
Really? Yes. You held a gun when you were seven?

Speaker 1 Yes. Okay.
Okay. I don't know.

Speaker 1 I'm out of my element. I'm out of my element.
I was in the Denver suburbs, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it wasn't until I left Texas and started hearing from folks that it's unusual in other states to give a gun to a seven-year-old. Yes, right? You know what it was about? And I'm being serious.

Speaker 1 It was about learning how to safely and responsibly handle a firearm.

Speaker 1 That's the whole thing. It was incredibly safe.
And I know it's funny, but

Speaker 1 it was all very, you know, very rote. And so there was no chance for any accidents.
It was very safe. And it was about learning how to do this safely and to have fun.

Speaker 1 That's the Texas culture that I believe in, one of responsible gun ownership. One where this is part of our culture.
Folks have a lot of firearms here in Texas. That's good.
That's fine.

Speaker 1 Most of the folks I grew up with,

Speaker 1 anyway, most of the folks I grew up with have small arsenals, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And that's fine, but we have to be responsible with it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this is where, when we come to things like, you know, what happened in Georgia, where having access to an AR, this is what you said would happen with the father who's been charged, and then we see what happens.

Speaker 1 We have to have laws in this country that take and keep these incredibly destructive weapons out of the hands of folks who shouldn't have it. Ted Cruz voted against that bill.

Speaker 1 so Ted Cruz voted against the Safer Communities Act. He seems to believe there's nothing that we can do to help save lives consistent with the Second Amendment.
I fundamentally disagree.

Speaker 1 Our man,

Speaker 1 my man, Betto, got in a little trouble on this one.

Speaker 1 I mean, though, say what you want, but I do think that as you talk about this balance, right, like how you win over Texas voters, like how do you kind of think about that challenge, right?

Speaker 1 Like this idea that maybe, you know, sometimes,

Speaker 1 you know, there are people in Texas that feel like the Democrats are going to come and start confiscating their arsenals, you know?

Speaker 1 Listen,

Speaker 1 obviously there's some folks that if you're fetishizing these things, then, you know, we're probably not going to have an open conversation.

Speaker 1 But I come across a lot of well-meaning Texans, and I do mean well-meaning, who tell me, you know, listen, this is, you know, It's important to me. This is a part of our culture.

Speaker 1 It's a part of, you know, that I've taught my children how to hunt. I think we should have the ability to have self-protection.
No one's putting that in question.

Speaker 1 And when I'm in the United States Senate, they'll have nothing to worry about.

Speaker 1 What we will do is make it harder for folks that shouldn't have access to these high-powered rifles to get access to them.

Speaker 1 And that's what I think is consistent with who we are as Texans and the Second Amendment.

Speaker 1 So just to be clear, so seven-year-olds, should you be able to go into a Walmart and purchase

Speaker 1 an AR-15 here?

Speaker 1 It's hard for me to know the rules these days, but

Speaker 1 apparently teenagers can just buy ARs now in a lot of places. That's true, actually, unfortunately.
And we have to change that.

Speaker 1 The shooter in Uvalde, the murderer,

Speaker 1 murdered 19 children and two teachers.

Speaker 1 He couldn't buy a beer.

Speaker 1 He couldn't buy a handgun.

Speaker 1 But he could buy an AR. He couldn't buy a SIG.
He couldn't buy a Zen. Right.

Speaker 1 And so this is obviously absurd.

Speaker 1 It's obviously absurd.

Speaker 1 And so we can change that. But we have to have leaders in place who want to.

Speaker 1 Amen. Let's also talk to a little politician.
So when I had met O in the pod a couple weeks ago, and I was asking about your race and

Speaker 1 the challenges and the opportunities. And here was his feedback.
He said, you know, I think he can win if he can raise and deploy enough money.

Speaker 1 We should see more of them, more unscripted moments, more connecting with people.

Speaker 1 What do you think about that? Like, what's the, how do you do it? How do you break through where he wasn't able to? Yeah. Well, listen, this is a

Speaker 1 We've got a great state, it's a massive state. In the last month, we've done 50 stops in 22 cities.

Speaker 1 And we also have to have the resources to make sure we can communicate in the biggest media markets in the country and also in

Speaker 1 places that are completely siloed from each other.

Speaker 1 What happens in Houston, nobody knows about in Dallas, by and large. What happens in Austin is unknown in El Paso, right? Because the distances are so vast here.

Speaker 1 And so it is a challenge in terms of making sure that you can get in front of everybody. But we are doing everything we possibly can to make sure we do that.

Speaker 1 But also we're making sure that folks know what Ted Cruz has not been doing. I want to make sure that folks know what I'll do and who I am, how I've served in Congress, how I'll serve in the Senate.

Speaker 1 But one thing that we have done and that I think will continue to do is show what Ted Cruz has not been doing over his time in the Senate, that he's trying to take away Social Security and Medicare, that he is singularly responsible for this abortion ban that we have in this state because he put the judges on the district court, the circuit court, and the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 He backed the state legislators in primaries often who are more extreme to then who are the ones that pass these laws at the state level.

Speaker 1 He called for and cheered the Dobbs decision and actually when he ran for president wanted to go further.

Speaker 1 He wanted to have a personhood so-called amendment that would ban things like IVF and certain forms of birth control. And so, you know, listen, we have to make sure the Texans know that as well.

Speaker 1 And that fundamentally the choice here is between the most bipartisan Texan in Congress who will care about all of us, who will represent all of us, who's served in a way it shows it's possible to bring folks together instead of pitting them against each other, versus the most extreme senator in the country who's been all about himself and who has been podcasting more than you, Tim.

Speaker 1 He's podcasting a lot. More than you.
I've been reading him in the rankings. I've been checking.
I've been checking our podcast. He had me for a little while.
We passed him.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it came from. It distracted him a little bit.
Can you imagine, though, representing 30 million people and then doing three to five podcasts a week? It's a lot. It's a lot.

Speaker 1 It's a lot of podcasts. It's obloviating.

Speaker 1 What about the getting attention side of things? I don't know.

Speaker 1 So putting on my old former Republican strategist hat. Republicans like to do those ads.
They got the guns and they're shooting people and they're like,

Speaker 1 we're going to take out the ballot boxes. That was the one I saw recently.
Maybe you should do some tackling drills. Like, I'm going to be taking out Ken Paxton.
They have like little fake Ken Paxton.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Is there...

Speaker 1 Do you need to do, do you need to do any, do you need to steal anything from my old people to get any attention or anything?

Speaker 1 Okay, I'll take it on.

Speaker 1 We're brainstorming.

Speaker 1 We're just brainstorming.

Speaker 1 I told you guys. No bad ideas in a brainstorming.
No bad ideas.

Speaker 1 It's up against the wall.

Speaker 1 Last night I was watching the Eagles Packers game with one of my friends from college, and he brought a mutual friend along. And he's one of these like Joe Rogan listening bros.

Speaker 1 And there's like a lot of conversation about this right now. There's this

Speaker 1 unprecedented gender gap. There's always been a gender gap, an unprecedented wide gender gap.

Speaker 1 There's a group of young men out there that are not socially conservative, that don't want a Donald Trump autocracy, really, but like culturally they have felt disaggregated from the Democratic establishment, fairly or unfairly.

Speaker 1 How do you like get? It feels like those should be gettable folks for you. You know, NFL player, you're not scary.
You're not, you know, what have you thought about that? No, I have.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it's actually interesting because, you know, because I'm raising two boys and

Speaker 1 I think a lot about

Speaker 1 where masculinity is at the moment, but also how do we, in the course of this campaign, how do we reach these increasingly disaffected young men?

Speaker 1 And in a lot of ways, that was kind of, I wasn't disaffected, but I was in their shoes. I was just trying to make it.

Speaker 1 When I went to law school at 28 years old, it was the first time

Speaker 1 in my adult life that I was not making my living off the sweat of my brow.

Speaker 1 I know what it's like to shower after work, not before it.

Speaker 1 When you're podcasting like me and Ted Cruz, that's not really a problem.

Speaker 1 Maybe he gets sweaty podcasts and he's kind of, he's not really in fit. So it might be, it might be onerous for him, but it's not one of those jobs.

Speaker 1 I was captaining the team at Baylor, and I think what comes with that is kind of an understanding

Speaker 1 and working around young men who are kind of feeling like, well, listen,

Speaker 1 do you care about me though? Right. And I think that's fundamentally, a lot of what we talk about in politics can feel, I think, to young men like it's not about them.

Speaker 1 And so that's my job to make sure that they know that I'm going to make sure that they have opportunities to take care of their families, to get ahead, that we want to put in place these ladders of opportunity that they can then take advantage of.

Speaker 1 And it's up to them from there.

Speaker 1 And that fundamentally, I'm going to care about them. I wake up every day thinking about what's best for them as opposed to what's best for me.

Speaker 1 And that's the message that we have to make sure we break through on. But I do think, you know, coming from a single-parent background, going to our public schools,

Speaker 1 playing sports here, and having made it in that regard, this is what a lot of young men that I come across, this is what they'd like to do or what they'd like the kids to be able to do.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 there's a connection that we have to build there. Yeah.
Is there a way to get to, I mean,

Speaker 1 maybe you're already doing this and I just haven't noticed it since I'm not a Texan.

Speaker 1 But is there a a way to get these guys through I don't know sports talk or like you know other ways besides you know doing the traditional yeah, and we've been doing some of that and

Speaker 1 and that's that's some of the stuff I really enjoy actually, you know, it's because also it's not it's not so political and yeah, listen, obviously I'm in office and I'm running for office.

Speaker 1 I'm actually just not a hyper-partisan. Like, I'm not, I've never come at things that way.
I don't wake up in the morning and think, what's Team Blue doing today? You know, I don't, you know,

Speaker 1 my thought process is not about politics at all time. This morning I was...

Speaker 1 You didn't have like a little picture of Walter Mondale in your bedroom growing up or any of the great Democratic leaders, Ann Richards. Do you have an Ann Richards poster?

Speaker 1 I do have an Ann Richards post.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 kind of bridged the political-cultural divide a little bit. Yeah, my mom was a huge Ann Richards fan, so was I.

Speaker 1 And Cecile Richards is a friend.

Speaker 1 But listen, I woke up this morning and all I wanted to figure out was what happened in the game last night, you know

Speaker 1 And that's how a lot of people are and so those are the those are the opportunities I appreciate So what's what's the problem with the Cowboys? Like things are things are ugly over there.

Speaker 1 It seems like they're in shambles the Texans are gonna be good Texans are gonna be good I think

Speaker 1 But the Cowboys are in shambles They had such a good year and it's just all falling apart. It's just Jerry.

Speaker 1 What's happening? It's Jerry blowing it? I don't

Speaker 1 think they won 12 games. I mean, you know, listen,

Speaker 1 they flamed out in the playoffs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that's been a consistent problem

Speaker 1 for them, not performing in the playoffs. But they've got an incredibly talented team.
I think they're going to have a good year, actually. You think they're going to have a good year?

Speaker 1 But I just don't know what they'll do in the playoffs.

Speaker 1 And so I think they're going to be okay.

Speaker 1 They've got a lot of talent. But to me, the better team in Texas professionally is probably going to be the Texans.

Speaker 1 I say that as somebody who the Texans were my division rival when I was in the

Speaker 1 like the Texans. That was back when

Speaker 1 they were really good and Matt Schaub was a quarterback, Andre Johnson at receiver,

Speaker 1 Aaron Foster at running back. They had kind of a triple attack there and they ran this really annoying stretch play that was very hard for defenses to stop.

Speaker 1 Anyway, you ever got a good hit on Arian Foster?

Speaker 1 Arian?

Speaker 1 Probably.

Speaker 1 I was more of the guy who came in and short yardage and goal line or somebody got hurt or special teams, which is what they do before they go to the commercial. Got it.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that's how I made my career.

Speaker 1 But I think they're going to be really good. They got a great young quarterback and they got a really talented team.

Speaker 1 And I played against their head coach, actually, who's a great guy. We're out of time.
Thank you so much, INA, everybody. The big.

Speaker 1 Go find somebody in your life. Go find somebody in your life that doesn't believe their vote counts in Texas because it does.
Texas can turn. This is possible.

Speaker 1 I think that the apathy is a big problem in this state, and I think it's the man that can do it. So good luck, Congressman All right.
Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank y'all.

Speaker 1 The hunky tongs in Texas were my natural second home.

Speaker 1 Where you tip your hat to the ladies and the roads of San Antonio.

Speaker 1 Well, I grew up on music we call Western Swing.

Speaker 1 It don't matter who's in Austin. Bob Wells is still the king.

Speaker 1 I can still remember the way things were back then.

Speaker 1 In spite of all the hard times, I'd live it all again.

Speaker 1 Just to hear the Texas Playboys and Tommy Duncan sing

Speaker 1 Makes me proud to be from Texas Texas where Bob Wells is still the king

Speaker 1 if you ain't never been there then I guess you ain't been told

Speaker 1 that you just can't live in Texas unless you've got a lot of soul

Speaker 1 it's the home of Willie Nelson the home of Western Swing

Speaker 1 and he'll be the first to tell you Bob Wells is still the king.

Speaker 6 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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